Come Rack! Come Rope! | Page 2

and that lay the flat
bottom through which he went--meadowland broken by rushes; his
mare Cecily stepped along, now cracking the thin ice of the little pools
with her dainty feet, now going gently over peaty ground, blowing thin
clouds from her red nostrils, yet unencouraged by word or caress from
her rider; who sat, heavy and all but slouching, staring with his blue
eyes under puckered eyelids, as if he went to an appointment which he
would not keep.
Yet he was a very pleasant lad to look upon, smooth-faced and gallant,
mounted and dressed in a manner that should give any lad joy. He wore
great gauntlets on his hands; he was in his habit of green; he had his
steel-buckled leather belt upon him beneath his cloak and a pair of
daggers in it, with his long-sword looped up; he had his felt hat on his
head, buckled again, and decked with half a pheasant's tail; he had his
long boots of undressed leather, that rose above his knees; and on his
left wrist sat his grim falcon Agnes, hooded and belled, not because he
rode after game, but from mere custom, and to give her the air.
He was meeting his first man's trouble.
Last year he had said good-bye to Derby Grammar School--of old my
lord Bishop Durdant's foundation--situated in St. Peter's churchyard.
Here he had done the right and usual things; he had learned his
grammar; he had fought; he had been chastised; he had robed the effigy
of his pious founder in a patched doublet with a saucepan on his head
(but that had been done before he had learned veneration)--and so had
gone home again to Matstead, proficient in Latin, English, history,
writing, good manners and chess, to live with his father, to hunt, to hear
mass when a priest was within reasonable distance, to indite painful

letters now and then on matters of the estate, and to learn how to bear
himself generally as should one of Master's rank--the son of a
gentleman who bore arms, and his father's father before him. He dined
at twelve, he supped at six, he said his prayers, and blessed himself
when no strangers were by. He was something of a herbalist, as a sheer
hobby of his own; he went to feed his falcons in the morning, he rode
with them after dinner (from last August he had found himself riding
north more often than south, since Marjorie lived in that quarter); and
now all had been crowned last Christmas Eve, when in the enclosed
garden at her house he had kissed her two hands suddenly, and made
her a little speech he had learned by heart; after which he kissed her on
the lips as a man should, in the honest noon sunlight.
All this was as it should be. There were no doubts or disasters
anywhere. Marjorie was an only daughter as he an only son. Her father,
it is true, was but a Derby lawyer, but he and his wife had a good little
estate above the Hathersage valley, and a stone house in it. As for
religion, that was all well too. Master Manners was as good a Catholic
as Master Audrey himself; and the families met at mass perhaps as
much as four or five times in the year, either at Padley, where Sir
Thomas' chapel still had priests coming and going; sometimes at
Dethick in the Babingtons' barn; sometimes as far north as Harewood.
And now a man's trouble was come upon the boy. The cause of it was
as follows.
Robin Audrey was no more religious than a boy of seventeen should be.
Yet he had had as few doubts about the matter as if he had been a monk.
His mother had taught him well, up to the time of her death ten years
ago; and he had learned from her, as well as from his father when that
professor spoke of it at all, that there were two kinds of religion in the
world, the true and the false--that is to say, the Catholic religion and the
other one. Certainly there were shades of differences in the other one;
the Turk did not believe precisely as the ancient Roman, nor yet as the
modern Protestant--yet these distinctions were subtle and negligible;
they were all swallowed up in an unity of falsehood. Next he had
learned that the Catholic religion was at present blown upon by many

persons in high position; that pains and penalties lay upon all who
adhered to it. Sir Thomas FitzHerbert, for instance, lay now in the Fleet
in London on that very account. His own father, too, three or four times
in the year, was under necessity of paying over heavy sums for