to lull them. For all this I did, knowing secretly that he is to meet one night, in some convenient place remote among the upper waters of the Zenner, with five or six (the same I spoke on), there to complete and make up their plot for seizing of Rerek to be a kingdom of itself, with him king thereof. Of time, place, and other particulars of this meeting set, I expect information hourly. You and I, we two alone, will keep that tryst with ’em: wherein if I bring not the rest to destruction and him to his obedience, at least I’ll die attempting it.
‘Well? Will you go, or bide behind?’
The Chancellor very pale and proud of mien, gazing as if into some distance, said after a minute: ‘I’ll go, my Lord the King.’ The King took him by both hands and kissed him. ‘And yet,’ said the Chancellor, facing him now squarely, ‘I would, with your serene highness’ leave, say one word.’
‘Say on, what thee lust.’
‘This, then: I think you are stark mad. And yet,’ he said and drew up his lip, ‘I may well humour my master in this, to suffer myself to be murdered along with him; for I am not afraid of my death.’
The King looked strangely at him: so might some eagle-baffling mountain look upon its own steadfastness imagined dim in some lake where rufflings of the water mar the reflection: so, it may be, might Zeus the cloud-gatherer look down, watching out of Ida. ‘If such fate expect my life, then better so. This must be for us a master-hour, an hour that judgeth all others. I’ll not turn back, Beroald.’
‘TIME, you know, is a curious business’, said Lord Anmering, tilting his head forward a little to let the brim of his panama hat shade his eyes; for it was teatime, and the afternoon sun, from beyond the cricket field below, blazed out of cloudless blue full in their faces. ‘Love of money, we’re told – root of all evil. Gad! I think otherwise. I think Time strikes deeper.’
Lady Southmere replenished the vacuum with one of the more long-drawn, contemplative, and non-committal varieties of the inimitable transatlantic ‘Aha’.
‘Look at Mary,’ he said. ‘Look at me. If I wasn’t her father: wasn’t thirty-two years her senior. Wouldn’t I know what to do with her?’
‘Well, I dare say you would.’
‘Easy enough when they’re not your own,’ he said, as they walked on slowly, coming to a halt at the top of two flights of shallow steps that led down to the field from the gardens. ‘But when they are – By Jove, that’s the style!’ The ball, from a magnificent forward drive, sailed clean over the far fence, amid shouts of applause, for six. ‘If you let your boy go and smash my melon-houses, knocking the bowling about like that, I’ll tell you, I’ll have no more to do with him. We mustn’t forget,’ he said, lower again: ‘she’s very young. Never force the pace.’
‘O but don’t I just agree? And the very dearest, sweetest—’
‘You know her, well as I do. No, you don’t, though. Look there,’ putting up his eye-glass to examine the telegraph board: ‘Eighty. Eighty: a hundred and sixty-three: that’s eighty-four to win. Not so bad, with only three wickets down. It’s that boy of yours is doing it: wonderful steady play: nice style too: like to see him make his century. You know our two best bats, Chedisford and that young Macnaghten, didn’t add up to double figures between ’em: Hugh’s got his work cut out for him. Look at that! Pretty warm bowling. A strong team old Playter’s brought us over this time from Hyrnbastwick: Jove, I’d like to give ’em a whacking for a change. Well, Hugh and Jim seem settled to it. Would you like to come down over there: get a bit of shade?’
‘I would like to do anything anybody tells me to. This is just too perfect.’ She turned, before coming down the steps, to look back for a minute to the great west front of Anmering Blunds, where it ranged beyond green lawns and flower-beds and trim deep-hued hedges of clipped box and barberry and yew: long rows of mullioned windows taking the sun, whose beams seemed to have fired the very substance of the ancient brickwork to some cool-burning airy essence of gold. This wing, by Inigo Jones, was the newest part, masking from this side the original flint-built house that had been old Sir Robert Scarnside’s whom Henry VIII made first Earl of Anmering. Round to the right, in the home park, stood up, square and grey, Anmering church tower. A sheltering wood of oak, ash, beech and sycamore was a screen for hall and church and garden against the east; and all the midsummer leafage of these trees seemed, at this hour, impregnate with that golden light. Northwards, all lay open, the ground falling sharply to the creek, salt marshes and sand-dunes and thence-away, to the North Pole, the sea. Southwards and landwards, park and wood and meadow and arable rose gently to the heaths and commons: Bestarton, Sprowswood, Toftrising. Lady Southmere, waiting on the silence a minute, might hear as under-tones to the voices of the cricket field (of players and lookers on, click of wood against leather as the batsman played) the faint far-off rumour of tide-washed shingle, and, from trees, the woodpigeon’s rustic, slumbrous, suddenly started and suddenly checked, discourse: Two coos, tak’ two coos, Taffy, tak’ two coos, Taffy tak— From golden rose to larkspur a swallowtail butterfly fluttered in the heat. ‘Just too perfect for words,’ she said, turning at last.
They came down the steps and began walking, first north, and so round by the top end of the cricket field towards the tents. ‘I’ll make a clean breast of it,’ she said: ‘twenty-six years now I have been English and lived in the Shires; and yet, Blunds in summer, well, it gets me here: sends me downright home-sick.’ Just as, underneath all immediate sounds or voices, those distant sea-sounds were there for the listening, so in Lady Southmere’s speech there survived some pleasant native intonations of the southern States.
‘Home-sick?’ said Lord Anmering. ‘Virginia?’
‘No, no, no: just for Norfolk. Aren’t I English? And isn’t your Norfolk pure England as England ought to be?’
‘Better get Southmere to do an exchange: give me the place in Leicestershire and you take Blunds.’
‘Well and would you consent to that? Can you break the entail?’
‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘there are many things I would do for you—’
‘But hardly that?’
‘I’m afraid, not that.’
‘O isn’t that just too bad!’ she said, as Jim Scarnside, playing forward to a yorker, was bowled middle stump.
Fifty or sixty people, may be, watched the game from this western side where the tents were and garden chairs and benches, all in a cool shade of beech and chestnut and lime and sycamore that began to throw shadows far out upon the cricket field: a pleasant summer scene as any could wish, of mingled sound and silence, stir and repose: white hats and white flannels and coloured caps and blazers contrasting here and there with more formal or darker clothes: a gaiety of muslin frocks, coloured silks, gauzes and ribbons, silken parasols and picture hats: the young, the old, the middle-aged: girls, boys, men, women: some being of the house-party; some, the belongings of the eleven that had driven over with Colonel Playter from Hyrnbastwick; some, neighbours and acquaintance from the countryside: wives, friends, parents, sisters, cousins, aunts. Among these their host, with Lady Southmere, now threaded his way, having for each, as he passed, the just greeting, were it word, smile, formal salutation or private joke: the Playter girls, Norah and Sybil, fresh from school: old Lady Dilstead, Sir Oliver’s mother, and his sister Lucy (engaged to Nigel Howard): young Mrs Margesson, a niece of Lord Anmering’s by marriage: Romer, the bursar of Trinity: Limpenfield of All Souls’: General Macnaghten and his wife and son: Trowsley of the Life Guards: Tom and Fanny Chedisford: Mr and Mrs Dagworth from Semmering: Sir Roderick Bailey, the Admiral, whose unpredictable son Jack had made top score (fifty) for the visiting eleven that morning: the Rector and his wife: the Denmore-Benthams: Mr and Mrs Everard Scarnside