Chapter II: The Testament

The Lord Constable halted on the first platform and flung from his head the hat with the singed plumes. His son looked at him in some anxiety: he had felt his father’s hand press ever more heavily on his shoulder as they came up the winding steps. Between the ash-powdered white locks, the handsome face struck him as more than usually drawn and pallid.

“A cup of wine for his lordship, Chitterley.—Haste!” cried he.

Rockhurst staggered slightly and sank down upon a stone bench; then looked up at his son and smiled.

“’Tis but a passing giddiness. All thanks, good lad!”

Even as he spoke the smile was succeeded by a heavy sigh. Scarce twenty-two, and his boy to wear so careworn a countenance! But a year ago, before their great trouble, he had tenderly mocked the boy for his over-youthfulness…! Here was a man with sad, haunted eyes, and features set with silent endurance of pain. And all the boyhood that had been the father’s delight was lost forever.

“’Tis as if the patience of God were worn out,” he went on, as though speaking to himself, after a while, during which he had gazed wistfully at the distant conflagration. “Well for those who can say in their heart that no sin of theirs has cried aloud for vengeance.”

And again the heavy sigh escaped his lips.

The anxiety grew deeper in Harry Rockhurst’s eyes; he took the cup of wine from Chitterley’s hand (half crazed his fellow-retainers deemed him, but alert enough still in all that concerned his master’s service):—

“Drink, my lord,” said he, “you need it. Human strength will not bear more of the work you have done to-day … indeed, all these days!”

But Rockhurst’s eyes having fallen upon Chitterley, he beckoned him to his side before lifting the wine to his lips. Full of secret importance, the old servant hurried to him.

Harry drew back. In many ways he felt as if his father still treated him like a child; in none more than these secret interviews with Chitterley. The Lord Constable seemed to make his servant sole confidant and instrument in the matter of some urgent and troublous private business; one which necessitated frequent absences on both sides. The secrecy pained the young man, but he bore the slight in silence; he had not been brought up to question the parental actions.

* * * * *

“Didst go where I bade thee?” whispered Rockhurst.

“Aye, my lord.”

“No news?”

“No news, no news!”

Rockhurst sat awhile, moodily gazing on the red of the wine. Rousing himself at last, he drank wearily, handed the empty cup to the old man and, with a wave of the hand, dismissed him. Then he sat awhile longer yet, watching his son—There were those who said that my Lord Rockhurst’s eyes could look at naught else, when his heir was by him. Harry was engaged in receiving the sergeant yeoman’s report. The father did not speak till he saw Bracy salute and withdraw. Then he lifted his voice:—

“Harry!”

The young man started, and in an instant was by his father’s side. There was something of womanly solicitude in his air. ’Twas a vast pity (the soldiers said among themselves) to see a young man so set upon an old one!—“Clean against nature,” Corporal Tulip had vowed, whose own amorous heart was now ashes beneath the ashes of the Thames Street Hall, while his sweetheart already thought of walking o’ sunsets with Anspessade Strongitharm.

Rockhurst rose and placed his hand on his son’s shoulder. The two looked affectionately into each other’s eyes: sad men both, and deadly worn this evening hour after the fierce work of the day.

“Harry, it is borne in on me that not many days will be given us of company together thus—”

“How, my lord—would you wish me from you again?”

“Nay—this time, Harry, it will be thy father who leaves thee.”

The young man started. Look and tone left no doubt of the meaning of the words.

“Ah, father,” he cried, with the irritability born of keen anxiety; “if you would but listen to me! Indeed you expose yourself unduly—”

“When death threatens from without, a man may smile at it. But when death knocks from within, Harry, thrice fool who does not hearken!”

“Sir, you alarm me.” Harry’s voice shook. “Oh, I have been blind! Your white hairs, your altered demeanour, are sure signs of suffering—some hidden sickness!”

“Even so, lad. Sickness incurable! A secret pain that gives no rest, night nor day. Nay, nay, Harry, no physician can avail, no remedy ease—”

“Ah,” exclaimed the son in bitter accents, “now I understand much. You have never given me your confidence, yet methinks I might have been as true to help you in your need, as wise in my devotion to advise, as old Chitterley. This sickness is the secret between you. ’Tis for physician or remedy that Chitterley journeys forth daily in such mystery while you toil. Can you not see, my lord, that to be shut out from your counsel has but added deeper grief to me? And methinks that I might have proved as true to help, as wise to counsel, as yonder old man.… But it has always been your pleasure to treat me as a child.”

Rockhurst fixed deep eyes of melancholy on his son.

“My illness is not of the body, Harry; it is of the mind. But the canker works, never ceasing, eats from soul to flesh.”

“You speak in riddles, sir.”

“Alas! you shall read my riddle soon enough. Hast ever heard—thou canst never have known it—of that sickness of the spirit which is called … remorse? In sooth, ’tis uglier than the pestilence.”

At the look of sudden fear his son cast upon him the Lord Constable laughed,—a laugh sadder than tears.

“Sit you down with me, Harry, and listen; for I have much to tell you, and it is, as I said, borne in upon me that it must be told now.”

The young man obeyed in silence; but for a moment or two neither spoke.

The western sky before them had become an image of flaming immensity, almost beyond the power of realisation. Glow of sunset mingled with glow of fire and painted the volutes of smoke massed on the horizon with every shade of fierce magnificence and lurid threat.

“’Twould seem as if the whole town were doomed,” muttered Rockhurst at last.

“The powers of hell let loose upon us,” said his son, gloomily.

“Say, rather, my son, the wrath of God! Look at me, lad! The last time, perchance, that you will look upon your father’s face with love and reverence.”

Words froze on the young man’s lips. The Lord Constable folded his arms; his voice grew stern, ironic:—

“You believe me—do you not?—a sober, godly gentleman, as true to his duty as Christian as he has been to his king as subject—”

“Indeed, my lord, I know you as such,” quickly interrupted Harry, in deep offence.

“Aye, Harry, aye,” laughed Rockhurst, bitterly, “I had but one part to act toward thee, and it seems I did it well!—I never let thee know but the father in me, the stern yet loving father.” His voice suddenly broke on a note of tenderness. “Nay, never doubt that, whatever else you may come to doubt: I loved you well. You were my delight—My son, you’ve had a sore heart against me many a time for that I treated you, in sooth, as a child, kept you far from me, in the country; that I so sternly forbade you the town and the life of the Court. Even now you have the plaint that you are excluded from my counsel. Well, such as I planned, I have made thee. Where I have failed in life, thou art strong. Thou hast kept thy manhood pure and clean, where thy father rioted, wasted—”

“Gracious heavens! my lord! What words are these?”

“Ah, ’tis not the sound man that praises the glory of health, but the sick. Not the sober Christian sees the full radiance of the jewel of purity, but the libertine. I never let thee guess that here, in this town, now dissolving in fire, I had won me the name of Rakehell Rockhurst.”

With paling cheek and a starting eye, the son had listened. Now he winced as if his father had struck him.

“Rakehell Rockhurst—Rakehell! And I smote Lionel Ratcliffe on the mouth for daring to couple the name to yours—!” Then, on a fierce revulsion of feeling, he caught the pale hand close to him and kissed it passionately. “Wherefore tell me this? Father, as I have ever known you, so must I ever love and honour you.”

“The Rakehell—” repeated the Lord Constable; and once more, out of the very pain of his avowal, came harshness into his tone—“that was my name in men’s mouths. His Majesty had another, a kinder one, for me; he called me in jest his merry Rockhurst. You have been reared in ripe veneration of the King’s Grace; yet, had you known life by my side (as once you yearned), you would have learned that the one name and the other meant, in Whitehall, at least, the same thing. Rakehell—aye, I may have had black perdition in my heart many a time; yet believe this, Harry, that when like Lucifer I fell, I sinned like Lucifer with pride, arrogance, recklessness, what you will—never with baseness. Merry, my good liege called me. To find me so mad, yet see me wear so grave a face, it gave him a spur to laughter. Merry? Nay; he loved me, in chief, because in his sad heart he knew mine. Both sad hearts, sickened of life. Forever striving to find a blossom in the dust, a jest in the weary round, to taste of a fruit that was not ashes on the tongue. And there you have the secret of my life and his.… Then came Diana.”

“Ah, hush, my lord!” Harry rose from his seat, in violent agitation, and stood a second, pressing his hands against his breast. “With me, you know, wounds heal slowly,” he went on, striving to speak calmly. “Do not touch upon that hurt, lest the bleeding begin afresh.”

The father rose, too, followed his son to the parapet, and, again laying a hand upon his shoulder, compelled his attention. The splendour of the sunset pageant had faded, and with it all beauty from the sky. Only the glow, the gloom, the belching smoke remained.

“I knew her ere ever you did,” said the Lord Constable, his eye fixed as upon an inner vision, fair and fresh and pure. “Aye, you never knew it. She spoke not of it again, nor did I; for you had come between us!… She entered into my life one winter’s night; and across the snow I set her again on her sheltered way, knowing what I was—and seeing what she was. But from the instant of our parting (’twas all in the snow, lad, and above us a sky of stars; scarce I touched her hand; not a word exchanged but a God be wi’ ye), from that instant she was never from my thoughts—She, the might-have-been, the one woman for me! Aye, you stare, your grave father! Your old father! I was a strong man, then, and life ran potent in my veins. Dost remember how I met her again, in the Peacock Walk at home, and you prating of your love for her, with beardless lip?”

“Oh, father, father, father!” cried the poor lad. “For God’s sake!… You are all I have left!”

“Hush! Look on these white hairs, sign among so many that life has done with me. Nay, I know full well I am not old in years, scarce double thine own; but the vital spring is dying. Listen, Harry, you are a man; I have a trust to lay upon you. Since that terrible dawn, when, crying out, ‘Diana’s dead!’ you fell, bleeding of your old wound, into swoon upon swoon, and thereafter into mortal sickness, you know her name has never passed your lips nor mine. It was better, in sooth, you should believe her dead.”

The young man caught at the parapet behind him for support; and the sweat broke on the father’s brow as he looked at him. There was a tense silence. Then, fiercely, Harry Rockhurst said:—

“Now, my lord, you must speak!”

* * * * *

A moment longer Rockhurst kept silence. Curious reversal of the wheel of fate! Here stood he, who had always been as a god to his son, now as one in the dock before his judge. He, Rockhurst, whose will the King himself could not bend, ordered to speech; and because of his own just mind, just through all injustice wrought, unresentful—aye, submissive. The moment of agony of a little while ago had passed.

Already it seemed to him the things of life were receding so quickly that he looked on them from afar. Passion had gone from his voice as he spoke; only a mighty sadness was left.

“It was even to speak, Harry, that I kept thee by me here. Know, then, that until the night of Lady Chillingburgh’s death,—the night which found Diana without a shelter,—in my daily intercourse with your promised bride the father was ever stronger in me than the man. Aye, and when her brother fled from the plague-stricken house and there was none but me to protect her (for her kinsman Lionel was, as thou hast good cause to know, my poor wounded boy, no guardian for thy bride) ’twas as a father I cared for her all through the livelong night as we wandered, vainly seeking a refuge. I brought her at length to my house, and went forth to seek the means of conveying her home. That was even the very morning of your arrival. Alack, nor horse nor man could fugitive then find in the waste of the doomed city! I came back to her.… Oh, my son, before you judge me, remember: men knew not what they did those terrible days. Question any who passed through them. Staid citizens became drunken reprobates, greybeards rioted horribly with the madness of youth, priests denied their God—”

“But Diana, Diana—”

“Aye, Diana! I deemed Fate itself had given her to me. The madness of the horror about me had turned my brain. Madness of my love for her, of my long self-denial! I would have wedded her, even that hour. But she, she had yielded her troth to thee … to thy father she gave her scorn! At that most cursed moment thy voice rose from the street, thou, my son whom I deemed far away, in the heart of the country! I would have killed her rather than yield her. Remember, I was mad. I thrust her from thy sight into an inner room. Ah, God, in that room!”

“In that room?”

“The plague lay in wait for her.”

“The plague—”

“Unknown to me one lay there, a woman who had crept in, sick—to die!”

Harry gave a deep groan, covered his face with his hands, and fell upon the bench.

“Whilst I lay raving, did she die of the plague, there, in your room? O my Diana!”

“My son, I know not. When I sought for her she was gone, vanished. The window was opened into the garden. The woman lay dead upon the bed.”

Harry sprang to his feet, clapped his hands together in a sudden agony of joy, more dreadful at that moment than all his sorrow to the father’s eyes.

“She escaped? She may be living yet! There is mercy in heaven!”

“No mercy for such as I—nor for thee, being my son. For my moment’s madness, what retribution! Harry, this whole long year I have looked for her, night and day. There is not a corner of the town we have not scoured, old Chitterley and myself. Aye, that was the mystery you fretted not to share!”

Harry looked at his father speechlessly, with fierce dry eyes.

“Alas!” Rockhurst went on stonily, “she must even be dead, stricken by the contagion—fallen at the street corner perchance, swept into the common pit as so many others! And yet, if she were not dead—There is not a burning house I pass but I fear she may be in the flames. Food is as ashes, drink as gall upon my tongue. And now, with the presage of death upon me, I lay the hideous burden upon thee, my son, my innocent son!”

He stretched his hand. But, drawing back, the latter turned a red glance upon him.

“And you let me believe her dead that morning—that morning! I could have saved her!” He flung his arms in the air and shook them; a terrible menace on his face.

“God!” he called, “God—!”

Rockhurst gave a loud cry:—

“My son, do not curse your father!”

The young man’s arms dropped by his side. He looked at the bent white head, at the countenance worn, wan, patient; then he cast himself upon his father’s breast, sobbing:—

“God help us all!”

Night was falling apace. Father and son sat together over the supper table. The meal, such as it was, was over; each had made a pretence at eating, lest he add to the other’s burden. In silence Harry’s eyes ever sought his father, striving to reconcile the man he had known and reverenced above all manhood with the man who had harmed him to the shattering of his life. Yet he could now find nothing in his heart but a deeper tenderness. Nay, as he gazed at the noble silvered head, the countenance, beautiful, diaphanous, it was with no jot of reverence abated, rather a kind of awe added to a climbing apprehension. His own words of that terrible moment of revelation rang in his ears as a tolling bell: “_Father! You are all I have left!_”

At last he rose and went restlessly to the open window. When he looked up, there was the pure sky overhead with a star or two, very peaceful; and when he looked forth between the towers, there raged the flames, yonder hung the murk the blacker for the fire lurid below. It seemed an image of his own life.’

“At least there can be peace,” he told himself.

* * * * *

The door opened behind him; he heard Chitterley’s shuffling feet, and next the quavering voice; but, lost in his contemplation, he never turned his head.

“Harry!” came Lord Rockhurst’s voice of a sudden.

The young man leaped at his tone. Rockhurst thrust a crumpled sheet into his hand.

“Read it, Harry! A messenger has brought it, hotfoot, and is gone as he came.”

As he spoke, the Lord Constable strode to the door.

“Ho there!” he called to the sentinel in the passage. “Call out the guard! Have the assembly sounded!”

His voice rang out, clarion clear. Harry, holding the paper, stared, astounded; the old fire had come back to his father’s eye, the old life to his step; under the very whiteness of his locks his face looked young again.

“Read, lad, read!” ordered Rockhurst, “and be in readiness.”

His step was already clanking down the stone stairs ere his son, hurrying to the window, could read the sheet in the waning light. Then a great cry broke from the young man: “Diana! Diana!”

“My lord” (so ran the hasty writing on the note), “the convent
of St. Helen’s, Bishopgate, within where my kinswoman, Madam
Anastasia Bedingfield, has given me shelter, though none of
her faith, is even now attacked by the rabble; and we are in
parlous danger. Send succour, as you still remember poor Diana!”

From below was heard the roll of drum; then the tramp of feet and the clank of firelock. And over all the Lord Constable’s voice:—

“Steady, lads, and haste. We’ve urgent work to-night!”

Hurriedly Harry set out to join them. His knees trembled as he went. He thought, in the confusion of his mind: My father goeth like a young man again to the rescue, and I like an old one. What will happen between us when we see Diana again?