A RECOVERY
There was a moment of intense silence, only emphasized by the settling
rustle of the girl’s dress. The door had closed softly, and Mr. Morris
stood within, in the shadow by the window, ready to give help if it were
needed. Beatrice remained a yard inside the room, very upright and
dignified, a little pale, looking from one to the other of the two
brothers, who stared back at her as at a ghost.
Ralph spoke first, swallowing once or twice in his throat before
speaking, and trying to smile.
“It is you then,” he said.
Beatrice moved a step nearer, looking at Chris, who stood white and
tense, his eyes wide and burning.
“Mr. Torridon,” said Beatrice softly, “I have brought the bundle. My
woman has it.”
Still she looked, as she spoke, questioningly at Chris.
“Oh! this is my brother, the monk,” snapped Ralph bitterly, glancing at
him. “Indeed, he is.”
Then Chris lost his self-control again.
“And this is my brother, the murderer; indeed, he is.”
Beatrice’s lips parted, and her eyes winced. She put out her hand
hesitatingly towards Ralph, and dropped it again as he moved a little
towards her.
“You hear him?” said Ralph.
“I do not understand,” said the girl, “your brother--”
“Yes, I am his brother, God help me,” snarled Chris.
Beatrice’s lips closed again, and a look of contempt came into her
face.
“I have heard enough, Mr. Torridon. Will you come with me?”
Chris moved forward a step.
“I do not know who you are, madam,” he said, “but do you understand what
this gentleman is? Do you know that he is a creature of Master
Cromwell’s?”
“I know everything,” said Beatrice.
“And you were at Tyburn, too?” questioned Chris bitterly, “perhaps with
this brother of mine?”
Beatrice faced him defiantly.
“What have you to say against him, sir?”
Ralph made a movement to speak, but the girl checked him.
“I wish to hear it. What have you to say?”
“He is a creature of Cromwell’s who plotted the death of God’s saints.
This brother of mine was at the examinations, I hear, and at the
scaffold. Is that enough?”
Chris had himself under control again by now, but his words seemed to
burn with vitriol. His lips writhed as he spoke.
“Well?” said Beatrice.
“Well, if that is not enough; how of More and my Lord of Rochester?”
“He has been a good friend to Mr. More,” said Beatrice, “that I know.”
“He will get him the martyr’s crown, surely,” sneered Chris.
“And you have no more to say?” asked the girl quietly.
A shudder ran over the monk’s body; his mouth opened and closed, and the
fire in his eyes flared up and died; his clenched hands rose and fell.
Then he spoke quietly.
“I have no more to say, madam.”
Beatrice moved across to Ralph, and put her hand on his arm, looking
steadily at Chris. Ralph laid his other hand on hers a moment, then
raised it, and made an abrupt motion towards the door.
Chris went round the table; Mr. Morris opened the door with an impassive
face, and followed him out, leaving Beatrice and Ralph alone.
* * * * *
Chris had come back the previous evening from Tyburn distracted almost
to madness. He had sat heavily all the evening by himself, brooding and
miserable, and had not slept all night, but waking visions had moved
continually before his eyes, as he turned to and fro on his narrow bed
in the unfamiliar room. Again and again Tyburn was before him, peopled
with phantoms; he had seen the thick ropes, and heard their creaking,
and the murmur of the multitude; had smelt the pungent wood-smoke and
the thick drifting vapour from the cauldron. Once it seemed to him that
the very room was full of figures, white-clad and silent, who watched
him with impassive pale faces, remote and unconcerned. He had flung
himself on his knees again and again, had lashed himself with the
discipline that he, too, might taste of pain; but all the serenity of
divine things was gone. There was no heaven, no Saviour, no love. He was
bound down here, crushed and stifled in this apostate city whose sounds
and cries came up into his cell. He had lost the fiery vision of the
conqueror’s welcome; it was like a tale heard long ago. Now he was
beaten down by physical facts, by the gross details of the tragedy, the
strangling, the blood, the smoke, the acrid smell of the crowd, and
heaven was darkened by the vapour.
It was not until the next day, as he sat with the Prior and a stranger
or two, and heard the tale once more, and the predictions about More and
Fisher, that the significance of Ralph’s position appeared to him
clearly. He knew no more than before, but he suddenly understood what he
knew.
A monk had said a word of Cromwell’s share in the matters, and the Prior
had glanced moodily at Chris for a moment, turning his eyes only as he
sat with his chin in his hand; and in a moment Chris understood.
This was the work that his brother was doing. He sat now more distracted
than ever: mental pictures moved before him of strange council-rooms
with great men in silk on raised seats, and Ralph was among them. He
seemed to hear his bitter questions that pierced to the root of the
faith of the accused, and exposed it to the world, of their adherence to
the Vicar of Christ, their uncompromising convictions.
He had sat through dinner with burning eyes, but the Prior noticed
nothing, for he himself was in a passion of absorption, and gave Chris a
hasty leave as he rose from table to go and see his brother if he
wished.
Chris had walked up and down his room that afternoon, framing sentences
of appeal and pity and terror, but it was useless: he could not fix his
mind; and he had gone off at last to Westminster at once terrified for
Ralph’s soul, and blazing with indignation against him.
And now he was walking down to the river again, in the cool of the
evening, knowing that he had ruined his own cause and his right to speak
by his intemperate fury.
* * * * *
It was another strange evening that he passed in the Prior’s chamber
after supper. The same monk, Dom Odo, who had taken him to Tyburn the
day before, was there again; and Chris sat in a corner, with the
reaction of his fury on him, spent and feverish, now rehearsing the
scene he had gone through with Ralph, and framing new sentences that he
might have used, now listening to the talk, and vaguely gathering its
meaning.
It seemed that the tale of blood was only begun.
Bedale, the Archdeacon of Cornwall, had gone that day to the
Charterhouse; he had been seen driving there, and getting out at the
door with a bundle of books under his arm, and he had passed in through
the gate over which Prior Houghton’s arm had been hung on the previous
evening. It was expected that some more arrests would be made
immediately.
“As for my Lord of Rochester,” said the monk, who seemed to revel in the
business of bearing bad news, “and Master More, I make no doubt they
will be cast. They are utterly fixed in their opinions. I hear that my
lord is very sick, and I pray that God may take him to Himself. He is
made Cardinal in Rome, I hear; but his Grace has sworn that he shall
have no head to wear the hat upon.”
Then he went off into talk upon the bishop, describing his sufferings in
the Tower, for he was over eighty years old, and had scarcely sufficient
clothes to cover him.
Now and again Chris looked across at his Superior. The Prior sat there
in his great chair, his head on his hand, silent and absorbed; it was
only when Dom Odo stopped for a moment that he glanced up impatiently
and nodded for him to go on. It seemed as if he could not hear enough,
and yet Chris saw him wince, and heard him breathe sharply as each new
detail came out.
The monk told them, too, of Prior Houghton’s speech upon the cart.
“They asked him whether even then he would submit to the King’s laws,
and he called God to witness that it was not for obstinacy or perversity
that he refused, but that the King and the Parliament had decreed
otherwise than our Holy Mother enjoins; and that for himself he would
sooner suffer every kind of pain than deny a doctrine of the Church. And
when he had prayed from the thirtieth Psalm, he was turned off.”
The Prior stared almost vacantly at the monk who told his story with a
kind of terrified gusto, and once or twice his lips moved to speak; but
he was silent, and dropped his chin upon his hand again when the other
had done.
* * * * *
Chris scarcely knew how the days passed away that followed his arrival
in London. He spent them for the most part within doors, writing for the
Prior in the mornings, or keeping watch over the door as his Superior
talked with prelates and churchmen within, for ecclesiastical London was
as busy as a broken ant-hill, and men came and went continually--scared,
furtive monks, who looked this way and that, an abbot or two up for the
House of Lords, priors and procurators on business. There were continual
communications going to and fro among the religious houses, for the
prince of them, the contemplative Carthusian, had been struck at, and no
one knew where the assault would end.
Meanwhile, Chris had heard no further news from Ralph. He thought of
writing to him, and even of visiting him again, but his heart sickened
at the thought of it. It was impossible, he told himself, that any
communication should pass between them until his brother had forsaken
his horrible business; the first sign of regret must come from the one
who had sinned. He wondered sometimes who the girl was, and, as a
hot-headed monk, suspected the worst. A man who could live as Ralph was
living could have no morals left. She had been so friendly with him, so
ready to defend him, so impatient, Chris thought, of any possibility of
wrong. No doubt she, too, was one of the corrupt band, one of the great
ladies that buzzed round the Court, and sucked the blood of God’s
people.
His own interior life, however, so roughly broken by his new
experiences, began to mend slowly as the days went on.
He had begun, like a cat in a new house, to make himself slowly at home
in the hostel, and to set up that relation between outward objects and
his own self that is so necessary to interior souls not yet living in
detachment. He arranged his little room next the Prior’s to be as much
as possible like his cell, got rid of one or two pieces of furniture
that distracted him, set his bed in another corner, and hung up his
beads in the same position that they used to occupy at Lewes. Each
morning he served the Prior’s mass in the tiny chapel attached to the
house, and did his best both then and at his meditation to draw in the
torn fibres of his spirit. At moments of worship the supernatural world
began to appear again, like points of living rock emerging through sand,
detached and half stifled by external details, but real and abiding.
Little by little his serenity came back, and the old atmosphere
reasserted itself. After all, God was here as there; grace, penance, the
guardianship of the angels and the sacrament of the altar was the same
at Southwark as at Lewes. These things remained; while all else was
accidental--the different height of his room, the unfamiliar angles in
the passages, the new noises of London, the street cries, the clash of
music, the disordered routine of daily life.
Half-way through June, after a long morning’s conversation with a
stranger, the Prior sent for him.
He was standing by the tall carved fire-place with his back to the door,
his head and one hand leaning against the stone, and he turned round
despondently as Chris came in. Chris could see he was deadly pale and
that his lips twitched with nervousness.
“Brother,” he said, “I have a perilous matter to go through, and you
must come with me.”
Chris felt his heart begin to labour with heavy sick beats.
“I am to see my Lord of Rochester. A friend hath obtained the order. We
are to go at five o’clock. See that you be ready. We shall take boat at
the stairs.”
Chris waited, with his eyes deferentially cast down.
“He is to be tried again on Thursday,” went on the Prior, “and my
friends wish me to see him, God knows--”
He stopped abruptly, made a sign with his hand, and as Chris left the
room he saw that he was leaning once more against the stone-work, and
that his head was buried in his arms.
Three more Carthusians had been condemned in the previous week, but the
Bishop’s trial, though his name was in the first indictment, was
postponed a few days.
He too, like Sir Thomas More, had been over a year in the Tower; he had
been deprived of his see by an Act of Parliament, his palace had been
broken into and spoiled, and he himself, it was reported, was being
treated with the greatest rigour in the Tower.
Chris was overcome with excitement at the thought that he was to see
this man. He had heard of his learning, his holiness, and his
austerities on all hands since his coming to London. When the bishop had
left Rochester at his summons to London a year before there had been a
wonderful scene of farewell, of which the story was still told in town.
The streets had been thronged with a vast crowd weeping and praying, as
he rode among them bare-headed, giving his blessing as he went. He had
checked his horse by the city-gate, and with a loud voice had bidden
them all stand by the old religion, and let no man take it from them.
And now here he lay himself in prison for the Faith, a Cardinal of the
Holy Roman Church, with scarcely clothes to cover him or food to eat. At
the sacking of his palace, too, as the men ran from room to room tearing
down the tapestries, and piling the plate together, a monk had found a
great iron box hidden in a corner. They cried to one another that it
held gold “for the bloody Pope”; and burst it open to find a hair shirt,
and a pair of disciplines.
* * * * *
It was a long row down to the Tower from Southwark against the
in-flowing tide. As they passed beneath the bridge Chris stared up at
the crowding houses, the great gates at either end, and the faces
craning down; and he caught one glimpse as they shot through the narrow
passage between the piers, of the tall wall above the gate, the poles
rising from it, and the severed heads that crowned them. Somewhere among
that forest of grim stems the Carthusian priors looked down.
As he turned in his seat he saw the boatman grinning to himself, and
following his eyes observed the Prior beside him with a white fixed face
looking steadily downwards towards his feet.
They found no difficulty when they landed at the stairs, and showed the
order at the gate. The warder called to a man within the guard-room who
came out and went before them along the walled way that led to the
inner ward. They turned up to the left presently and found themselves in
the great court that surrounded the White Tower.
The Prior walked heavily with his face downcast as if he wished to avoid
notice, and Chris saw that he paid no attention to the men-at-arms and
other persons here and there who saluted his prelate’s insignia. There
were plenty of people going about in the evening sunshine, soldiers and
attendants, and here and there at the foot of a tower stood a halberdier
in his buff jacket leaning on his weapon. There were many distinguished
persons in the Tower now, both ecclesiastics and laymen who had refused
to take one or both of the oaths, and Chris eyed the windows
wonderingly, picturing to himself where each lay, and with what courage.
But more and more as he went he wondered why the Prior and he were here,
and who had obtained the order of admittance, for he had not had a sight
of it.
When they reached the foot of the prison-tower the warder said a word to
the sentry, and took the two monks straight past, preceding them up the
narrow stairs that wound into darkness. There were windows here and
there, slits in the heavy masonry, through which Chris caught glimpses,
now of the moat on the west, now of the inner ward with the White Tower
huge and massive on the east.
The Prior, who went behind the warder and in front of Chris, stopped
suddenly, and Chris could hear him whispering to himself; and at the
same time there sounded the creaking of a key in front.
As the young monk stood there waiting, grasping the stone-work on his
right, again the excitement surged up; and with it was mingled something
of terror. It had been a formidable experience even to walk those few
hundred yards from the outer gate, and the obvious apprehensiveness of
the Prior who had spoken no audible word since they had landed, was far
from reassuring.
Here he stood now for the first time in his life within those terrible
walls; he had seen the low Traitor’s Gate on his way that was for so
many the gate of death. Even now as he gripped the stone he could see
out to the left through the narrow slit a streak of open land beyond the
moat and the wall, and somewhere there he knew lay the little rising
ground, that reddened week after week in an ooze of blood and slime. And
now he was at the door of one who without doubt would die there soon for
the Faith that they both professed.
The Prior turned sharply round.
“You!” he said, “I had forgotten: you must wait here till I call you
in.”
There was a sounding of an opening door above; the Prior went up and
forward, leaving him standing there; the door closed, but not before
Chris had caught a glimpse of a vaulted roof; and then the warder stood
by him again, waiting with his keys in his hand.