Come Rack! Come Rope! | Page 5

difference between the two
religions, then it would be the act of a wise man to turn Protestant too,
if only for a while. And on the other hand his pride of birth and his
education by his mother and his practice ever since drew him hard the
other way. He was in a strait between the two. He did not know what to
think, and he feared what Marjorie might think.
It was this, then, that had held him silent. He feared what Marjorie
might think, for that was the very thing that he thought that he thought
too, and he foresaw a hundred inconveniences and troubles if it were
so.
"How did you know I had anything in my mind?" he asked. "Is it not
enough reason for my coming that you should be here?"
She laughed softly, with a pleasant scornfulness.
"I read you like a printed book," she said. "What else are women's wits
given them for?"
He fell to stroking her hand again at that, but she drew it away.
"Not until you have told me," she said.
So then he told her.
It was a long tale, for it began as far ago as last August, when his father
had come back from giving evidence before the justices at Derby on a
matter of witchcraft, and had been questioned again about his religion.
It was then that Robin had seen moodiness succeed to anger, and long
silence to moodiness. He told the tale with a true lover's art, for he
watched her face and trained his tone and his manner as he saw her
thoughts come and go in her eyes and lips, like gusts of wind across
standing corn; and at last he told her outright what his father had said to
him on St. Stephen's night, and how he himself had kept silence.

Marjorie's face was as white as a moth's wing when he was finishing,
and her eyes like sunset pools; but she flamed up bright and rosy as he
finished.
"You kept silence!" she cried.
"I did not wish to anger him, my dear; he is my father," he said gently.
The colour died out of her face again and she nodded once or twice,
and a great pensiveness came down on her. He took her hand again
softly, and she did not resist.
"The only doubt," she said presently, as if she talked to herself, "is
whether you had best be gone at Easter, or stay and face it out."
"Yes," said Robin, with his dismay come fully to the birth.
Then she turned on him, full of a sudden tenderness and compassion.
"Oh! my Robin," she cried, "and I have not said a word about you and
your own misery. I was thinking but of Christ's honour. You must
forgive me.... What must it be for you!... That it should be your father!
You are sure that he means it?"
"My father does not speak until he means it. He is always like that. He
asks counsel from no one. He thinks and he thinks, and then he speaks;
and it is finished."
She fell then to thinking again, her sweet lips compressed together, and
her eyes frightened and wondering, searching round the hanging above
the chimney-breast. (It presented Icarus in the chariot of the sun; and it
was said in Derby that it had come from my lord Abbot's lodging at
Bolton.)
Meantime Robin thought too. He was as wax in the hands of this girl,
and knew it, and loved that it should be so. Yet he could not help his
dismay while he waited for her seal to come down on him and stamp
him to her model. For he foresaw more clearly than ever now the

hundred inconveniences that must follow, now that it was evident that
to Marjorie's mind (and therefore to God Almighty's) there must be no
tampering with the old religion. He had known that it must be so; yet
he had thought, on the way here, of a dozen families he knew who, in
his own memory, had changed from allegiance to the Pope of Rome to
that of her Grace, without seeming one penny the worse. There were
the Martins, down there in Derby; the Squire and his lady of Ashenden
Hall; the Conways of Matlock; and the rest--these had all changed; and
though he did not respect them for it, yet the truth was that they were
not yet stricken by thunderbolts or eaten by the plague. He had
wondered whether there were not a way to do as they had done, yet
without the disgrace of it.... However, this was plainly not to be so with
him. He must put up with the inconveniences as well as he could,