The Four, as they departed, took the silence with them. The rest of the night was by way of being a release from perfection, and was given over to every kind of scattered activity.
Between the bonfires that surrounded the lake and warmed the air above the chestnut forest, fresh fires were being lit, and under the lake-ward boughs hampers and baskets of provisions were being unpacked.
The Countess of Groan, who had remained throughout the masque as immovable as the log on which she sat, now turned her head over her shoulder.
But Titus was no longer on the platform, nor was Fuchsia at her side.
She rose from the log, the traditional place of honour, and moved abstractedly down to the lake's edge between lines of functionaries, who on seeing her rise knew that they were now free for the rest of the night to disport themselves as they wished.
Against the shimmering lake her massive form loomed darkly save for the moonlight on her shoulders and her dark red hair.
She gazed about her but seemed to be unaware of the crowds that thronged the water's edge.
A giant picnic was piecing itself together as the fish and fruit and loaves and pies were laid out beneath the trees, and it was not long before the lake was surrounded by an unbroken feast.
And while all these preparations were going on, shrill packs of urchins raced through the chestnut woods, swarmed among the branches, or streaming out of the trees, pranced or cart-wheeled to the centre of the lake, their reflections flying beneath them, and the film of water spouting from their feet. And when a pack would meet its rival pack, then hand to hand, a hundred watery combats would churn the shallows, as scattered over the aqueous arena the children grappled, the moon-light sliding on their slippery limbs.
And Titus watching longed with his whole being to be anonymous - to be lost within the core of such a breed - to be able to live and run and fight and laugh and if need be, cry, on his own. For to be one of those wild children would have been to be 'alone' among companions. As the Earl of Gormenghast he could never be alone. He could only be lonely. Even to lose himself was to be lost with that other child, that symbol, that phantom, the seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast who hovered at his elbow.
Fuchsia had signalled him to jump from the platform, and together they had raced into the chestnut woods immediately behind, and for a moment or two, in the darkness, they had held each other in the deep shadows of the trees and had heard one another's hearts beating.
'It was wicked of me,' said Fuchsia at last, 'and dangerous. We are supposed to have our midnight supper at the long table, with mother. And we must go back soon.'
'You can if you like,' said Titus, who was trembling with a deep hatred of his status. 'But I'm leaving.'
'Leaving?'
'Leaving for ever,' said Titus. 'For ever and ever. I am going into the wild, like... Flay... and like that...'
But he could think of no way to describe that wisp of a creature who had floated through a forest of gold oaks.
'You can't do that,' said Fuchsia. 'You would die and I wouldn't let you.'
'You couldn't stop me,' cried Titus. 'Nobody could stop me -' and he began to tear off the long grey tunic, as though it were in his path.
But Fuchsia, her lips trembling, held his arms to his sides. 'No! no!' she whispered passionately. 'Not now, Titus. You can't...'
But with a jerk he freed himself, but immediately tripped in the darkness and fell upon his face. When he raised himself, and saw his sister above him he pulled her down, so that she knelt at his side. In the distance they could hear the cries of the children by the lake, and then, suddenly, the harsh ringing of a bell.
'That is for supper,' whispered Fuchsia, at last, for she had waited in vain for Titus to speak, 'and after supper we will go along the shore together and see the cannon.'
Titus was crying. The long day he had spent alone, the lateness of the hour, the excitement, the sense of his essential isolation - all these things had worked together to weaken him. But he nodded. Whether Fuchsia saw his silent answer to her question or not, she made no further remark, but lifting him from the ground, she dried his eyes with the loose sleeve of her dress.
Together they picked their way to the edge of the wood, and there were the bonfires again and the crowds and the lake with the chestnut trees beyond, and there was the platform where he had sat alone, and there was their mother at the long table with her elbows on the moonlit linen, and her chin in her hands, while before her, and seemingly unnoticed, for her gaze was fixed upon the distant hills, the customary banquet lay spread in all its splendour, a rich and crowded masterpiece, the gold plate of the Groans burning with a slow and mellow fire and the crimson goblets smouldering at the moon.
FIFTY-ONE
I
And all the while the progress of the seasons, those great tides, enveloped and stained with their passing colours, chilled or warmed with their varying exhalations, the tracts of Gormenghast. And so, as Fuchsia wanders across her room in search of a lost book, the south spinneys below her window are misty with a green hesitation, and a few days later the sharp green fires have broken out along the iron boughs.
II
Opus Fluke and Flannelcat are leaning over the verandah railing above the Professor's quadrangle. The old quadman is sweeping the dust thirty feet below them. It is thick and white with heat, for the spring has long since passed.
'Hot work for an old fellow!' shouts Fluke to the old man. The ancient lifts his head and wipes his brow. 'Ah!' he calls up in a voice that could not have been used for weeks. 'Ah, sir, it's a dry do.' Fluke retires and in a few minutes has returned with a bottle which he has stolen from Mulefire's apartment. This he lowers on a length of string to the old man, far below in the dust.
III
In his study, and locked away from the world, Prunesquallor, lying rather than sitting in his elegant arm chair, reads with his crossed feet resting just below the mantelpiece.
The small fire in the grate lights up his keen, absurdly refined, and for all its weirdness of proportion, delicate face. The magnifying lenses of his spectacles, which can give so grotesque an effect to his eyes, gleam in the firelight.
It is no book of medicine that he is so absorbed in. On his knee there is an old exercise book filled with verses. The hand-writing is erratic but legible. Sometimes the poems are in a heavy, ponderous and childish hand - sometimes in a quick, excited calligraphy, full of crossings-out and mis-spellings.
That Fuchsia should have ever asked him to read them was the most thrilling thing that he had ever experienced. He loved the girl as though she were his own daughter. But he had never sought her out. Little by little, as the times went by she had taken him into her confidence.
But as he reads, and while the autumn wind whistles in the branches of the garden trees, his brow contracts and he returns his gaze to the four curious lines which Fuchsia had crossed out with a thick pencil- How white and scarlet is that face, Who knows, in some unusual place The coloured heroes are alight With faces made of red and white.