“Oh, even at that date the United States were on the other side. You see, Richard was a person of intelligence. He anticipated Galileo by making the earth round, so he would surely get ahead of Columbus in guessing at a New World.”
They were the only tourists in the cathedral at that early hour, so the attendant verger tolerated this flippancy.
“In the left-hand corner,” he recited, “you see Augustus Cæsar delivering orders for a survey of the world to the philosophers Nichodoxus, Theodotus, and Polictitus. Near the center you have the Labyrinth of Crete, the Pyramids of Egypt, the House of Bondage, the Jews worshiping the Golden Calf——”
“Ah, what a pity we left Mrs. Devar at the post-office—how she would have appreciated this!” murmured Medenham.
Still Cynthia refused to take the fly.
“May we visit the library?” she asked, dazzling the verger with a smile in her best manner. “I have heard so much about the books in chains, and the Four Gospels in Anglo-Saxon characters. Is the volume really a thousand years old?”
From the Cathedral they wandered into the beautiful grounds of the Bishop’s Palace, where a brass plate, set in a boundary wall, states in equivocal phrase that “Nell Gwynne, Founder of Chelsea Hospital, and Mother of the first Duke of St. Albans,” was born near the spot thus marked. Each remembered the irresponsible chatter of Saturday, but neither alluded to it, nor did Medenham offer to lead Cynthia to Garrick’s birthplace. Not forty-eight hours, but long years, as measured by the seeming trivialities that go to make or mar existence, spanned the interval between Bristol and Hereford. They chafed against the bonds of steel that yet sundered them; they resented the silent edict that aimed at parting them; by a hundred little artifices each made clear to the other that the coming separation was distasteful, while an eager interest in the commonplace supplied sure index of their embarrassment. And so, almost as a duty, the West Front, the North Porch, the Close, the Green, the Wye Bridge, were duly snap-shotted and recorded in a little book that Cynthia carried.
Fitzroy poses as the first Earl of Chepstow.
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Once, while she was making a note, Medenham held the camera, and happened to watch her as she wrote. At the top of a page he saw “Film 6, No. 5: Fitzroy poses as the first Earl of Chepstow.” Cynthia’s left hand hid the entry just a second too late.