Title:      The Blanket of the Dark (1931)
Author:     John Buchan
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Blanket of the Dark (1931)
Author:     John Buchan





"Where is Bohun?  Where is Mowbray?  Where is Mortimer?  Nay, which
is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet?  They are intombed
in the urns and sepulchres of mortality."

SIR RANULPHE CREWE, 1625.





TO

DOROTHY GASKELL




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I.  THE PAINTED FLOOR

II.  IN WHICH PETER IS INTRODUCED TO FORTUNE

III.  IN WHICH PETER LURKS IN THE SHADOW

IV.  IN WHICH PETER GOES DEEPER INTO THE GREENWOOD

V.  THE PARLIAMENT OF BEGGARS

VI.  IN WHICH PETER EMERGES INTO THE LIGHT

VII.  HOW A WOULD-BE KING BECAME A FUGITIVE

VIII.  HOW PETER SAW DEATH IN THE SWAN INN

IX.  THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

X.  OF THE CONCLAVE AT LITTLE GREECE

XI.  HOW PETER CAME AGAIN TO AVELARD

XII.  OF THE VISION IN THE SNOW

XIII.  THE UNLOOSING OF THE WATERS

XIV.  HOW PETER STROVE WITH POWERS AND PRINCIPALITIES

XV.  HOW THE SWAN OF BOHUN WENT DOWN

XVI.  HOW PETER RETURNED TO THE GREENWOOD

EPILOGUE




CHAPTER I

THE PAINTED FLOOR


Peter Pentecost, from his eyrie among the hazels, looked down on
the King's highway as it dipped from Stowood through the narrow
pass to the Wood Eaton meadows.  It was a King's highway beyond
question, for it was the main road from London to Worcester and the
west for those who did not wish to make Oxford a halting-place; but
it was a mere ribbon of rutted turf, with on each side the
statutory bowshot of cleared ground between it and the forest
fringes.  And, as he looked, he saw the seventh magpie.

Peter was country-bred and had country lore in the back of his
mind.  Also, being a scholar, he respected auspices.  So, having no
hat to doff, he pulled his forelock.  Seven magpies in one day must
portend something great.

He had set off that summer morning on an errand for the cellarer of
Oseney Abbey to the steward of the King's manor of Beckley, some
matter touching supplies for the Abbey kitchen.  The sun had risen
through lamb's-wool mists, the river was a fleckless sheet of
silver, and Peter had consecrated the day to holiday.  He had done
his errand long before noon, and had spent an hour watching the
blue lagoons on Otmoor (there was much water out, for July had
begun with rains), with the white geese like foam on the edges.
The chantry priest at Horton had given him food--a crust only and a
drink of ale, for the priest was bitter poor--and in the afternoon
he had wandered in the Stowood glades, where the priory of Studley
had right of pannage and the good sisters' droves of swine rooted
for earth-nuts.  Peter was young, and holiday and high summertide
could still intoxicate.  He had lain on the spicy turf of the open
spaces, his nose deep in thyme and rock-rose; he had made verses in
the shadow of the great oaks which had been trees when Domesday
Book was written; he had told his dreams aloud to himself at the
well under the aspens where the Noke fletchers cut their arrows.
The hours had slipped by unnoted, and the twilight was beginning
when he reached his favourite haunt, a secret armchair of rock and
grass above the highway.  He had seen four magpies, so something
was on the way.

The first things he saw in the amethyst evening were two more of
the pied birds, flapping down the hollow towards Wood Eaton.  After
them came various figures, for at that hour the road seemed to have
woken into life.  Travellers appeared on it like an evening hatch
of gnats.

First came a couple of friars--Franciscans by their grey habits--
who had been exploiting the faithful in the Seven Towns of Otmoor.
Their wallets swung emptily, for the moor-men had a poor repute
among the religious.  They would sleep the night, no doubt, in the
Islip tithe-barn.  After them appeared one of the Stowood hogwards,
with the great cudgel of holly which was the badge of his trade.
Peter knew what he was after.  In the dusk he would get a rabbit or
two for his supper on the edge of the Wood Eaton warren, for the
hogwards were noted poachers.

From his view-point he could see half a mile down the road, from
the foot of the hill to where it turned a corner and was lost in
the oakwoods of the flats.  It was like the stage of a Christmas
mumming play, and Peter settled himself comfortably in his lair,
and waited with zest for the entry of the next actors.  This time
it was a great wool-convoy, coming towards him from the Cherwell.
He watched the laden horses strain up the slope, eleven of them,
each like a monstrous slug buried in its wool-pack.  There were
five attendants, four on foot and one riding a slim shaggy grey
pony.  They might be London bound, or more likely for Newbury,
where Jack Winchcombe had his great weaving mill and the workmen
wrought all day in sheds high and dim as a minster--so many workmen
that their master twenty years back had led his own battalion of
spinners, carders and tuckers to Flodden Field.  Peter viewed the
convoy with no friendly eye.  The wool barons were devouring the
countryside, and ousting the peasants.  He had seen with his own
eyes hamlets obliterated by the rising tide of pasture.  Up in
Cotswold the Grevels and Celys and Midwinters might spend their
wealth in setting up proud churches, but God would not be bribed.
Let them remember Naboth's vineyard, those oppressors of the poor.
Had not the good Sir Thomas More cried out that in England the
sheep were eating up the men?

The next arrival was a troop of gipsies, a small furtive troop,
three donkeys laden with gear, five men on foot, and two women,
each with an infant at breast.  In his childhood Peter remembered
how these vagabonds had worn gaudy clothes and played openly on
fantastic instruments of music; they were shameless priggers and
rufflers, but they were welcomed everywhere except by the dwellers
in lonely places, for they brought mirth and magic to the
countryside.  Now they were under the frown of the law, and at the
will of any justice could be banished forth of England, for it was
believed that among them they harboured Scots and Spaniards, and
plotted against the King's peace.  This troop were clad like common
peasants, and drab and dingy at that, but there was no mistaking
their lightfoot gait, and even at that distance Peter could mark
their hazel-nut skins and bird-like beaks.  They came on the stage
stealthily, first reconnoitring the patch of open road, and, when
they neared the other corner, sending out a scout to prospect
ahead.  Peter saw the scout turn his head and give a signal, and in
a second the Egyptians, donkeys and all, had taken cover like
weasels, and were deep in the wayside scrub.

Presently the cause was apparent.  Down the hill trotted an
imposing cavalcade, four gentlemen, no less than six servants armed
with curtal-axes, and two led baggage-horses.  One of the gentlemen
was old, and his white hair mingled with the ermine collar of his
purple cloak.  The others rode cloakless in the warm evening.  Two
had the look of lawyers, being all in black and white, except for
their tawny horsemen's boots, but the fourth was a gay gallant,
with a wine-red doublet, a laced shirt, sleeves monstrously puffed
and slashed, and on his head a velvet bonnet with a drooping blue
feather.  Two of the servants carried at their saddle-bows the flat
leather boxes which scriveners used.  Peter guessed their errand.
They were some of the commissioners whom the King was sending far
and wide throughout the land to examine into the condition of the
religious houses.  Their destination might be the Augustinians at
Bicester or the Benedictines at Eynsham--the latter he thought, for
there were better roads to Bicester from London than this, and
these men were doubtless from the capital.  They were in a hurry,
and passed out of sight at a sharp trot, the led horses shying at
the smell of the gipsy donkeys hidden in the covert.  In two hours'
time they would be supping off Thames trout--for it was a Friday--
in the Eynsham fratry.

When the last of the company had jolted round the far corner the
stage was empty for a while.  The amethyst was going out of the
air, and giving place to that lemon afterglow which in a fine
summer never leaves the sky till it is ousted by the splendours of
dawn.  The ribbon of road was beginning to glimmer white, and the
high wooded sides of the glen to lose their detail to the eye and
become massed shadows. . . .  But the play was not yet ended, for
up the road towards him came a solitary rider.

Down a gap from the west fell a shaft of lingering sunlight which
illumined the traveller.  Peter saw a tall man mounted on a weedy
roan, which seemed to have come far, for it stumbled at the lift of
the hill.  His head was covered with an old plumeless bonnet, he
had no cloak, his doublet was plain grey, his trunks seemed to be
of leather, and between them and his boots were hose of a dingy
red.  He wore a narrow belt fastened in front with a jewel, and
from that belt hung a silver dagger-sheath, while at his side
dangled a long sword.  But it did not need the weapons to proclaim
that this was no servant.  The man's whole poise spoke of
confidence and pride.  His shaven face was weathered like a
tinker's, his eyes searched the covert as if looking for
opposition, his mouth was puckered to a whistle, and now and then
he flung back his head and sniffed the evening odours.

Peter watched and admired with a pain at his heart.  Here was one
who rode the broad ways of the world and feared nothing; a
masterful man who would have his way with life; one who had seen
with his own eyes that wonderful earth of which Peter had only
read; a fierce soul who would be a deadly enemy, but who might also
be a delectable comrade, for there was ease and jollity in his air.
Peter sighed at this glimpse of the unattainable.

And then he saw the seventh magpie.

The heats of the day, the constant feasting of the eyes upon blue
horizons, had had the effect of wine upon Peter's brain, and this
drunkenness had been increased by the spectacle of the masterful
traveller.  The scholar, whose days were spent among books, felt
himself within hail of the pomp of life.  He had almost forgotten
the heavy thoughts which had burdened him so many days.  The hour
was growing late, and he was miles from his bed in the Castle
precincts, but he had no intention of going home yet awhile.  For
he was near to a place which was his own discovery, his special
sanctuary, and he was minded to visit it before he slept. . . .

And then came the seventh magpie, a chequered zigzag in that dim
world.  The bird was an invitation to adventure.  Peter rose from
his eyrie, shook the moss and twigs from his clothes, and scrambled
down the slope to the highway.  He was clad in a tunic and long
summer hose of thin woollen, and his gown, which was the badge of
studentship, he carried loose on his arm.

He padded in the sweet-smelling dust of the road for a little way,
and then turned to his left to climb the farther side of the
hollow.  He had forgotten about the Egyptians in the covert.  They
were still there, and had settled down for the night, for suddenly
he saw in a cleft beside him the glow of a little fire on which a
pot was bubbling.  He was too late to avoid it, his foot slipped,
he slid into the cleft, and found a hand at his throat.  The hand
was relaxed, and the grip changed to his shoulder, while a small
covered lantern was flashed in his face.

Shaken and startled, he saw one of the gipsies standing above him,
a man with a thin wolfish face and burning eyes.  Peter's youth and
the sight of the gown on his arm apparently convinced the man that
here was no danger.  He grunted, and picked up what seemed to be a
book which had fallen to the ground.

"You are far from home, clerk," the voice said.  "What do you at
this hour prowling in Stowood?  You are not of the Children of the
Moon."

The Egyptians bore an ill name for secret robbery and murder, and
Peter's heart had pounded on his side when he felt the clutch at
his throat.  But this man whom he could only see dimly, a grey
ghost flecked with firelight, seemed no marauder.  His voice was
not the Egyptian whine, and his words were not the Egyptian jargon.
In spite of his rags he had a certain air of breeding and
authority.  The other gipsies were busy with their cooking, and the
women were suckling their babes, but this man seemed to be engaged
with papers and he had the lantern to light him.  Peter realised
that the gaze fixed on him was devouring and searching, but not
hostile.

"A clerk," said the man.  "One of the blind eyes and dumb mouths
that have Oxford for their stepmother.  I have forgot what Oxford
is like.  Do you still plough the barren fields of the Trivium and
the Quadrivium?  Do you yet mumble the leavings of Aristotle?  Are
your major gods Priscian and Cato and Alexander of Villa Dei?  Is
the hand that leads you up Parnassus that of old John Leland?  Ut
rosa flos florum sic Leland grammaticorum--it is so long since I
heard it I have lost the jingle.  Or perhaps you are for the new
masters, for I hear that to-day in Oxford the Trojans are few and
the Grecians many?"

"Troy has fallen," said Peter, amazed to hear such speech from a
gipsy's tongue.

"And her folk are scattered.  They have put Duns and Aquinas in
Bocardo.  They tell me that the great vellum leaves of the
Sentences flap in the wind about the college courts, and that
country louts gather them to make flappers to keep the deer within
the pales."

"What know you of Oxford and her ways?" the stupefied Peter
demanded.

"This much," said the man fiercely, "that her ways are not the
paths of truth, and that her fruits, old or new, are but husks to
be flung to swine.  I tell you, clerk, there is only one new
learning, and that is the ancientest.  It is here," and he held up
his book, "and it is old and yet ever young.  For it is the wisdom
not of man but of God."

"Show it me," said Peter, but the man put it behind his back.

"Not yet, clerk.  England is not yet ripe for it, but the hour
draws near."

"Who are you that speak in riddles?"

The man laughed.  "Under the blanket of the dark all men are alike
and all are nameless.  Let me view your countenance that I may know
it when I meet it again."

He held up the lantern, and the light also revealed his own face.
It was that of a man in early middle life, very lean and haggard,
with a long nose broken in the middle, and eyes that seemed to burn
in a fever.  But the brow was broad and fine, and the mouth was
gentle.

"An honest face," he said.  "You were no churl's get, young
clerk. . . .  Now get you hence to your prayers, and leave me
to mine."

During this short dialogue the other gipsies had taken no notice of
Peter.  He felt the thrust of the man's hand, and in a moment he
was out of the hollow and the firelight and back in the midnight
dusk of the woods.

He ran now, for his head was in a whirl.  The magpie was a wise
bird, for that night he was indeed seeing portents.  He had
observed one kind of authority mounted and jingling on the highway,
and now he had witnessed another kenneling with the gipsies.  The
world was strange and very wide.  It was time for him to find his
sanctuary, where he could adjust these new experiences and think
his own thoughts.

The place was his very own, for he had unearthed it after it had
been lost for centuries.  In a charter in Oseney he had read how
the King of Wessex had given to the Bishop of Winchester a piece of
land by Cherwell side, which ran from a certain brook "along the
green valley by the two little hills and past the Painted Floor,"
till it reached a certain thorn patch and a certain spring.  The
words had fired his fancy.  Once the Romans had strode over these
hills, the ruins of their massive causewayed highroads ran through
marsh and forest, they had set their houses with vines and reaped
their harvests where now only wild beasts rustled.  To one like
Peter, most of whose waking thoughts dwelt on Greece and Italy, the
notion of such predecessors among his familiar fields seemed to
link his wildest dreams to the solid world of fact.  That Painted
Floor must be found, for it could only be a fragment of Roman work;
there was such a floor in the midget church of Widford on Windrush,
a mile or two from the home of his childhood.  He knew the green
valley and the little hills of the charter; they lay east from Wood
Eaton, between the demesne of that manor and the ridge of Stowood.
The Romans had been there beyond doubt, for not long since a
ditcher in that very place had turned up a pot of gold coins with
Emperors' heads on them--some were now at Oseney among the Abbey's
treasures.

So Peter had spent the dry March days nosing like a fox in the
shallow glade which dropped from the high slopes to the Wood Eaton
meads.  The Painted Floor was not among the run-rigs of beans
and oats and barley, nor in the trodden grass of the common
pastureland; it must be nearer the hills, among the rough meadows
where the brook had its source, or in the patches of oaken scrub
which were the advance pickets of the forest. . . .  He found it--
found it one April day in a coppice of ash and thorn, guided to it
by a sudden flatness in ground which nature had clearly made
hummocky.  It was a floor indeed, carpeted with fine turf and
painted only with primroses and windflowers.  Peter's nails clawed
up the turf and came on tiles, and in an hour he had cleared a yard
or two and revealed what even in the dusk of the trees showed
brighter colours than earth and stone.

Peter borrowed an axe and a mattock from an Elsfield forester, and,
with the tools hidden in his gown, journeyed to the spinney every
hour of holiday.  In places seeds had found lodgment among the
tiles, and had grown to trees, the roots of which split the mosaic.
In one part a badger had made his earth and powdered a yard or two
into dust.  But when Peter had cut down encroaching saplings and
had stripped off the layers of turf, there lay revealed a hundred
square yards of tesselated pavement.  Perhaps since Roman days the
place had been used as a sheep fold, for there were signs of a
later circumscribing wall, but once beyond doubt it had been the
floor of a Roman's dwelling. . . .  Peter fetched water from the
spring among the bracken, and washed off the dirt of centuries.
Bit by bit he unveiled a picture.  In the centre, in the midst of
an intricate design of grape leaves, sat a figure of some goddess--
Ceres perhaps or Proserpina.  At each corner were great plaques
which presently revealed themselves as the Four Seasons--Spring
with Pan's pipes, Summer with a lap of flowers, Autumn lifting
aloft a cornucopia, and Winter a fur-clad hunter holding a rabbit.
And all between was a delicate maze of convolutions so that the
central goddess seemed to float upon clouds.  It was simple rustic
work, for the greys were the limestone rock, and the yellows and
browns a neighbouring sandstone, and the blue slate or glass, and
the reds coarse earthenware; but the design had a beauty which to
Peter was a revelation.  He felt it akin to the grave music with
which sundry Roman poets had ravished his soul.

The place was forest land, he knew, and therefore belonged to the
King, though it was very near the Wood Eaton clearing and Sir Ralph
Bonamy's ground.  But it was his own by the oldest and strongest
tenure, effective occupation.  No one but himself knew of this
marvel.  He concealed his movements going and coming as if his
purpose had been crime.  The Wood Eaton churls were not likely to
drag their heavy feet to a place where there were neither tasks to
be wrought at nor coneys to be snared, and the foresters would
neglect a trivial spinney which offered no harbourage to deer.
Only Peter had business there.  He would lie in the covert in a hot
noon, watching the sun make a chequer of green and gold, till he
fell asleep, and awoke, startled, to see what for a moment he
thought was the shimmer of a woman's gown and to hear the call of
an elfin flageolet.  But it was only fancy.  The Floor was dim with
dusk, and the wood was silent but for homing birds.

To-night he crossed the brackeny meadow and came to the coppice
with a sudden wild expectation.  The seventh magpie!  There had
been marvels many that day, but a seventh magpie must portend still
more.  The spring bubbled noisily among its greenery; he had never
heard it so loud.  He lay prone and drank a great draught of the
icy water, so cold that it sent little pains running behind his
eyes.  Then he entered the coppice.

It had been his custom to treat it as a sacred place and to enter
with reverent feet and head uncovered.  Nor did he enter it direct.
He would fetch a circuit and come in from the top to his own perch
above the Floor, like a seat in one of the tiers of an amphitheatre
looking down on the arena.  So he climbed the slope to where half a
dozen great oaks hung like sentinels above the coppice, and found
his way downhill through the scrub of hazels and briers.  The moon
was already well up in the heavens, and the turf was white as with
frost, but inside the wood it was dark till he reached the edge of
the Floor.  There, since the taller trees fell back from it, light
was permitted to enter from the sky.

Peter parted the bushes, found a seat of moss between two boulders,
and looked down from the height of perhaps twenty feet upon the
moon-silvered stage.

The Floor had a sheen on it, so that the colours were lost in a
glimmer of silver.  The colours, but not the design.  The enthroned
Ceres in the heart of it seemed like a reflection of a great statue
in a deep clear pool.  Bits of the corner plaques could be seen
too--the swung rabbit in Winter's hand, half of Autumn's
cornucopia, more than half of Summer's lapful of flowers.

The place was very quiet.  It had the scent of all woodland places
in high summer--mosses, lush foliage, moist earth which has had its
odours drawn out by a strong sun.  There was also a faint sweetness
of cut hay from the distant Wood Eaton fields, and something
aromatic and dry, which was the savour of stone and tile and
ancient crumbling mortar.  There seemed to be no life in the
thicket, though a few minutes before the world had rustled with the
small noises of insect and bird.  At that hour there should have
been sleeping doves in the boughs, and hunting owls, and rasping
nightjars looking for ewes and she-goats to milk.  Or the furtive
twist of a stoat, or the pad of a homing badger.  But there were
none of these things, no sound even of a wandering vapour; only the
moonlight, the scents, and the expectant silence.

But surely there was movement, though it was soundless.  Peter,
entranced with the magic of the place and hour, saw in the steady
radiance of the moon shadows slip across the Floor.  It almost
seemed as if Ceres had lifted her hands from their eternal
entwinement.  The flowers had shifted in Summer's lap, Spring had
fingered her pipe. . . .

Peter crossed himself with a shaking finger and began a prayer.
Suddenly company had come out of the night.  He realised that he
was not alone.

Something was moving on the Painted Floor, something which so
blended with the moonlight that its presence could be known only
when it obscured the pattern. . . .  From where he sat, Peter
looked beyond the little amphitheatre to a gap in the encircling
coppice, a gap through which could be seen the descending glade and
a segment of far hills.  The moonlight on the Floor, being framed
in trees, was an intenser glow than the paler landscape beyond.
Suddenly against this pallor a figure was silhouetted--the figure
of a girl.

Peter tried to pray.  He tried to say a prayer to the Mother of God
which was his favourite invocation in emergencies.  It began,
Imperatrix supernorum, Superatrix infernorum, but he did not get as
far as superatrix.  For he found that he had not the need to pray.
His fear had been only momentary.  His heart was beating fast, but
not with terror.  The sight before him was less an invocation to
prayer than an answer to it.  Into his own secret sanctuary had
come the appropriate goddess.

It was a mortal who danced below him--of that he had instant and
complete assurance.  The misty back world of Peter's mind, for all
his schooling, held a motley of queer folk, nymphs, fays, witch-
wives, who had their being on the edge of credence.  But this was
not of that kind.  It was a mortal with blood in her veins. . . .
She had flung up her arms, when she showed in the gap, in a very
rapture of youth. . . .  He had seen her head clear--eyes over
which the eyelids drooped, a smiling mouth, a delicate face on a
slim neck. . . .  Her garments were now drawn tight round her, and
now floated wide like the robes of a fleeing nymph on a Greek gem.
They seemed to be white, but all of her was white in the moon.  Her
hair was silvered and frosted, but it might be gold or ebony by
day.  Slim and blanched, she flitted and spun like a leaf or a
blown petal, but every line of her, every movement, spoke of youth
and a rich, throbbing, exultant life.

The pattern of her dance seemed to be determined by the pictures
under her feet.  Sometimes she tripped down the convolutions and
whorls till the eyes dazzled.  At the corner plaques she fitted her
movements to their design--wild in Spring, languorous in Summer, in
Autumn a bacchanal, in Winter a tempest.  Before the throned Ceres
she became a hierophant, and her dance a ritual.  Once she sank to
the ground, and it seemed that her lips rested on the goddess's
face.

Never before had Peter stared at a woman and drunk in the glory of
her youth and grace.  He had seen very few, and had usually passed
them with averted eyes.  They were the devil's temptation to the
devout, and a notorious disturbance to the studious.  But this
woman had come into his sanctuary and made free with it as of
right.  He could not deny that right, and, since the sanctuary was
his, the two were irrevocably linked together.  They were
worshippers at the same secret shrine. . . .  He looked at her more
calmly now.  He saw the pride and nimbleness of motion, the
marvellous grace of body, the curves of the cheek as the head was
tilted backwards.  It was a face stamped indelibly on his memory,
though under the drooped eyelids he could not see the eyes.

Afterwards, when he reconstructed the scene, Peter held that he
fell into a kind of waking dream, from which he awoke with a start
to realise that the dance was ended and the Floor empty.  The moon
had shifted its position in the sky, and half the Floor was in
shadow.  There was still no fear in his mind and no regret.  The
nymph had gone, but she would return.  She must return, as he must,
to this place which had laid its spell upon both. . . .  He felt
very drowsy, so he found a bigger patch of moss, made a pillow of
his gown, and went to sleep in that warm green dusk which is made
for dreams.

But he was too young and too healthily tired to dream.  He woke, as
was his habit, at sunrise, sniffed the morning, and turned round to
sleep for another hour.  Then he rose, when the trees were still
casting long shadows on the meadow and the Painted Floor was dim
with dew, and took the road towards Wood Eaton and its little
river.  He would not go back to Oxford yet awhile, he decided, but
would seek his breakfast at Oseney, which was without the gates.
He came to the Cherwell at a narrow place overhung with willows;
there he stripped, bundled his clothes inside his gown, and tossed
the whole to the farther bank.  Then he dived deep into the green
waters, and thereafter dried himself by cantering like a colt among
the flags and meadowsweet.  The bath had sharpened both his energy
and his hunger, so that he passed at a trot the Wood Eaton granges
and crossed the Campsfield moor, where the shepherds and cowherds
were marshalling their charges for the day.  Presently he was
looking into a valley filled with trees and towers, with, on the
right, below a woody hill, the spire of a great church set among
glistening streams.



CHAPTER II

IN WHICH PETER IS INTRODUCED TO FORTUNE


Peter did not slacken pace till he descended from the uplands and
crossed the highway which joined Oxford and Woodstock, a frequented
road, for by it the staplers sent their pack-trains to load their
wool in the river barges.  There was a great green plain on his
right hand, grazed upon by a multitude of geese, and already
country folk with baskets of market stuff were on their way to the
north gate.  He turned down a lane by Gloucester Hall, where he
looked over a close of pippins to the Rewley fishponds, and passed
the little stone quays at Hythe bridge, where men were unloading
sweet-smelling packages from a lumpish green boat.  In the huts of
Fisher Row strange folk, dingy as waterweeds, were getting ready
their cobles and fishing-gear against the next fast-day.  Peter
crossed the main stream at Bookbinders bridge, and came on a broad
paved path which ran to what seemed a second city.  Walls, towers,
pinnacles rose in a dizzier medley than those of Oxford, which he
had seen five minutes before beyond the north gate.  In especial
one tall campanile soared as the stem of a pine soars from a
wilderness of bracken, white and gleaming among the soberer tints
of roof and buttress.

Suddenly from it there fell a gush of lovely sound, the morning
canticle of the noblest peal of bells in the land.  Peter stopped
to listen, motionless with delight.  In the diamond air of dawn the
bells seemed to speak with the tongues of angels, praising God for
His world, with the same notes that birds used in the thickets or
the winds on the waters.  As the peal slowed and ebbed to its
close, one bell lingered, more deep and full than the rest, as if
its rapture would not be stayed.  Peter knew it for Thomas of
Oseney, which had no equal in England--as great as Edward of
Westminster or Dunstan of Canterbury.

The bells told him the hour.  Prime was long past, and now the
Chapter was over.  There would be no food for four mortal hours
unless he could make favour in the kitchen.  He hurried through
Little Gate and past the almshouses to Great Gate, with its cluster
of morning beggars.  It was dark under the portals, so dark that
the janitor did not at first recognise him, and caught him roughly
by the cloak till his face was revealed.  Beyond was the wide
expanse of Great Court, one half of it in shadow, one half a pool
of light.  On three sides, north, east and west, lay the cloisters,
roofed with Shotover oak, and faced with the carved work of old
Elias of Burford.  Peter knew every inch of them, for, far more
than his cell in St George's College in the Castle, the Oseney
cloisters were his home.  There on the west side was his
schoolroom, where he instructed the novices; there on the north was
the scriptorium, where lodged the Abbey's somewhat antiquated
library; there on the south, beside the kitchen, was the Abbey's
summer parlour, and the slype which led to the graveyard, the
gardens and the river.  This last was Peter's favourite corner, for
in the morning hours it had the bustle of a market-place.  On its
stone seats sat those who waited on business with the Abbot, and
foreign merchants using Oseney as a consulate, and brethren who
could snatch a half-hour of leisure.  It was a window from which
the Abbey looked out into the world.

This morning there was a great peace in all the cloisters.  Two old
canons were taking the sun, and a half-dozen children stood in a
ring repeating what might have been equally a game or a lesson.  To
Peter's chagrin there was no comfort in the kitchen.  The morning
meal in the fratry was still hours distant, and the under-
kitchener, who was his friend, had gone to the Abbot's lodging,
busied about an early collation for the Abbot's guests.  To forget
his hunger Peter turned into Little Court, whence by way of the
infirmary he could reach the back parts of the Abbey.

He found himself presently in a strange place, a place of lanes and
closes, cot-houses and barns, from which came the clang of hammers
and the buzzing of wheels.  It was a burgh of itself, that part of
the Abbey precincts which was known as Oseney-town, where dwelt the
artificers.  Here during the centuries there had grown up a
multitude of crafts--tanners who prepared the Cotswold skins;
bookbinders who clad in pigskin and vellum the archives of abbey
and college; illuminators who decked the written word with gold and
vermilion; wax-chandlers who made the lights for the holy places;
shoemakers and workers in all kinds of leather and fine metals.
Here were the millers who ground the corn from the Abbey farms, and
carpenters and smiths and fullers and weavers of wicker-work.  From
every doorway came the sound of busy folk, and as an undertone the
rhythmic beat of mill-wheels and the babble of little chinking
rivulets.  From this hive of industry there rose, too, a dozen
smells, pleasant smells which told of wholesome human life--the
bitter reek of the tan-pits, the freshness of new leather, the
comfortable odour of ground corn which tormented Peter's emptiness.
And everywhere the clean scent of running water.

But Peter did not linger amid the busyness of Oseney-town.  A gate
between two dovecotes, where homing pigeons made a noisy cloud, led
him across a bridge to the Abbey gardens.  First came orchards of
apples, pears and plums, quinces and apricots, and a close of
plainer fruits, filberts, walnuts, almonds, and the cornels from
which sweet drinks were made.  There were fig-trees on the west
walls, and a vineyard whose small grapes were used for a rough
wine, but mostly for sweet pasties.  Beyond lay the herb-garden,
where Brother Placidus was now pottering.  He had beds of every
herb that healed the body and some which hurt, for he had mandrakes
which must be torn up only by a black dog in the dark of the moon.
There were flowers, too, in their July glory, admitted shamefacedly,
since they were idle and fruitless things, and served only to make
nosegays for the children of the craftsmen.  Then came more meadows,
some already shorn, some heavy with hay, and more dovecotes and
orchards.  Through all of these meandered runnels, which spouted
sometimes over tiny lashers.  Last came the fish-ponds, oblongs of
clear green water, where in the depths great carp and bream and
tench could be seen, motionless but for an occasional flicker of
their tails.  Beyond them, after a banked walk among willows, lay a
shining loop of river, and across the farther meadows the smoke of
Hinksey village and the hills of Cumnor, already dim with the haze
which promised another day of breathless summer.

Peter crossed the meadow called Nymph's Hay, the fodder from which
was reserved for the Abbot's stalls, and entered the little orchard
named Columbine, which was all of apple trees.  He chose the place
because it had an open view, on one side to Cumnor and Wytham, on
the other to the soaring tower of Oseney Great Church, with the
hump of Oxford Castle and the spire of St Mary the Virgin beyond
it.  He was hungry and had long to wait before he breakfasted, but
that was nothing new to Peter.  It was his soul not his belly that
troubled him.  The high spirits of yesterday, the vigour of that
very morning, had gone, and he was in a mood of profound disquiet.
He flung himself among the long cool grasses, and sniffed the scent
of earth; he lay on his back and watched pigeons and finches
crossing the space of blue between the trees; and then he shut his
eyes, for his trouble was within, in his heart.

It had been coming on for a long time, this malady of the mind.
There were days like yesterday when youth and sunshine and holiday
gave him the unthinking happiness of childhood.  Sometimes for as
much as a week he would be at peace, busy with his books, his small
duties at the Abbey, and the pleasant ritual of food and sleep.
And then a film seemed to dim his outlook, and all that had been
coloured grew drab, and what had seemed a wide horizon narrowed to
prison walls.

He raised his head and looked at the lift of the Abbey towers
beyond the apple trees.  Sometimes he thought the sight the noblest
on earth, not to be bettered surely by Rome or Jerusalem.  But now
he saw it only as a jumble of grey stone, and under that jumble he
knew that there were weedy courtyards, and seventeen ageing canons
stumbling aimlessly through their days of prayer, and an Abbot on
whose brow sat the cares of the world rather than the peace of God,
and shrill-voiced impudent novices, and pedlars who made the
cloisters like St Giles's Fair--a shell once full of fruit, but
empty now but for weevils and a few dry and rotting shreds. . . .
A medley of singing rivulets filled the place, freshening the
orchards and meadows, sending strong leats to wash away filth,
edging the walks, turning mill-wheels, making everywhere pools and
founts and cisterns.  In a happier hour he had told himself that
Oseney was a northern Venice, a queen of waters; now in his
distemper it seemed only a mouldering relic among sewers.

He wanted life and power and pride; not in a sinful cause, but for
noble purposes--this he told himself hastily to still a doubting
conscience.  He wanted to tear the heart out of learning, which was
to him the mother of power.  He wanted to look the world in the
face, to cast a spell over men and make them follow him.  In all
innocency he hungered for pomp and colour, trumpet notes, quick
music, the stir of the heart. . . .  And he was only a poor scholar
of St George's College in the Castle, entitled to little more than
lodging and a commons of bread and ale; a pensioner of Oseney under
an ancient corrody of the keepers of Wychwood Forest; a teacher of
noisy infants and dull hobbledehoys; a fumbler at the doors of
knowledge when he should be striding its halls; a clerk in a shabby
gown, whom no woman cast a second glance at and proud men thrust
from the causeway; a cypher, a nobody, neither lay nor cleric,
gentle nor simple, man nor maid. . . .  He remembered the face of
the traveller on the weary roan whom the night before he had seen
ride in the gloaming into Stowood, and at the memory of his mastery
Peter turned on his side and groaned.

The queer gipsy man, who spoke like a clerk, had said he was no
churl's get.  But he had been wrong.  Peter's mind flew back to
what he remembered of his youth.  His only recollection was of the
forester's cottage on the edge of Wychwood, looking down upon
Windrush.  Mother Sweetbread, the forester's wife, was all of a
mother he had ever known, and the forester all of a father.  He was
not their child, but more distant kin--his father, he was told, had
been a soldier slain in the wars. . . .  His early life had been
that of other country children--long summer days in wood and
meadow, and winters snug at the back of the fire.  But there had
been sudden odd gleams athwart it.  He remembered once being
hurried into the deeps of Wychwood by Mother Sweetbread, where he
lived for several days in a cold cleft by a stream, and somehow
that hasty journey was associated in his mind with trampling horses
and a tall man with a scar on his brow. . . .  Then there was
Brother Tobias, who superintended his schooling.  Tobias was an
Oseney canon, whose face, as long as Peter remembered it, had been
wrinkled like a walnut.  Tobias had taught him his letters, and
arranged for him to attend the Witney school, where he boarded with
the parson.  Tobias had spoken to him of wonderful things and
opened up new worlds and set him on the scholar's path.  It was
Tobias who had got him an entrance to St George's College, and had
been his guide and benefactor when the Wychwood corrody placed him
on the Oseney foundation.  To Tobias he had gone in every trouble
save his present discontent.  That he could not carry to him, for
Tobias would declare that it was sin.  Tobias hoped that he would
presently take up the religious life: it was for such a purpose
that he had brought him from the Windrush cottage.

Peter had been now three years in Oxford, and in those three years
he had strayed far from the Witney school and the precepts of
Tobias.  He had found the place humming with a strange jargon and
fevered with the beginnings of a new life.  There was Greek to be
had in the new lectures at Corpus Christi College, and Greek was
not a fresh subject to be added to the Trivium or Quadrivium, but a
kind of magic which altered all the rest of man's knowledge.  It
made him contemptuous of much that his betters still held
venerable, and critical even of the ways of God. . . .  But there
was more astir in Oxford than Greek.  The sons of great men were
coming now to college, instead of going like their fathers to a
nobleman's household or the King's Court, and they were bringing
the wind of politics into its sheltered groves.  All was in a flux
in Church and State.  Great things were happening, greater still
were promised; it was hard to keep the mind on study when every
post from London set the streets and taverns in a babble.

It was a moment when barriers seemed to be cracking, and there were
wild chances for youth.  But in such chances Peter had no share.
The most that lay before him was the narrow life of the religious,
regular monk or secular priest, or a life not less narrow spent in
the outer courts of learning as a copier of scripts and a
schoolmaster to youth.  He was a peasant and a son of peasants, and
there was no place for him in the glittering world. . . .  Once the
Church might have helped him to a pinnacle, as it had helped the
great Cardinal of York, now dead.  But the Church was crumbling;
soon it would be no more than an appanage to the King's palace, and
its affairs would be guided by high-handed oppressive folk such as
he had watched last night jingling through Stowood.

Again Peter raised his head, and this time his eye was held by the
soaring tower of the great church.  It was of Taynton stone, and
whiter than the fabric; a sudden brightness seemed to fall on it
and make it a shaft of alabaster with a light behind it. . . .  He
saw again Oseney as he had first seen it, a mystic city filled with
all the wisdom of God and man.  Especially he remembered how the
tower had seemed to him to leap into the skies and marry earth and
heaven.  Something of the old mood returned to him.  Sinner that he
was, he had the Faith to hold him up, the Faith for whose mysteries
he had once hungered and trembled.  The world might go withershins,
but here was a cornerstone which could not be removed, an anvil
which had worn out many hammers.  To remember that he was a clerk
gave him a second of pride, almost of defiance, for the Church and
her clerks had many foes.  He was not obscure so long as he was a
member of that celestial brotherhood, nor humble when he had a
title to the pride of Heaven. . . .  He gazed again at the shining
tower, and a fount of affection welled in his dry heart.  At that
moment Thomas, the great bell, boomed the hour for High Mass.

Peter hurried through the orchard closes and over the little
bridges and through the purlieus of Oseney-town.  The place smelt
less pleasingly than it had an hour ago, and, with the dazzle of
dawn out of his eyes, he could see the squalor of much of it--the
dirt and offal in the runnels, a sluttish woman at a door,
crumbling styes and byres, a bridge mended with a broken cart-
wheel, a scum of grease filming an eddy in a stream.  He ran past
the infirmary and across Little Court, for Thomas had had a
peremptory note in his voice, and he did not slacken pace till he
was in the cloisters of Great Court, and joined a little convoy of
canons proceeding to the west door of the church. . . .  Then
suddenly he was in a hollow like the inside of a mountain, a hollow
lit with twinkling lights and strange jewelled belts of sun, thick
with incense smoke, and tremulous with the first notes of the great
organ.

The growing poverty of Oseney had not yet shown itself in its
mighty church.  Peter, in his seat below the choir, felt himself
once again secure from the temptations of life and lapped in an
ancient peace.  Nothing could stale for him the magic of this
hollow land whose light and colour and scents were not those of the
world.  He followed the service mechanically from long practice,
but his thoughts were far away.  Oseney kept up the old fashion: no
prick-song with its twists and tremors, but the honest plain-song
of their fathers.  The solemn cadences dwelt in the dim recesses
above him like a night-wind among the clouds.  They soothed him,
and yet quickened the life in him, so that his fancies ranged in a
happy medley.  On the wall opposite him hung a tapestry of some
saint of the Thebaid, with Libyan lions dogging his heels, and an
aureoled angel offering him something in a cup.  In the background
little yellow hills ran out to a blue river, beyond which, very far
away, lay a city with spires, and a sea with two ships.  The sun
coming in through the rose window in the south transept made the
phylactery which the angel bore glow like a topaz, and gilded the
hermit's bald head, while it turned the ciborium below into shining
gold. . . .  Slowly Peter's mind passed from a happy vacuity to
making tales about the scene depicted in the tapestry, and, as his
fancy ranged, the peace which the dim light and the grave harmonies
had given him began to shiver like mist and disappear.  Adoramus te
Christe--sang the pure voices of the choristers--Jesu fili Dei
vivi--but Peter's thoughts were not on God.  That tapestry had
become a window through which he looked again upon the secular
world which tormented him.

At the benediction he made straight for the fratry, for his hunger
was now grievous.  At the laver in the cloister he bathed his face,
and washed hands which were stained with the soil and moss of the
orchard.  The fratry was on the south side of Great Court, to be
reached by a broad stairway, for all the ground-floor was occupied
by cellars and store-rooms.  It was too large by far for the
present community, for the officers, canons, novices and clerks
attached made only a cluster at one end of the great hall.  The
daïs was empty, since Abbot Burton was entertaining guests in his
own lodgings.  The precentor gabbled a grace, and the little
company began their meal on the viands already on the table, for
there were no hot dishes when fast was broken in summer-time.  The
food was plentiful and good--rye bread in abundance, and for each a
commons of the fine white Oxford loaves called "blanchpayn," the
Abbey's own ale, the Abbey's own cheese and butter, smoked London
herrings, and dishes of fresh lettuces of Brother Placidus's
growing.  Peter's place was at the lower end, and he ate hungrily,
having no ear for the novice, who in a stone pulpit read aloud from
St Jerome.  The black dog was on his back again.  He was a poor
clerk in a poor place, disconsidered even by the disconsidered.
The homely smell of the food, of the scrubbed floor and woodwork,
of the coarse fabric of his neighbours' clothes, filled him with a
childish exasperation.  He looked at the grey heads around him.
Was he to grow old like them in this place of shadows?

A hand was laid on his shoulder as he descended the staircase into
the July sunlight, and he found Brother Tobias beside him.  Brother
Tobias was a little lame, and leaned heavily on his arm while he
spoke in his placid cooing way in his ear.  Brother Tobias had a
very small face, red and rosy and wrinkled like a walnut, and a
very long neck, stringy as a hempen rope.  From earliest days he
had been Peter's guardian, patron, father in God, or whatever title
covers the complete oversight of interests in time and eternity.
He had blue eyes a little dim from study, for he was Oseney's chief
scholar and accounted a learned Thomist as well as a noted Grecian,
but those same eyes saw much that others missed, and at moments
they could gleam with a secular fire.  For Tobias had not always
been a churchman; there were tales of a youth spent in camps and
courts, for he was come of high stock from Severn side.

His dragging arm led Peter to the slype beside the summer parlour.
On the stone seats some of the brethren, who had already eaten,
were basking in the sun.  Two men in green, clothiers from the
Stour, were engaged in argument with the hosteller about certain
coverlets supplied to the hostel beds. . . .  Brother Placidus, a
lean old man with a skin the colour of loam, was upbraiding Brother
Josephus, because the latter, who was skilled in the work of
illumination, had plucked as a model the leaf of a certain rare
plant, which the former alleged to have been thereby destroyed.
The leaf in question was now past the use for which Brother
Josephus had designed it, having been rolled into a pellet
in Brother Placidus's angry hands. . . .  A pedlar of wild
strawberries had plumped his baskets on the flags and was extolling
the merits of fruit picked that morning in the Besselsleigh
woods. . . .  Two brethren were imperilling their digestions by a
theological argument as to whether our Lord, combining a divine and
a human nature, was to be described as conflatus or commixtus.  A
third joining in, urged that the proper word was unitus, or perhaps
geminatus, and quoted a sentence of St Augustine. . . .  A group of
younger canons were discussing the guests whom the Abbot was then
entertaining.  One was Sir Ralph Bonamy of Wood Eaton--he was a
familiar figure; but the other, the old man with the small white
beard and the quick anxious eyes?  Doubtless a confrater, or lay
member of the Abbey, come to consult on Oseney business.  One
claimed to know the face as that of a lord in the west country who
was very close to the King's ear. . . .  The reeve from the Abbey's
lands at Kidlington was engaged with the sub-cellarer on an
intricate computation of the number of beeves to be fattened for
the Abingdon market. . . .  Peter, who could not choose but hear
fragments of the tattle, felt an overpowering weariness of soul.

Brother Tobias, stretching his old legs in the sun's warmth, looked
curiously at his friend, whose gown had slipped from his shoulders,
and who stood before him very comely in his young grace, but with
something listless and dejected in his air.

"I missed you at supper last night, son Peter," he said.  "Were you
in the woods, maybe?  You have become more of a forester these days
than a clerk.  In this summer of God no doubt the woods are the
best school.  Would that my limbs were less ancient and I could go
with you, but where I must jog on a mule you can stride like a
hunter.  When saw you Mother Sweetbread last?"

"Yesterday seven days."

"She was in health?"

"In the health which her age permits."

"Ay.  That good wife grows old like me.  Age needs cherishing, and
she is all the kin you have.  Next week, if the Lord spare me, we
will go together upstream and taste the Windrush trout and the
Forest strawberries.  But before that we must speak together of
some difficult matters.  You are a man now, with your twenty-first
year behind you.  It is time to consult about the future."

"That is what I desire," said Peter moodily.

"Let it be this evening before compline."  He looked up at the
boy's shapeliness, the clean limbs, the narrow loins, the breadth
of shoulder, at the face dark with weather, the straight brows, the
noble lines of head and jaw, the candid grey-blue eyes at present
sullen and puzzled, the crisp brown hair, for Peter had never been
tonsured.  All this Brother Tobias gazed at, and then he sighed,
before he rose to limp back to his studies.  He wondered whether
such youth would submit readily to the dedication which religion
demanded.  "I must require of him some special discipline," he
thought.



Peter finished his duties in the novices' school by an hour after
noon.  He visited his attic in St George's College in the Castle.
It was very hot, and, since the window opened to the south, the
little room was like an oven.  He looked at his unslept-in bed,
with its mean bedclothes, his shelf of papers weighted by a book or
two, the three-legged stool and the rickety table which were all
the furniture, and a pair of blue flies buzzing at a broken pane,
and the sight did not increase his cheerfulness.  Poverty lay like
dust over everything.  He had meant to give the afternoon to his
own studies, to that translation of a book of Plato into Ciceronian
Latin, at which, with a fellow of Corpus Christi College, he had
been for some months at work.  But he found it impossible.  On such
a day and in such a mood he would go mad in that stuffy cell.  He
would go to the library of Merton College, where he had permission
to read, and look up certain passages in Diogenes Laertius till
dinner-time.

It had become a day of blistering heat.  The last summer had been a
succession of fogs and deluges, so that the hay rotted in the mead
and the beans in the field.  But this year, though there had been
many comforting rains, there had also been weeks of steady heat,
when the sun rose in a haze, glared at noontide from a cloudless
sky, and set again in amethyst and opal.  Peter entered the city by
the west gate, and by way of Friars' Street came into St Aldate's
opposite the gate of what had once been Cardinal College.  It was
still unfinished, a barrack of gaunt masonry, noble only in its
size, with beyond the raw gables and the poles of the scaffolding
the lovely grey spire of St Frideswide's Church.  Peter on his way
to Merton passed through the new main quadrangle, which was as yet
more like a quarry than a dwelling for men.  The older work was of
hard Burford stone, but much of the finishing, to save time and
cost, was in the soft stone of Headington, and the masons who
wrought on it filled the air with a fine dust and made the place in
the sultry afternoon like a desert in a sandstorm.  On the older
plinths and buttresses Peter read the great Cardinal's arms, and he
wished his soul well wherever it might be.  Wolsey had loved
grandeur and pomp, and had made all men bow to him.  Also he had
loved sound learning, and, had his dreams been realised, the Greek
of Corpus would have been to the Greek of Cardinal as a cup of
water to a flood.

Merton Street gave him shade, where the town houses of the gentry
of the shire beetled over the narrow pathway.  Beyond he saw bare
ground up to the city wall; that had once been a populous quarter
of the city, but it had been untenanted since the Black Death a
hundred years before. . . .  The great Cardinal dwelt in his mind,
not as a warning against pride, but as an encouragement to the
humble.  Though tragedy had been the end of him, he had wrested
rich prizes from life.  Dukes had held the ewer while he washed,
and earls had tied the strings of his shoes.  His palaces at
Hampton and Tittenhanger and the More had been as noble as the
King's.  He had travelled about with three hundred servants, and
he, the flesher's son, had sat as equal at the council-board with
the Emperor and the King of France.  Peter's fancy fired at the
thought, and in a dream he climbed the library steps with long
strides and found his accustomed corner.

But the mood did not last. . . .  Wolsey had been Wolsey, and he
was Peter Pentecost, without a friend save Brother Tobias and the
Oseney canons, and with no means to raise himself from his
humility.  His obscurity was too deep for any good fortune to
disinter him.  Diogenes Laertius that day was not profitably
studied, for Peter sat on the oak settle with his eye on the page
and his mind far away. . . .  He thought of his happy careless
childhood with irritation.  Born a peasant in a peasant's hut, not
very clear even about his own humble kin, learning had opened
windows for him and given him a prospect beyond his station.  But
learning having made the promise could not give him fulfilment.
The Church offered no career.  It was crumbling; as Tobias said,
the gates of Hell were prevailing against it.  A churchman met hard
glances nowadays wherever he went; and, worse, he found the doors
of power barred to him.  There was a new world coming to birth, and
it was a world which, instead of exalting Peter Pentecost, must
force him deeper down into the mire. . . .  Mother Sweetbread was
growing old, and she was all the kin he knew.  The thought at the
moment brought no kindness to his heart, for youth has its hard
patches.  He felt something which was almost resentment against the
woman who had reared him for so narrow a life.  Yet in those days
he had been happy.  His memory of them was of an infinite series of
golden hours, green woods and clear waters and gentle faces.
Illusion, no doubt, but it was better than the grim reality of to-
day. . . .

And then his thoughts flew to the Painted Floor, and the strange
spectacle of the night before.  Since his youth could not be
recovered, might he not win that clean and gracious world which the
classical poets had revealed to him, another and a fairer youth, an
eternal springtide of the spirit?  But the harsh present was too
insistent, nor did he believe that he had the makings of the true
scholar.  He could not consent to live only with books and dreams,
even if that life were free to him.  He had revelled in old poets
because they had given him a sphere so remote from squalid reality
that he could indulge the fancy that within it he was a master and
not a slave.  He had rejoiced in the Painted Floor, because it was
his own, and he was king there by the strongest right of tenure.
But did not the secret of both affections lie in the fact that they
made him what he could dream, but could never attain to? . . .

He had a momentary thought of breaking all shackles and seeking
another course of life.  He had been taught the use of arms by the
Wychwood foresters.  Brother Tobias himself had seen to it that he
had some skill of the sword, a rare thing in a clerk.  His chest
was deep and his limbs were tireless.  What of the big unclerkly
world beyond Oseney gates and Oxford walls? . . .  The notion only
crossed his mind to be dismissed.  Learning, even a little
learning, had spoiled him for beginning life in the ranks among
bullies and cut-throats and fellows whose sole possession was their
sinews.  It had made him fastidious.  He hungered, and yet could be
dainty about any offered dish. . . .  Peter shut his book and
dropped his head on his arms.  He was feeling the pressure of life
which sets a man's nerves twitching and confuses his brain, and
which can be mastered only by blinding the eyes and concentrating
on a single duty, or--the poet's way--by weaving tumultuous
phenomena into the simplicities of art.  What were those words of
Tobias which he was always using of England?--"The blanket of the
dark."  The gipsy with the hot eyes in Stowood had said the same.
Peter had a sense of a great cloud of darkness encumbering him, a
cloak at once black and stifling.

His restlessness drew him from the shadowed library and sent him by
way of Merton Lane into the bustle of High Street.  It was cooler
now, but, since that narrow street ran east and west, the sun's
beams fell in a long slant and there was no shade.  Peter, filled
with his own thoughts, and keeping close to the booths, found
himself so jostled that he was shaken into cognisance of the world
around him. . . .  A cowman, leading a red bull by the nose, was
pulled off his legs and had a wordy brawl with a mounted lackey
wearing the Harcourt liveries. . . .  For a moment the street was
cleared, while a veiled lady on a palfrey was escorted by four
running footmen and an armed steward.  Great folk from Ewelme,
thought Peter, for the men had the Suffolk colours. . . .  He saw
two friars cross the street and disappear within the Wheatsheaf
passage, moving furtively and fast.  They were from a Dominican
house among the south marshes, a foundation long decayed and now
trembling to its fall.  Dr John London, the Warden of New College,
emerged from the Bear inn, wiping his lips and arguing loudly with
a pale priest in a cassock.  Dr John's red face and vehement eye
dominated the pavement, and the citizens doffed their caps to him,
while the friars quickened their pace at the sight, for he was deep
in Cromwell's confidence and purposed to make himself a scourge for
the religious houses under the direction of the masterful chief
whip of the Council. . . .

There were plenty of threadbare scholars of Peter's own complexion,
and a sprinkling of a different kind of youth--ruddy boys, richly
doubleted and booted, and in defiance of statute bearing arms--
young sprigs of gentrice and nobility, to whom the life of Oxford
was that of a country house.  The sight of them made Peter shrink
still farther into what shadow he could find. . . .  In a press at
a corner he thought he caught a glimpse of the lean face and the
hot eyes of the gospeller of the night before.  And of one face he
was certain.  Down the causeway, as if he were its squire, strode
the tall horseman whom he had seen twenty hours ago ride up the
hill into Stowood.  He had changed his clothes, for gone were the
plumeless bonnet and battered doublet: now he was handsomely
dressed in black and silver, with a jewel in his cap, but the same
long sword swung at his side. . . .  Opposite Haberdashers' Hall,
which was on Oseney ground, there was a loud cry to clear the way,
and, a hundred yards off, he saw the head of a mounted man bobbing
above the throng.  It was a post from London, no less than the
Vice-Chancellor's own private courier, and, since he had many
acquaintances, he was delayed by people plucking at his stirrups
and bridle and asking for news.  To avoid the crowd Peter stepped
into an open door of the Ram inn, and found a seat well back in the
dusk.

It was a place which he sometimes frequented, when his weekly three
silver pennies permitted the indulgence.  A drawer brought him a
pot of ale, and when he had taken the edge from his thirst he
looked round the room, which was bright in front where its low
windows and door admitted the sunlight from the street, but at the
back was dusky as a vault.  A clerk sat on the settle next him, and
he saw without pleasure that it was that Jeremy Wellaby of Corpus
with whom he was at work on Plato.

There was a clamour at the door and loud cries on Master Puncheon
the vintner to bring forthwith a hogshead of ale to quench the
drought of an honest man.  The Vice-Chancellor's messenger had
halted at the Ram door and was being treated by his friends.  Peter
could not choose but catch echoes of the babble, as the said
friends discussed the news.  The Pope's men rising . . . Norfolk
way . . . some say the Bishop leads 'em . . . nay, not the Duke of
Norfolk, who was the right hand of the King's grace . . . Darcy
maybe, and unnamed lords in the north . . . St Albans had fallen to
them . . . some said they were stopped at Huntingdon. . . .  Nay,
nay, Master Giles had been clear that there was no rising as yet,
only the fear of one. . . .

The crowd surged on, but, like an ocean billow, it left some
flotsam behind it.  Several figures had entered the taproom of the
Ram.  One was already a little drunk, and had the look of a
scrivener's jackal, for there were ink stains over his large splay
hands.  He sat near the door, spilling his ale as he drank over a
grimy doublet, and he seasoned his draught with complaints to all
within earshot.

"Ay, my masters," he hiccuped, "the King's grace has gotten the
Pope at last in his belly.  Now that the big black Cardinal crow is
dead, the rookeries will be hewn down, and there will be rook pie
for every poor soul that seeks it.  A better world, says I.  No
more mortuaries and probates and a right to sin for every lousy
clerk.  Dr John!  Dr John London!  More power to your stout arm!
They waxed fat and kicked fat, forsooth . . . three dishes at a
meal for the plain gentleman and only six for a great lord of
parliament, but nine on the board of him that was Cardinal of
York. . . .  It is the day of recompense, my masters, and blessed
be the eyes which shall see it. . . ."

The man saw something in the street which plucked him from his
bench and sent him staggering into the open.

"It is the day of loose tongues," said a grave man, an Oxford
mercer who was dining handsomely off a roast duck and a cup of
sack.  "The stocks and a clipped ear await that one. . . .
Doubtless it would be a pleasant world lacking mortuaries and such-
like, but what an honest man saves from the Church he will pay to
the King.  An Englishman is born to be fleeced by the mighty ones,
and what with subsidies and loans and amicable aids he is like to
be worse off than before.  His money is lost to him whether it goes
to Pope or bishop or exchequer clerk.  I am a good citizen and a
true and loyal King's man, but it is the right of a freeman to have
his grumble."

Master Wellaby spoke up.

"You had an England of laymen and clerks, and you are destroying
it.  What better will it be to have an England of rich and poor?
Will there be more peace and happiness, think you?"

A new-comer had ordered a meal, with an observing eye upon the
mercer's fare.  He was a countryman by his ruddy face and the dust
on his square-toed boots and leather breeches, but from his dress
he might be reeve or steward or verderer or petty squire.

"Marry, there will always be rich and poor," he said, "since the
Scripture orders it, and since the new breed of rich is less gentle
than the old, the poor will fare the worse.  Are the new men that
lord it to-day the make of the old?  I trow not.  What is Russell
and Audeley and Wriothesley to Mowbray and Bohun and Mortimer, or
Seymour to De Vere, or Fitzwilliam to Lovell?  You have a new man
at the King's elbow, Master Crummle, of whom they speak great
things.  Nevertheless he is but a gilded scrivener.  My own cousin
saw him a score of years back a ragged serving-lad at the door of
Messer Friskyball's bank in Florence.  It sticks in my mind that
the new masters will be harsher than the old, since they are but
risen servants."

"History confirms you, sir," said Master Wellaby eagerly.  "In
ancient Rome the freedman was the worst tyrant."

"I know nought of Rome, ancient or new, but much of England,
notably that part of it which lies between Cherwell and Severn, and
I declare before God that I love the old ways best, as I love best
old ale and old pasture.  'Twere better if instead of bare-back
fleshers and scriveners the ancient masters bore rule again in the
land.  Such an one as the mighty Duke of Buckingham."

"Him that suffered in '21?" the mercer inquired.

"The same.  His blood was direct from Bohun and King Edward.  There
was the great lord!  He had fourteen thousand marks of rental each
year, and he never stirred abroad without four hundred armed men at
his back."

"Too proud," said the mercer.  "Too proud for a naughty world.
Wherefore did he die, good sir?  I was only a stripling then and
forget the tale."

"Because of an old wives' gossip of treason.  Wolsey, whom the
devil burn, feared to go to the French wars and leave such a man
behind him.  It is our foolish fashion to sacrifice some great one
before we fight our enemies.  'Twas Pole in '13, and 'twas
Buckingham in '21.  I uphold that the Duke's death was a crime in
God's eyes, and that He hath visited it not only on Wolsey who was
the guilty one, but on the King's grace who was an innocent
partaker.  Witness his lamentable barrenness in the matter of
posterity. . . ."

There was a hush at the words, as if each auditor feared his
neighbour.  But the countryman went on undaunted.

"And now there is nought left of the proud race of Stafford and
Bohun, and old England is the poorer place."

After that he spoke no more but gave his mind to a meat pasty.
Presently Wellaby rose to leave, and soon Peter was the only
occupant of the taproom.  It was the hour of the evening meal at
Oseney, but Peter had no mind to it.  He expended one of his few
coins on a little bread and cheese, and sat on as the dusk deepened
and the booths put up their shutters and women called their
husbands to supper.

He was in a mood of profound dejection, for two things had befallen
him that afternoon.  He had realised that the life to which he had
vowed himself was in danger of becoming no more than a blind alley,
and that the huge fabric of the Church was falling about his ears.
Also he had been made aware that great events were toward in the
State, and he had seen the happy bustle of men with purpose and
power, while he himself sat a disconsidered oddment in a corner.
The blanket of the dark was very thick about him.



A hand touched him and woke him from his lassitude.  It was one of
the Abbey servitors from Oseney.

"Make haste, Master Pentecost--'ee be wanted.  I've been rakin'
Oxford for 'ee this past hour.  Brother Tobias bade me bring 'ee
post-haste."

Peter followed him into the street, listless and incurious.  This
was the consultation, no doubt, for which Tobias had trysted him
that morning.  But what could Tobias do?  Peter had not lost the
savour of life; the deadly sin of accidia was not his; he felt the
savour with a desperate keenness, but he despaired of passing from
the savour to the taste of it. . . .  The crowd in the street was
less, since it was the meal hour, but there were travellers on the
road, spurring through the city to some Cotswold inn or manor.
Also there were many of the new proud breed of collegians, coming
from the Beaumont field to the colleges nearest the river, or
forsaking their bare commons for a tavern supper.  There were
merchants of the town, too, taking the air and discussing the last
news, comfortable men, with a proper reverence for a lord and a
proper contempt for a poor scholar. . . .  To everyone he met, even
the humblest, he was nothing--a child of country peasants, a
dabbler in unwanted learning, a creature of a falling Church.  In
the bitterness of his soul he clenched his hands till the nails
hurt his palms.  As he crossed Bookbinders bridge and entered the
Abbey he felt like a dog whistled back to its kennel.

So low were his spirits that he did not notice that he was being
conducted to the Abbot's palace till his feet were on the
threshold.  The messenger handed him over to the seneschal, who
appeared to be awaiting him.  This was an odd spot for his
appointment with Tobias, for he had never entered the place before,
but he followed his guide dully through the outer hall, and through
the dining chamber and up a stairway of Forest marble.  He entered
a room part panelled and part hung with tapestries, which looked
westward over the Botley causeway and the Wytham meadows.  It was
lit by the summer sunset, and beside the table stood two men.

One was Tobias, whose crab-apple face seemed strangely perturbed.
He looked at Peter with hungry eyes as if striving by them to say
that which he could not put into words.  The other was an old man
dressed soberly in black, who wore a rich chain of gold and a jewel
on his breast.  His face was deeply lined, his mouth was grim, and
he had the eye of one used to command.  Recollection awoke in Peter
at the sight.  This was the very man whom he had seen wearing a
purple cloak and an ermine collar in the cavalcade of the evening
before.  He had guessed that he was one of the King's commissioners
sent to deal with the religious houses.  Eynsham had not been his
goal.  He must have been Oseney's guest for the night.

Both men rose at his entrance and remained standing, a strange
thing for a great one in the presence of a youthful clerk.  The
elder looked at him steadily, ardently, his eye taking in every
detail of the threadbare clothes and lithe form and comely face.
Then he sighed, but his sigh was not of disappointment.

"The same arch of the brows," he murmured, "and the little cleft in
the upper lip."

"You are he whom they call Peter Pentecost?" he said.  "I have
searched long before I found you, my child.  They told me that you
were an inmate of a religious house in these parts, but which I
could not learn.  Having found you, I have much to tell you.  But
first answer my question.  Who and what are you and what was your
upbringing?"  There was no rudeness in the interrogation, but
nevertheless it was peremptory, and the speaker's air had that in
it which compelled an answer.

"I was reared by one Mistress Sweetbread at Leafield, the wife, and
now the widow, of a Wychwood forester."

The old man nodded.

"Your father?"

"Of him I know nothing.  I have heard that he was a soldier who
fell in the wars oversea."

"Your mother?"

"I never saw her.  She was, I think, of near kin to the
Sweetbreads, a sister or a sister's child."

The other smiled.

"It was a necessary imposture.  There was no safety for such as you
except to bury you deep in some rustic place.  You remember nothing
of the years before you came to Leafield?"

Peter shook his head.  A wild hope was beginning to surge in his
heart.

"Then it is my privilege to enlighten you.  There were some who
knew the truth, but it did not become them to speak.  This good man
for one," and he turned to Tobias.

"I judged it wiser to let the past sleep," said Tobias, "for I
considered only the happiness of him whom I loved as my own son.
There was no need . . ."

"The need has arisen," said the old man firmly.  "We who were your
father's friends have never lost sight of that likelihood, though
i' faith we let you sink so deep into Oxfordshire mud that it has
been hard to find you.  That was the doing of our reverend brother
Tobias.  You have lived a score of years in a happy ignorance, but
the hour has come when it must be broken.  Your mother . . ."

He paused, and Peter's heart stood still.

"Your mother was no Sweetbread kin.  She was the Lady Elinor, the
eldest daughter of Percy of Northumberland."

Peter's heart beat again.  He felt his forehead flush and a wild
gladness in him which sent the tears to his eyes.  He was noble
then on the distaff side, noble with the rarest blood of England.
What runaway match, what crazy romance, had brought him to birth?

"My father?" he asked.

"Be comforted," said the other, smiling back.  "I read your face,
but there is no bar sinister on your shield.  You were born in
lawful wedlock, a second son.  Your mother is long dead, your elder
brother is these three months in his grave.  You are now the only
child of your father's house."

"My father?"  The tension made Peter's voice as thin as a bat's.

"Your father?" said the old man, and he rolled the words out like a
herald at a tourney.  "Your father was that high and puissant
prince, Edward, Duke and Earl of Buckingham, Earl and Baron of
Stafford, Prince of Brecknock, Count of Perche in Normandy, Knight
of the Garter, hereditary Lord High Steward, and, in virtue of the
blood of Bohun, Lord High Constable of England."

"He died in the year '21," said Peter, blindly repeating what he
had heard in the Ram inn.

"He died in the year '21, a shameful and unmerited death.  His
lands and honours were thereby forfeited, and you have not one rood
to your name this day.  But in the eyes of God and of honest men
throughout this land you are Buckingham and Bohun and the sixth man
from Edward the Third.  I and those who think with me have sought
you long, and have planned subtly on your behalf, and on behalf of
this unhappy realm which groans under a cruel tyranny.  The times
are ripe for a change of master, and there will be no comfort for
our poor people till that change be accomplished."

"You would make me a duke?" Peter stammered.

The westering sun was in the old man's face, and it showed that in
his eyes which belied his age.  He was suddenly transfigured.  He
came forward, knelt before Peter, and took his hand between his two
palms.

"Nay, sire," he said, "by the grace of God we will make you King of
England."



CHAPTER III

IN WHICH PETER LURKS IN THE SHADOW


Four weeks later to a day Peter sat again in his old eyrie, above
the highway which descended from Stowood to the Wood Eaton meads.
Strange things had happened meanwhile.  Twenty-four hours after
the meeting in the Abbot's lodging the heat had broken in
thunderstorms, followed by such a deluge of rain as washed the
belated riverside haycocks to the sea and sent Isis and Cherwell
adventuring far into distant fields.  In the floods a certain
humble dependent of Oseney, Pentecost by name, had the ill-luck to
perish.  For two days he was missed from his accustomed haunts, and
on the third news came up the river from Dorchester that he had
been last seen attempting a crazy plank bridge over Thame which had
been forthwith carried down by the floods.  The body was not
recovered, but there were many nameless bodies washed up those
days.  Perfunctory masses were sung for the soul of the drowned man
in a side chapel of Oseney Great Church, and in the little chapel
of St George in the Castle, and Brother Tobias wore a decent mask
of grief and kept his chamber.  A new master in grammar was found
for the novices, and there was a vacancy in an Oseney corrody and
an empty bed in the Castle garret.  In a week a deeper tide than
that of Isis had submerged the memory of Peter Pentecost.

"It is necessary to do such things cleanly," the old Lord Avelard
had said.  "There must be no Lambert Simnel tale that might crop up
to our undoing."  He was a careful gentleman, for Brother Tobias
was sent to Wychwood to spread the news, so that those who had sat
by Peter on the benches of Witney school might spare a sigh for a
lost companion.

Then Peter by night was taken to Sir Ralph Bonamy's house at Wood
Eaton.  No servant saw him enter, but in the dark a clerk's gown
was burned, and in the morning a young man broke his fast in Sir
Ralph's hall, who bore the name of Bonamy, and was a cousin out of
Salop.  The manor-house of Wood Eaton was no new-fangled place such
as fine gentlemen were building elsewhere.  It was still in
substance the hall of Edward the First's day, with its high
raftered roof, its solar with plastered walls, its summer parlour,
its reedy moat, which could nevertheless be speedily filled bank-
high by a leat from Cherwell, its inner and outer courtyards
bastioned and loopholed for defence.  Sir Ralph was as antique as
his dwelling.  A widower and childless, he lived alone with an
ancient sister, who spent her days amid the gentle white magic of
herbs and simples.  He was well beyond three-score and ten years,
but still immensely strong and vigorous, and able to spend long
days in the field with his hounds or on the meres with his fishing
pole.  He was short and broad, with a noble head of greying reddish
hair, and he was clad always in coarse green cloth like a yeoman,
while his boots were as massive as an Otmoor fowler's.  He was a
lover of good fare and mighty in hospitality, so that his hall was
like a public house of entertainment, where neighbour or stranger
could at any time get his fill of beef-pudding and small beer.  It
was an untidy place, murky in winter with wood-smoke and dim even
in summer, for the windows were few and dirty.  It smelled always
of cooked meats and of a motley of animals, being full of dogs--
deer-hounds and gazehounds, and Malta spaniels, and terriers;
likewise there were hawks' perches, and Sir Ralph's favourite
tassel-gentle sat at his elbow.  The stone floor was apt to be
littered with marrow-bones and the remains of the hounds' meals,
and the odour was not improved by the drying skins of wild game
which hung on the walls.  Sir Ralph had a gusty voice and a habit
of rough speech, which suited his strange abode, but he was also
notably pious, and a confrater of Oseney; a small chapel opened
from the hall where the family priest conducted regular devotions,
and he kept his Fridays and fast days as rigidly as any Oseney
canon.  He was an upholder of the old ways in all things--religion,
speech, food and furnishing.

Peter, clad in a sober, well-fitting suit of brown such as became a
country squire out of Salop, breakfasted his first morning at Wood
Eaton with his head in a whirl.  His host, in a great armed chair,
made valorous inroads on a cold chine of beef, and drank from a tun
glass of ale which he stirred with a twig of rosemary.  The long
hawking-pole, which never left him, leaned against his chair, and
by his hand lay a little white stick with which he defended his
platter against the efforts of a great deer-hound and two spaniels
to share its contents.  Sir Ralph had welcomed his guest with a
gusto which he had in vain attempted to make courtly, and since
then had said nothing, being too busy with food and dogs.  "Eat,
sir," he had said, "youth should be a good trencherman.  Now, alas!
I can only pick like a puling lanner."  Then he cut himself a wedge
of pie which might have provisioned a ploughman for a week.

Peter turned his head at a sound behind him.  Lord Avelard had
entered the hall, preceded by his body-servant, who arranged his
chair, procured him some wheaten cakes and butter, filled a glass
of sack which he mixed with syrup of gillyflowers, and then bowed
and took his leave.  Seen for the first time in the morning light,
the face of the old man was such as to hold the eyes.  His toilet
was but half made; he had slippers on his feet and still wore his
dressing-gown; his age was more apparent, and could not be less
than four-score; nevertheless, so strong was his air of purpose
that he seemed ready forthwith to lead an army or dominate a
council.  A steady fire burned in his pale eyes, a fire of
enthusiasm, or, it might be, of hate.  Peter, as he looked on him,
felt his curiosity changing to awe.

But the old man was very cordial to the young one.  He greeted him
as a father might greet a son who was presently to be pope or king.

"We will call him for a little by your name, Ralph," he said.
"Master Bonamy--Master Peter Bonamy--I have forgot what is his
worship's manor t'other side of Severn. . . .  Wood Eaton will be a
safe retreat for a week or two, till I am ready to receive him at
Avelard."

"By your leave, my lord," said his host, "it is none too safe a
sanctuary.  Wood Eaton has a plaguey name as a house of call for
all and sundry.  It is as open as the Oxford corn-market.  Likewise,
I have lodging here my niece Sabine--old Jack Beauforest's
daughter--you mind Jack of Dorchester, my lord?  Come to think of
it, Sabine is as near kin to your deceased lady as to me.  She is
gone for a week to the nuns at Godstow, where she went to school--
Abbess Katherine was her mother's cousin--but will be home to-
morrow.  The secret with which you have entrusted me is too big for
a maid's ear, and I do not want Mistress Sabine and this new cousin
of ours to clap eyes on each other.  You see the reason of it, my
lord, though, as one with a hospitable name, I think shame to urge
it."

"But I have a plan to offer," he continued, when he saw the old
man's countenance fall.  "Let him go into Stowood to a verderer's
lodge.  I, as principal ranger, can compass that.  There is one
John of Milton, a silent man, who lives deep in the forest, and to
him I would send our cousin, my lord.  There no eye will see him
save that of gipsy or charcoal-burner or purley-man, and he will
have leisure to perfect himself in arts in which I gather he is
lacking.  A month will pass quick in the cool of the forest."

Lord Avelard pondered.  "Your plan is good, Ralph," he said.  "Wood
Eaton is a thought too notable because of its master."  He looked
at Peter and smiled.  "How will you relish taking to the greenwood
like Robin Hood or Little John?  You are dedicated, my son, to a
great purpose, and it has always been the custom of the dedicated
to sojourn first for a while in the wilderness."

His face, as he looked on the young man, was lit for a moment with
a strange tenderness, but the next second it had fallen back into
the wary mask of the conspirator.

"How goes the country, Ralph?" he asked.  "What does Oxfordshire
say of the latest doings at Court?"

"Oxfordshire is very weary of the Welshman," was the answer, "and
grieves for the fate of poor Hal Norris.  It was well to cut off
the Concubine's head, but why should Hal have been made to suffer
for her misdoings--Hal whom I knew from boyhood and who was
innocent as a christom babe?  Wychwood and Langley forests had
never a better keeper than Hal. . . .  Who is to have the post,
think you?  I heard talk of Jack Brydges. . . ."

"The King, as you know, has married the Seymour, so he has a new
breed of wife's kin to provide for."

"The Welshman makes a poor business of marrying, for he has nothing
to show for his pains.  The Lady Mary is outlawed, and the
Concubine's child is outlawed, and . . ."

"Nay, but there is a new conceit," said Lord Avelard.  "Parliament
has granted the King's grace the power to bequeath the Crown of
England by will, as you or I might legate an old doublet."

"God's wounds!" cried Sir Ralph, "but this is sacrilege!  If a pack
of citizens can decide the disposition of the crown what becomes of
the Lord's anointing?  It is the tie of blood which God has
determined. . . ."

"Do not vex yourself, for the thing works in our favour.  If the
King forget the obligations of lawful descent, England remembers
them. . . .  What further do you report of the discontents?"

"There is the devil's own uproar over the King's extortions among
the gentle, and the simple complain that they are sore oppressed by
the inclosers and the engrossers and the wool-staplers.  Likewise
the pious everywhere are perturbed, since heretics sit in high
places and the blasphemer is rampant in the land.  Crummle's
commissioners go riding the roads, with the spoils of God's houses
on their varlets' backs, copes for doublets and tunics for
saddlecloths.  There are preachers who tell the folk that the Host
is only a piece of baker's bread, and that baptism is as lawful in
a tub or a ditch as in a holy font; and will allow a poor man none
of the kindly little saints to guide his steps when God and His
Mother have bigger jobs on hand.  Certes, the new England they will
bring upon us is good neither for Jack nor his master."

"Jack knows it," said Lord Avelard.  "I will prophesy to you,
Ralph.  In a matter of months, or maybe of weeks, you will hear
strange news out of the eastern and northern shires.  There will be
such a rising of poor Christian people as will shake the King on
his throne."

"Ay, ay.  I have heard something of it.  But Jack alone will never
oust the Welshman.  That is a job for Jack's masters.  What of
them, my lord?  What of the nobles of England?"

"Their turn will come," was the answer.  "First, the priests and
the common people.  Then, when they have fluttered the heart of the
Court and drawn the King's levies into a difficult campaign, we
shall strike in the western and midland shires, and the blow will
not be by a bill in a clodhopper's hand but by a glaive in a steel
gauntlet.  First the commonalty, then the gentles--that is our
stratagem."

"And of these latter more puissant folk what numbers can you
command?  Remember, my lord, I have been a soldier.  I was at
Flodden and Therouanne.  I am not ignorant of the ways of war."

Lord Avelard consulted a paper.  "Your walls are secret?" he asked.

"As the grave.  Likewise I have no servant who is not deaf or dull
in the wits."

"Of the plain country squires throughout the land, three out of
four are on our side. . . .  For the greater ones--Norfolk is
Harry's man, and Suffolk married his sister--we can reckon on
neither. . . .  In the north there is hope of Northumberland.  He
was once affianced to the Concubine and weeps her death, and
likewise he is your cousin's kin on the distaff side."  He smiled
on Peter.  "Westmoreland and Cumberland are with us, and Latimer
and Lumley.  In the mid shires and the east we shall have Rutland
and Huntingdon and Hussey and Darcy.  We can count assuredly on the
Nevilles. . . .  Shrewsbury we cannot get, but if we lose the
Talbots we have the Stanleys."

"What of the west?" Sir Ralph asked.  "What of Exeter?"

"I have good hopes.  But the Courtenay blood is hard to judge,
being in all things capricious, and my lord of Exeter is a grandson
of Edward Fourth, and so himself within modest distance of the
throne.  He cannot love the Tudor, but he may not consent to give
place to a son of Buckingham.  Yet we shall see. . . .  What of
you, old friend?  Will you strike again for England against the
Welshman the shrewd blow which you struck against the Scot at
Flodden?"

"I am aged," was the answer, "and am somewhat set in my habits.
But I stand for holy Church, the old blood and the old ways, and
not least for Ned Stafford's son.  I will ride with you, provided
your campaigning season does not fall athwart my other duties. . . .
Let me consider.  In the months of August and September, I am
engaged, as principal ranger of the King's forests of Stowood and
Shotover, in thinning the deer.  The fallow buck are already ripe
for the bolt, and in a week the velvet will be off the red deer's
horns.  That brings me to October, when we take the wild fowl from
the Otmoor fleets; a heavy task which needs a master's eye and
hand.  Then up to Yule I hunt the fox and badger and get the pike
out of the river.  January is a busy time with my falcons, seeing
that the geese are on the wing if it be frost, and if it be mild
the pigeons are in every spinney.  February and March are the
training months for the eyasses, while the herons nest, and in
April and May there are the trout to be caught in the Fettiplace
waters and the monks' ponds of Bicester.  In summertime I have the
young haggards to consider which my men take in the forest, and
that, too, is the season when the manège must be looked to against
the hunting months."

"You have filled up your year to the last minute," said Lord
Avelard.

"By the sorrows of God, I have."  He pondered in deep perplexity.
"Let it be summer, then," he said at length.  "I must leave the
haggards to my falconer Merryman.  I will mount and ride with you
if your summons come on the first day of June.  But, as you love
me, not a day sooner, for Windrush trout rise heartily till the
last moment of May."



So Peter had exchanged the gloomy halls of Wood Eaton for the
verderer's lodge deep in the heart of Stowood, where the ground
fell steeply from the chantry of Stanton St John to the swamps of
Menmarsh.  The lodge stood in a glade among oaks, beside a strong
spring of water--a pleasant spot, for the dwellers there looked
northward over dim blue airy distances and a foreground as
fantastic as a tapestry.  The verderer, John of Milton, who came
from the Milton hamlets in the east by Thame side, was all day
absent on his own errands, and to Peter, as a cousin of the chief
ranger, he behaved as a respectful servitor, sparing of speech but
quick to execute his wishes.  The boy was not lonely, for he went
anew to school.  Under Sir Ralph's direction he was taught the
accomplishments of his rank.  One of the Wood Eaton men, who had
like his master confronted the Scottish spears at Flodden, taught
him various devices in the use of the two-edged, cut-and-thrust
blade, of which he already had mastered more than the rudiments.  A
hedge-captain came out from Oxford to instruct him in the new
Spanish sword-play, where the edge was scarcely used and the point
was everything.  Peter had often marked the man in Oxford and had
taken him for a lord from his fierce eyebrows and arrogant air--but
he proved only a different kind of usher, who doffed his cap
respectfully to Sir Ralph's kin.  Likewise, Sir Ralph's chief
falconer, Merryman, who was an adept at the cross-bow, made Peter
sweat through long mornings shooting at a mark, and a Noke man
taught him to stretch the long-bow.  Peter was no discredit to his
tutors, for his eye was true, his sinews strong and his docility
complete.  Besides, his training had been well begun years before
on the skirts of Wychwood.

At last had come Brother Tobias, riding out on an Abbey mule, when
the little wild strawberries were ripe in the coverts.  Tobias
liked these fruits, and had a bowl of them, lappered in cream from
the verderer's red cow.  He regarded Peter nervously, avoiding his
eye, but stealing sidelong glances at him, as if uncertain what he
should find.  Peter himself had no shyness, for this old man was
the thing he loved best in the world.

"You knew all the time?" he asked when he had settled his guest on
a seat of moss beside the spring.

"I knew, and I was minded never to tell," was his answer.  "You
were born too high to find peace; therefore I judged that it was
well that you should remain low, seeking only the altitude which
may be found in God's service.  It was not so decreed, and I bow to
a higher wisdom."

But if Tobias was embarrassed he was likewise exalted.  It appeared
to him that his decision had been directly overruled by
Omnipotence, and that his pupil had been chosen for a great
mission--no less than the raising again of Christ's Church in
England.  He expounded his hopes in an eager quivering voice.  The
Church stood for the supremacy of spiritual things, and the King
out of a damnable heresy would make it a footstool to the throne.
The Church stood for eternal right and eternal justice; if it fell,
then selfish ambition and man-made laws would usurp the place of
these verities.  Upon the strength of the Church depended the unity
of Christendom.  Weaken that integrity, and Christendom fell
asunder into warring and jealous nations, and peace fled for ever
from the world.  Granted abuses many; these must be set in order by
a firm hand.  But Pope must be above King, the Church's rights
above the secular law, or there could be no Christian unity.  God
and Mammon, Christ and Cæsar--they could not share an equal rule;
one must be on top, and if it were Mammon or Cæsar then the soul's
salvation was ranked lower than the interests of a decaying and
transitory world.  It was the ancient struggle which began in Eden,
and now in England it had come to the testing-point, and Peter was
the champion by whose prowess the Church must stand or fall.

The old man's voice ceased to quiver and he became eloquent.
Forgotten was the Grecian, the exponent of new ways in learning,
the zealous critic of clerical infirmities; he who sat on the moss
was a dreamer of the same dreams, an apostle of the same ideals, as
those which had filled his novitiate.

Peter said nothing--he spoke little these days.  But he remembered
the sinking revenues and the grass-grown courts of Oseney, the
pedantries of the brethren, the intrigues and quarrels that filled
their petty days.  He remembered, too, the talk of Lord Avelard.
Those who took the Church's side in the quarrel had, few of them,
much care for the Church, save as part of that ancient England with
which their own privileges were intertwined.  None had such a
vision as Brother Tobias.  Peter had travelled far in these last
years from his old preceptor, and had come to think of the Church
as no better than a valley of dry bones.  Could those bones live
again?  Were there many with the faith of Tobias, life might still
be breathed into them.  But were there many?  Was there even one?
He sighed, for he knew that he was not that one.  Disillusionment
had gone too far with him, and his youth had been different from
that of the old believer at his side.



He sat that August afternoon on his familiar perch above the
highway, and his head was like a hive of bees.  It had been humming
for weeks, and had become no clearer.  Outwardly he was a silent
and reflective young man, very docile among his elders, but
inwardly he was whirlpool and volcano.

He had got his desire, and he was not intoxicated or puffed up or
strung to a great purpose; rather he was afraid.  That was his
trouble--fear--fear of a destiny too big for him.  It was not
bodily fear, though he had visions now and then of the scaffold,
and his own head on that block where once his father's had lain.
Rather it was dread of an unfamiliar world in which he had no part.

Lord Avelard's was the face that stuck in his mind--that wise,
secret face, those heavily pouched eyes, the gleam in them of an
unquestionable pride and an undying hate.  He had treated him
tenderly as the son of an old friend, and respectfully, as one of
whom he would make a king.  But Peter knew well that he was no more
to Lord Avelard than the sword by his side, a weapon to be used,
but in a good cause to be splintered.  The man and all his kin, the
ancientry of England, were at deadly enmity with this Welshman who
had curbed their power, and was bringing in a horde of new men to
take their places.  They professed to speak in the name of the
burdened English commons, but for the poor man he knew they cared
not a jot; given the chance they would oppress as heartily as any
royal commissioner; was it not they who had begun the ousting of
tillage by the new sheep pastures?  They claimed to stand for the
elder England and its rights, and the old Church, but at heart they
stood only for themselves. . . .  And he was to be their tool,
because he had the blood of the ancient kings in him.  He was being
trained for his part, so that when he came into the sunlight he
should have the air and accomplishments of his rank. . . .  Peter
sickened, for it seemed to him that he was no more than a dumb ox
being made ready for the sacrifice.

They professed to fight in the name of Christ's Church.  For a
moment a recollection of Tobias's earnest eyes gave this plea a
shadow of weight.  Sir Ralph, too.  That worthy knight, if he could
be dragged from his field sports, would fight out of piety rather
than concern for his secular privileges. . . .  But the rest! . . .
And was that Church truly worth fighting for?  Had he any desire to
set Aristotle and St Thomas back in their stalls?  Was he not vowed
heart and soul to the new learning which Colet and Erasmus had
brought into England, and would not his triumph mean a falling back
from these apples of the Hesperides to the dead husks of the
Schools?  Was it any great matter that the Pope in Rome, who had
been but a stepfather to England, should have the last word, and
not an anointed king?  Was there no need of change in the
consecrated fabric?  Half the religious houses in England were in
decay, no longer lamps to the countryside, but dark burrows where a
few old men dragged out weary days.

He tried to recover that glowing picture of the Church of God which
he had brought with him from Witney school, when Oseney's towers
seemed to be bathed in a heavenly light, and its courts the abode
of sages and seraphs.  He tried to remember and share in Tobias's
vision of Christendom.  It was useless.  He saw only the crumbling
mortar and the warped beams of Oseney cloisters, and heard Brother
Lapidarius and Brother Johannes disputing shrilly about the
Kidlington dues, over their fried onions at supper. . . .  The
glamour had passed.  How could he champion that in which he had no
belief or men who at the best were half-believers?

 As he looked at the strip of highway passing through the canyon of
the forest he recalled with a shock that evening a month before,
when at the end of a day of holiday he had watched the pageant of
life on the road beneath him, and longed for an ampler share in it
than fell to the lot of a poor clerk of St George's.  He had got
his wish.  He remembered his bitter jealousy in the hot Oxford
streets of a sounding world in which he had no part.  He was in the
way during the next few months of getting a full portion of that
world.  And he realised that he did not want it, that the fruit was
ashes before he put his mouth to it.

Peter tried to be honest with himself.  One thing he had gained
that could never be taken from him.  He was not born of nameless
peasants, but of the proudest stock in England.  He had in his
veins the blood of kings.  That was the thought which he hugged to
his breast to cheer his despondency. . . .  But now he knew that he
wanted that knowledge, and nothing more.  He did not desire to live
in palaces or lead armies.  He wanted, with that certainty of his
birth to warm his heart, to go back to his old bookish life, or to
sink deep among countryfolk into the primordial country peace.  He
had thought himself ambitious, but he had been wrong.  His early
life had spoiled him for that bustling fever which takes men to
high places.  He did not like the dust of the arena, and he did not
value the laurels.

The opposite slope of the hill towards Elsfield was golden in the
afternoon sunlight, and mottled with the shadows of a few summer
clouds.  He saw the brackeny meadow, and above it the little
coppice which hid the Painted Floor.  He had a sudden longing to go
there.  It was his own sanctuary, hallowed with his innermost
dreams.  It represented a world of grace and simplicity æons
removed from the turbid present. . . .  But he did not dare.  He
must go through with the course to which he was predestined.  He
had got what he had hungered for, but he felt like a wild thing in
a trap.  Yet he was Buckingham's son, and there could be no turning
back.

A magpie flew down the hollow, but he had turned his head to the
hill and did not notice it.



There was a hunt that day in Stowood.  At dawn the slowhounds had
been out to start the deer and the greyhounds had been unleashed
before noon.  They had begun by running a knobber in the
Shabbington coverts, but in the afternoon the sport had been
better, for they had found a stag of ten in the oak wood by Stanton
and had hunted him through the jungle of the Wick and the Elsfield
dingles, and killed in the hollow east of Beckley.  As Peter made
his way back to the verderer's lodge he had heard the mort sounded
a mile off.

He hastened, for he wished to be indoors before he was seen by any
straggling hunter.  Such had been Sir Ralph's precise injunction;
when the hunt was out he must bide indoors or in cover.  But this
time he was too late.  He heard cries and laughter on all sides; a
knot of hunt servants, whom they called Ragged Robins, crossed the
road ahead of him at a canter.  Worse, he saw two of the hunters
coming towards him, whom he could not choose but pass.  One was a
woman on a black jennet, the other a young man on a great grey
gelding.  The first wore a riding dress all of white, with a velvet
three-cornered cap, and a rich waistcoat of green velvet, the other
had the common green habit of the woods, and was not to be
distinguished from a yeoman save by the plume and the jewel in his
flat cap.

Peter recognised the man first.  He was the rider whom he had
envied a month ago, first at the gate of Stowood and then in the
Oxford street, because he seemed so wholly master of his world.
The man had still that mastery.  He passed the boy with a lifted
hand to acknowledge his greeting, but he scarcely spared him a
glance; nor were his eyes set on his companion, but roaming
fiercely about as if to seek out matter of interest or quarrel.
His weathered face had the flush of recent exertion, but his pale
eyes were cool and wary.

These same eyes might well have been on the girl at his side.
Peter had a glimpse of ashen gold hair under the white cap, a cheek
of a delicate rose above the pale ivory of the uncovered neck.  She
bowed her head slightly to his salute, and ere she passed on for
one instant the heavy lids were raised from her eyes.

Peter stood stock still, but he did not look after them.  This was
the white girl who had danced at midnight on the Painted Floor.
Now he had seen her eyes, and he knew that there was that in them
of which the memory would not die.

He continued his way in a stupor of wonderment and uneasy delight.
He halted at the spring by the verderer's lodge, and turned at the
sound of hoofs behind him.  To his amazement it was the girl.  She
sprang from her horse as lightly as a bird.  The jennet, whose bit
was flecked with foam, would have nuzzled her shoulder, but she
slapped its neck so that it started and stood quivering.

"I am warm with the chase, sir," she said.  "I would beg a cup of
water."

Peter fetched a bowl from the lodge and filled it at the spring.
When he gave it her she sipped a mouthful.  Her face was no longer
rose-tinted but flushed, and she was smiling.

"Greeting, cousin," she said.  "I think you are my cousin Peter
from Severn side.  I am niece of Sir Ralph Bonamy at Wood Eaton.
My name is Sabine Beauforest."

She offered him her cheek to kiss.  Then she drew back, and to
Peter it appeared that she blushed deeply.  She sank in a low
curtsey on the moss, took his hand and carried it to her lips.

"I am your Grace's most loyal and devoted servant," she said.



CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH PETER GOES DEEPER INTO THE GREENWOOD


Two days later came Sir Ralph Bonamy to the verderer's lodge in
Stowood.  He left his big-boned horse in a servant's charge half a
mile from the place, and reached the cottage by a track among
brambles and saplings, walking so fast that the sweat beaded his
brow.  Clearly Sir Ralph's errand was one of speed and secrecy.

"This is but a feeble harbourage," he told Peter.  "I thought you
were safe here as in the heart of Otmoor, but you have taken the
air too freely, my lad.  It seems you have been seen, and questions
asked, for a youth of your shape and bearing is a scarce thing in
the forest."

"There was a lady . . ." Peter began.

"Ay.  That was my niece Sabine.  If I ever trusted woman with a
secret, it would be niece Sabine, for she is close as a hazel-nut.
She had word of a cousin from beyond Severn who was sojourning in
Stowood, and, being a quick-witted wench, put a name to you when
she saw you.  It is not Mistress Sabine that troubles me, for I can
control my womenkind, but he that rode with her.  Did you mark
him?"

"A tall fellow with a stiff neck and a proud eye."

"That is he.  That is Master Simon.  I have naught against the lad,
though my sire and his fought like cockerels.  They both claimed
for their scutcheons the barry nebuly of Blount, and they wrangled
as bitterly over that device as Scrope and Grosvenor over the bend
d'or.  The lad himself is well enough, a good man to horse and
hound, a keen eye for a cross-bow, and a strong hand for the sword.
But he is not of our faction."

"Is he one of Crummle's men?"

"Nay, he loves Crummle and his rabble as little as I.  But he is a
King's man, and has been on some errand of the Welshman's to the
northern states of Europe.  Also, he has been on voyages with the
Bristol merchants, and has picked up some vile heresies in
outlandish parts.  My news is that he is asking questions about a
stranger in Stowood, and when such an one asks he is likely to get
an answer.  He lives too plaguily near at hand for my peace of
mind, for he is Simon Rede of Boarstall--his home is not five miles
distant under Muswell hill.  Also through his mother he has heired
the manor of Headington, and his lawful occasions take him often
through this forest.  We must find you a safer lodging, friend
Peter."

Sir Ralph removed his bonnet, and with his great brown face, and
his ancient brown doublet, much soiled at the shoulders by his
falcons, he looked not unlike a stump of oak.

"You are not due at Avelard yet awhile, and we must jealously
observe my lord's instructions.  But Avelard is the other side of
Cotswold, and the nearer you are to it the better for my lord's
purposes.  My advice is that you move west in the company which I
shall appoint for you.  I had thoughts of sending you to Otmoor
among the moormen, but Simon is a moorman himself after a fashion,
and Boarstall is on the edge of the meres.  You will be safer in
Wychwood and Cotswold."

"I was bred there," said Peter.  "There are many living who
remember me.  Mother Sweetbread . . ."

"Why, so much the better.  Peter Pentecost is dead and masses sung
for his soul, but Mother Sweetbread will not have forgot him and
will welcome her foster-child restored to her, whatever name he may
choose to bear.  She has all along been privy to your tale, for she
was a serving-woman of your mother's.  There you will be safe from
the sharp eyes of Simon Rede, and the coverts of Wychwood are
deeper than the coverts of Shabbington.  But to make security
certain I have trysted with one who will accompany you and never
leave your side till you are safe at Avelard.  He will be here
before sunset to start with you, and 'twere well that you keep
yourself privy till then."

"Who is this guide?" Peter asked.

Sir Ralph smiled and scratched his head.  "That were hard to say.
The name he will give you is Solomon Darking, but he has many
others.  He is of the old race of these parts, the squat dark folk
we call the Wens, who were here a thousand years before the Romans.
He is a true man and a wise man, and if he seems strange to you,
remember that wisdom is apt to cohabit with oddity.  There are
mannikins plenty who have seen something of oddity in ME.  This I
can tell you.  If I were fleeing for my life it is to Solomon
Darking I would go, for he could call the beasts of the field and
the birds of the air to my defence. . . .  Farewell and God bless
you.  I must get me to Beckley, where there is a gyr-falcon
training for me at the Upper Lodge."

Off rode Sir Ralph, leaving Peter to an afternoon's meditation in
the deeps of an oak coppice.  Two days had worked a miracle in his
mood.  He was no more the doubter, proud only of his rediscovered
race, but shrinking from the hazards and heartbreaks of the career
into which others would thrust him.  He now longed for it.  He
longed to set his foot on the wildest road so long as it led him to
the hill-top.  For he had seen someone for whom a hill-top was the
only dwelling.

The girl, of whom he had had two glimpses in the afternoon sunshine
of Stowood, whom he had seen dancing at midnight on the Painted
Floor under the moon, had sent warmth and light running through a
world that had seemed all frost and shadow. . . .  He had never
since his childhood looked a woman full in the face.  He had been
aware of them as mysterious beings, sometimes old and witch-like,
sometimes young and shining, but always to be shunned by him who
would serve God and save his soul.  Yet he had had his own fancies.
He had seen in imagination the slim girls in Theocritus dancing to
the shepherd's pipes, and he had exulted in the proud tales of old
queens, for whom men had counted the world well lost.  So he had
come in time to make for himself pictures of a woman who should be
fair as Helen and gentle as the Virgin Mother, pictures as vague as
gossamer, for they rested on no base of human meaning.  Sometimes
indeed, when the sun was bright of a spring morning, his visions
had taken a simple form, and he had felt strange stirrings of the
blood, which he had not resisted as sin--which he had not even
questioned, for they seemed as innocent as thirst or hunger.

But now, suddenly, all his imaginings and desires had become
centred on a living woman.  She had first come to him on his own
Painted Floor, a fellow discoverer.  Two days ago she had taken his
hand and called him liege-lord.  Surely in this there was a divine
foreordering.  What if the two of them were predestined to tread
the road together?  That road which seemed so grim would be
different indeed if that white girl were by his side, and if at the
end of it he could make her a queen.  For a queen she was born
to be; nothing less would content him, or be worthy of her
magnificence. . . .  Peter, deep in the oak scrub, felt a wild
hunger to be up and doing, to be treading the path to greatness
which others had marked out for him.  It was a fine thing to be
Buckingham and Bohun; it would be a finer to lay England at Sabine
Beauforest's feet.  He thought of her with none of the tremors of a
lover.  He did not ask her beauty for his arms, but that
principalities and powers should rest in her slender hands.  He was
in that first stage of love when it is divinely unselfish.

When the shadows began to lengthen he returned to the verderer's
lodge, dressed himself for a long journey, and put a few simple
belongings into his wallet.  He was to be still in the greenwood,
but a little nearer to the hour and the place where he would begin
his new life.

Presently out of the thicket came an urchin.  John of Milton was
gone to Bernwood, so Peter was the only living thing in the place
for the messenger to accost.  The boy was about twelve years of
age, squat and freckled and frog-like.  He spoke in a tongue which
was hard to comprehend, but his intention was made clear by a
jerked thumb.  He had been sent to lead him somewhither to someone.
Peter picked up his wallet and followed.

The urchin led him, at a pace surprising in one so small, past the
granges of Woodperry, and downhill to where a long tongue of Otmoor
crept into the forest.  After that the road lay in the dry belt of
tall reeds along the edge of the marsh, till the slopes of Beckley
had been turned and the rise of Wood Eaton hill was visible, and
the hovels of Noke, smoking for the evening meal, could be seen
over pools now reddened with the sunset.  Then they turned north,
along a causeway which brought them to the little river Ray, which
they crossed by a plank under the hamlet of Oddington, where geese
were making a great clamour in the twilight.  Once again they were
in forest country, a long rough hillside full of hollows and
thickets.  Into one of these they plunged, and after a rough
passage came into an open space in the heart of it, where a fire
burned.  There the urchin disappeared, and Peter found himself
confronted with a man who rose from tending a pot and doffed his
cap.

The man was short and burly in figure, his dress was that of a
forester, and he carried a cross-bow slung on his back and a long
hunting knife in his girdle.  His face was sharp and yellow, like
one who had suffered from the moor-ill, and a mop of thick black
hair fell to his shoulders.  His eyes, seen in the firelight, were
like a dog's, large and sombre and steadfast.

"I seek Solomon Darking," said Peter.

"He is before you, my lord," was the answer.  "He that you wot of
has spoken to me.  I make you welcome to a hunter's hearth.  You
will eat and then you will sleep, but dawn must find us many miles
on our way.  Sit ye down.  No grace is needed for food eaten under
the sky."

He made a seat for Peter on a heap of fern, and served him with
stew from the pot on a little iron platter.  He did not eat
himself, but waited upon his guest like a servant.  When Peter had
finished he cleansed the platter in a well of water and made his
own meal.  The same water was the sole beverage.  Not a word was
spoken; the only sounds were the crumbling of the fire's ashes, the
babble of a brook that ran from the well, and--very far off--the
chiming of bells from Islip church.  When he had finished the
forester again washed the platter, cut some swathes of bracken and
made two beds, and stamped out the embers.  He stood listening,
like a dog at fault, for a moment, and then, like a dog, shook his
head and stretched himself.

"To your couch, my lord," he said.  "You have four hours to sleep
ere we take the road.  A wise man feeds full and sleeps deep when
he has the chance, for it may be long before that chance returns."

Peter asked no questions.  There was something about this man which
made them needless.  He had the sense of being shepherded by wise
hands, and laid his head on the bracken as confidently as he had
ever laid it on his pallet in the Oxford attic.

He was awakened while it was still night, though there was a thin
bar of grey light on the eastern horizon.  Darking stood ready for
the road, and Peter, rubbing sleepy eyes, did up the belt of his
doublet and prepared to follow him.  There was a thick dew on the
ground, and Peter was soon soaked to the knees; also the air blew
cold as if rain was coming from the west.  Come it did before they
had crossed the Cherwell, and Peter, empty and chilly, felt his
spirits sink.  Soon, however, he found that he had so much ado to
keep up with his companion's vigour that he had no leisure to
despond.  Darking moved at a prodigious pace, so fast that Peter,
who was half a foot taller and had longer legs, was compelled often
to trot to keep abreast of his stride.  Moreover, the road chosen
seemed to be the worst conceivable.  Anything like a path was
shunned, even when it bent in the right direction.  Open
meadowland, the bare crest of a hill, a broad woodland glade were
avoided as if an enemy's arrows commanded them.  Darking did not
even take advantage of the fords, for streams were crossed at their
deepest and miriest.  Presently, as they toiled through a thicket
of oak saplings, the sun came out.  Darking sniffed the air.  "The
rain has gone," he said.  "It will be fine till sunset.  We are
nearing our breakfast."

They came to an outcrop of rock rising above the woods and thatched
with wild berries.  From a distance its bald head could not be
distinguished from the oak tops; it looked like a patch of dead
wood in the coppice.  There was a hollow on the left, and this had
been roofed with timber, now so lichened as to be indistinguishable
from stone.  The result was a narrow hut, discernible only at the
closest quarters by one who knew what he sought.  In front of it a
blackened angle of the rock showed where a fire had once burned.

Darking brought some dry billets and twigs from the hut, and laid
and lit a fire.  From the hut, too, he fetched a pan, some collops
of deer's meat, a lump of deer fat, a loaf of rye-bread, and a
leatherjack of ale.

"Strip," he commanded.  "You will have ague in your young bones if
you sit in a damp shirt.  For me, I am so full of it that a wetting
more or less does not concern me."

So Peter, stripped to the buff, sat warming his toes at the fire,
while the meat sizzled in the pan, and his clothes, stretched on
the rock face, dried fast in the sun.

"You have led me by a hard road," he said, when Darking filled his
platter.  "Why need it have been so secret?  Are you a man of many
enemies?"

Darking's gravity did not respond to the smile on the young man's
face.

"It is well to be secret in such times," he said.  "Households are
divided within themselves and sons are set against fathers.  No man
knows his enemy.  He who would live at peace must take the byways.
I was told that it is most needful that you, my lord, keep out of
men's sight yet awhile; therefore, while you are in my company we
will court no questions."

He broke off and pointed to the south, where a flock of birds was
wheeling.  He stared till they were out of sight, and when he spoke
his voice was solemn.

"That is the second portent within the week.  Last Thursday in
Horton spinney I saw a bramble with both ends growing in the
ground.  Know you the meaning of that?  It is the noose the Devil
makes for his next hunting. . . .  And now, behold these birds."

"They are only curlews," said Peter.

"Curlews and whimbrels--young birds bred on the hills.  But what do
they here in the tail of August?  Two months ago they should have
been on the salt beaches.  Remember, the long beaks are no common
fowls, but have foreknowledge of many things, and their lives are
full as long as a man's.  They tarry inland to see what they shall
see.  The old wives say that a curlew after June spells foul
weather.  Foul weather comes, not in the heavens, but in the ways
of men.  Therefore it were wise to go secretly."

They crossed the little streams of Dorn and Glyme and came out of
the forest to wide downs of grass and furze.  Bearing northward,
they still ascended, Darking in the bare places showing as much
precaution as if he were stalking a winter's hind.  They never
passed a crest except on their bellies, or crossed an open slope
without a long reconnaissance.  They had seen no dwelling or sign
of man, but he behaved as if he were in a populous land.  At last
they reached a point which seemed the highest ground in the
neighbourhood, for on every side the country fell away into
valleys.

Peter recognised his whereabouts.  He was on the skirts of
Wychwood, the other side from where he had dwelt as a child, and so
to him unknown country.  Away to the south he saw the lift of the
Leafield ridge, and that gave him his bearings.  All about them the
forest flowed in a dark tide, so that it seemed to cover the whole
visible earth.  The little clearings round the hamlets were not
seen, and the only open patches were the marshy stream-sides far
below, which showed bright green among the dun and olive of the
woods.  It seemed a country as empty of man as when primeval beasts
had trumpeted in the glades and wallowed in the sloughs.  And yet
their journey had been as stealthy as if enemies had lurked in
every acre.

"There are no folk left hereabouts," Peter said.  "Why have we made
so secret a business of this morning?"

"The hamlets are emptying, but the woods are filling," said
Darking.

"But we have seen no sign of humanity since sunrise."

"YOU have not, my lord, but you have not the ears and eyes for the
forest.  I have seen and heard many."

Peter stared.

"There were charcoal-burners in the coppice above the Dorn.  There
was a camp of Egyptians a mile on--I smelt their cooking--a fawn, I
think.  A man with a long-bow was in the thicket this side of
Glyme.  I saw two of the Ditchley foresters pass on our left but an
hour ago, and there was a horseman in a mighty hurry on the road
from Woodstock to Enstone.  Also the prickers were out among the
hazels beyond Wootton.  One way and another I have seen a score of
mortals since we broke our fast."

"They did not observe us?"

"Of that I am certain."  A slow smile lit his sallow face.

"But I have seen no smoke from cot or village," said Peter.

"You will see none.  There are few cots, save here and there a
forester's lodge, and scarcely a village.  The land has become all
wood and sheep-walks."

"And the people?"

"Dead or wanderers.  England is full of broken and masterless men
this day.  They have gone under the ground, finding life too hard
above it.  Let us press on, and I will show you something."

They came presently to an upland meadow whence rose one of the
feeders of Evenlode.  Once there had been a village here, for there
were the ruins of a score of mud-and-wattle huts.  The baulks of
the common field were still plain; likewise orchards running wild,
and that rank growth of weeds which means abandoned ploughland.  In
one corner by the brook stood a heap of stones, which at first
sight Peter took for a quarry.  Darking stood for a little gazing
at the scene.

"When I was a child," he said, "this was a thriving village.
Bourtree was its name--Bourtree in the Bush, men called it.  Half a
hundred souls had their dwelling here, and it was noted over all
the land for its honey.  You must know that there was a miracle
wrought here.  Once upon a time a fellow stole a fragment of the
Host that he might work magic by it, and set it by his hives to
improve their yield.  But the bees, the little pious ones, built
round it a church all of wax, with altar and windows and steeple,
to protect its holiness.  You have heard the tale?"

Peter nodded.  He had told the story to the novices at Oseney.

"Behold Bourtree to-day!  The church is a heap of stones, most of
which they have carried off to help build the new great church at
Charlbury.  What was once tillage and orchard is now sheep-walks
for the graziers.  The men and women that dwelled here are most of
them under the sod, and if any still live, they are nameless folk
drifting like blown leaves in the shadows."

He lifted his head and looked Peter full in the face with his odd
melancholy eyes.  "Much of old England is gone to ground, my lord,"
he said.  "Keep that in your mind and ponder on it, for it may
deeply concern your own business."



"I have brought you to a Pisgah-sight," said Darking an hour later.
"The land is your own, so long as I am with you, and you are as
secure as a badger in its earth.  What are your commands, my lord?
I can hide you so snugly till the summons comes that all the King's
armies searching daily for ten years would not find you.  But that
might be but a dismal life for youth in sunshiny weather.  Or . . ."
He paused.

"Or?" Peter repeated.

"Or I can take you with me a little way underground--among the
masterless folk who will soon be half our people.  I ask no
questions, my lord, but he at Wood Eaton warned me that you were a
precious piece of goods that mattered much for the welfare of
England.  The gentles play their high games and the noise of them
fills the world, but in the end it is the simple who decree the
issue.  Would you sojourn for awhile among the simple?"

"I was bred among them," said Peter.  "I would first see my foster-
mother, the widow Sweetbread, who lives below Leafield on the
forest edge.  Do you know the place?"

"Nay, then, since you are Mother Sweetbread's fosterling, you have
already the right of entry among all the forest people.  Well I
know her.  Her good-man, Robin Sweetbread, was my trusty comrade."
He seemed suddenly to look at Peter with changed eyes, as if a
special password to his confidence had been spoken.

When they took the road again, so as to ford Evenlode and come down
the Windrush side, Darking, while still wary in choosing obscure
paths, was no longer silent.  Friendliness now mingled with his
dignity.  He spoke to Peter like a respectful kinsman.  He was
quick to point out, here a derelict farm, there a ruined village,
among the grassy spaces of the hills.

"'Twas the little granges first, and then the hamlets, and now, if
all tales be true, 'twill soon be the proud abbeys.  Nought of
man's work in England is steadfast, not even the houses he has
built for God.  What sends an earl to the block sends a churl to
the gallows' hill, and the churl's wife and children to eat nettles
by the wayside.  None is safe to-day save those who do not raise
their noses above the cov