Another stage had been passed in More’s journey towards death, in the previous month, when he had been attainted of misprision of treason by an act designed to make good the illegality of his former conviction, and the end was beginning to loom clear.
“I said it would be no use, Mistress Beatrice, and it is none—Master Cromwell will not hear a word.”
Beatrice looked up at Ralph, and down again, as her manner was. Her hands were lying on her lap perfectly still as she sat upright in her tall chair.
“You have done what you could, I know,” she said, softly.
“Master Cromwell did not take it very well,” went on Ralph with an appearance of resolute composure, “but that was to be expected.”
Again she looked up, and Ralph once more was seized with the desire to precipitate matters and tell her what was in his heart, but he repressed it, knowing it was useless to speak yet.
It was a very stately and slow wooing, like the movement of a minuet; each postured to each, not from any insincerity, except perhaps a little now and then on Ralph’s side, but because for both it was a natural mode of self-expression. It was an age of dignity abruptly broken here and there by violence. There were slow and gorgeous pageants followed by brutal and bestial scenes, like the life of a peacock who paces composedly in the sun and then scuttles and screams in the evening. But with these two at present there was no occasion for abruptness, and Ralph, at any rate, contemplated with complacency his own graciousness and grandeur, and the skilfully posed tableaux in which he took such a sedate part.
As the spring drew on and the crocuses began to star the grass along the river and the sun to wheel wider and wider, the chill and the darkness began to fall more heavily on the household at Chelsea. They were growing very poor by now; most of Sir Thomas’s possessions elsewhere had been confiscated by the King, though by his clemency Chelsea was still left to Mrs. Alice for the present; and one by one the precious things began to disappear from the house as they were sold to obtain necessaries. All the private fortune of Mrs. More had gone by the end of the winter, and her son still owed great sums to the Government on behalf of his father.
At the beginning of May she told Ralph that she was making another appeal to Cromwell for help, and begged him to forward her petition.
“My silks are all gone,” she said, “and the little gold chain and cross that you may remember, Mr. Torridon, went last month, too—I cannot tell what we shall do. Mr. More is so obstinate”—and her eyes filled with tears—“and we have to pay fifteen shillings every week for him and John a’ Wood.”