Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (394 page)

CHAPTER IV.

IN the ordinary course at such a moment Mr. Sorrell would have cared little about views. He was very much out of breath and his feet hurt him a great deal, whilst a strong wind coming over the hill-top fluttered the skirt of his single garment. So that for a minute he had to stop. He was upon the top of a high ridge and the aspect of an immense tract of country burst suddenly up at him. Though the sun still shone brightly, it was all blues and greys. Only in the distance the wine-purple of heather stretched itself before him. And this expanse ran down very steeply from before his feet and swept up again towards the horizon. With some idea of identifying, if possible, the place in which he stood, Mr. Sorrell turned straight round and scrutinised the view which lay behind him. This was, upon the whole, simple and green. It was a closely grassed valley like the hollow of your hand, running downwards, the gallows-tree, little and plain at some distance below him, with the shadow cast by the climbing sun stretched flat on the turf behind it. Suddenly Mr. Sorrell said “By Jove!” again. A long way beyond the descending lip of the valley, against the blue sky, a chalk-white object tapering to a point with, at its head, a glitter of gold, rose up exceedingly motionless and exceedingly silent.

It affected Mr. Sorrell as if he had been watched by something stealthy, and, as the vane veered round and lost the light of the sun he exclaimed:

“Salisbury Spire!” He looked a little anxiously at the sun, and then, considering that it must be about four o’clock in the afternoon, he estimated that he must be some seven miles to the south-west of Salisbury and going south-west. He remembered distinctly that once he had motored from London to Bath by a road that went through Salisbury, but though he racked his brain he could not for the life of him remember the name of any single town or village through which he had passed.

And for the moment he felt a regret that then he had travelled so fast. He had thought it was rather fine because, leaving London at eleven and giving two hours for lunch at Salisbury itself, they had reached Bath at half-past four, giving them a speed when they were on the road of an average of about thirty-three and a half miles an hour. He remembered that they had run over a pig, but as they had not stopped to make any inquiries he could not tell what the name of the place was. He remembered that there had been an awkward bridge off to the left and that the main road was narrow with high hedges. It certainly was not, as he and his friends had said, the place to let pigs lie about on the high road.

And then, again, he remembered the railway accident. The last thing of which his eyes had been conscious had been the fact that the photograph of a beauty spot, together with the wall of the carriage and the luggage-rack, were descending immediately towards his forehead. And the next thing was, that he was there in his night-shirt seven miles or so from Salisbury. That the railway accident had taken place actually in Salisbury he was fairly certain. He had been trying to wriggle away from Mrs. Lee-Egerton’s maternal blessing, which she had administered to him sandwiched in between fragments of the tale of a Greek slave who had brought the Tamworth cross to Tamworth Castle, which was within a few miles of Salisbury. He remembered that the story of the slave had interested him very much — the bare-footed traveller in a single garment of whitelinen, who, bearing a cross of gold, had travelled some hundreds of miles all alone through a country infested by robbers.

Decidedly, Mr. Sorrell thought, he had escaped in delirium from the hospital to which he, along with other victims of the disaster, must have been taken. And, without doubt, the nun, who was a sick nurse, had been sent out to pursue him. He wondered whether he had better stop where he was until she sent someone to look after him, or whether it would be better to consult the shepherd, borrow a pair of trousers of him, and get up to London by the first train from Salisbury. He turned, however, once more to regard the carcases that were dangling from the oak tree.

“Of course, they don’t hang people like that, even in these out-of-the-way places,” he said to himself. And then he considered that they had been having a pageant there. There were pageants in every corner of England. The thing was being a good deal overdone. And when he considered the tops of the other hills, he thought that they had been overdoing it altogether a great deal too much. On the skyline of a very uplifted range upon his left hand he perceived the outline of no less than three gallows; and on his right, upon the summit of a dark and forbidding heather-clad hill, scalloped and ridged so that Mr. Sorrell considered that it must be the remains of a Roman camp, there rose up desolately another gibbet. A heavy chain descended from its outstretched arm, and from the bottom hung a repulsive fragment decorated with rags.

“Oh, this is altogether disgusting!” Mr. Sorrell said. “Someone will have to write to the papers about it,”

They must have been searching for every blessed hill which had ever had a gallows in the good old times. Even in the Dark Ages they could not have hanged as many people as that. It would have taken half the population. But he admitted that of its kind the thing had been well done. He had had a decidedly eerie sensation, as if the bat on his skull had knocked him clean through space into another generation. There really had not been anything whatever to show him that he was not in the thirteenth century. Except, perhaps, for the eggs. Eggs in a basket struck him as being exceedingly modern sort of things. He did not believe they had eggs in the thirteenth century. —

He did not know much about history, but he thought they had been introduced into England by Sir Walter Raleigh, along with potatoes and brandy. He did remember — the fact had somehow impressed itself on his mind because it was philological, and he had always taken an interest in the study of languages, which was a sound commercial pursuit — he remembered distinctly having read somewhere that Chaucer or Caxton, taking a voyage from the coast of Kent to Suffolk, had landed in search of eggs. They had not been able to get them, because in Suffolk — or perhaps it was the other way round? — at that date eggs had been called
eyne.
This had distinctly interested him, because it had shown him that in mediaeval England there were as many different dialects as there are in South America, and because the word so nearly resembled the modern German
Eier,
which signifies eggs. And, thinking about it, it came distinctly into his mind that he had read this in two specimen pages from his own encyclopaedia that he had reproduced in facsimile for his prospectus.

He remembered the woodcut that had illustrated his specimen page. It had the word
Harleian MS.
below it, to show the care with which the encyclopaedia had been compiled, and it represented a mediaeval gentleman with knock-knees and pointed shins, something representing a kilt and about forty yards of woollen stuff wound round his head, holding an anchor and jumping out of a boat about the size and shape of a piece of melon peel. He could have sunk it with one foot.

And then acutely it came into his head to wonder what they were doing with the account of the travels of Mr. Car K. Claflin, the intrepid explorer who had rushed round the Equator. He did not know what they would have been doing with it, he did not know how long he had been ill, but he started impulsively down the valley because he had got to get to the nearest railway station. He would have to take things in hand again. He stopped once more and with anxious eyes surveyed the immense field. He was looking for the trail of smoke of an approaching train. It was impossible that there should not be a line in all that expanse of country. He had never seen a really great view of England that had not at least one, two, or sometimes as many as three plumes of smoke ascending and flying across space. But he saw nothing. He could not make out even a road running along the valley at his feet. He looked for the dust of an oncoming motor. There was none. Green grass ran down into the valley: in the bottom there were some high trees, dark and very full of foliage, like a ribbon along the stream. In the bottom too there were some thatched huts, so small that they resembled rabbit boxes. There were too, here and there, some small enclosures with little hedges round them. Mr. Sorrell imagined that these must be Small Holdings. “That blessed Act doesn’t seem to make much progress here” he said. Hidden deep amongst some very tall elms he could see the shoulder of a square church tower. And then, coming round the angle of a spur of the downs, once more there was the nun progressing slowly very far below him upon the mule that, tiny and distinct, appeared like a fragment of white chalk.

“Oh well, I’m going after her,” Mr. Sorrell said. “I suppose she’s got the hang of the situation. She seemed to know something about Mrs. Lee-Egerton.” At any rate, she had certainly mentioned the family name, and the legend of the family slave who had travelled half England over with only the words “Egerton” and “Tamworth” in his vocabulary. And Mr. Sorrell considered that no doubt Mrs. Egerton had sat at his bedside whilst he had been in hospital, and had told the nun all about the cross. Probably he had held on to the cross like grim death when he had been insensible, and they had not liked to force it away from him. That was, without doubt, why it was still in his grasp. No doubt the palm leaf had been some patent hospital packing that they had put on to prevent the cross from being banged about.

He plodded on determinedly after the nun. But the grass here and there was pierced with tiny little, very sharp sprigs of broom, and Mr. Sorrell had to tread with care. The mule on the other hand, as if it smelt its stable, was travelling faster and faster. It was fully a mile and a half ahead, and decidedly it was gaining upon him. And Mr. Sorrell felt a desperate desire to overtake the nun. After all, she understood the position. She was, perhaps, the only person in the countryside who would understand the position. In the ordinary way he would have felt an extreme shyness about appearing before a lady in attire so exiguous. But if he met anybody else — even a man — he would have to explain, and that would make him feel very awkward. He had got the hang of the story by now; his head was perfectly clear, just as the wrappings round it were perfectly clearly hospital wrappings. But he did not want to have to explain to anybody that he had been practically a wandering lunatic. It would make him appear small and ignominious, whereas he was actually the distinguished Mr. Sorrell, one of the most up-to-date men of his day. No, decidedly, he would not mind meeting the nun. He wanted to meet her more than anyone else in the world. She did not, after all, seem so very much like a lady: she was more like the laundress of his chambers in the Temple. Probably she was a lower class nun. And Mr. Sorrell had never felt embarrassed when, for instance, he had asked a housemaid to fasten a stiff evening collar for him. Besides, it was a sick-nurse’s duty to look after her patients. And with these ideas in his head Mr. Sorrell trotted onwards as swiftly as he could. He imagined that decidedly he must be losing weight; it was probably better than Turkish baths. The nun disappeared round another fold in the downs. From her swaying and uneven motions Mr. Sorrell imagined that the mule must be actually galloping. And when, a little later, he came upon a broken egg, he felt positively sure of it. He trotted on.

CHAPTER V.

THE Lady Blanche D’Enguerrand de Coucy of Stapleton stood yawning upon the watch-tower of Stapleton Castle. There was no reason why she should have stood there, for upon the three stone steps in the north-east corner the ancient watchman with his horn slung from his neck leant in an attitude of dejected boredom upon his pike. It was his business to signal to those in the keep below the approach of any traveller. Thus he would blow four gruff grunts — his horn being of wood — to signify the approach of a knight-at-arms with his company, or he would blow five, supposing that he had observed upon the hill-tops any person in armour and with a company whose cognisances might be unknown to him or whose appearance suggested that they might be malefactors of the one sort or the other. Or, on the other hand, if the man approaching appeared to be a merchant with pack-mules, he would make one gruff sound. If, apparently, it was a knightly minstrel, he would do his best to produce three high notes and a flourish, though this he did very seldom now, and for the last month he had been seeking to train himself to blow one very high note long and sustained when he observed the approach of Lady Dionissia de Egerton de Tamville, who had lately acquired the habit of riding over from the castle of Tamville to supper every other evening. This last call had, indeed, been of late almost the only one that his aged lips had had occasion to make, though it is true that when it sounded it would cause some little commotion in the castle, the due states and ceremonies having to be observed. Thus in the quadrangle below he would see offal and egg-shells and hot water being thrown on to the heap of garbage that formed the centre of the courtyard. Women and pages and old men would hurry from side to side far down below. The Lady Dionissia would ride up with her attendant train of women, little boys, old men, a chaplain or so, and shortly afterwards the washing trumpet would blow and the commoner sort of people would be observed cleansing themselves in the courtyard. But at that time it was only two hours after noon and it wanted two hours more for supper-time.

The old watchman leant upon his pike; the Lady Blanche yawned. In another corner of the small, square enclosure formed by the breast-high battlements, and of sheet lead warmed by the sun underfoot, the Lady Blanche’s ladies, Blanchemain and Amoureuse, whispered and tittered continually with the little golden-haired boy Jehan, her page and the cousin of her husband. The Lady Blanche could not imagine what they could find to talk about. There was nothing in the world. And it seemed to her to be disgusting that there should be nothing in the world. She remembered that as a Lady of the Queen-Mother she had never found the time hang heavy on her hands. If they had not anything else to do at the Court they could at least play cat’s-cradle, and there had always been gossip. Nowadays there was not any gossip, since, except for the outlaws, the clubmen and robbers, who made riding out a dangerous pursuit, there was not probably an able-bodied layman within twenty miles of the neighbouring castles of Stapleton and Tamville. Her husband, Sir Guy, was tiresome and foolish when he was present. In espousing the cause of the late King — he was said by now to have been murdered in Berkeley Castle by means of a red-hot horn — in espousing the cause of the late King and his favourites as against the now Queen-Mother, the always foolish Sir Guy, who always did the wrong thing, had done it once again, and the thought of it added to her nervous exasperation. This entirely foolish husband of hers had undoubtedly ruined her life. With the Queen Isabella she had always been a favourite. But her husband’s insolence to Roger Mortimer had not only cost him various fines and amercements amounting to more than two hundred pounds, which they could ill afford, considering that by his silly joviality and easy manners the peasants had been encouraged to neglect their work upon the demesne lands — whereas in his father’s time they would have had at the end of the year seventy pounds from the sale of hay alone and that in bad years, nowadays, it was much if they got forty in the best of years; — not only had his folly cost them two hundred pounds’ worth of fines, but they were totally estranged from the Queen-Mother, who, having returned from France with a small company of knights of Hainault, had utterly discomfited and put to death, not only the late King, but all his favourites.

And now Sir Guy, utterly without cause, had got together all his fighting men and kinsmen and retainers, and had gone at his own cost to aid the new young King in his campaign against the King of Scots. This, indeed, was a crowning folly, for in this war Sir Guy had not been summoned to do any service at all. The war was in Scotland, and no knight had been called for by the King or by the Queen-Mother from farther south than Lincolnshire. It was an utterly foolish piece of braggadocio. What Sir Guy had wanted to do had been to impress the Queen-Mother with the sense of his power and importance. But the Lady Blanche knew Isabella well enough to be certain that she would see how Sir Guy was weakening himself and his cousin, Sir Egerton de Tamville. Even on their own showing, these two foolish men had confessed that the expedition would cost them at least two thousand pounds apiece, and she had made her own inquiries of the Jew Goldenhand of Salisbury. Jews were forbidden to live or to lend money in these parts at that time; but the town council of the city had paid no attention to the writs that came down from London for the expulsion of Goldenhand. They had baptised him by force instead, without washing the habit of lending money away.

She had learned that the two knights had borrowed of him at least eight thousand pounds, impignorating all their joint and several rights over land, the lordships of Old Sarum and Wiley. And where in the world should they find eight thousand pounds, even if they made fat plundering, going to and from the war and in the war itself? Why, each man of the four hundred that they must take with them must bring back, as the Cantor Nicholas had informed her, the value of at least twenty pounds in booty before they could make it good. And her husband and his cousin were not the type of men to bring back money by way of booty. They were inspired by the modern crazy notions of forbearance towards their foes if their foes had fought well. These silly ideas had come from France. Why, after the siege of Hardeville, when Sir Guy had taken with his own hand the Sire Jehan D’Estocqueville, whose ransom might have been a thousand crowns, Sir Guy had set the Frenchman free. He had done it with great pomp and ceremony, approaching the French knight whom he had served during dinner in the midst of two hundred people, and not only bidding him go free but setting on his head the chaplet of pearls that he had worn in his own hair. It was perfectly true that Sir Guy had gained much praise for this absurd action and many amorous glances from the ladies, which had been what he desired. But what lordships, demesnes or estates, could stand this riotous drain, this foolish and sentimental ostentation, and what did it mean to her?

There she groaned and twisted her nails in aching solitude during how many months! Had they but husbanded their resources she might have ridden north with Sir Guy, and lain with the Queen, who was in the New Castle, just short of the Scottish border. And with twenty minutes of the Queen’s ear, she would have done more good to Sir Guy than all he would ever get by the cracking of rusty iron on the heads of penniless Scottish knights. And, for all she knew, her husband had got himself into a new folly, for might it not be he who had roused the archers against the men of Sir John of Hainault, who were aiding the King in the Scotch war? These outrages were said by the juggler, who brought them news, to have been committed by archers from Lincolnshire, who had fallen on Sir John of Hainault and his fellows as they went back at night from the King’s lodgings to their own. But how could she tell that it was not their own Wiltshire archers, of whom Sir Guy and his cousin had taken many bands with them, in addition to the men-at-arms and the gentlemen armed cap-à-pie, and upon the greedy destriers that ate so much hay and fodder? It was part of the folly of Sir Guy and his cousin that they could not, like other knights, ride to the seat of war upon light hackneys, with their armour in carts behind them, but they must go prancing England from north to south upon great wasteful chargers that they might very well have waited to buy until they came to the northerly parts. Of this folly and vainglory of men there was nowadays no end, and the Lady Blanche dug her fingernails into her palms and breathed a tense sound of exasperation and rage.

The old man with the horn blew a single high-stopped note.

“Oh yes, a woman upon the road from the Plain,” she said impatiently. And she did not trouble to look over the battlements. “When will there come again knights riding or men with bears and jugglers with their little flutes and golden balls?”

She called petulantly to the old man who stood three steps high. “What woman is it upon the road?”

He answered huskily, wiping the rheum from his eyes with the back of his hand:

“Mistress, it is the nun Lugdwitha, upon her white mule.”

“And what makes the nun Lugdwitha upon the road?”

“Mistress, I do not know,” the watchman answered. “Maybe the Lady Blanchemain shall tell you.”

“Why, ask her,” the Lady Blanche said. “I am tired of the sound of my own voice.” —

Being in private, for she could reach the leads of the watch-tower by narrow stairs in the wall from her own chamber, the Lady Blanche was wearing only a tight-fitting dress of grey homespun wool that she had had for seven years. She was a woman of twenty-four, with a hard mouth, a high colour, a very erect back, and dark, resentful eyes. The Lady Blanchemain, on the other hand, was quite fair, and, although on account of the parsimony or poverty of her mistress and kinsman, she too was dressed in grey homespun wool, nevertheless from feudal respect she wore a large white coif and plaited sleeves of white and grey. The Lady Blanche liked her very well, since she was very tiny, for she had been born in the castle of Hardelot on the first day of the siege that lasted five months. Thus she had been very stunted at the outset of her growth, for most of that time there had hardly been either spoon meat or mother’s milk for her. Her father had died in a dungeon, her mother in a convent, and at the age of ten, according to the law, she had come to act as kinswoman and serving-maid to her cousin the Lady Blanche upon her marriage to Sir Guy seven years before. And since she was very gay, insignificant, and contented, the Lady Blanche liked her well enough. She had, besides, a very nimble ear for gossip.

She looked, crinkling up her eyes, over the ramparts that reached almost to her nose.

“The Sœur Louise,” she said, preferring for the moment to speak in French, “went into Sarum this morning to buy sugar and spices and eggs. She went along the valley with some merchants from Warminster. I think she will come back over the Plain, because it is a safer way along by the gallows that Sir Guy set up to be a warning to evil gentry.”

“Ah, this convent!” the Lady Blanche said spitefully. “What surveillance is it that they keep up that they must needs buy eggs when to-morrow is Friday?”

“Why, all their hens have died,” the Lady Blanchemain said. “A pestilence or a murrain struck them, and a mouldiness is fallen upon their corn wells, and their fowler was drowned on Monday, and their fishponds ran dry so that most of their fish are dead.”

“That, then, is a judgment upon them,” the Lady Blanche said. “Blessed be He that has done it, that they may know by their empty bellies what it is to grasp at the rights of the Lord that protects them.” And, intent upon wounding the feelings of her other handmaid, the Lady Amoureuse, that was of a pious nature, the Lady Blanchemain opened her heart as to the grievances she had against the religious of both sexes who dwelt on either side of the castle, the convent being to the right and the priory to the left, though the priory was for the most part within the lands of Egerton de Tamville.

With the intent to wound the feelings of the Lady Amoureuse, the Lady Blanche went at extraordinary length into grievances against the convent, the priory, the lordship of Tamville, and the inhabitants of the little town of Wishford that was perhaps a quarter of a mile from the castle of Stapleton. It was a matter of extraordinary complication, and it was one of the Lady Blanche’s chief grievances against her lord that he could not set his mind seriously to grasping what were his actual rights.

On the one hand, the lords of Stapleton Castle claimed by rights of the most ancient nature the service of the bullock teams of every peasant of the manors of Stapleton St. Michael, Berwick St. James, and Wishford le Virgin upon every third day of the week not being a holiday and the holidays being counted against the peasants.

The convent claimed by virtue of rights granted to them before the Conquest the right to three-fifteenths of the labours of every ninth day. On the part of the lords of Stapleton it was argued that this right, because it was granted before the Conquest, had been abrogated by the grant of the land to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, by William the First. The nuns set up the plea that on account of the exceeding sanctity of their community, which had been established by the Blessed Edward Confessor, their rights had been specially exempted by the Conqueror. It had been represented on the parts of the lords of Stapleton that these three-fifteenths should be properly taken from the time of the peasants themselves and not from the time which the peasants owed their liege lords. But on the part of the nuns it was argued that they, being women, had no power to enforce obedience from the peasants. According to the spirit of the grant from the Confessor, it must be certainly intended that the three-fifteenths must be taken from the third day of the lord of the manor, since the lord of the manor had the means of arms to enforce his rights, whereas the nuns had not. It had been replied on the part of Sir Guy that since his grandfather had received the grant of the demesne his ancestors had hanged innumerable of the peasants, in the Christian and worthy endeavour to force them to give up their time to the service of the convent.