sandals he called to the men to re-enter.
They came in at once and one of them approached Titus with the scarf in his hand.
‘Your lordship,’ he said.
‘What’s
‘It’s part of the ceremony, lordship. You have to be blindfolded.’
‘No!’ shouted Titus. ‘Why should I be?’
‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ said the man. ‘It’s the law.’
‘The law! the law! the law – how I
‘Nothing to do with me,’ said the man; it was his favourite phrase. ‘You see,’ he added, ‘if we don’t blindfold you it won’t be such a surprise when you get there and when we undo the scarf. And you see’ (he continued as though he had suddenly become interested in what he was talking about) ‘you see – with your eyes blindfolded you won’t have any idea of where you are going – and then, you know, the crowds are going to be deathly silent and …’
‘Quiet!’ said another voice – it was the man who had the mountain-chair. ‘You have overreached yourself! Enough sir, for me to say’ (he continued, turning to the boy) ‘that it will be for your pleasure and your good.’
‘It had
His longing to get out of the playroom mitigated his distaste for the blindfolding, and after taking a drink of water and cramming a small cake in his mouth, he took a step forward.
‘All right,’ he said and standing before the scarf-man, he suffered himself to be bandaged. At the second turn of the scarf he was in total blackness. After the fourth he felt the cloth being knotted at the base of his head.
‘We are going to lift you into the chair, your lordship.’
‘All right,’ said Titus.
Almost immediately after he was seated in the basket-work chair he found himself rising from the ground, and then after a word from one of the men, he felt himself moving forward through black space and the slight swaying of the men beneath him. Without a word, or a pause, each man with an end of the long bamboo poles resting upon his shoulder, they began to move ever more rapidly.
Titus had had no sensation of their leaving the room, although he knew that by now they must have left it far behind. It was obvious that they were still within the walls of the castle for he could both feel the frequent changes of direction which the tortuous corridors made necessary, and also he could hear the hollow echoing of the bearers’ feet – an echoing which seemed so loud to Titus in his blindness that he could not help feeling that the castle was empty. There was not a sound, not a whisper in the whole labyrinthine place to compete with the hollow footfalls of the men, with the sound of their breathing or with the regular creaking of the bamboo poles.
It seemed that it would never end – this darkness, and these sounds, but suddenly a breath of fresh air against his face told him that he was in the open. At the same time he could feel that he was being borne down a flight of steps, and when they had reached the level ground he felt for the first time that airborne jogging, as the four men began to trot through an empty landscape.
And it was as utterly deserted as the castle. All the feverish activity of the day had been brought to a close. The gentry, the dignitaries, the officials, the workmen, the performers, the populace, man, woman and child – there was not one who had not arrived at his appointed station.
And the bearers ran on over the darkening ground. Above their heads and reaching down into the west was a great tongue of yellow light.
But with every movement that passed the lustre faded and the moon began to slide up through the darkness of the east so that the light on Titus’ upturned face grew sharper and colder.
And the bearers ran on, over the dark ground.
There were no echoes now. Only the isolated sounds of the night – the scurry of some small animal through the undergrowth, or the distant barking of a fox. From time to time Titus could feel the cool sweet gusts of a night breeze blowing across his forehead, lifting the strands of his hair.
‘How much further?’ he called. It seemed that he had been floating in the basket chair for ever.
‘How much further? how much further?’ he called again, but there was no reply.
It was impossible to carry so rare a burden as the seventy-seventh earl – to carry him shoulder-high along forest tracks, across precarious fords and over stony slopes of mountains and to have at the same time, while they kept running, any room in their minds for anything else besides. All their awareness was focused upon his safety and the measured smoothness of their rhythmic running. Had he called to them ten times as loudly they would not have heard him.
But Titus was near to the end of his blind journey. He did not know it but the four bearers who had, for the last mile or more, been loping through pinewoods, had come suddenly upon an open shoulder of land. The ground swept downwards and away before them in swathes of moon-chilled ferns and at the base of this slope lay what seemed like a natural amphitheatre, for the land rose on all sides. The floor of this gigantic basin appeared at first sight to be entirely forested and yet the eyes of the bearers had already caught sight of innumerable and microscopic points of light no bigger than pinpricks, that flashed, now here, now there among the branches of the distant trees. And they saw more than this. They saw that in the air above the basin’d forest there was a change of hue. In the darkness that brooded over the branches there was a subtle warmth, a kind of smouldering dusk that in contrast to the cold moon, or to the glints of light among the trees, was almost roseate.
But Titus knew nothing of this swarthy light. Nor that he was being taken down a steep track through the ferns to a district where the great chestnuts far from forming a solid forest, as it falsely appeared from the surrounding slopes, were marshalled a furlong deep about the margin of a wide expanse of water. The points of light that had caught the bearers’ attention were all that they had been able to see of the moonlit lake when for a moment they had paused on a high open shoulder.
But what of the glow? It was not long before Titus knew all about it. He was by now among the deep moon-
