As he tramped the muddy hill-road his mind was busy. The scent from
the wet weeds on either side of him, heavy with the yester rains,
brought back his boyhood insistently, and his memory leaped between
then and now like a shuttlecock. He had dreamed dreams then; he was
dreaming dreams now, though he had thought he was done with dreams. A
few short months ago he had planned out his last part, the prosperous
village citizen, the authority of the gossips, respectable and
respected. His fancy had dwelt so fondly upon the house where he
proposed to dwell that he seemed to know every crimson eave of it,
every flower in the trim garden, the settle by the porch where he
should sit and smoke his pipe and drain his can and listen to the
booming of the bees, while he complacently savored the after-taste of
discreditable adventures. He knew it so well in his mind that he had
half come to believe that it really existed, that he had always owned
it, that it truly awaited his home-coming, and his feeling as he
entered the village that morning had been that he could walk straight
to it, instead of abiding at the inn and going hither and thither day
after day until he found in the market a homestead nearest to his
picture. And now he was walking away from it, walking fairly fast,
too, and walking whither? What business was it of his, after all, if
some sad-faced fellows from Cambridge tramped across country to lay
puritan hands upon Harby. What business was it of his if monarch
browbeat Parliament or Parliament defied king? He owed nothing to
either, cared nothing for either; what he owned he owed to his sharp
sword, his dull conscience, his rogue's luck, and his player's heart.
Why, then, was he going to Harby when he ought to be busy in the
village looking for that house with crimson eaves and the bee-haunted
garden?
He knew well enough, though he did not parcel out his knowledge into
formal answers. In the first place, if the country was bent upon
these civil broils, clearly his intended character of pipe-smoking,
ale-drinking citizen was wholly unsuited to the coming play.
Wherefore, in a jiff he had abandoned it, and now stood, mentally, as
naked as a plucked fowl while he considered what costume he should
wear and what character he should choose to interpret. His sense of
humor tempted him to the sanctimonious suit of your out-and-out
Parliament man; his love for finery and the high horse lured him to
lovelocks and feathers. The old piratical instinct which he thought
he had put to bed forever was awake in him, too, and asking which
side could be made to pay the best for his services. If he must take
sides, which side would fill his pockets the fuller? It was in the
thick of these thoughts that he found himself within a few feet of
the walls of the park of Harby.
The great gates were closed that his boyhood found always open. He
smiled a little, and his smile increased as a figure stepped from
behind the nearest tree within the walls, a sturdy, fresh-looking
serving-fellow armed with a musketoon.
"Hail, friend," sang out Halfman, and "Stand, stranger," answered the
man with the musketoon. Halfman eyed him good-humoredly.
"You do not carry your weapon well," he commented. "Were I hostile
and armed you would be a dead jack before you could bring butt to
shoulder. Yet you are a soldierly fellow and wear a fighting face."
The man with the musketoon met the censure and the commendation with
the same frown as he surlily demanded the stranger's business at the
gates of Harby.
"My business," answered Halfman, blithely, "is with the Lady of
Harby," and before the other could shape the refusal of his eyes into
an articulate grumble he went on, briskly, "Tell the Lady Brilliana
Harby that an old soldier who is a Harby man born has some words to
say to her which she may be willing to hear."
"Are you a King's man," the other questioned, still holding his
weapon in awkward watchfulness of the stranger. Halfman laughed
pleasantly.
"Who but a King's man could hope to have civil speech with the Lady
Brilliana Harby?"
He plucked off his hat as he spoke and waved it in the air with a
flourish. "God save the King!" he shouted, loyally, and for the
moment his heart was as loyal as his voice, untroubled by any thought
of a venal sword and a highest bidder. Just there in the sunlight,
facing the red walls of Harby and the flapping standard of the
sovereign, on the eve of an interview with a bold, devoted lady, it
seemed so fitly his cue to cry "God save the King!" that he did so
with all the volume of his lungs.
The man with the musketoon seemed mollified by the new-comer's
specious show of allegiance.
"We shall see," he muttered. "We shall see. Stay where you are, just
where you are, and I will inquire at the hall. The gate is fast, so
you can do no mischief while my back is turned."
As he spoke he turned on his heel and, plunging among the trees in
pursuit of a shorter cut than the winding avenue, disappeared from
view. Halfman eyed the gateway with a smile.
"I do not think those bars would keep me out long if I had a mind to
climb them," he said to himself, complacently. But he was content to
wait, walking up and down on the wet grass and running over in his
mind the playhouse verses most suited to a soldier of fortune at the
gate of a great lady. He had not to wait long. Before the
jumble-cupboard of his memory had furnished him with the most
felicitous quotation his ears heard a heavy tread through the trees,
and the man with the musket hailed him, tramping to the gate. He
carried a great iron key in his free hand, and this he fitted to the
lock of the gate, which, unused to its inhospitable condition,
creaked and groaned as he tugged at it. As at length it yielded the
man of Harby opened one-half wide enough to admit the passage of a
human body, and signalled to Halfman to come through. Halfman,
smilingly observant, obeyed the invitation, and looked about him
reflective while the gate was again put to and the key again turned
in the lock to the same protesting discord. Many years had fallen
from the tree of his life since he last trod the turf of Harby. All
kinds of queer thoughts came about him, some melancholy, some full of
mockery, some malign. He was no longer a poor lad with the world
before him to whom the Lord of Harby was little less than the
viceregent of God; he was a free man, he was a rich man, he had
multiplied existences, had drunk of the wine of life from many casks
and yet maintained through all a kind of cleanness of palate, ready
for any vintage yet unbroached, be it white or red. The rough voice
of his companion stirred him from his reverie.
"My lady will see you," he said. "Follow me."
As the man spoke he started off at a brisk pace upon the avenue with
the evident intention of making his words the guide-marks to the
new-comer's deeds. But Halfman, never a one to follow tamely, with an
easy stretch of his long limbs, swung himself lightly beside his
uncivil companion, and without breathing himself in the least kept
steadily a foot-space ahead of him. "I was ever counted a good
walker," he observed, cheerfully. "I have taken the world's ways at
the trot; you will never outpace me."
The man of Harby slackened his speed for a second, and there came an
ugly look of quarrel into his face which made it plain as a map for
Halfman that there was immediate chance of a brawl and a tussle. He
would have relished it well enough, knowing pretty shrewdly how it
would end, but he contented himself for the moment, having other
business in hand, with cheerful comment.
"Friend," he said, "if we are both King's men we have no leisure for
quarrel, however much our fingers may itch. What is your name,
valiant?"
The serving-man scowled at him for a moment; then his frown faded as
he faced the smile and the bright, wild eyes of Halfman.
"My name is Thoroughgood," he answered, and he added, civilly enough,
as if conscious of some air of gentility in his companion, "John
Thoroughgood, at your service."
"A right good name for a right good fellow, if I know anything of
men," Halfman approved. "And I take it that you serve a right good
lady."
"My lady is my lady," Thoroughgood replied, simply. "None like her as
ever I heard tell of."
Halfman endeavored by dexterous questionings to get some further
information than this of the Lady of Harby from her sturdy servant,
but Thoroughgood's blunt brevity baffled him, and he soon reconciled
himself to tramp in silence by his guide. So long as he remembered
anything he remembered that passage through the park, the sweet smell
of the wet grass, the waning splendors, russet and umber, of October
leaves, the milky blueness of the autumn sky. This was, indeed,
England, the long, half-forgotten, yet ever faintly remembered, in
places of gold and bloodshed and furious suns, the place of peace of
which the fortune-seeker sometimes dreamed and to which the
fortune-maker chose to turn. The place of peace, where every man was
arming, where citizens were handling steel with unfamiliar fingers,
and where a rover like himself could not hope to let his sword lie
idle. It was as he thought these thoughts that a turn of the road
brought him face to face with Harby Hall, and all the episodes of a
busy, bloody life seemed to dwindle into insignificance as he crossed
the moat and passed with John Thoroughgood through the guarded
portals and found himself once again in the shelter of the great
hall.
The great hall at Harby was justly celebrated in Oxfordshire and in
the neighboring counties as one of the loveliest examples of the rich
domestic architecture which adorned the age of Elizabeth. "That
prodigal bravery in building," which Camden commends, made no fairer
display than at Harby which had been designed by the great architect
Thorp. Of a Florentine favor externally, it was internally a
magnificent illustration of what Elizabethan decorators could do, and
the great hall gave the note to which the whole scheme was keyed. Its
wonderful mullioned windows looked out across the moat on the
terrace, and beyond the terrace on the park. Its walls of panelled
oak were splendid witnesses to the skill of great craftsmen. Its
carved roof was a marvel of art that had learned much in Italy and
had made it English with the hand of genius. Over the great fireplace
two armored figures guarded rigidly the glowing shield of the founder
of the house. Heroes of the house, heroines of the house, stared or
smiled from their canvases on the mortal shadows that flitted through
the great place till it should be their turn to swell the company of
the elect in frames of gold. At one end of the hall sprang the fair
staircase that was itself one of the greatest glories of Harby, with
its wonderful balustrade, on which, landing by landing, stood the
glorious carved figures of the famous angels of Harby.