• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1056 0

wives, one after the other (I’m not really interested in these facts but they have a bearing on my story). And we went through chapels, and music rooms, right up immensely high in the air to a large old chamber, full of presses, with heavily-shuttered windows all round. And Florence became positively electric. She told the tired, bored custodian what shutters to open; so that the bright sunlight streamed in palpable shafts into the dim old chamber. She explained that this was Luther’s bedroom and that just where the sunlight fell had stood his bed. As a matter of fact, I believe that she was wrong and that Luther only stopped, as it were, for lunch, in order to evade pursuit. But, no doubt, it would have been his bedroom if he could have been persuaded to stop the night. And then, in spite of the protest of the custodian, she threw open another shutter and came tripping back to a large glass case.

‘And there,’ she exclaimed with an accent of gaiety, of triumph, and of audacity. She was pointing at a piece of paper, like the half-sheet of a letter with some faint pencil scrawls that might have been a jotting of the amounts we were spending during the day. And I was extremely happy at her gaiety, in her triumph, in her audacity. Captain Ash-burnham had his hands upon the glass case. ‘There it is – the Protest.’ And then, as we all properly stage-managed our bewilderment, she continued: ‘Don’t you know that is why we were all called Protestants? That is the pencil draft of the Protest they drew up. You can see the signatures of Martin Luther, and Martin Bucer, and Zwingli, and Ludwig the Courageous…’72

I may have got some of the names wrong, but I know that Luther and Bucer were there. And her animation continued and I was glad. She was better and she was out of mischief. She continued, looking up into Captain Ashburnham’s eyes: ‘It’s because of that piece of paper that you’re honest, sober, industrious, provident, and clean-lived. If it weren’t for that piece of paper you’d be like the Irish or the Italians or the Poles, but particularly the Irish…’

And she laid one finger upon Captain Ashburnham’s wrist.

I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, something evil in the day. I can’t define it and can’t find a simile for it. It wasn’t as if a snake had looked out of a hole. No, it was as if my heart had missed a beat. It was as if we were going to run and cry out; all four of us in separate directions, averting our heads. In Ashburnham’s face I know that there was absolute panic. I was horribly frightened and then I discovered that the pain in my left wrist was caused by Leonora’s clutching it:

‘I can’t stand this,’ she said with a most extraordinary passion; ‘I must get out of this.’

I was horribly frightened. It came to me for a moment, though I hadn’t time to think it, that she must be a madly jealous woman – jealous of Florence and Captain Ashburnham, of all people in the world! And it was a panic in which we fled! We went right down the winding stairs, across the immense Rittersaal to a little terrace that overlooks the Lahn, the broad valley and the immense plain into which it opens out.

‘Don’t you see?’ she said, ‘don’t you see what’s going on?’ The panic again stopped my heart. I muttered, I stuttered – I don’t know how I got the words out:

‘No! What’s the matter? Whatever’s the matter?’

She looked me straight in the eyes; and for a moment I had the feeling that those two blue discs were immense, were overwhelming, were like a wall of blue that shut me off from the rest of the world. I know it sounds absurd; but that is what it did feel like.

‘Don’t you see,’ she said, with a really horrible bitterness, with a really horrible lamentation in her voice, ‘Don’t you see that that’s the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them…’

I don’t remember how she went on; I was too frightened; I was too amazed. I think I was thinking of running to fetch assistance – a doctor, perhaps, or Captain Ashburnham. Or possibly she needed