Title:      The Blanket of the Dark (1931)
Author:     John Buchan
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0301411h.html
Language:   English
Date first posted:          November 2003
Date most recently updated: November 2003

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TO

DOROTHY GASKELL

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.

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."

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.

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,