by John Buchan
“Pray,” he said between clenched teeth. “This is the last stage. Pray that we be given strength to face what may be beyond this door.”
Tobias’s voice was calm. “Expectans expectavi Dominum,” he said, “et intendit mihi, et exaudivit preces meas, et eduxit me de lacu miseriæ, et de luco fæcis, et statuit super petram pedes meos. Lead on, my son. He who has brought us thus far will lead us to a secure place.”
Peter’s fingers trembled so that he fumbled for long with the key. At last the bolt lifted with a shriek like an animal in pain. The door opened towards them, and as they drew back to let it swing it seemed that a foul wind, smelling of a charnel house, blew for an instant in their faces. . . . Then the lantern gave them a view.
It was a little chamber hewn out of the living rock, and there must have been an entrance of air from above, for after the first noisome blast the place smelled pure and cold. And it was empty. There were none of the chests and strong boxes which might be looked for in a treasury. Rather it was like an anchorite’s cell. There was a table and a chair, and in one corner a pallet heaped with rotting bedclothes. There were objects scattered on the floor, and on the table a sconce for candles, and some mildewed parchments. There were other things, for as Peter stepped in he tripped over something which lay close to the door. . . . With horror he saw that the something had once been a man.
For a moment he thought it lived, that it was creeping to catch his foot. He cried out and dropped the lantern. Fortunately, it was not extinguished, and Tobias caught it and turned it on the body.
It lay huddled and crooked, as if it had been struggling with the door, and had used its last flicker of life in a hopeless assault. It was the body of a tall man, and it was not yet a skeleton. There had been no rats or worms to deface it, and, though the eyes had shrunk to things like dried berries, the skin, grey and wrinkled, still hung on the bones. The beard had become like lichen, and so had the fur collar of the surcoat. The teeth had mostly dropped from the withered gums, but two protruded over the grey lips, with an awful air of ravening and pain. . . . The man had died of hunger and thirst, had died in mortal agony, for he had gnawed his finger-tips and bitten deep into his left wrist. Wrinkled at their feet, every limb contorted, the garments disordered in the last extremity, the body was an awful parody of the image of God.
Peter, deadly sick, leaned on the table. Tobias touched the jewel at the belt, and it fell from the decayed leather. He took a broad ring from a claw-like finger.
“This is not Lovell’s treasure,” he said softly. “It is Lovell himself. See, here is the barry nebuly and the chevronels. . . . So passes the world’s glory. We will seek no more gold, son Peter, for God this night has shown us a better thing. He has shown how sure and righteous are His judgments. Qui fodit foveam, incidet in eam, et qui dissipat sepem mordebit eum coluber.” He signed himself with the cross, and stood with downcast eyes.
Peter’s bodily sickness was passing. He could look now at the thing in the gloom. . . . He saw the dreadful panorama of the man’s death as if he had been an eye-witness. The fugitive from Stoke battle, with the avenger of blood at his heels, had sought refuge in his own house, where Mother Blackthorn hid him beyond the reach of any pursuit. She alone knew the secret of his lair, and had the means of entrance. There Lovell waited till a way could be found of moving himself and his ill-gotten wealth overseas. . . . But the woman had fallen sick, a mortal illness, and, since she was the sole guardian of the hermitage, the refugee deep in the earth had no one to give him food and drink. She had grown delirious, men had had to hold her down in bed and check her frenzy, for she knew that her master below was dying by inches; presently she had passed into stupor and death. Meanwhile, he who had been a great prince and had ruled England had grown hourly weaker, impotent as a babe to save himself. He had licked up from the floor the crumbs of his last meal, he had eaten the candle-ends, he had gone mad and chewed his hands, until at the end in his ultimate mania he had beaten on the unyielding door till he dropped with death in his throat. . . .
The first emotion of horror had left Peter. He had now only a great pity and a great clearness, as if some cloud had lifted from his brain. In that subterranean cell he seemed to view the world from a high hill.
He turned the lantern on the crumpled vellum pages on the table. He saw that it was an account-book. Lovell had been passing the hours of his confinement in counting his wealth. Perhaps the book would give a clue to its whereabouts? . . . With a spasm of nausea he dismissed the notion. Lovell’s treasure seemed to him a thing accursed, and any motion to win it a sure plunge into damnation.
“Let us be gone,” he said faintly, “and seal up this place so that no eye may ever look on it again.”
“Nay,” said Tobias gently, “we must first give this body Christian burial. We are bound to the dying man in Oxford who pledged you to lay the wandering spirit of his lord. I will have masses sung in Oseney for his soul’s repose. Do you go and bring Darking to help.”
“I dare not leave you alone in this place.”
“Nay, I have no fear. What is there to affright me in a handful of bones and parched skin? His spirit will not hurt me, for I do it a kindness. Haste you, son Peter, while I meditate on him who once was Francis Lovell.”
Peter made his way back to the outer air, fumbling in the dark, for he had left the lantern in the cell. It seemed an age till he caught a speck of light, and saw Darking’s face peering in at the tunnel’s entrance. When he emerged into the bitter night, a new faintness came over him, and he leaned, choking, on Darking’s arm.
“You have found the gold?” Darking asked.
“We have found its master,” he gasped.
The witch-wife cried out. Her curch had slipped and her grey locks hung loose like a mænad’s.
“Lovell is there! I dreamed it! White and picked like an ancient crow! But what of the gold he guards, my lord? Let us deal mercifully with his bones that his ghost may be kind. See, I have brought a dead-cloth, that he may be decently and piously planted in holy earth.”
She drew from her bosom a coarse shroud, which fluttered ghoulishly in the night.
“Come with us,” said Peter to Darking, “that we may get him above ground.”
They broke off the table legs and made a bier of the top, wrapping what had been Lovell in his rotting surcoat. Once in the open Madge Littlemouse shrouded him in her linen, and Peter and Darking bore him to the graveyard of the ruinous church. There, among the broken headstones, they dug a grave with the mattock which had been destined to unearth treasure, and into that grave, before the earth was shoveled back, Peter flung the vellum account-book which might contain the clue to Lovell’s hoard. Tobias said the prayers for the dead, and it seemed to Peter that as he spoke the air lightened, and the oppression lifted from the black trees and mouldering walls. There was a sudden rift in the clouds, and the moon rode out into clear sky.
“Nihil enim intulimus in hunc mundum,” rose the voice of Tobias; “haud dubium quia nec auferre quid possumus. . . . Nunc autem Christus resurrexit a mortuis, primitiæ dormientium. . . .”
As the voice ceased, the witch-wife plucked at Peter’s arm.
“The gold!” she croaked. “We have laid the ghost. . . . Now the road is plain. . . . Where Lovell laired the treasure cannot be far distant.”
“I have found it,” he answered, “for I have got me a new mind.”
CHAPTER X. OF THE CONCLAVE AT LITTLE GREECE
At Mother Sweetbread’s he found the lean urchin Dickon of the Holt, whose rags now hung on yet barer bones. He greeted Peter with a pull of his forelock.
“They be after ye, master,” he said. “The other of you two, a tall man, him that set free the prisoner three nights back, has been at his tricks again. Maybe ‘twas he set the Fettiplace men after ye, forbye that ye were seen this day in the forest. In less than an hour they’ll be here, for they know that this is your hidy-hole. They were to muster at Asthall crossroads, for I was dob
bing down in a chump of furze and heard them plan it.”
“Are you hungry?” Peter asked, and the boy’s wolfish eyes answered.
“Give him food, mother,” said Peter. “There is a bare cupboard at the Holt.”
“There be no cupboard there,” said the boy, “and there be no Holt. When I followed ye t’other night, father he set the place afire, and hanged himself to a rafter, and him and mother was all burned to cinders.” He spoke calmly as if such doings were trivial, and his eyes followed Mother Sweetbread as she brought food.
“Then you have no home? Where do you sleep?”
“Where there is a chance of meat. Outside Martin Lee’s kennels, where I can pick up scraps from the hounds’ dish, or beside the swine-troughs up Swinbrook way. That’s how I come to hear the talk of the Fettiplace folk.”
“You will come with me, Dickon lad, for it seems you are destined to serve me. Have you any old garments of mine, mother, to amend his raggedness?”
“We must be on the move,” said Darking. “Little Greece is the best shelter. I know not if John Naps be there, but I have the right of entry, and no Fettiplace durst follow.”
Madge of Shipton took up the tale. She was in a sullen mood, and had sat mumbling to herself in a corner.
“What of Lovell’s gold, young sir? The gold I have tracked by my spells through air and earth and water? What of the treasure that will set you among kings?”
“Let the first comer have it,” said Peter. “I have no longer need of it. I am beholden to you, Mother Littlemouse, but I am done now with spells and treasure. I have a path to tread where it would only cumber me.”
Peter’s tone, solemn and resolute, woke Brother Tobias from the half-doze which the fatigues of the night had brought on him.
“And you, Father,” said Darking, “will sleep here the night, and to-morrow I will send a man who will lead you back to Oseney.”
“Not so, friend,” said the old man. “My bones are rested, and my horse can carry me to Little Greece, which I take to be no great journey. I have a notion that my son Peter will need my counsel, and Oseney can well spare me.”
“Then let us haste,” said Darking, “or we shall have the Fettiplaces on our backs, and I for one am in no mood for a mellay. Food, mother, for there may be no larder at Little Greece. Make speed, Dickon, with that new jerkin.”
When they left the cottage, Dickon in the frieze of Peter’s boyhood, Tobias stiff and weary on his ambling cob, Peter and Darking striding ahead, the clouds had for the most part lifted, and the moon was riding in mid-heaven. There was no sign of pursuit, as they entered the forest aisles, and in ten minutes, through Darking’s subtle leading, there was no fear of it. They were back in an ancient world where Darking, and indeed Peter himself, could baffle any Fettiplace lackey. The cold had lessened with the dark, and the wind seemed to have shifted, for it blew in their left ears now and not in their right. Darking sniffed the air. “Winter has taken a step back,” he said. “St Martin will not forget his little summer. The moles were throwing up fresh earth, so I knew that the frost would not hold.”
Few words were spoken on that journey, and none by Peter, for he was in the grip of a great awe and a new enlightenment. The tortured dead, sprawled by the locked door, had tumbled down his fine castle of dreams. What was the glory of the world if it closed in dry bones and withered skin? . . . Lovell had been, next the King, the greatest man in all England, and he had died like a rat in a trap, gnawing his fingers in his agony. The starved peasant gasping out his last breath in a ditch had a better ending. And, as Lovell, so had been his grandsire, Henry of Buckingham, and his father, save that their threads of life had been shorn by a clean axe in the daylight for all men to see. It was not death that he feared, but the triviality of life. He had the awe of the eternal upon him, and he saw mortal things as through an inverted spy-glass, small and distant against the vast deserts of eternity. . . . Only a few hours back his head had been full of trumpets and horsemen, and his blood as brisk as a March morning. Now they all seemed little things, short-lived and weakly. The song of Pierce the Piper came to his mind —
“Worm at my heart and fever in my head —
There is no peace for any but the dead.
Only the dead are beautiful and free —
Mortis cupiditas captavit me. . . .”
But no, he had no craving for death, as he had no fear of it, and he did not yearn for a peace which was rottenness. It was the littleness of life that clouded his spirit.
He had known these moods of disillusion before, when light and colour had gone out of everything. At Oseney, often, when he was tempted to forswear his gods, and the solemn chants of the choir in the great abbey church and the manuscripts of Plato in Merton library alike seemed foolishness. Since his new life began, he had scarcely felt them; rather he had been filled with a young lust of living. But now he had seen the world grow suddenly small, once at Avelard when the gospeller spoke his testimony . . . once when he saw the dead woman in the hut at the Holt . . . and two nights ago when he had looked at the dying face of the Rustler. . . . And if earthly greatness had shrunk for him, he was not recompensed by any brighter vision of celestial glory. Was it accidia that troubled him, that deadly sin? Or was it illumination, the illumination of the King Ecclesiast, who had cried Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.
Nay, there was one thing that was no vanity. In the atmosphere of decay which surrounded him one thing shone fresh and bright and living, a star among clouds, a rose among the graves. The beauty of Sabine came over him like a benediction. . . . He had got a new mind, he had told Madge of Shipton, and he had spoken the truth. In the last hour he had become very old and wise. He had sacrificed all his whimsies. He would do whatever work God called him to, but he asked no reward. He did not seek kingdoms or dukedoms, or purple and fine linen, or trampling armies behind him. Such pomps he renounced as willingly as any monk. But in his revulsion from death he hungered for life, and to him Sabine shone as life incarnate, youth in excelsis, beauty sanctified. A great tumult of longing filled him. A line of some forgotten wandering poet came into his head —
“O blandos oculos et inquietos!”
It was true; her eyes were both lovely and wild, unquiet and kind. He searched his memory for more. Illic — how did it go? — yes —
“Illic et Venus et leves Amores
Atque ipso in medio sedet Voluptas.”
He tried to turn the couplet into his own tongue:
“For there dwells Venus, and the tiny Loves,
And in their midst Delight.”
The word Voluptas offended him. It should have been Desiderium.
They threaded without challenge the maze of thorn scrub which surrounded Little Greece, and when they reached the great barn there was no light in it. But the door was unlocked, as Darking had told them was the custom, and within there was plenty of kindling, and on the rafters a ham or two and the side of a fat buck. Darking and Dickon, who showed himself assiduous in his new duties, made a fire on the stone floor, and from the bean straw in the far end shook out four beds. “We will rob old John’s larder,” said Darking, and he cut slices from one of the hams and fried them on Naps’s griddle. But of the party he alone ate, and Dickon, who had vast arrears to make up. Peter would have flung himself on his pallet that he might dream of his love, but Tobias detained him. The old man lay couched on the straw, his head on his hand, and the firelight on his face revealed an anxious kindliness.
“There are no secrets among us, son Peter,” he said. “For certain you have none from me, for I read you like a printed book. This night you have seen a vision, such as befell St Paul on the Damascus road. You have seen the vanity of earthly glory, and your soul is loosed from its moorings. Speak I not the truth?”
“It is the truth.” Peter spoke abstractedly, for he had been called from the deeps of another kind of meditation.
“I have wondered sometimes,” Tobias continued, “whether of late months
you had not forgot your upbringing, and had become over-worldly for one of your high calling. The lust of the eyes and the pride of life were new things to you, and I have often feared that you were dazzled. But this night you spoke words which were balm to my heart. You said you had got you a new mind, and that you trod a road where Lovell’s gold would only cumber you. If you meant what I take it you meant, you have indeed had a baptism of grace. I would have had you get treasure that you might be the more free to work a noble purpose. But if you sought it only to hold your head higher among worldly men and attain more readily to worldly honour, then your purpose was evil and God in His mercy has frustrated it.”
Peter made no answer.
“For you are a soldier of Christ, my son.” The old man’s voice had a crooning tenderness. “If you fight in your own strength and for your own cause, you will go down — I know it as if God had whispered to me. You will be the third of your house to die a violent and a futile death. For you may drive out the Tudor and yet go the way of Duke Harry and Duke Edward, for he who draweth the sword in his own quarrel will himself be slain by the sword. But if you fight as the champion of God’s Church and His poor folk you cannot fail, for if you fall you fall a blessed martyr, and angels will waft you to Paradise — and if you win, your crown will be like the crown of Israel’s High Priest, with the words writ thereon, ‘Holiness to the Lord.’”
Tobias had raised himself on his couch, eyes and voice had become rapt like a prophet’s, and he held out his arms to Peter in an ecstasy of appeal. Then he sank back, for the fire blazed up in a sudden draught, and there was a bustle at the doorway.
