COLIN woke next morning to a serene sense of well-being; while still too drowsy to question himself on the cause of this sunny sleepy happiness, he knew it was there. Then he remembered that he was at Stanier, which alone might account for this content at waking, and one after another fresh interests and anticipated amusements came bubbling into his mind. That talk with Violet in the moonlight last night embodied several of them, but there was another which interested him more.
He drew himself up in bed, and took from the table by it a great pile of typewritten sheets, the perusal of which had caused him so late and absorbed a session last night. There was the transcript, now made for the first time, of the memoirs written by his Elizabethan ancestor, to whom and to whose bargain the fortunes of the house were wondrously due. When last he went to London he had taken the original volume with him for reproduction in more legible form, for the text was written in a strange, crabbed hand, the ink of which was dim with age, and was so difficult to follow, that the mere decipherment of it occupied the mind to the exclusion of the appreciation of the text. But the fragments which he had puzzled out were so sprightly and entertaining that he had determined to procure a less distracted study of the whole.
Colin had read last night with fascinated glee the account of the early life of his ancestral namesake, who analysed his own nature, not in tedious terms of abstract tendencies, but by the far more convincing method of putting down just what he did, and letting his actions analyse for him. He admirably sketched his boyhood in the days when the marsh was still largely undrained, and the white-plumed avocets bred there, when the tall ships came up full-sailed on the tide to Rye, and the smugglers brought in barrels of Hollands, and if caught were summarily hanged. His father, Ronald Stanier, whom he succinctly described as “a drunken sot” (how charmingly did heredity reproduce the type) was a farmer with fat acres and full flocks, who dissolved his substance in drink. He was barbarously harsh to the boy and to his wife, whom he tamed from her shrewish ways into obedience and silence, and used to beat them both till there came a day when Colin had no mind to take any more strappings, and soundly thrashed his own father. “And this I did,” he wrote, “with great pleasure, not only because I served him as he had served me, and with a stronger arm, but because I had always hated him.” He described his own queer power over animals: a savage dog would never bite him, an unruly horse behaved itself when he came near it, “and that was strange, because I had no love for animals, and indeed no love at all. I made good pretence, for so folk were kind to me, and I liked a wench well enough for my own pleasure to which she ministered, but all I loved was my own strength, and my own beauty, which they loved too....”
Colin had got to this point last night, and now, sitting up in bed, ran over the pages again. How amazingly history repeated itself; there more than three centuries ago was Ronald Stanier the drunken sot, and the tamed silent wife, who was the mother of Staniers: and there above all, three centuries ago, was his very self, incarnate surely in the bodily tabernacle of his ancestor, he and his handsome face which the wenches loved, and his heart which hated love and loved hate.
And then came the story of the Legend, told with sober conviction by the beneficiary himself. The boy had gone that day (it was a week before Easter) to see the Queen pass through Rye, and luck attended him, for he had been at hand when Her Grace’s horse stumbled, and she would have had a fall had he not run forward and caught her in his arms.
“And I knelt, after she had released me from her flat bosom,” he recounted, “and gave her just such a look as I would give to a wench at a fair, and I saw this pleased her.” She told him to wait on her at the Manor of Brede next day, and he went back to the lambing, for the ewes were fruitful, and his father was drunk, and all that afternoon and deep into the night he was busy with his midwifery, and finally he threw himself down on a heap of straw in the shepherd’s hut, for a few hours’ sleep before morning. He woke, while it was yet dark, but, dark though it was, he could see that a fine tall fellow dressed in red stood by him, who revealed himself as none other than Satan. He promised him all that his heart could desire, of health and wealth, of beauty and honour and affluence, if in return for these gifts he would sign away his soul. “I cared little for my soul,” so ran the account, “and I cared much for honour and wealth, and further he did promise me that our bargain should hold good for the heirs and descendants of this my body, if they should choose to take advantage of it. So quickly we were at terms, and he gave me pen and parchment and I pricked my arm for ink and signed in my blood the deed he had prepared, which deed he bade me keep as testimony to our pleasant bargain. Then shone there a strong flash of light in my eyes, and I cried out and fell back on the straw, where I had been sleeping, and he was gone from me, and the night was yet black round me. But this was no dream, for the parchment was in my hand, and then came a blink of lightning, and I saw that my signature of blood was still wet.”
Colin gave a gasp of pure pleasure and surprise. What an inimitable touch of veracity was that! No one could have invented that; the experience, fantastic and dipped in mediæval superstition was absolutely and literally real to the writer. He described what he saw. In this first-hand contemporary record, the legend of Faust lived again in unadorned and literal simplicity. Since then it had come into sad disrepute, becoming merged in cooked-up tales and elaborate myths: Marlowe had made a tragedy of it, and Goëthe fishing it up had built a dreary and tedious philosophy on it, and Gounod had made an opera of it. But here was the same story plain and vivid without comment or moralizing. Faust himself was describing just what happened....
Colin turned the page. Authentic and eye-witnessed surely as was that touch about the blood being still wet, there were difficulties, insuperable ones, about accepting the story of the Legend in connection with the parchment now let into the frame of old Colin’s portrait. Here was a perfectly ignorant shepherd-boy, who almost certainly could neither read nor write, subscribing his name to a document which was, if the parchment was authentic, written in Latin. The most credulous could hardly swallow that....
He read on. “I had no skill then either to read or write, but there still wet and red was what I had written. After that I slept soundly, and in the morning I got home and hid away the parchment, and went to wait on the Queen’s Grace as she had bade me, at the Manor of Brede. Of that I will tell presently, but here first will I tell of the parchment, and what befell. For presently I was attached to Her Grace’s Court, as her page, and there I learned both to read and write, and Latin I learned too, for she loved to speak in Latin, and show her wisdom and learning which indeed was no great affair. Then could I see that though, on that night in the sheepfold, I had no knowledge of writing, yet I had signed my name, very scholarly and clerk-like, and in the hand that was mine when I had learned to write. Then, too, I could read what therein was promised me, riches and honour all of which came to pass. As for the parchment itself, I kept that secretly, and told no man of it, for they burn at the stake those who have had dealings with my Lord and benefactor, and I had no wish to suffer such a fate. For my soul I have no care; I do not reckon my soul at the worth of a doit, but it would be a grievous thing to be burned, thought I, while my life was yet strong in me and the lusts of the flesh sweet. So I told no man of the matter, except only in after years my two sons, each of them, when he came of age. I had brought them up with both precept and example for their profit, and they knew what manner of man their father was, and how mightily he prospered, and how it went ill with those who crossed him, and so, when their time came to know of the parchment, and to make their choice, it was no wonder that they chose with wisdom and prudence, even as I had done.... Now let me write what so wonderfully befell when next morning I walked to Brede and waited on the Queen....”
Just so far had Colin got in his reading, when Nino, his valet, came in to call him. Usually Colin slept like a child till he was roused; often Nino had to twitch his bedclothes or rattle with cans before he could raise him out of these tranquil deeps.
“Awake, signor?” said Nino in surprise.
“Yes, very much so,” said Colin. “Morning, Nino. I’ve been reading about what I was like rather more than three hundred years ago.”
Nino put his letters and the morning paper by the bedside. There was no one in the world to whom Colin felt more akin than to him. Nino was Southern and gay, and had the morals of a sleek black panther. In the Italian fashion, he had made Colin his chief interest in life: he was devoted to him and was quite without fear of him. In Nino’s eyes whatever Colin did was right.
Nino beamed over this unintelligible remark. All that mattered was that Colin was pleased.
“And used I to call you in the morning then?” he asked.
“No-one called me in the morning as far as I’ve got,” said Colin. “I was a shepherd-boy with bare feet. What sort of a day is it, Nino?”
“I brought it straight from Capri,” said Nino. “Hot, hot, ever so hot.”
“I’ll bathe then,” said Colin, getting out of bed. “Bring some clothes along, Nino. Just flannels. Come and bathe, too. I hate bathing alone. And bring my tea with you. I’ll drink it after my bath.”
The morning as Nino had said was already very hot, but the dew of the night before had been heavy, and in the shadow the grass was still shining with it, and the smell of the wet earth was fragrant with liquid freshness. Colin kicked off his shoes for the pleasure of walking barefooted; and for very lightness of heart ran whistling down the grass slope to the lake. There was a bathing shed on the bank towards the deep end with steps and spring-board, and next moment he had stripped off his pyjamas, and stood poised to cleave the deep water, where the rhododendrons and the white balustrade of the sluice were unwaveringly reflected. Taut as an arrow of sunlit limbs he flicked outwards from the board and disappeared in a fountain of foam.
He rose to the surface and struck out into the lake, swimming with overhead stroke, his shoulders gleaming as they lifted themselves alternately, his golden head now a-wash and now glistening in the sunlight as it emerged. Then when he was half-way across the lake, and opposite the sluice, he turned and swam straight towards it.... There the water was deepest, and there it slept in the shadow of the bushes, and now he dipped his head and dived, scooping with his arms, and pulling himself downwards. Down, down he pressed, till the twilight of the depths closed round him, and the bright surface above was veiled and dim. The water was markedly colder here, and he thought how cold it must have been to Raymond when the ice was thick above.... Then turning he kicked out, and shot upwards again into the sunshine and the sweet air.
Nino had followed hard on him, bringing his clothes and his tea, and as Colin came to the surface again, there he was on the header-board ready to dive. Colin swam towards him.
“See if you can get to the bottom, Nino,” he said, “where it’s deep opposite the sluice.”
Nino rose from his plunge, and laughed, shaking the water from his face.
“Scusi, signor,” he said, “but I do not like the depth below. That is the place for the dead.”
Colin laughed back at him.
“So it is,” he said. “‘Down among the dead men’: there’s a song about it. I don’t insist on your going there yet.”
“Grazie: molte grazie!” said Nino.
Soon Colin paddled to land, and lay basking on the grass. Never had he felt the current of life run more strongly through him, tingling for some outlet of self-expression. And yet just to be alive was enough, here in the home of his inheritance, which he, about whom he had been reading last night and this morning, had built to the glory of himself and those who came after. And it was more than kinship he seemed to claim with that engaging ruffian, it was identity; the memoirs shewed him his own mirrored self, astonishingly revealed. There was much more of them to come, at present he had but read a chapter or two, the sincerity of which he could vouch for by the picture it gave not of the writer only but of himself. He burned with his passions, bubbled with his hatreds, revelled in the largesse of ‘his Lord and benefactor.’ He had his son, too, whom one day he would initiate into the evil sacrament, and like Colin of old he would let Dennis see how mightily his father prospered in his allegiance, and how it went ill with those who crossed him, so that when the time came for Dennis’s choice he would choose with wisdom and prudence, as old Colin’s sons had done. As yet he was but a baby, scarcely able to walk, but soon he would learn what splendid paths were hewn for him, how royal a road....
The future lay before Colin wrapped in this sunlit mist, much as the plain of the marsh lay swathed in pearly vapours. Soon the heat would fold up that soft mantle of the cool night, and the plain glitter in the sun-steeped noon; and just so with him would the future emerge and shew its discovered delights. He had no wish to brush the mists away, or dive and grope into that obscurity. All would grow clear as his own life rose towards its noon ... as for the evening and the decay of day which would follow, it was idle to give a thought to them. Days were long in summer, and the day was given for enjoyment: he was a fool who wasted its goodly hours in thinking of what came next after it was done: sufficient unto the day was the good thereof.
He lay back on the cool green grass, while his body and limbs, still wet with his bathe, drank in the kindly heat, purring with sheer physical satisfaction. The activity of his vigour for the moment was satiated with his plunge and his swim, the bodily demands desired nothing more than this freshness and effulgence which soaked through his skin into his very marrow, and fed it with youth and pliant strength. Sinew and nerve and bone lay still and sunned and stretched, content with this blissful passivity. It could not last long: soon their vigour would stir and twitch in them again; and, even as they drowsed and purred, so for the moment his soul and the desires that lay behind the body were satisfied with the mere fact that he was at Stanier, in the midst of all that was his. Uncle Ronald with his gaping cod-fish mouth, Aunt Hester with her ridiculous sprightliness, his grandmother, that image of death in life, Violet even with her horror and love of him were mere puppets of a show over which he pulled down the curtain.
But this quiescence of the spirit was less lasting than that of his physical vigour, and even while he lay slack and stretched with his arm over his eyes to shield them from the glare, and his body still sunned itself without asking anything more than to lie open and naked, alertness and the twitch of activity began to beat in the pulses of his brain again. There was a broth of immediate interest bubbling there.... Violet had been tiresome last night: she had said she would not give a hint to her father and mother that they were not wanted; he must move in that matter himself then, and make her sorry she had struck that filial attitude ... and then there were the memoirs to read, which revealed him to himself ... and there was Dennis.
This stirring of his soul began to react on his body; it was delicious to lie here with the cool grass below and the sun above, but one could not do that for ever. He rolled over on to his side, and saw Nino sitting by him.
“Nino, it’s almost like basking at Capri,” he said. “I shall come down again after breakfast.—What time is it?”
Nino pulled a watch out of the pocket of his coat that lay on the grass.
“Ten o’clock,” he said.
Colin sat up.
“Then why the devil didn’t you tell me it was getting late?” he snapped.
“I thought you looked happy,” said Nino. “What does the time matter, signor, if you’re happy?”
Colin laughed.
“That’s a very sound observation,” he said. “But you ought to have told me I was already late for breakfast. Never mind, give me my clothes. I’ve got a lot to do. Yes, shirt and trousers and shoes. That’s all I want.”
Nino, but for a towel round his loins, was still as Nature had made him. But she had done it very nicely, and as he handed his master his clothes, Colin looked at his shapely shoulders and broad chest.
“You’d make an awfully good bronze statue, Nino,” he said. “You’d look nice in a museum, covered with verdigris, and with an arm and leg missing. How would you like to be an antique?”
“I like better being young,” said Nino.
Colin pulled his shirt over his head.
“So do I,” he said. “But Time’s a thief, Nino, and you can’t insure against his burglaries.”
This was too much for Nino’s English, and he raised a puzzled eye.
“You understand what I mean, though you don’t understand what I say,” observed Colin. “Do you believe in God, Nino?”
The boy crossed himself.
“Si, signor.”
“Then why are you such a dreadful bad lot?” asked Colin. “Don’t you know that He will punish you when you’re dead?”
Nino shrugged his brown shoulders.
“May be,” he said, “but I’m not dead yet.”
Colin laughed.
“Nor am I,” he said. “But why talk theology before breakfast?”
“Scusi!” said Nino. “But who began?”
Colin leaned against him as he stepped into his flannel trousers.
“I did,” he said. “Do you know, you’re extremely like me, Nino? I think you must be a Stanier. I wonder if the old fellow I’ve been reading about had an Italian mistress from whom you’re descended. We both believe in God, and are determined to go to the devil.... There you are talking theology again, and I told you to shut up!”
“I am dumb as a sheep,” said Nino.
“Ba-a-a,” said Colin.
Colin found his menagerie at breakfast, as he came in coatless, with his hair drying back into curls again, and his shirt open at the neck, with sleeves rolled up to his elbow. There was Aunt Hester, looking, so he thought to himself, like some aged hag under the delusion that it was still spring-time with her, the absurd old woman with her short skirt and girlish blouse, and beribboned hat. And there was Uncle Ronald, bleary-eyed and unsavoury beyond all words, in a velveteen coat, with his gouty knobbed hand all a-tremble as he lifted his tea-cup. And there was Aunt Margaret, looking, as she always did, as if the bells were ringing for church on Sunday morning, and she was just ready to start....
“I wonder what she finds to accuse herself of in the Confession,” thought Colin: “a want of diligence over her Patience, I suppose....” And there, with face suddenly and involuntarily lit up at his entrance, and as suddenly clouded again, was Violet.
“Good morning, everybody,” he said. “I’m late, and I’m not dressed, and I’m not sorry because I’ve been enjoying myself. Darling Aunt Hester, why didn’t you come down to bathe? You would make the most seductive water-nymph. And why has nobody got a complexion like yours? Give me a kiss, if you don’t mind my being unshaved.”
“Face like a peach,” said Hester. “Talk of complexions——”
“Aunt Hester, we mustn’t flirt with so many relatives present,” said Colin. “You’ll shock Violet. Uncle Ronald, you look awfully fit this morning. That’s the effect of good Doctor Colin coming home and seeing that you took that medicine for your gout. Now I’m going to make a nice dog’s dinner for myself, fish and bacon and a poached egg all on one plate. What’s everybody going to do this morning?”
“Sit in my skeleton, like that wag Sidney Smith,” said Aunt Hester.
“When and where?” asked Colin. “I want to come and look. You must have got a delicious skeleton, Aunt Hester, needn’t ask what Violet’s going to do. She’s going to attend a three-hours’ service of baby-worship. Violet and I talked about Dennis last night, didn’t we, darling? She wants to make him a string of amulets to keep off evil spirits. Sensible idea: it’s a wicked world. And Aunt Margaret’s going to write out menu-cards, and Uncle Ronald’s to take a glass of my famous sun-medicine at eleven. You’re all provided for.”
“Well, and what are you going to do?” asked Hester.
“Me? Studious morning, Aunt Hester, over my books.”
“Books, indeed!” said Aunt Hester. “Where’s the use of reading books when you’re young? When you’ve got to sit by the chimney-corner and keep your feet warm, then’s the call for books, for they pass the time and make you drop off and have a snooze. I’ve not taken to books yet, thank God.”
Colin laughed.
“My dear, you talk about taking to books as if it was like taking to drink,” he said. “Doesn’t she, Uncle Ronald?”
“Eh, what, I beg your pardon, Colin,” said he. Uncle Ronald was not very bright at breakfast, he liked to be left alone to drink several cups of strong tea. After that he could toy with a little toast and marmalade.
“I was only saying that Aunt Hester regards reading as a vice in the young, like drink, and hopes I shan’t take to it yet.”
Colin let his laughing eye dwell on Ronald long enough to be assured that he took in some of this, and then on Violet to see that she had arrived.... Then he turned to Aunt Hester again.
“One of the books I am going to read this morning is entirely about drink, Aunt Hester,” he said, “and nobody can guess what it is. There’s nothing but drink in it from beginning to end. Guess, Aunt Hester!”
“Oh, one of those rubbishy novels,” said Hester. “Seven and sixpence worth of gibberish. Don’t ask me!”
“Not a novel at all,” said Colin. “Every word in it is true. In fact it’s the cellar-book, and I shall see how much gin you’ve drunk, Aunt Hester, since I’ve been away. And then if I find you’ve drunk it all, so that there’s none left for Uncle Ronald and me, I shall go down to the lake and drown myself, and haunt you ever afterwards. Oh Lord, I wish somebody would stop me talking such awful drivel. Tell us about your new Patience, Aunt Margaret.”
Mrs. Stanier folded up her napkin very neatly. She would do the same with the napkin given her at lunch. She would fold up her napkin when the Last Trump sounded....
“I’m afraid I haven’t got a new Patience, Colin,” she said.
“Ah, the old is better. You must teach me one of your Patiences someday. Violet and I must learn Patience, to occupy the autumn evenings when we’re alone here.”
Colin was half-inclined to reconsider his plan for sending the menagerie on tour. Just as the lover is happiest when the object of his affection is with him, so dislike and contempt sun themselves in the presence of their derision, for it supplies them with fuel. It was amusing to plant little stinging darts, to speak of drink to Uncle Ronald, to flick Violet with an allusion to their solitary evenings in the autumn, to make everybody uncomfortable with the threat that he would drown himself in the lake, for that reminded them of Raymond. These darts were feathered with his gay inimitable geniality, which charmed and enchanted, with that sunniness that warmed their cold old bones, for so the point stung more smartly. Certainly that allusion to the time when he and Violet would be alone here gave them all something to think about....
Colin, before settling down to the Memoirs again, sent for his butler and the cellar-book, and rather enjoyed the fact that Uncle Robert had been consuming the 1860 port at a steady average of a bottle and a half a day. He was a sodden old brute, of course, but, as drink was all that he cared about, it shewed sense to annex as much as possible of the very best, for he always, it appeared, asked for that memorable vintage. But, though it was an agreeable diversion to look at his tremulous unsightliness of a morning, it did not counterweigh the heavy burden of his presence, and he had better go.... Violet would have to convey that to him, if only for the reason that she had said she would not. Colin thought he had a persuasive device about that....
All this was very trumpery, and, with a sense of turning to something better worth his attention, he took up the Memoirs again, and soon found himself delightfully absorbed in them. Never was there so sincere and unvarnished an autobiography; the author rejoiced in his presentation of himself. Most men when they paint themselves cannot avoid dipping their brush in the medium, if not of conscious falsity, at least in that of self-deception. They view themselves with a kindly eye, they gloss over or tone down, even to the point of omission, their uglier characteristics; they emphasise what is creditable, they find a sympathetic reason for their occasional frailties. All this may be honest enough in intention, for the reason that they have hoodwinked themselves and really see themselves in such and such a light, but here Colin found an honesty transcendent and diverting. For this ancestor of his had no desire, conscious or subconscious, to fashion an edifying image of himself; he had no mind to be decorated with virtuous phylacteries, and with plain deft strokes he presented this evil and sincere picture of himself. That picture was mirror as well as portrait, and it took Colin’s breath away to see himself so unerringly delineated.
....So the shepherd-boy waited on the Queen next morning, at the Manor of Brede. He had not dressed himself up in his best, but came in his shepherd’s garb, shirt and breeches and shoes, and he carried with him his crook and a young lamb. The varlets would have driven him from the door, but that he said it was by the Queen’s orders that he presented himself, and they, knowing the whims of that fiery dame, sent word to the Controller of her household that a lousy lad demanded audience of Her Grace. “Lad indeed I was,” indited the writer, “but no lousy one, for I had washed the muck of my lambing off me, and had bathed myself in the Rother, and I was cleaner and sweeter than any of they. So out came the Queen’s Controller, a pursey fellow, and he too would have shoo’ed me away, but I told him fairly there would be trouble for him, if Her Grace knew that I had been turned from her door. He went to tell Her Grace, and presently came back faster than he had gone, and brought me speedily into the Queen’s presence, me and my lamb and my crook. There she sat at the end of a great table, where she had been holding a Council, and she said never a word, but watched me. So I bent my eyes on the ground, but I lifted up my heart to my Lord and Benefactor, and prayed that he should guide my doings, and well he counselled me. I put myself in his hands, and thought no more what I should do or say but trusted him, and I walked past the long table towards where she sat, and the rushes on the floor pricked the soles of my feet, for I had left my shoes outside. Once only did I look up, and saw her still watching me, out of those sharp eyes, with their high eyebrows. How little was her face, I thought, and how red her hair, and how fine her ruff and how yellow her skin, and this was the Queen of England. Then I looked down again, and walked until I saw close in front of my bare toes the tip of her shoes set with pearls. And then I knelt down, and bowed myself and said:
“‘A lamb, madam, which is the first fruits of the spring. My crook which I lay at your Grace’s feet, and myself who am not worthy to lie there.’
“Then I raised my eyes and looked at her, gay and bold, as I look at the wenches, for wench she was, though the Queen of England. And then once more, as if blinded by her splendour, I abased myself, and she spoke.
“‘Look at me, Colin Stanier,’ she said.
“‘Madam,’ said I.
“‘Well, what next?’ quoth she impatiently.
“‘My body and soul, madam,’ said I. And I made my eyes dance at her, and my mouth to be eager.... She bent towards me, and drew her hand down my cheek.
“‘And is your desire to be my shepherd-boy, Colin?’ she asked. ‘You desire to be my page?’
“‘I am sick with desire,’ said I.
“‘I appoint you,’ says she. ‘I greet and salute you, Colin Stanier.’
“Now I had just that pause for consideration as she stroked my cheek and tweaked my chin, but even then, when I was but a downy boy, I never thought long whether I should do this or that, or should forbear, and I knew that a man fares better by taking risks than by shunning them, if he has his way to make. I knew, too, how a wench looks at a lad when she would like to be kissed by him, how her neck goes forward to him, and she turns her chin, and Queen or whore they are all alike in that. So my mind was made up, and straight I kissed her cheek, for she had saluted me as her page, and was I not to salute my Queen? Which when I had done, I abased myself again and kissed her smelly shoe.
“‘You bold dog!’ says she. ‘Stand up. I might well have you whipped for that.’
“‘And I should still be the infinite gainer, your Majesty,’ said I, and she laughed.
“That good thought then was the first of the benefits which my Lord gave me, and there was no whipping for me, but for the slap she gave me on the ear, and Her Grace clapped her hands, and in came the Controller of her household.
“‘Colin Stanier is my page,’ said she, ‘and attached to my person. See to it. And at the feast of Easter, I will dine off his lamb. Begone, Colin Stanier, and learn your duties, and see that you serve not the wenches as you have served me!’”
So there was Colin Stanier who last night had been among the ewes translated as at the wave of a magician’s wand into the Queen’s page. He returned home only to take from its hiding-place the bond he had signed, and within a week he had his fine new clothes and was in waiting on his mistress.