By a kind of violent reaction he had a long happy dream that night. The fierce emotions of that day had swept over his imagination and scoured it as with fire, and now the underlying peace rose up and flooded it with sweetness.
He thought he was in the north again, high up on a moor, walking with one who was quite familiar to him, but whose person he could not remember when he woke; he did not even know whether it was man or woman. It was a perfect autumn day, he thought, like one of those he had spent there last year; the heather and the gorse were in flower, and the air was redolent from their blossoms; he commented on this to the person at his side, who told him it was always so there. Mile after mile the moor rose and dipped, and, although Skiddaw was on his right, purple and grey, yet to his left there was a long curved horizon of sparkling blue sea. It was a cloudless day overhead, and the air seemed kindling and fresh round him as it blew across the stretches of heather from the western sea. He himself felt full of an extraordinary vitality, and the mere movement of his limbs gave him joy as he went swiftly and easily forward over the heather. There was the sound of the wind in his ears, and again and again there came the gush of water from somewhere out of sight—as he had heard it in the church by Skiddaw. There was no house or building of any kind within sight, and he felt a great relief in these miles of heath and the sense of holiday that they gave him. But all the joy round him and in his heart found their point for him in the person that went with him; this presence was their centre, as a diamond in a gold ring, or as a throned figure in a Court circle. All else existed for the sake of this person;—the heather blossomed and the gorse incensed the air, and the sea sparkled, and the sky was blue, and the air kindled, and his own heart warmed and throbbed, for that only. When he tried to see who it was, there was nothing to see; the presence existed there as a centre in a sphere, immeasurable and indiscernible; sometimes he thought it was Mary, sometimes he thought it Henry Buxton, sometimes Isabel—once even he assured himself it was Mistress Margaret, and once James Maxwell—and with the very act of identification came indecision again. This uncertainty waxed into a torment, and yet a sweet torment, as of a lover who watches his mistress’ shuttered house; and this torment swelled yet higher and deeper until it was so great that it had absorbed the whole radiant fragrant circle of the hills where he walked; and then came the blinding knowledge that the Presence was all these persons so dear to him, and far more; that every tenderness and grace that he had loved in them—Mary’s gallantry and Isabel’s serene silence and his friend’s fellowship, and the rest—floated in the translucent depths of it, stained and irradiated by it, as motes in a sunbeam.
And then he woke, and it was through tears of pure joy that he saw the rafters overhead, and the great barred door, and the discoloured wall above his bed.
When his gaoler brought him dinner that day it was half an hour earlier than usual; and when Anthony asked him the reason he said that he did not know, but that the orders had run so; but that Mr. Norris might take heart; it was not for the torture, for Mr. Topcliffe, who superintended it, had told the keeper of the rack-house that nothing would be wanted that day.
He had hardly finished dinner when the gaoler came up again and said that the Lieutenant was waiting for him below, and that he must bring his hat and cloak.
Since his arrest he had worn his priest’s habit every day, so he now threw the cloak over his arm and took his hat, and followed the gaoler down.
In passing through the court he went by a group of men that were talking together, and he noticed very especially a tall old man with a grey head, in a Court suit with a sword, and very lean about the throat, who looked at him hard as he passed. As he reached the archway where the Lieutenant was waiting, he turned again and saw the sunken eyes of the old man still looking after him; when he turned to the gaoler he saw the same odd look in his face that he had noticed before.
“Why do you look like that?” he asked. “Who is that old man?”