Alas, how easily things go wrong!A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,And life is never the same again.
Alas, how easily things go wrong!A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,And life is never the same again.
Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.
‘Farewell, dear Joan—till to-morrow!’
‘Till to-morrow, dear Brion!’
It sounded in his ears like an empty echo.
O, the mist and the weeping rain! They were there in good earnest when Brion opened his eyes the next morning to a disenchanted world. In the night great sea fogs had trooped in from the south-west, and sponged out the landscape as a fresco might be blotted from a wall, leaving only faint indications here and there of the original design. It was drearily ominous of change, of the effacing of halcyon days, and of the blankness which follows Youth’s first realisation that it is not immune from the common heritage of loss and sorrow. Sad is loneliness, but sadder still the loneliness which bright company has found and forsaken. There was a time before the boy which, in moods and spasms, he was to feel almost unendurable.
He did not, of course, wake at once to any desolate conviction of an end; but, while something faintly premonitory of it whispered in his heart, rose and went about his business, pretending to himself a confidence he did not really feel. Hope was not dead because the weather was bad. He had a tryst to keep, and keep it he would, though the heavens fell.
Yet he did not keep it—and for the sufficient reason that he could not. He had had no experience so far of a Dartmoor mist, nor guessed the nature of its baffling density. A very little venturing, however, was enough to convince him that he had no more chance of winning to the bower in that sodden blinding cloud than he had of finding his mistress, unless by some miracle, awaiting him there. And to that conclusion Phineas, who had discovered him on the point of issuing forth, helped him.
‘Whither away, an it please you?’ said he, his brows lifted.
‘To the moors,’ answered Brion.
‘And to your death on them, mayhap,’ said the cook. ‘Dost know what thou venturest? Be warned, young master.’
‘What death?’ said the boy scornfully.
‘The death of rocks and water, of falls and blind wanderings, of cold and exhaustion. Thou must not go, indeed.’
‘Must not, master cook! That is no word for me. Now, stand aside, I prithee.’
‘What shall I say to his honour, when he comes to call my account?’
‘Say that you did your best, but could not prevail with a proud and wilful boy. I prithee, good Phineas.’
‘Now, God help both me and you! Will you do it?’
Brion pushed by, with no answer other than a laugh, and ran out into the mist. He found, with some difficulty, the wicket in the big outer gate, opened it, stepped through, and passed over the bridge. And the fog swallowed him.
An hour later he came back. Phineas heard and ran out, to find him sitting, white and dripping, in the hall. He threw up his arms, with a great sigh of joy and relief:—
‘Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro!’
‘That is Church Latin,’ said Brion weakly.
The other hung his head.
‘Old habits will cling. ’Tis all one for the language of the heart.’
‘Well, you were right, Phineas, and I was wrong. I was lost as soon as started. Only good chance brought me presently back to the gate, and to the near fracture of my skull against it. In the interval I have followed spectres, I have had falls, I have soaked in water enough that if you wrung me in the moat it would overflow. I prithee give me something hot before I perish.’
‘Now, get you, if you can, rid of your clothes and into dry duds. I will bring you up with my own hands a stoup of broth and such mulled sack as shall persuade you half way into a tippler’—and he hurried off to his task, grunting relief and jubilance by the way. He was very much concerned, was Phineas—not only over this last piece of obstinacy, but over certain wayward moods which had preceded it. It had been patent to all the small household, and particularly to him through his profession, that matters had not been latterly as they should be with the boy. To put it as a case, Brion had eaten well when he was most repining, and ill when he was most elated, which, gastronomically, was all wrong. After Clerivault’s going, he had been sad with a glad appetite, and, later, glad with a bad appetite. What was the reason, and why had he, who for so long had hung disconsolate about the house, suddenly taken to being hardly ever at home? There mustbea reason, and cogitating it, the wise cook shook his head. There seemed to him only one plausible explanation of the phenomenon—an intrigue with some moorland pottlepot.
Well, such eventualities had to be counted on, and, if it was the case, he could do nothing. But it should have restored all his theories of fitness, when, as came shortly to occur, Brion fell definitely into a state of being sad with a bad appetite.
Now, the damning mist and drizzle lasted for three days; and what the boy suffered in that time only his own passionate prematurity could tell. It was not simply that he was temporarily shut off, fettered and helpless, from his earthly paradise, but that he was tortured with anxiety as to what might be happening behind the veil. Then that sense of dark premonition would reassert itself, and paint the future for him in blackest colours. What if he were to find their worst apprehensions realised, and Joan torn from him in the very moment of their perfect understanding? No, Fate could not be so cruel!
But Fate was just so cruel, and a little more, since that was exactly what had happened. On the very day following that of the last meeting in the bower Sir John Medley had saddled up and departed for London, taking the whole of his household with him. Brion heard the news from William as a mere piece of local gossip, and bore it unflinching.
‘And Mars Phineas says as they du say,’ added William, ‘that Sir John he be a-leaving the Chase for good, and not intending to come back to it never again no more.’
So the worst was not the worst, after all, and the tragedy not so complete but that Fate must provide an anticlimax to it. She was gone from him, and that was not enough: she must be lost to him for ever and ever. Any miserable hope he might have entertained of another season renewing the rapture of this must be forgone and stoically renounced. The end of all things had come.
He thought so, indeed, poor lad, and wisdom shall have no smile for his delusion. If this was, after all, but a boy and girl romance, to magnify the importance of which were to misuse one’s sense of proportion, it was a thing as intensely felt, and far more purely, than many an older passion. His life, his loneliness, his own reserved temperament had made of Brion a boy with something of a man’s heart, and it was as a man rather than as a boy he suffered.
But it was as a boy that, when at last the bitter delayed sun made his appearance through the clouds, he climbed to the empty bower, and wept and wept childish tears to know his sweet love gone from it. What would be her fate, so ravished beyond the reach of his influence, besieged and persecuted, perhaps, to force her into compliance with an unnatural demand? How he hated that unknown suitor; how he despised and scorned the commercial-souled parent who could stoop to barter his own flesh and blood (for to that unwarrantable conclusion he had jumped) against some worldly consideration. In alternations of mood he would sorrow dumbly, or burst into wild imprecations over the inhuman destiny which had uplifted him only to cast him down. At first, in spite of a fact stated and verified, he would cherish some mad hope that the family had not really departed—at least thatshehad been left behind, and that he would go to the bower one day and find her awaiting him with shining eyes and soft enamoured looks. But that dream was of brief duration: it could not survive the testimony of witnesses who knew the truth and could have no object in distorting it. And so, reconvinced of its emptiness, he would to his ravings again.
Well, the tumultuous time passed, and was succeeded in due course by a sad and settled resignation. The habit of sorrow comes, like other habits, to fit the more easily the longer it is worn. There was reached a day of half sweet, half melancholy reveries, when past joys began to assume an air of dim peacefulness, more of regret than of anguish. Old looks, old tones took on a mystic glamour, like happy things remembered from a dream. Most of all, queerly enough, there lingered in the boy’s mind a thought, humorously pathetic, of those quaint misterms which had issued so funnily from the girl’s lips. He put them down, young learned clerk that he was, to a faulty education; but he would not have his memory of his Joan without them. They seemed an essential part of the sweet thing she was.
And so, for what she had been and remained, he locked his dream away in his breast, only to be taken out and sorrowed over in rare relapses on emotion, but otherwise quietly possessed as a gift of ancient beauty. Always it abode with him, and was not the less there because other interests and desires, fruit of his growing life, appeared to absorb him. But he never forgot his early love, or forgot that he had dedicated his service, true knight and champion, to her honour and renown. That consciousness, though it ceased in time to be insistent, kept him brave and pure.
Ithappened timely that there arrived from London at this pass that great consignment of goods and furniture before referred to. The unloading and distribution of the stuff, for all the boy’s professed repudiation of any interest in it, came presently, however, irresistibly to engage his curiosity, and he won a certain wintry distraction from his own thoughts by directing the placing of the multifarious items in the spots most fancied by his sense of fitness or caprice. He showed a good deal of captiousness in the matter, being in no mood to consider other people’s feelings when his own had been so rasped and wounded; but his obedient henchmen, influenced, perhaps—at least in the Cook’s case—by their sympathy with something loosely approximating the truth, submitted meekly to his tyranny, and lugged heavy objects at his bidding into all sorts of inconvenient nooks and eyries. And, not until every piece was disposed to their young despot’s liking, were they permitted to relax their efforts and conclude their task fulfilled; when he thanked and praised them so sweetly, with a hint of remorse for his own inconsiderateness, that they forgave him offhand, and withdrew luminously to submit their bruised thumbs and abraded fingers to the ministrations of Mrs Harlock.
Brion wondered, and without any great excitement, if this arrival might portend the return of his Uncle and Clerivault to the Grange. He did not seem to care much, one way or the other; but certainly the practical business of thus preparing for them was useful in keeping his mind occupied with something other than its own unhappiness. Especially was he pleased with the books—of which there was a considerable number—and with the promise they held out to him of a temporary forgetfulness in their absorption. He took much time and thought over their classification and shelving, and was gratified to discover amongst them some old friends, together with others he had heard of whose acquaintance he was interested to make. For he had always been a reader, appreciative and discriminative above his years, and in that respect owed to his good old preceptor, who had done much to direct his tastes.
Now amongst the volumes familiar to him through knowledge or repute he counted to his satisfaction the following items:—
A Christian exhortacion unto customable swearers: by Miles Coverdale (A more or less recent tract whose title tickled him).
Cooper’s Chronicle, of the Kings’ Successions, ‘wyth divers profitable Histories’ (Also recent, as brought up to date to the seventh year of the Queen’s Majesty’s reign).
Chaucer’sCanterbury Tales, with the Caxton imprint.
Sir Thomas More’sUtopia(done into English by Robynson, with the date 1551, though, if in the original Latin, it had possessed small difficulties for him).
The Bayte and Snare of Fortune: by Roger Bieston (a highly moral discourse, ‘treated in a Dialogue betwene man and money,’ and printed ‘At the signe of the Sunne over against the conduite in Fletestrete’).
The obedyence of a Chrysten Man: by William Tyndale, translator of the Bible—
And some others. There were also a good many books, contentious or expository, on Romish theology, and quite a number of illuminated Vulgates, Psalters, Passionales, Lectionariums, Graduals, Breviaries and Books of Hours, most of which were of extreme value and beauty. All these gave him great satisfaction in prospect, as, with one possible exception, they most certainly would not do to a Brion of to-day; but the small reading of 1574, excluding such levities as theDecameroneand the impossible extravagances of Sir John Mandeville, to be seemly had to be dull. Even the unprecedented Knight of la Mancha had not yet stalked into print; and Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe were decades away.
The boy was browsing one afternoon among these illuminated volumes, enjoying the beauty of their convoluted designs and brilliantly-pictured legends, when he saw something which sent the blood back upon his heart in a curious little shock. He had taken down a Book of Hours,Horae Beatae Virginis Mariae ad Usum Romanum, cum Calendario—a fair little volume in Roman letter with splendid wood-cuts—when, in turning over the leaves he discovered a name upon the title page—Jane Middleton Baggott: her booke:1554:at Gray’s Inne.
He was squatting on the floor. Gently he put the little volume down in his lap, and turned his head to gaze out of the great west window, which looked into the Court. It was very still; a light brooding mist filled the air; there were swallows skimming and diving under the eaves. But he saw nothing material: only the softness and quietude of things seemed consonant with the wistful abstraction his eyes expressed.
‘One sister; but she died.’ Clerivault’s unwilling words came back to his mind—and again others spoken by his Uncle, when he had taken his face between his hands and read some likeness there. Jane Middleton—had that been her name; and was it the memory of that dead sister which had seemed to move the brother so deeply when gazing into his eyes? Middleton! and he himself was so called—why? A queer unforgotten word once uttered by his lost love recurred to him—not for the first time. Was here the clue to the long riddle? Some shadowy suspicion of the truth had already flitted through his soul—from ages ago—from the day when the pale pretty lady had stopped her horse to speak to him. He felt again her kiss upon his baby lips; he felt——
Suddenly his eyes were hot with tears: they had come unexpected, from out of nowhere, and had taken him by surprise. He sat very still, battling with his emotion; and in a little he had quite mastered it. Then he took up the Book of Hours, and rose to return it to its place; but first, in a quick impulse, he bent and kissed the name upon the title.
‘She called herself my first lover,’ he whispered—‘I remember it now so well—and her pretty one, and her babe. She was sad and beautiful; and I hated him that rode with her.’
And now in thought he hated the handsome sinister cavalier more than ever—hated him with the hatred of a child’s rebellion against misused authority and immitigable wrong.
All the rest of that day Brion went very quiet. He seemed preoccupied; he was grateful for little ordinary services; almost submissive to those who rendered them. It was as if some shock to his young pride had humbled him to the dust. But his mind was restlessly busy. He had never seen his Uncle since he parted from him in theCocktavern; he had felt some anticipatory awe over their re-meeting; now he wanted him to return, that he might face him with a direct question. He meant to put that question; whencesoever he derived it, he had an imperious spirit.
There was another associated matter, too, which gave him food for uneasy reflection, especially in the light of certain remarks once made by his girl love—and that was the Romish savour of much of the Judge’s literature. Was this Uncle of his really at heart, or had been, a Papist? It was a dangerous thing to be suspect of such sympathies in these days. Yet there was that story of his disgrace, which might not be calumny, and there were these pious evidences, which might, after all, be no more than the evidences of an enthusiastic book-lover. It would seem at least that the little ‘Horae Beatae’ had been personal to the devotions of Jane Middleton, for the marks of frequent use were visible on its pages. He thought of the slender fingers turning the leaves, of the wistful face bent above them, with a strange indulgent feeling that was like protection. Well, she anyhow was dead, and beyond the reach of persecution. He felt the tears very near his eyes again.
So the books had taught him something which he had never looked to find in them. They could not, alas! teach him how to forget, but rather, through this discovery, had aggravated his memory. Was it to be his fate always to be forsaken of his womankind? For a time again the anguish of his recent loss drove him to desperation. He wandered incessantly abroad, visiting, with melancholy iteration, every spot connected with his lost love’s presence—the glen, the copse, the old well-house. That place held no terrors for him at last. If he had felt any hesitation about re-entering it, he had savagely turned on himself for suspecting what was for ever now made lovable through her association with it. It was the sanctum where, recalling her sweetness and her endearingness, he could most let his emotions free. His own sad spirit haunted it in a way, with a force, to overbear and extinguish all lesser ghosts.
He was in there, one day, leaning against the rim of the big wheel and indulging his most twilight mood, when something occurred of a sufficient interest to afford his mind at least a temporary surcease from its dejection. He had been recalling, for the hundredth time, that unforgettable morning of the adventure, and how resolute she had been, the darling, and how clear-headed; and how her bright temerity had been innocent of all moral-pointing, when she might have despised him for his cowardice. Would the contempt come now, he thought, if she could know him for what he was? Or did she already know—or guess? There must have been some half-conscious purpose in her assurance to him, so quaintly expressed, of her indifference to the name given him by her father. Pondering it all, he fell into a fit of profound musing, from which he was suddenly startled by the sound of the well laughing.
He gave a violent start—not of panic, for he was long familiar now with that weird throaty chuckle and its cause, but of mere nervous repercussion—and, coming erect, found himself caught at the back. Some part of his dress had hitched in a projection of the wood-work, and held him prisoner. He pulled, and the object, whatever it was, appeared to come away. Suddenly it yielded, and fell heavily at his heels. He turned to see what it was, and discovered that he had drawn out from the circumference of the wheel one of the short boards or panels of which it was composed.
For the moment, stooping to lift the thing, he imagined that its detachment was due to mere accident or decay; but suddenly, as he idly handled it, his fingers touched on something which set him oddly thinking. This was a notch or groove on theundersideof the board—representing theoutsideof the wheel—which had been intentionally cut there, it would seem, to facilitate its removal. But for what purpose? A little excited, he made a quick examination of the gap exposed, and saw at once that chance had led him on a curious discovery. The board, a stout one, some eighteen inches in width, was furnished with a tongue on each side, the two being formed to slide into corresponding grooves cut in the adjacent sections, in the manner of a ‘match-joint,’ and it was fitted on its outer edge, like a box-lid, with a flange which, when the panel was pushed home, came up flush with the wheel-rim. Brion tried it in and out, and found that it ran quite easily. But why was it there, and what was the meaning of the notch?
Now the lowest segment of the wheel, as already said, turned, for a foot or more below the surface, in a little oblong pit cut to receive it in the pavement, as if some miscalculation of the diameter had necessitated that stratagem. Brion had always so looked upon it as a makeshift, but now he began to wonder. After a minute of thrilling reflection, he slid out the panel, laid it aside, and, turning the wheel until the gap in it came over the pit, steadied the slowly rotating monster and looked down. And instantly, with a little shock of the blood, he understood. The pit was no shallow depression made to receive the wheel, but the entrance to an underground chamber of unknown depth and significance.
For some moments he leaned over, staring, his heart going like an excited bird’s. In that dim and melancholy twilight he could not make out much, but quite unmistakably the outline of rough stone steps descending. Still he did not quite understand. It was obvious now that the notch was for the use of anyone hidden below and desirous of emerging; yet the position of that sunken part of the wheel would preclude the possibility of the panel being pushed outward. How was it managed? There was nothing for it but to go down and see. Only he must have a light. He shivered with impatience: he could hardly command it to hurry away, and make for the house, and, as privately as he could, procure tinder and taper. But he did it, and got back unobserved.
The aperture left by the dislodged board was not great, yet it was more than sufficient for an ordinary person to pass. Brion descending through it, in a state far too wrought up for perturbation, easily gained the upper step; and there he crouched, to look for the first solution of the puzzle. It was simple enough, after all. There was a slot cut in the side of the pit into which the panel could be run, and, when there, it anchored the wheel in place. The boy, elate with his discovery, came out and put the device to an immediate test. He turned the wheel, slipped in the panel, brought it over the hole, and, manipulating it from the upper side, found the slot and slid the board in. The whole thing, it seemed to him, had the virtues of extraordinary simplicity combined with absolute secrecy. Who would dream that the wheel, an engine of everyday use, covered the entrance to a subterranean hiding-place? He would never have discovered it himself but for that accident of his jerkin hooking itself on a tough splinter.
But now there faced him the deeper essay. He did not hesitate over it a moment, but, entering and descending with his light, found himself, at some three yards down, in a little stone-lined chamber excavated out of the soil. It might have measured a cubic nine feet or so, and was quite empty. Its walls were dank, there was a smell of the unopened vault about it, and that was all. There appeared to be no egress from it in any direction but up the steps. Probably it had been devised for a hiding-place in the days so far back as the Wars of the Roses, when it was convenient for all militant gentry to possess a handy burrow.
Satisfied that he had seen all that was to be seen, Brion ascended again to the light, pushed the panel into place, revolved the wheel a little so as to shuffle, as it were, the cards, and retired, rich in the possession of the second of two secrets with which that Spring had endowed him. True, there seemed small object in reserving this latest to himself; yet one never knew.
Itwas late in July when Brion, returning one noon from a visit to the Glen—where, against his better sentiments, he had found an irresistible attraction in watching the trout and grayling blowing rings in the water—was conscious, as he approached the Moated Grange, of something in its atmosphere which had not been there when he left it. A livelier smoke seemed to rise from the kitchen chimney: there were signs of hoofmarks in the dust about the bridge. With a beating heart he pushed open the wicket; there was a shout, and the next moment he was in Clerivault’s arms.
‘Marry come up!’ cried that dear paragon. ‘Is not here a gallant guerdon for my toils! Nay, hold away, while my hungry eyes make a feast of thee!’
His lids blinked; he looked gaunter, more fantastic than ever; for all his cherished grudge against him it warmed Brion’s heart to hear again the high husky voice with its intermittent squeak. He had nothing to give his friend for the moment but smiles and welcome.
‘Have you really come back, Clerivault,’ he said—‘and for good?’
‘For good, sweetheart? Ay, for no harm, at least.’
A vast hulk of a man, standing at the door of the porter’s lodge, laughed out like a jovial bassoon:—
‘There’s a rare wit for you, Master,’ said he.
He was enormous, like a tree—a great lusty fellow in a buff jerkin and hip-high boots, with a falling band about his throat. Each of his ruddy cheeks might have sufficed a moderate man for his whole countenance; and his fist would have served a giant for his Sunday joint. Clerivault flicked him under the chin with his glove.
‘Speak when you’re spoken to, little Nol,’ said he; ‘and then to better effect than to point out the obvious. Lout, man, lout to your betters, nor stand there beaming like the sun in a red hazel bush.’
The huge creature ducked to Brion, who responded by holding out his hand.
‘Is this Nol porter?’ he said, with a smile. ‘On my troth, a fit attendant on a Judge of Assize!’
The giant, grasping the slim hand abashed, gaped doubtful a moment, then went into a second boom of laughter. Here was another quip patent to his perceptives. It was to be his rare fortune, it seemed, to serve under a second wit, matching Clerivault’s own.
That gentleman interposed, a little starchily. He was jealous for the boy’s sole attention.
‘A Judge,’ said he, ‘is not needed in a matter beyond dispute. This creature’s hugeness hits the eye like a battering-ram. He hath evidenced, and may be dismissed. Hence, porter—ha! and ruminate, like a vast ox, on the condescension shown thee.’
He led Brion away, while the other backed, bobbing and grinning, into the lodge. ‘Now,’ said he, stopping once more to look admiringly in the boy’s face, ‘let me gaze on thee my fill. Art grown, I swear, and to an aspect something graver than thy wont. Hast taken sadness in this interval to be thy housemate?’
‘Is it cheering, think you,’ said Brion, levelling his voice, ‘to have cherished a friend, and to have been forsaken by him without a word?’
The other did not answer for a moment.
‘Nay,’ he said softly, ‘I left a message for thee to be of good heart, and to keep a corner in it for me. An William gave it thee not, I will break his head for him.’
‘Spare thy bluster. Hurt to another would not mend mine. Besides he gave me thy message.’
‘What then, sweetling? I had to go.’
‘And I to be deserted.’
‘The occasion was peremptory. No choice was left to me.’
‘Save to wake me and say good-bye.’
‘O!’ cried Clerivault, apostrophising Fate in a voice of grief and despair: ‘what coil is this!Iwake thee to that message! If I have sinned, I have sinned in good faith, and my reward is my love is rejected.’
‘I said not that,’ said Brion, relenting. ‘But, indeed, Clerivault, it wounded me to the heart to find you gone.’
‘Did it? did it?’ cried the other, in a rapture of emotion. ‘Then happy, happy Harlequin for all his racking! If thou but knewest, my blessed one—if thou but knewest, thou wouldst sure forgive me. But the peril—if peril it was—is laid at last, and henceforth, by God’s countenance, we shall live together in security, and never more be disparted. When we rode away that night——’
‘Nay,’ said the boy, stopping him, a flush on his face—‘whither or on what urgency I will not know. If I might not hear the exordium, I will not hear the peroration. We were separated and we have rejoined, like the sides of a wound. That should be enough for us. The interval of pain it is well to forget, as if it had never been. I prithee speak no word of it more. Is my Uncle returned with you?’
‘He is within,’ answered Clerivault. He was comforted but perplexed. There was some change apparent here which he could not quite unriddle. It was like a new birth, a detachment, as when a clinging tuber has separated itself from its parent stock and declared for an independent existence. There was a pride in it of conscious power; the old sweet pliancy might be there, but its backbone had strengthened. Was he become a man indeed in this short space? It would almost seem so. There was a shadow on his lip; a knowledge, even a sadness, in his eyes which had not been there before. Whence and how had they come? The thought which had been Phineas’s thought just crossed his mind. Well, he did not know whether to be glad or sorry for this development; only thank God they were together again, and reconciled, and friends as of old.
‘I will go to him,’ said Brion, and they walked on and entered the house. The Justice was in his private closet off the hall—a room selected for his use by Clerivault before his departure. It was a small oak-panelled chamber, sombre but comfortable. The one diamond-paned window, jewelled in its upper lights with heraldic devices, threw a pattern like trellised moonshine on the carpet of blue cloth—the only one in the house. An escritoire had been set there by Brion’s directions, and the smaller bookcase, into which he had gathered the best of the illuminated missals. They knocked, and being bid to enter, Brion saw his Uncle again.
He was seated by a table, on which stood a jug of sack and a silver tankard from which he had drunk copiously. He was just come off the road, and was soiled and weary. Yet there was that in his expression somehow more significant of mental than of physical exhaustion. The dark moody features seemed bitten with a deeper consciousness of their own fall from grace and beauty; into the large congested eyes had grown a hunted listening look, pathetic in its implication of strength harried and demoralised. His hands were tremulous when the boy came in: it had needed but that little unexpected sound upon the door to unnerve and shake him. But he greeted his nephew kindly, and with a light come into his face which shone straight into Brion’s heart. He beckoned, with a smile, to the boy, and, when he came, stood him between his knees, and asked him many questions—as to his life since they had parted, and the way he had employed his time, and his opinion—a little wistfully this—as to the house and its surroundings and his feelings regarding them.
‘I shall be happy now you have come,’ was the brave answer.
He seemed much affected. ‘What! You love me still?’ said he.
‘Yes, indeed, Sir.’
‘That’s well and good. Methinks, child, I could not do without your love.’
‘Will you live here always now, Uncle Quentin?’
‘Ay, so they will leave me in peace.’
He said it wearily, his brow glooming a moment. But the shadow passed, and he smiled again. ‘You ask no question,’ he said; ‘and that’s discreet. Now, tell me: have you kept the trust I erst warned you? I have not forgotten, you see.’
‘I have kept it on my honour.’
‘Well said. I like your honour as I like your face. I have been in hiding, Brion. Are you curious to know why?’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Then, when you ask me, I shall tell you.’
‘I shall not ask you.’
‘Think, boy; to love me is to share my burden.’
‘I will take it all, Uncle, if you will, not seeking to know its nature.’
The other did not answer for a little; but he heaved a great sigh, gazing enrapt into his young kinsman’s face. Presently he said:—
‘Ay, sweet; this is love. Let it rest untaxed. It is enough to know such confidence in store for me against a day when to bear my burden longer alone were perchance to see me sink under it. So, you will be happy? It is a brave and fair country, is it not? and, for the house, Nol and our laughter shall mend its glooms. I lived here once, Brion.’
‘So Clerivault told me, Sir.’
‘He is a gossip, that. Dost love him too?’
‘I love him much, Uncle.’
‘A little mad, though—eh?’
‘I think a little madness spices life.’
The other laughed.
‘Heart! so it may. Well, he shall be answerable for thine outward parts; act Chiron to thy Diomed; exercise thy limbs in sport and chase and make a skilful swordsman of thee. For thine inner, I must account; rub up my Greek and Latin; look to thine education. Wilt thou be a creditable pupil?’
‘I will be a willing one.’
‘That’s sure. I see a life before us of full content—a happy round of simple toils and sober pleasures, asking no more than health and a quiet mind. What is vext Fortune but a gilded sore? A curse on the lust for riches, which, like the fairy gold, turn to ashes in the hands of him that grasps them with a covetous heart. I am gratefuller being poor and lowly. Dost thou hear, child? I am poor at last. Will it turn thee from me?’
For answer—for his heart was full—Brion made but a caressing gesture. But it was enough.
‘God bless thee,’ said his kinsman in a broken voice. ‘Now leave me’—and he put a hand before his eyes. But, as the boy went from the room, too awed for the moment to put the question nearest his heart, the hand was lowered to the half-emptied beaker.
Sothe parts were cast, and the new life begun in earnest. What was over was prologue; the real business of the house dated from this moment. Its members fell into their places; the weeds were gathered from the Court; the giant in short time, putting his great back into the job, brought order out of Chaos in the garden, and the whole place began to assume an aspect of more homeliness than it had shown for years. Not that on slender means it was to be reclaimed to the prosperity it had once enjoyed; it was ever in Brion’s time a thin estate, a half vacant building; but at least the worst of its desolation was amended to a plausible patchwork, and the cheeriness and devotion of its denizens made up in volume for the emptiness that echoed them in unfurnished rooms.
At first the boy was restless under this transformation of surroundings which, however dreary, had been associated with some sweet times. A weight, moreover, was upon his mind, which, until he could find occasion to shift it, must still oppress and agitate him. If only he could put the question he longed to put, he would feel, he thought, whatever the nature of the answer, a more resigned harmony with his lot than ever he could attain to while that question was pending. And at length the opportunity he sought came to him, and he seized it.
Every morning he read with his uncle in the Classics—Livy’s History, Isocrates’ Pleadings, Cicero on Friendship and Old Age, or the Tragedies of Sophocles—showing a mind so well balanced and informed that the tutor, finding himself in danger of being surpassed by his pupil, fell more and more into the negative rôle of assenter rather than proposer, until there came a day when he withdrew unostentatiously from the partnership, leaving the boy to conduct his own education after the manner he thought best.
There was another sentiment, however, associated with this relinquishment which was neither so sagacious nor so humorous. Despondency, combined with mental inquietude and the means he took to allay them, were encouraging in Quentin Bagott at this time a habit of moody solitariness, which from an indulgence was to become an obsession, and which, in its extreme phases, only Brion could invade with impunity. The truth was that, in spite of all he had acclaimed, and wished to believe, to the contrary, an existence of pastoral seclusion and inaction, after the busy forceful life he had led, was impossible to the man, and had become only the more unendurable as his mind was gradually relieved of its apprehensions regarding a possible impeachment. A veritablemal du paysensuing, he had had recourse for its alleviation to a remedy already only too familiar to him as a begetter of dreams and oblivion. Pride, too, and the bitter chagrin of a fallen power, conscious of his neighbours’ knowledge of his own equivocal position, and of the means they were not slow to take to enforce that knowledge on him, helped to aggravate the double evil, and to drive him ever more upon himself and the means to forgetfulness. He might profess to scorn, in his own self-contained strength and the devoted efficiency of his household, the ‘slings and arrows’ of extraneous malice: his professions could gain no confirmation from his habits. Whatever the case, however, it became soon enough patent to all about him that, of the great store of wine and strong waters had over from theGolden Lionin Ashburton, by far too great a proportion found its way to the ex-Judge’s table or, worse, into his private closet. And the effect was not long in revealing itself, or in pointing its own miserable moral of debasement. There is tragedy in the still smouldering ruins of a house, but only squalor in them quenched and sodden.
But long before this evil had become a thing to whisper and remark on, Brion had learned all that he was destined to learn about his own history. He was with his Uncle one day, reading, at the table (to love both books and sport is to be the admirable youth) from Melancthon’sConfession, and looking up occasionally to ask the other, who sat in his big chair by the escritoire, to expound for him some knotty passage from the gentle Reformer, when suddenly a look came into his eyes, and a thrill to his heart, with the knowledge that he had reached the way. He rose, breathing hard, his eyes shining, to his feet.
‘Uncle Quentin,’ he said.
‘Nephew,’ was the response.
‘May I ask you a question—a personal one?’—he just touched the volume before him.
The heavy brows were bent upon him, suspicious, inquiring. ‘What question?’
‘Are you of the Reformed Church?’
‘Why should you doubt it?’
‘I do not. It is only the evidence of so many of your books that moiders me.’
‘It befits a Judge of law, child, to hear the evidence on both sides, and it befits a judge of beauty to prize beauty above dogma. I am not so stern a convert but I can allow some virtues to the faith I have abandoned.’
‘You were once a Papist, then? And was Jane Middleton a convert too?’
He had said it, and boldly, stiffening his neck; yet he might have hesitated, had he foreseen its effect upon the other. Quentin Bagott rose with a staggering motion from his chair; his features worked painfully; he stood breathing heavily, a hand to his throat.
‘Uncle!’ cried the boy, aghast.
‘What was that you said?’
‘Clerivault once told me you had a sister—but she died. Was she not called so?’
‘What if she were?’
‘I meant no harm. But, O, Uncle, I am sick to know! I found her name in the little Book of Hours: Jane Middleton Bagott, it was writ; and—and my name is Brion Middleton.’
He leaned forward passionately, a sobbing flutter in his throat. ‘Uncle!’ he cried again.
And over his own clenched hand the other bowed his head, lower, lower, and, holding it so, sank down into the chair from which he had risen. At that the boy ran and flung himself on his knees before him, pleading in a desperate voice:—
‘What have I said! I never thought to hurt you so.’
The hand unclasped itself to an impatient gesture.
‘Let out! You would know—what?’
The beat was going fast in the boy’s throat. He struggled with himself to control it, but it yielded to an irresistible cry:—
‘If she was my mother.’
A long silence followed; and then suddenly Bagott lifted his head, and looked straight and haggard into the eyes before him.
‘She was thy mother,’ he said.
The lad gave a little gasp; but he knelt up manly to receive the stroke he felt was threatening. The other did not alter his fixed gaze.
‘Who told you?’ he asked.
‘No one.’
‘Since when have you known—or guessed?’
‘I think, in my heart, from that day when she came and kissed me on the road after the Queen had passed.’ He spoke up steadily, putting force upon himself to do so.
‘What made you think that she that kissed you was your mother?’
‘I know not—some instinct. But the thought only grew to haunt me after years had gone, when once there returned upon me a memory of Clerivault’s message, and of how, in seeming response to it, my dear master had taken me apart that day to see the Queen go by, and of what had followed. And after, when I read the name in the book, and thought of how I called you Uncle, it all seemed to piece together, so that in a moment I felt the truth of it, and wept.’
‘Why should you weep?’ He said it harshly, with a sneer. ‘If she’s dead, the nobler parent lives. Are you not curious to know about him—your father?’
‘No; I hated him.’
‘Hated!’
‘He was an evil man. She feared him, sitting beside her. He looked at me, too, as if he hated me.’
‘God!’ An amazed, half startled look came into his eyes. ‘Speak soft. What it is to have so quick a wit! Thy father, that—was it? Do you know, then, what you are?’
‘I know what he called me.’
‘What?’
‘I will not speak if of myself.’
The eyes were piercing him; and then, all in a moment, a film seemed to come before them, and they were wonderfully dim and soft. An arm was put about his neck; the voice dropped to a moving tenderness, full of grief and pity.
‘I will not speak it of thee neither. A curse on him that made thee so! Ah, that day! She would importune me—child, she would importune me for a sight of thee—a little speech—one kiss, to ease her load of shameful yearning. And I, though I feared the issue, consented; I sent Clerivault to prepare the way. And he—that evil man—he looked on thee with hate, did he? And well he might, to see such evidences of his own villainy. She was ever sweet and trustful—nay, you shall hear it all—my Jane, my little sister—and he a smooth-tongued liar. It was at Mary’s Court they met, she a lady-in-waiting, and he, already a wedded man, just out from the Tower—would to God he had shared his father’s fate there—made Master of the Queen’s ordnance. A curse upon his house! But she ever believed in him—she died believing in him. Ah died, my girl! And we had been children here together—bred in the old faith—in her heart she never abandoned it—she clung to where she loved. It was that guided my choice of thy preceptor, thine adoptive father—a good old man, but weakly recusant, known to me by name and repute. A Protestant, forsooth? Neither that nor the other, but a Catholic with views moderated by the Reform movement. So were we all: so was the Queen herself, till Cecil drove her to intolerance: so was—no, he was never but a plausible time-server—a perjurer and false-swearer. Yet he gave thee life, Brion—he gave thee life.’
His voice broke: he had spoken spasmodically, and with great emotion, and the effort seemed to have exhausted him. But to Brion’s young soul the confession had brought a tragic resignation which was almost like peace after storm. Long half-suspecting the truth, he knew now what he was, and what he could never be. His brain was busy as he knelt. To make a name or inherit one—which was the nobler? He could be anything in the wide world but that one thing, and that one thing was the one thing in the wide world no child of earth could ever achieve for himself. There was no question of personal credit connected with it, and he would be a poor moralist who should hold him to blame for another man’s fault. So reasoned the sane young philosopher. He could be all that he chose, except the one thing in which he had no choice, and he was not debarred by that single exception from the best thing of all, which was certainly self-respect. For his own sweet erring mother he felt the tenderest love and pity; towards the instrument of her undoing nothing but animosity. No ethical qualms moved him there; bad was bad, by whatever name you called it.
‘He gave my mother to shame,’ he said, presently and quietly, in answer to his Uncle’s last appeal: ‘and I shall ever hate him for it.’
‘Hush, boy!’ said Bagott, lifting his head. ‘You know not what you say, or of whom you speak.’
‘Do I not, Uncle? His name was uttered that day by one that served him, and whom he struck for revealing it.’
‘My God! was it so? Nathless you must not hate him. It is not for the lamb to hate the bear—nay, the royal lion himself, as may come to hap. Forget him, an thou canst do naught else. On thy life never breathe his name in choler. The air is as full of ears as he of power. Have I not reason to hate him too; yet for thy sake will I put him and his misdeeds from my mind.’
Brion did not answer; but after a moment he rose to his feet, and stood erect before the seated figure. He would keep his own proud counsel thenceforth, in all matters affecting his honour and duty. His head was lifted, his eyes shone; before their authority the other’s blinked and were lowered.
‘Uncle,’ he said: ‘what for my sake thou mayst do I might not for my own. Yet for what for my sake thou hast done, my love and gratitude shall endeavour. Hast thou not been my better father, and from the first?’
‘From the first, boy: I made thee my charge to sorrow and to silence. Yet, though I planned to consign thee to oblivion, my thoughts pursued thee. Thou wert the last of us—her child. I could not forget that nor thee; and when curst Fortune made of my life a ruined waste—Ah, what disgrace on thee like mine! ’Twas then in bitter self-scorn I first claimed thee kinsman; for was I not done honour in the connexion?’
He spoke and bowed his head again. He had forgotten, in his emotion, that to this child his retirement figured as a voluntary exile. But Brion paid no heed, nor seemed to notice what he had said. His eyes still shone.
‘Uncle,’ he said; ‘now it is confessed and done with, I ask one only thing of thee—never to let word be uttered between us on this subject again. From this moment I would begin a new life—my own. I will make myself, who should be the best architect of mine own honour. Will you?’
And the compact was made; and from that hour kept unbroken between them.
Somewherein the late summer of ’77 there came to the Moated Grange early one morning two visitors, of whom one was destined to exert a considerable influence on Brion’s fortunes. These were Sir Richard Grenville, and a young connexion of his named Walter Raleigh, both West Border gentlemen of good family, and one of them, the elder, holding some sort of official position as County Sheriff. This latter was a strong, compact, saturnine man of thirty-seven, rough bearded and voiced, and with a manner which halted, if at all, on the near side of offence; in all of which characteristics he afforded as complete a contrast as was possible with his companion, whose extreme graces of courtesy and geniality, together with a handsome gallant presence, made only more emphatic the coarse grain of the other. This Mr Raleigh was but lately home, it seemed, from fighting in the Low Countries, where he had played the part of a good soldier against the King of Spain, and earned for himself a reputation which he was quite prepared to stake against the most extravagant throws of Fortune. He was a tallish young man of twenty-five, very shapely in the limbs, with a white hand and a comely intellectual face, rather overhigh in the forehead, but with noble brown eyes, which, at a tale of arms and chivalry, would glow like living fires. His human weakness—if weakness it were to treat so fine a body delicately—lay in a certain over-gallantry of attire. He loved fine clothes, and knew how to wear them to effect. Now, though he was by the road, and only country folk to appraise him, he was dressed as though to attend a Queen’s junketting—from embroidered bonnet to long Flemish boots of soft leather a star of fashion. His little pointed beard was scented, as were his cheveril gloves; he had jewels in his ears; his gilt spurs ‘rang the morris-dance.’ And yet to judge him effeminate would have been to invite disaster. There is a form of foppishness about which it does not do to assume that it lacks the courage of its opinions; and here was a wrist as strong and supple as the wit behind it was virile.
The two gentlemen—the one in virtue of his office, the other of his own engaging assurance, it seemed—appeared as uninvited guests; but there was little doubt as to the purpose of their visit. Rumours, in an unfriendly neighbourhood, had got abroad as to the supposed Papistical tendencies of the master of the Grange, and the Sheriff considered, or made, it his business to inquire into the matter. He did so, to do him justice, frankly and at first hand, and would accept no hospitality, for himself and his companion, until he was satisfied as to the baselessness of the accusation. Convinced of which, he consented for them to dine and lie the night at the Grange, and Phineas was put to his mettle to provide a feast worthy of the occasion.
Brion, having been early astir, with Clerivault, on the moors after wild fowl, did not encounter the newcomers until he came in to dinner at eleven o’clock. But his surprise on finding them there was so graced by tact in his greeting as to appear more like gratification than wonder.
He had developed in these three years into a prepossessing young man of nineteen, lithe and well-proportioned, with a smooth rather pale complexion, and the most winning gray eyes full of gravity and humour. His fair hair had deepened a thought in tone, and even more so his eyebrows and lashes, once described as mouse-coloured, but now a well-marked umber, while a definite shadow pencilled his lip. Always possessed of an attractive manner, though shy in its expression, his earlier reserve had yielded to an unaffected friendliness which was as sincere as it was captivating. Self-reliance and a certain beauty of mind had wrought of this youngster a very maiden knight, whose sword was as ready as his word to uphold that religion of honour which he had made his own. What he owed to himself he paid in sweetness and forbearance to others; yet there was a humour in him which saved him very adequately from the saint. He could be ebullient sometimes, and do things of which he repented. Yet among these was never to be counted a lapse from one fixed ideal. Dedicated to his lady’s service, he would be pure and chivalrous for her sake, nor, for her sake, would he ever break his virgin plight, unless, by blessed fortune, it were to achieve in her the desire of his heart. So he was resolved, vowing it should be his Joan for him or none, and in the meantime what arms and enterprise fell to him he would use to her sole renown, whereby he would be constantly pledged to the nobility his birth denied him.
This firm resolution—the more inflexible, perhaps from the lack of any temptation, in that masculine community, to reconsider it—had lasted since the closing of that brief romance had left him, as he thought, with a broken heart. It all seemed very far away now; such episodes in the full years of youth fade quickly into the background of dim memories. He could afford, perhaps, to smile at it, and at the tragic intensity of the grief which had predicted for him an eternity of unforgetting anguish. Yet, though that dear apparition might never materialise for him again, the love it had engendered in his soul still made itself a sanctuary there, and called to be revered and honoured for the dream’s sake. It had no more to build on. In all these years the family had never returned to the Chase, nor, hugging that poignant secret to his heart, could he venture to seek information as to its possible plans and movements. She was gone from him, it seemed, never to return; and gone to what fate? For long he had suffered intolerable torment, raging over her peril and his own helplessness. But the impotence of his agony had proved its cure. He had learned first despair from it and then resignation. At least they had had those lovely moments together which had been all their own. No power on earth could rob him of that possession, or spoil its sweetness for him so long as he himself kept it spotless. And so he had preserved his dream and become a knight of dreams.
That steadfast sentiment had been one factor in the forming of the boy’s character, as his relations with his Uncle had proved another. It is melancholy to record that the ex-Judge had at this date degenerated into something little removed from an habitual sot. His vice had steadily grown upon him under his nephew’s eyes, until, for all his inexperience and reluctance to believe, Brion had been forced into a recognition of the truth. He took it passionlessly, gravely, and set about to adapt his conduct to the newly-realised conditions. There could be no question of coercive or of remonstrant measures with a spirit of that force and authority; instead, he devoted himself to hedging about an evil which he could not remove, and so hiding its worst manifestations from the world. The drunkard watched, with a drunkard’s cunning, the nature of these means so privily taken to safeguard his reputation, and was leeringly tickled or gloomily affected by them according to his mood. But they had this inevitable effect upon him, that he took to leaning more and more upon his nephew’s resourcefulness and quiet strength of will, until in the end it ensued that Brion became virtual master of the house, ordering its affairs and attending to its accounts. And that was only to anticipate events indefinitely, for he had long been made and legally attested sole heir to all the little property, including house and messuage, which his Uncle still possessed.
Clerivault knocked thrice on the sideboard with a rolling-pin, and the company assembled to its dinner in the great hall. The meal consisted of two courses, the items of which, for any who may care to consult them, figured as follows:—