And almost with the thought he heard her coming. There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. ‘Joan!’ he breathed from his bursting heart—and the door on the moment opened, and she entered.
She came in on the arm of her governante, the blown breathless old lady with the stick. She gave one bashful glance towards the stranger, then looked aside, with a little mincing shrug and wriggle of her shoulders. There was a pause, quite painful in its intensity. And then Brion opened his mouth and gasped out an inquiry:—
‘Mistress Joan Medley?’
‘The same, young man,’ panted the governante, her voice wheezy from her exertions. ‘What, young man, what, you speak as though you doubted! By’r lady, you should know her, it seems, better than she knows you. Come, whatever thy petition, speed with it, for she hath but a little time to spare thee.’
‘Trudy!’ murmured the young lady, in a tone of coquettish remonstrance.
Wasshe young? There was no telling. There are those—the fortunate ones, perhaps—who, looking like wizened age in youth, in age come to look youthful. What Brion saw before him was a little undersized creature, with a sharp unhealthy face and ferrety eyelashes. She was all hung and sown with gems, after the fashion of a royal model. Her head-dress was as monstrous as was her farthingale, over which a jewelled stomacher came down so deep as to give to her already short lower limbs an aspect of quite grotesque stubbiness. The red heels to her shoes were four inches in height; the vulgarity of tasteless wealth marked her all over; as a figurine in a gallanty show she might have passed, but as nothing akin to nature in all the world. She glanced up from under her pale lashes, wreathing and unwreathing her fingers, and so down again.
‘You wished to see me, Sir,’ she said, her shoulders always in a state of convulsion. ‘I am willing to hear what you have to say. Such a persuasive friend as you sent—O, dear, o’my conscience!’
Brion opened his mouth to speak; but not a word would come of it. He felt as if trapped—fairly confounded in a snare of his own setting. The old lady broke in impatiently:—
‘Hey-day! a backward gallant on my word. What, to press a suit quotha! Here’s not enough of “night and secrecy” for him mayhap. Well, there’s a form of eloquence with some grows bolder as the lights go out. Hark ye, shy lover—there’s privacy enow down here to suit an Abbot. Go to! I’ll leave ye to your billings, pretty things, and shut the door, and hope to find your manners mended when I ope again.’
With a leer, and a little shake of her stick, she turned to put her threat into execution. Desperate with terror, Brion came to his wits, and took a quick step towards her.
‘Stay, I prithee,’ said he. ‘There—there is a mistake.’
At the sound of the word the old woman stopped, and the younger one, her countenance changed, started and turned rigid.
‘A mistake!’ whispered she; and gave a little choke.
There was nothing for the unhappy young man but instant candour. He plunged for it, his face going scarlet.
‘This is not the lady I expected.’
‘Eh!’ cried the governante violently—‘’Tis Mistress Joan Medley.’
‘I cannot help it,’ said Brion: ‘It is not she I thought. O, I am a humbled wretch, craving absolution! How the misconception arose I dare not think; some—some confusion in the name, belike; yet the blame shall be mine alone, and the full contrition. If I had had but one clue to the truth, I had not so come to shame myself, or insult an honoured lady to whose gracious condescension alone I am indebted for this interview. I entreat her to forgive me, and to permit me to withdraw from the presence I have offended, with a thousand apologies for a presumption which was never dreamed or purposed.’
The governante looked from one fallen face to the other, and an ineffable leer came into her own.
‘Well, well,’ said she: ‘You’re here; and there she is who knew and knows you not from Adam. What then? If a tree is sweet and fruitful, it may be loved without a name. She’s content, if you are, to accept you on your merits. Go to: Take what Fortune brings you, and make no words about it. There’s many a cross scent followed ends in tastier game than that that was first pursued and missed.’
Brion did not answer, but panic-struck he shook his head and made for the door. He was halted by a sudden screech, followed by a torrent of vituperation:—
‘Base and perfidious! How dare you, Trudy, how dare you, I say—to deal with me thus, to answer for me thus, before a common rogue and impostor, in whose face I had detected the low villainy even before he spoke. Content! His merits! I’d sooner touch a toad.’ Her shred of a body heaved and stormed, threatening to burst its laces; her face was a very spectre of rageful spite. ‘And you—to encourage him, that lewd and pernicious enormity—to let him to think I craved his base attentions—a common groom—I, I, that could choose among a hundred of his masters—I’ll have him followed and exposed. I’ll have him scourged at the cart-tail, whileshelooks on—the one he dared to think me—the one——’
She was gasping hysterically to an end. It came in a wind of tears, and she dropped into the chair by the hearth. Brion, appalled a moment, the next took his discretion in hand and bolted. He found his lantern yet burning, seized it, opened the door with agitated fingers, and, leaping into the night, closed it behind him. And then he ran—ran as if the devil were at his heels, and never stopped until he had reached the barge and jumped aboard.
‘Put off, a God’s name!’ said he. ‘I’m winded.’
Raleigh, who had been sitting wrapped in his cloak and half asleep in the sternsheets, greeted him with some surprise:—
‘So soon! Was not the lady kind?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Not kind?’
‘It was the wrong lady—that was all.’
‘Arethere two Joan Medleys in the world; and both——’
Brion stopped, and fell into such a deep and frowning reverie that the Captain would not venture to break into it for a while, but sat sipping his mulled wine, and glancing from time to time, with a curious amused expression, at the absorbed young figure. They were back at theCock, and drinking anight-capin company.
‘You do not,’ said Raleigh at last, seeing the other stir, ‘blame me for this fiasco?’
Brion shook a disconsolate noddle.
‘I blame nobody. We are victims all, in different degree. But of what or whom?’
Seeing him inclined to a fresh fit of abstraction, Raleigh put in hastily:—
‘Well, now it is resolved, I will confess it seemed to me an infatuation passing strange, and accountable to nothing, unless it were the worship of a golden idol. But there I wronged thee, and do ask thy pardon for it.’
‘What else could you think? Yet, thy romantic mystery, forsooth, and poetry reduced to prose! O, God mend us all! Why would you not tell me how she looked to you?’
‘Looks are like gospels, for each to construe according to his faith. Had my interpretation differed from yours, you’d ha’ damned me for a heretic.’
‘But to dream I could have thoughtthatbeautiful!’
His expression was so dismayed that Raleigh, after a vain attempt to control himself, went into a shout of laughter.
‘Well——’ began Brion; and his face quivered, and in a moment he was shaking too.
‘This riddle,’ said the soldier presently, gasping himself into sobriety—‘we must seek the clue to it.’
But on that Brion, returning to an instant seriousness, put a definite veto.
‘No further,’ said he. ‘I prithee from this moment let the whole question drop. I say it with all earnestness, and do entreat thee to let it rest as final.’
The other nodded: ‘Well, if you wish it’—and at that moment Clerivault, coming in with a faggot to lay on the embers, ended the discussion.
‘Signor Clerivault,’ said Raleigh, ‘is not beauty, in your opinion, a question of taste?’
Clerivault, depositing the log in its place, came frigidly upright.
‘I have no claim to a foreign title, Sir.’
‘I should have said Master.’
The paragon bowed stately:—
‘Sir, how taste?’
‘Why, thus. I call a woman beautiful: another shakes his head. His eyes cannot see it; mine do. Therefore her beauty is not intrinsically in her, but in mine eyes. There is no standard to judge by.’
‘There would be no beauty, Sir, if there were. Eternal conformation to a rigid model would make very deformity desirable by contrast.’
‘Very true’—he showed an inclination to chuckle—‘I think some of us feel that. It is human to like change—even to pursue it on occasion to extremes. The loveliest of her sex will sometimes attach herself to the most repulsive of ours—and vice versa, it may hap. Hast ever been in love with a monstrosity yourself, Master Clerivault?’
‘Nay, not so far, Sir, not so far.’ He lifted his chin, handling his throat as if he traced its contours luxuriously. ‘Yet I may have felt—I do not say—the lure—what I may call the fascination of abnormity.’
‘Instance, instance!’
‘Hem! It was in the days—but all’s one for that. My quarters—no matter for what occasion—were at Dunster, one side the British Channel; and hers on the opposite shore. She had a siren voice—I’ll say so much—and sang me with it daily across the water.’
‘A siren fog-horn rather. Well, you took boat and back—daily?’
‘No, I swam.’
‘My God! Fifteen miles if a yard. And back, too. A very quintuple Leander.’
‘Not back.’
‘O, not back! You disappoint me.’
‘Why, Clerivault!’ cried Brion, aghast over this enormous invention. ‘You cannot swim but a yard or two, and that with one foot on the bottom. Have I not seen you floundering in the Dart?’
‘Fresh water, Sir, fresh water. There’s no comparison between fresh water and salt. In certain seasons of the brine ’tis just to lie and paddle.’
‘Or to lie and not paddle,’ said Raleigh.
He loved this creature, loved todrawhim, whether for vanity or inspiration. It was all fruit, he saw, of the same quality of imagination, and had within it for eternal condonation the living kernel of truth and loyalty.
He spoke to him, chancing across him a day or two later, on the subject of his young master’s obduracy in a certain matter. Raleigh had urged his friend to make his début at Court under his aegis, promising him a favourable reception. His youth and gallant bearing, he said, would be his certain passports to notice and advancement. It was a kind insistence, and generous on the part of one whose interests were not in creating rival fetiches; but he had conceived a great affection for the boy, and really wished him well.
But Brion had declined, with every courtesy, the proffered service. He refused to give reasons; called it a question of sentiment; declared he had no wish to be a Courtier, and was generally as obstinate as a young mule, impervious to any persuasion but that of his own inclinations. The Captain was a little hurt, and when he ran across Clerivault, expatiated on the opportunity his master was deliberately throwing away, and urged him to exerthisinfluence over him to persuade him to a reconsideration of the proposal. But, to his surprise, Clerivault supported the other in his resolution. He declared, with emphasis, that he thought he had decided rightly, and that he, for his part, would certainly do nothing to dissuade him from his determination. And then, being pressed, he gave his reasons, only developing the truth to one who was already in possession of the gist of it:—
‘How accident,’ said he, ‘brought him to knowledge of his parentage is a true story but a past one. Let it suffice, Sir, that he knows, and eke is bitter hostile to one author of his invalidity, and that not the dead one. His blood is proud and hot, and I should dread beyond measure their meeting. No, he’s better from Court—’ and he told Raleigh of the little contretemps the day the Queen went a’hawking, and of Brion’s gesture of hate and repulsion, and of how he had been in terror ever since of some evil befalling his charge.
The Captain bent his brows over the recital. It was true he had not guessed of this knowledge of Brion’s, and it altered the case for him. It might affect—perhaps he debated, if there were truth in the report of his cordial relations with a certain great nobleman—his own favoured position, and evoke animosity where had been friendship.
‘Well, on the whole,’ said he, ‘mayhap he is right, and thou, excellent servitor’—and from that time he made no other attempt to shake the young man’s resolution.
But the fear of some catastrophe still nervously abode with Clerivault, in spite of that confidence now shared with a sympathetic and influential friend, and he was never easy when the young man was out of his sight. He would follow him like his shadow; impose himself on him uninvited in a way that presently drove Brion to rebellion, and later to exasperation. He had no need, he said, to go in leading-strings to a male nurse; he had the wit to find his own way about, and a preference, on occasion, for his own company above any other that might attach itself to him. He was not always kind in the way he vented his irritability on the poor fellow. But Clerivault uttered no complaint; he took all rebuffs with a stoical impassibility, indifferent to wounds received in what his duty told him was an indispensable service. He had not, it is true, the clue to one motive inclining his young master to fits of restless moodiness, in which he desired to be, and wander, alone. Since the night of that absurd but rather shattering escapade a sense of some disaster threatening a long cherished ideal had haunted Brion’s mind like a secret shadow. He would stoutly deride its menace, would refuse to admit or analyse it, but it remained there all the time, and he could not throw off the consciousness of its possession. His faith had been shaken, and in a very unpalatable manner. That shrill and vulgar little termagant seemed to have blown away at a blast all that sentiment which had wafted him on wings of rapture towards an imagined goal. The whole thing was cheapened and vulgarised. A sense of his own credulous folly, of the necessity of eschewing for the future all such illusive enthusiasms, and setting worldly wisdom in their place, gripped and resolved him. He must rise from this time superior to the rather exotic romanticism which for so long had affected his outlook, and must become that independent and self-reliant entity which practical manhood demanded. Hence his impatience of supervision.
‘No, my friend,’ he said one morning, turning on the faithful watch-dog who was about to follow him out: ‘I need no escort, by your leave.’
‘No question of need, Sir, but of sociability,’ answered Clerivault sweetly. ‘You may favour your own company more than I do mine.’
‘I do for the nonce. I would be alone, my good fellow. You hear?’
‘With difficulty, Sir. I am dull o’ the lug this morning. I shall hear better in the fresh air.’
‘Clerivault, I would not have us quarrel.’
‘God forbid!’
‘I say God forbid.’
‘May I not follow, even at a distance?’
‘To stick in my thoughts like a pursuing conscience! No, stay where you are. I shall be back anon.’
The man looked after him wistfully as he disappeared; but Brion’s mood had been so peremptory that he dared not disobey. He only groaned and shook his head, as he turned back into the yard from which the other had gone forth. As he did so, he was passed by a stranger who had risen hastily from drinking a mug of ale at one of the tables hard by, and who also vanished through the archway leading into the street.
Brion, loitering eastward, was aware of some excitement in the town. A press of people, all moving his way, gathered volume as he advanced. He asked the reason of a neighbour, and was told that Her Majesty was to go that morning in state to Paul’s Cross to hear a notable Reformer preach. He pushed on, and somewhere beyond the Palace gained a position in the crowd whence, obscurely situated himself, he could see the procession pass. He had no desire to risk a second meeting at close quarters with the man from whom, of all souls in the teeming city, he felt the most alienated and apart.
He had not long to wait before a vast blare of horns announced the Queen’s coming. She was preceded by a great company of halberdiers, on whose heels followed a band of drummers and trumpeters, a little army in number, from whose hundreds of instruments arose—for Her Majesty liked her music strong—a shattering din which tore the very air into tatters. Thereafter appeared a company of morris dancers, men and girls, in full beribboned panoply—Maid Marian, Morisco, Franciscan friar and the lot—all reeling and capering and intertwining as they flowed on with the procession, of which the very next instalment was Her Grace herself, a gorgeous idol in a gorgeous palanquin, borne on the shoulders of six high gentlemen of the Court, and smiling on her good people as she passed. Before the litter walked my Lord Hunsdon, carrying the sword of State, and beside and behind it thronged an immense train of lords and ladies on foot, every one bareheaded and resplendent in velvet and satin and flashing jewels. To these again succeeded soldiers, a full thousand of them and divided into companies, between which came rumbling behind their prancing teams no less than ten great pieces of ordnance, whose purpose was peaceful display, while, to finish all, a couple of great white bears in shining collars, ten keepers holding by gilded chains to each collar, shuffled out the climax, their heads hanging, their red tongues lolling, their eyes smouldering helpless animosity.
It was a stupendous exhibition; yet Brion found himself wondering what connexion it could possibly have with the pious object which had evoked it. Perhaps the morris dancers might have found precedent in the dance of David before the Ark; but what of the cannon and the bears? There was nothing of ritual about them. He was forced to the conclusion that when Her Majesty had a mind for an impressive display of herself—which was not infrequently the case—the nearest pretext was made to serve her purpose.
Well, he watched it all go by, and without distinguishing amid the glittering mob the person of him he least desired to look on; and, being satisfied with what he had seen, extricated himself from the crowd, and turned into one of the side lanes which led down to the river. He had hardly entered it, when he heard himself accosted from behind, and turned to see a breathless stranger addressing him.
‘Master Middleton, if I may venture the surmise?’
He was sallow and lank-featured, with an air of such nervous hurry about him that his voice shook in putting the question. He wore a dark cloak huddled about his shoulders, as if he were cold, and the slouch of his hat barely allowed his eyes to be seen. Brion bowed, wondering.
‘I carry a message from a friend of yours,’ said the stranger quickly—‘one Clerivault. He wished me to say that he followed you, despite your desire, and, having observed where you stood among the crowd, was able to give me directions, together with a description of your person, which led to this fortunate encounter. Your friend, I regret to say, has met with a mishap, and asks you to come to him.’
The frown which, on Brion’s face, had greeted the first part of this sentence, was changed to a look of pallor and alarm at the end.
‘Clerivault! Hurt!’ said he. ‘O! where is he?’
‘He has been carried into a house,’ said the stranger. ‘I will show you where. It is not a stone’s throw away.’
They went off at a race together, down the very lane they were in. It was a mere deserted wynd, sunk like a deep ravine in a hill of gloomy stone. As he hurried on, the young man put an agitated question:—
‘How hurt? You did not say.’
‘A moment,’ said the stranger, stopping. ‘You will see for yourself in a moment.’
They had come to an iron-studded door set in the blank wall of a great building, and with a couple of steps leading up to it. The stranger took the steps at a bound, and knocked on the door. It was opened immediately, and he beckoned Brion to mount and follow. The boy, an easy prey in his excitement and inexperience, complied, unsuspecting. The moment he was in, the door slammed to behind him with a noise of thunder, which seemed to reverberate through adjacent halls; and darkness, profound after the sunshine of the streets, rushed upon him like a blinding night. He stood paralysed a moment, and then, ‘Where am I?’ he said aloud, groping out with his hands. And even in the act, as if he had proffered those for manacling, they were seized on either side in an iron grip, and he knew himself a prisoner to some unknown power. He gave a little gasp—he was only a boy, after all—struggled a little; and then, feeling the futility of his efforts, resigned himself to what Fate might develop.
‘That’s wise,’ said a gruff low voice in his ear. ‘Twenty to one’s too great odds for even a gentleman game cock, young master.’
Slowly, as in a theatre, when dark veils are lifted one by one to simulate a gradual dawn, before Brion’s eyes, as they accustomed themselves to the gloom, came into shadowy being the shapes and forms about him. He stood, he saw, in a low vaulted chamber, a score of armed men surrounding him and the two who held him captive. Narrow shafts ran up into the groining of the roof, against one of which lolled he who had spoken in his ear, and who appeared to be the captain of the party. His conductor had disappeared—presumably to notify some one of his seizure—and silence and stagnation prevailed, pending, it seemed, the messenger’s return. The occasional clearing of a throat or the shuffle of a foot on the stone flags were the only sounds to break the dead stillness. Somewhere in front of him, and above the level of his eyes, a vertical line of silver, the merest thread, seemed to denote the presence of heavy curtains, shrouding the way into the inner recesses of the house; and on that line he fixed his attention.
He had made one attempt to break the silence, and had been roughly bidden by the officer to hold his tongue or he would be incontinently gagged. And so he stood mute, but raging in his heart over the damnable treachery which had been used to draw him into this snare. His one grain of comfort lay in Clerivault’s safety. Of that he was now convinced: the story had been devised, he saw, merely to entrap and secure him—how devised, with what intention and on what information, it were idle to speculate. He knew enough of the man into whose clutches, he never had a doubt, he had fallen, to know that he never lacked for agents and abettors in any sinister business he had on hand. But, for all that, it was nothing less than his own vanity and headstrong will which were responsible for this trouble. Clerivault had foreseen truly, and he had flouted in his conceit the faithful seer. Like a child he had blundered into the trap, and now he must pay the penalty for his obstinate folly—with what?
It was that thought which most maddened him—his real simplicity, and the self-sufficiency which had made it vulnerable to a blatant imposture. His passion rose with his sense of humiliation. Was no course left to him but submission to the unknown force which held him here imprisoned? Better the risk of a dash for freedom than a surrender so spiritless.
The door by which he had entered was behind him. Barred and bolted, there was no hope of escape that way. But—what the curtains hid—if he could once gain the intricacies of the house beyond!
He had been standing so passive as to lull his guards into a sense of false security, and the rigour of their hold on his arms had a little relaxed itself in consequence. He was as lithe and muscular as a young leopard. With a sudden leap and wrench he tore himself free and, before they could recover from their surprise, was bounding for the thread of light. He gained this small advantage, that in the dusk, and the confusion of the general rush to recapture him, he had time, before he was beset, to draw his sword; but he could do no more, since an obstacle he had not foreseen, in the shape of a short flight of steps leading to the curtains, baulked and brought him to bay. He laid one fellow’s cheek open with his blade; but he had no play in the crush for his sword arm, and could only shorten his weapon and stab ineffectively, as, feeling for the steps with his heels, he essayed to mount them backwards one by one. The noise was at its height—the scuffle of feet, the clash of steel, the calling of the officer to his men to take him alive o’ God’s name, and do him no hurt on peril of their heads—when the curtains at Brion’s back parted, letting in a faint gush of light, and with it the apparition of a white panic-struck face. The boy glanced round, saw the beast who had entrapped him, and, with a mighty effort and a cry of rage, leapt the remaining step and fell tooth and nail upon his enemy. The man went down under him with a yelp like a bitten dog’s, and lay writhing. But the end was come. Before the youngster could seize his blade into position, the whole party was upon him, and he was severed from his prey and set, torn and dishevelled on his feet, his sword wrested from him and his arms bound behind his back. And there he stood, panting and scornful, jeering at the pitiful figure of the other, as they set him too, shaking like a jelly, upright.
‘See the meal-faced pitcher-bawd,’ cried he, ‘how his valour fits with his profession!’
There was a stifled laugh or two, and the man, casting a fell venomous look about him, made a mute gesture to the others to follow, and went on himself before. The curtain had been torn aside in the fracas, revealing a narrow dim-lit passage down which the whole party made its way, the prisoner held secure in its midst. But Brion had no further thought to escape, and, breathed and defenceless as he was, allowed himself to be carried along unresisting.
Deep into the bowels of the building, like the passage tunnelled in a pyramid, ran the corridor, until at length it opened into a lofty stone hall, octagonal in shape, and having a peaked timbered roof with coats of arms emblazoned in its triangles, at whose apex an iron lantern, caging rather than releasing the little daylight which sought to enter and explore the glooms beneath, just enabled it to dilute their melancholy, and to reveal in each of the eight sections of the wall a heavy curtain hanging, denoting the presence of a room beyond.
Before one of these curtains the guard halted their prisoner, while the decoy, cringing and fulsome, parted the folds and vanished within. A muffled wrath of words followed, and presently the white face of the creature reappeared, and he whispered, his breath fluttering, in the Captain’s ear. That officer grunted, and gave an order to his men:—
‘Stand by till I call.’ He turned to Brion: ‘Now, young Sir’—and, taking him by one of his bound arms, led him into the room. The curtain closed behind them.
It was no great chamber—a spacious closet might describe it—but rich beyond the wont in its appointments. There was a Turkey carpet on the floor; another, inventoried by that name, on the table—‘of crimson velvet, richly embroidered with my Lord’s posie, bears and ragged staves of clothe of goulde and silver, garnished upon the seames and aboute with goulde lace, fringed accordinglie, and lyned with crimson taffeta sarsenett.’ And on it stood a flagon of hammered gold, from which, it seemed, my Lord had just drunk. The walls were panelled, and set in their darkness like a gem was a portrait of the Queen by Zucchero. From the ceiling hung a brazen candelabrum, with many branches. The chairs were upholstered in crimson velvet, and on one of them, drawn up before the hearth, on which a fire of sea-coal burned, sat the expected figure of him whom out of all the world Brion had most wished to avoid, yet whom, it seemed, in some fateful way, he was most destined to encounter. Yet, since it was his destiny, he set his neck stiffly to it, and faced his captor with a look of proud defiance.
The soldier, staying his convoy within some three yards distance of this brooding figure, put his heels together with a click and saluted. At the sound, my Lord brought his chair about, a little labouredly, and setting his hands on his thighs, looked hard and curiously into the face of the boy before him. Steady as a rock, Brion returned the gaze. ‘I will know him, now I see him,’ he thought.
He was in his fiftieth year, burly, short-necked and nearly bald. His complexion was colourless; his strong eyebrows, mustachio and full spade beard were as black, whether from nature or artifice, as black ink. He had a black velvet bonnet on his head, and the suit he wore might have been the dark-man’s livery. He looked a figure cut out of jet and ivory. Under the impassivity of his expression seemed to lurk a fierce and watchful arrogance, in the wings of his aquiline nose, in the pupils of his eyes, which were more often turned towards this ear or the other than set forthright in their sockets. Like a suspicious dog he appeared to listen with eyes and ears together, while his head was held as stiff as pride. His voice came hoarse and ruttish, rumbling in his throat, when he spoke at last:—
‘How now, boy! Are these your manners, being invited to my house to fall upon my servants and beat and maltreat them?’
‘Such an invitation,’ answered Brion, ‘as the fowler lures his quarry withal. For my manners, not being framed on falsehood and cozenage, they were not made to please you.’
His boldness seemed to strike a very stillness in the room, so tense that one could hear, as it were, the Captain’s skin pricking. Leicester’s expression did not change or move, but his nostrils flickered, and sudden lamps seemed turned up in his eyes.
‘So?’ he said softly: ‘a spirited retort; yet wise, in the circumstances?—Well, we’ll question. Dost know me—who I am?’
‘Too well, indeed.’
‘Too well, yet not well enough, I’ll venture, or some thought of peril might come to sing in you a milder note.’
‘I have that thought,’ said Brion. ‘I should be a fool not to.’
‘Ah! You have that thought—and, mayhap, the guilty conscience that fathered it?’
‘I miss your meaning.’
‘I think not. Confess your design; make a clean breast of it; and perchance—I’ll not say; but certain considerations may weigh with me—your peril may be less.’
‘Will you tell me my design? I have known of none, but to avoid where I could the very thought and sight of you.’
‘Wherefore you waited me in a public place, and dared, you young presumptuous fool, to make public manifestation of your feelings. What, you’d show your high displeasure, would you!’
He rocked a little, back and forth, his lip lifting.
‘I waited you not,’ answered Brion, undaunted. ‘That meeting—it was the last from my desire. Methinks, had I foreseen it, I had never come to London.’
‘Better for you, sirrah, an you had not, nor listened to the flattering persuasions of a crafty counsellor: better had you stayed in your rustic obscurity, satisfied, with that old besotted rogue, your kinsman, to risk the penalties for recusancy, than run the deadlier peril of a throw with me. Ah, that opens your eyes! You did not guess, maybe, the range of my knowledge, when you complotted to discredit me.’
‘With whom? But what is the use to ask. I have plotted with no one—been guilty of no design against your credit. As to my feelings, I cannot control my instincts, nor would not if I could. For my kinsman, who loved and cherished me, when those who had owed me all disclaimed their debt, he is no rogue—I throw the slander in your teeth. It is worthy of one whose range of knowledge works through such vile means and instruments as have been used to-day to trap an unsuspecting boy. Belike it was he, that same lying reptile, that informed you of how I fell away that morning on seeing you. The action was of repulsion—in itself a convincing witness to any but a fawning pickthank. A plotter, methinks, had concealed his feelings more than I did.’
Again, in the silence that succeeded this hot outburst, it was as if the Captain’s nerves vibrated audibly in his body. Awaiting the certain consequences of such mad temerity, he stole a significant glance at his lord, and saw in the intolerant face an expression which both startled and perplexed him. There was some obstupefaction in it, but not the fury he had expected. Instead, interest, curiosity, a suggestion of some faint and hard-held emotion, seemed to battle there for ascendancy or suppression. Yet the words that followed, though not what he had looked for, were sneering enough:—
‘So innocent and yet so fearful! So guiltless a conscience, and yet that thought of peril! They hardly consort, according to my mind.’
The boy gave a curt laugh.
‘Decoyed hither by a lie, fallen upon and bound, my weapon taken from me; above all the character of him that holds me helpless in his power—it were unnatural for me, were it not, to dream of any harm designed me in such circumstances? Well, do your work. I understand so much of it that I am not a pleasant reminder in your eyes.’
‘Ha! I will not ask of what.’
‘I would not.’
‘For your disarming, you brought it on yourself.’
‘Would I had killed thine informer first.’
‘And so, with thy bloody sword, on me!’
Brion looked steadily into the eyes of him that spoke it.
‘O!’ he said softly: ‘not uponherson, but upon you, be charged that black unnatural thought.’
Leicester started ever so slightly, moved uneasily in his seat, looked away, and again at the upright figure before him.
‘Thou hast a bold spirit, boy,’ he said harshly.
‘Would I could trace it to a better source,’ answered Brion.
‘Thou——’ he looked for a moment as if he had received a blow; then again his expression changed. ‘Unbind him, Granton,’ he said.
The soldier loosed the cord, setting the prisoner free. Leicester pointed to the curtain. ‘Within call,’ said he. ‘I’ll trust him.’
Granton disappeared, and the two were left alone together. The moment that was so, their eyes met in steady challenge.
‘I might answer,’ said my lord, in a low voice, ‘would I could trace my better self therein.’ He seemed to ponder on the face before him in a darkly brooding way. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you would not kill me?’
He received no answer but the same steadfast look, nor seemed to expect one.
‘Nor,’ he added, ‘design me any evil?’
‘I have told you,’ was the reply, ‘my sole design is and ever has been to forget you live.’
Again a silence ensued, until suddenly Leicester spoke again:—
‘What is your purpose, tell me, in seeking to be introduced at Court?’
‘I do not seek.’
‘What! it was not for that you were persuaded to leave your retreat?’
‘So far from it that the knowledge of your presence there had made me reject such an offer though a thousand times more pressed.’
‘So, it was pressed?’
‘In a way—good-humouredly.’
‘By whom?’
‘By one that would do me a service—a friend.’
‘And me a dis-service, perchance?’
‘Your name was never mentioned between us, nor so much as thought on, by him, I’ll swear.’
‘How know you what was in his heart?’
‘I know something of his heart. It is a fine and generous one, incapable of perfidy. Besides, why should he think of you in this connexion of his offer, or suspect the truth? Be sure I have not told it him, nor any. I am not so enamoured of it. I protested I would not be a courtier; and he was fain to let it rest at that, ceasing to importune me when he saw I was resolved; implying I might be right—that it was no great matter after all—as indeed it was not.’
Believing what he said, he spoke with obvious sincerity—enough to convince even the dark suspicious nature of him that listened, and who had put these questions—with what intent?
Was a corner of the veil here lifted? Hardly enough for Brion to gather more than a faint surmise of what lay behind. Yet the whole truth, if revealed, had seemed a pitiful enough thing to be clothed in such a giant’s robe of artifice. It turned upon one, grown old as his time judged age, and by reason of his years, perhaps, and their disqualifying ravages, become sensible of a loosened hold on those royal affections he had once commanded. It turned upon the thought of an infidelity committed in long past days, and never suspected by her who, thinking their then mutual faith inviolable, would bitterly resent that lost illusion, and visit his deception on his head in terms of final estrangement, finding therein a pretext for ridding herself of what, one might suspect, already a little irked her. It turned upon this pretty witness to his faithlessness—never, indeed, lost wholly sight of—and how at a late day his sin had come home to roost in him, and how it might be used by designing enemies to bring about his ruin. It turned upon all such considerations far more than upon any real suspicion that a vengeful spirit in this young victim of his wrongdoing nursed designs upon his life; though that thought, too, had been weighed and balanced. And now—was he reassured? He believed so. The boy’s scornful repudiation of him was the best evidence in his favour, and it was for that very reason that he had suffered his young defiance and forgiven him his insolence. Had it been otherwise, had his suspicion been in any way confirmed, he would have disposed of him as ruthlessly and remorselessly as he would of any alien conspirator snared into his hands. But now, being reassured, and at liberty to consider him for himself, and not for his imagined designs, a certain emotion, weak and obscure, strange even to himself, but quite genuine in its nature, allowed itself a little room in his breast for play. The eyes which had scorned him, the spirit which had defied, became notes for admiration. They reflected credit on himself; he felt a pride in them; he had a sudden wish to stand well with the boy.
And Brion? He neither guessed, nor was ever to know, the secret motives which had underlain this interrogation. That this man suspected him of scheming in some diabolical way against his life and fortunes was the one apparent thing; and with that explanation of a mystery he must rest content. He had no heart or wish, indeed, to inquire further; he wanted only, as he had himself truthfully declared, to put him for ever out of his mind.
A long time Leicester sat gazing into the young undaunted face, as if striving to recall some memory from it. At length he sighed and spoke:—
‘Shall I believe thee? Well, sith thy truth unflatters me, I will believe it truth. Yet fain would I learn what brought thee to London, and in that company?’
‘I shall not tell you what.’
‘Rash and headstrong! Bethink you what you say.’
‘I do, and say it. I shall not tell you. What brought me was no thought of you, nor anything concerning you. Have I not said it? I am not so proud of this connexion that I wish to vaunt it. To deny it, rather, since I had no voice in it. Be assured of that. It shall never be betrayed for me.’
‘Nor shall word to living soul of this interview—eh—an I let thee free?’
‘That follows—though I give my promise, if you will.’
‘Ah!’ He put his hands on the elbow of his chair, preparing to rise. ‘Well, thou hast been in peril—believe me. That thou hast escaped it, thank her whose trustful spirit looks from out thine eyes. For thy rash insolence—I forgive it.’ He got heavily to his feet, went forth and back once or twice in a narrow space, and stopped before the young man.
‘Why will you hate me?’ he said.
‘Have I much reason to love?’ answered Brion, his voice yielding a little.
‘So you do hate me?’
‘Hate connotes harm. I would not harm you, before God.’
‘Will you—for her sake—call me once by that name your duty owes me?’
The boy shook his head. Something rose in his throat, hard as he struggled to resist it. ‘I could not,’ he whispered.
Leicester turned away, without a word. He stood looking down upon the glowing hearth.
‘It may chance, boy,’ he said, in a voice so strange and moving in such a man that it seemed to betray one secret of his influence over impressionable hearts—‘that you judge me too harshly. That I risked greatly where I loved may be no condonation of my fault, yet at least it may testify to the wholeness of my devotion. For my wrong to thee, I regret it. Since there is no remedy, I will say no more. I could take pride in thee, but I may not. It is better we should never meet again. Go, and for her sake remember me as kindly as thou mayst. Call Granton hither.’
But Brion did not at once obey. Pride and emotion fought within him for mastery; his breast heaved; a moisture had sprung to his eyes. Suddenly, with an impulsive movement, he lifted the other’s unresisting hand, and kissed it once gently, and gently put it from him. Then he turned, and went hurriedly to the door, and beckoned to the Captain, who stood with his men in the hall. The soldier strode to the summons.
‘Granton,’ said his lord, without turning his head, ‘restore this youth his sword, and let him free. He is my friend, Granton.’
And so it was that Brion, a man escaped from a deadly hazard, yet keeping for ever in his mind the picture of that tragic hour, the gloomy building and the room set like a lustrous shrine in its midst, found himself once more in the free and open street, an exultation at his heart, but also a wistful pain. That, in a measure, was never to leave him; yet even so it was as balsam on an ancient wound, the amelioration of one hurt by another. And, since it was so, his spirit henceforth felt a certain peace which it had never yet quite known. If he had lost something, he had gained no less in compensation.
He went straight back to his inn; and surely the sun had never shone so bright to him nor the air breathed so sweet. He found Clerivault pacing the yard, restless and uneasy, and was moved to remorse hearing the enormous sigh of relief with which that good creature greeted his return. It touched his humbled vanity to the quick. He answered to it, his eyes shining:—
‘Hast thou so felt my truancy, then?’
‘No matter what I have felt, sir,’ was the reply, ‘since you are here again. I would be no man’s pursuing conscience, I.’
‘You are; you were, Clerivault. The figure of you dogged my ungrateful heels.’
‘On my honour, Sir, I have not moved from here, as you bade me.’
‘I know it, good heart. I spoke but metaphorically. I was a thankless ingrate—for the last time, where thy love is in question, I do hope. Forgive me, Clerivault.’
‘Forgive thee!’ The man lifted his arms and eyes to heaven as if in mute ecstatic protest. ‘Forgive my balm, my solace, my one friend? Say it again, sweetheart. I could kiss thy very shadow for that word!’
Hadhis fears in any degree been justified? That disquieting suspicion may have just entered Clerivault’s mind, seeking for the clue to some connexion between his young master’s mental and material conditions. Something, it was evident, had torn and dishevelled that gentleman’s attire, as something had disturbed his moral equilibrium. The good fellow’s uneasiness was so great that he could not forbear significantly drawing Brion’s attention to the state of his clothes. The youngster laughed.
‘A brawl, Clerivault,’ said he. ‘I lacked my Mentor for the occasion. That is enough admitted, by your leave. Methinks, all said, I have had sufficient of London for one time, and incline to our good Devon again. What say you?’
What, indeed, but a most relieved acquiescence? He was glad to the heart to find his charge so minded—so glad that he was content to let the other question lapse in the joy of the near prospect of being rid of its burdensome responsibility.
And Brion himself? In truth the novel interests which this enterprise had brought him were small compensation for the emotional experiences he had had to suffer in their course. London, for all her promise, had given him but derision and disappointment—a hate, perhaps, dispelled, but a bright illusion darkened; a new serenity won, but an old sorrow made more sorrowful. Yes, he was better back among his moors and streams and lonely hills.
One day before they left they rode over to Clapham to pay a visit, which the young man reproached himself with having already delayed to make too long. Yet that visit, too, when accomplished, proved a sorrow and a disappointment. More than eight years had passed since he had ridden, an anxious, unhappy boy, from the gates of the home which for so long time had protected and sheltered him; and now reapproaching it, and recalling its familiar environments, his heart was wonderfully moved with the thought of all that that ancient affection had meant for him. He had heard little of the family during the interval. A letter or two, in the early days of the severance, had passed—one, a little billet, in sedate language and misshapen script, from baby Alse—but with the soon cessation of that small correspondence all association with his former intimates seemed ended. He did not know who was to blame: nobody, perhaps, but only circumstance, in a day of difficult communications. But anyhow such was the case; and he was riding now, with a feeling of strange emotion, to take up what severed ties?
Alas! on the very threshold of his expectations a cruel rebuff awaited him. The old school-house was in its place, but with other tenants, and with all its most familiar features improved out of recognition. He learned the facts from those who lived there. The good old untidy Dame, so improvident yet so lovable, so busy yet so unbusinesslike, was dead these many years; the boys, Gregory and Richard, were, the one, in an attorney’s office at Bristol, the other, a clerk at Oxford; the ex-Divine himself, burdened with years, and much reduced in circumstances since his scholars had gradually deserted him with his faculties, lived with his only daughter, now grown a comely young woman, in a humble way in a small domicile near the church.
Sorry at heart, Brion sought and found them there. It was indeed a modest tenement, but bright and clean—one of a little group standing almost against the walls of the old church of which the poor man himself had been at one time vicar. He hardly knew his former ward and pupil; seemed lost in the little woes and selfishnesses of senility, on which his daughter waited with a grave and patient motherliness which was very pretty and touching. She had grown out of Brion’s memory—not he out of hers. She seemed to measure him with her candid gray eyes, shyly, but with no lack of self-possession. He thought he read a quiet rebuke in them, read in her manner a pride of gentle repulse of an interest which years of so long neglect made little better than an effrontery. Such was his impression, though she may have meant nothing of the sort. She took him, by his own wish, to see her mother’s grave in the churchyard hard by, and watched him as he plucked a rose from a brier and laid it, with a kiss to its petals, under the headstone. And after that, when he spoke of old days, she seemed to answer with a more responsive kindness. They went into the church together, and he read once more the texts on the walls, which had been painted there in accordance with the great Queen’s own instructions, and on samples of which he had so often, as a child, put his own infantine interpretation. There was the ‘Man doth not live by bread alone,’ which on Sundays had always served him for a sort of jubilant sanction of the chopping dinner to follow, and presented the Deity as a jolly hospitable host, scorning half-measures; there was the ‘Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards,’ which had brought an unfailing picture of the village blacksmith, whose wife was a notorious scold; there was the ‘Wizards that peep and that mutter,’ a cryptic and suspicious contribution—displayed near the pulpit, too—which had afforded him many delicious thrills. He fell into a smiling reverie, recalling them all and their associations, and only roused from it with a sigh to hear the girl beside him speaking:—
‘Mother never forgot you, Master Middleton. You were in her mind to the last.’
He looked wistfully in her face; then took her hand and led her from the building. At the door he stopped, to point mutely to yet another scroll upon the wall:—
‘I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.’
‘You will let me, Alse?’ he entreated outside. ‘I have the right and the means to, notwithstanding all these years of separation.’
She understood him at once; but she shook her head, with a bright smile:—
‘It is not so bad as that. We have enough, and to be independent and happy on. When the time comes, my brothers will care for me.’
He felt he could not urge her further without discredit to himself and insult to that brave young spirit. If, in her eyes, he had forfeited his right to, in her eyes persistence would but blacken his case; and that he would not risk. He went back with her to the house, where, like a proper little hostess, she insisted upon serving him and Clerivault with a stirrup-cup of sweet metheglin to warm them for their homeward journey. He kissed his hand to her on starting. ‘Goodbye, dear Alse!’ he said. But she only dropped him a staid little courtesy in response, with a ‘Fare thee well, Master Middleton.’
He was very silent as he rode back; might have felt even a deeper preoccupation could he have guessed how those same sweet eyes would go following his receding figure in imagination, on and on into the night, until they parted with it in the land of dreams, where hopeless Fancy yields itself to Oblivion.
‘A winsome little lady, Sir,’ said Clerivault, breaking into his abstraction, with an odd side-glance. ‘A man might do worse than wive with such.’
‘Worse!’ He turned on his comrade, with a sudden violence: ‘I tell you no gentleman of honour and renown but might count it his rich fortune to possess her—a gentleman—the best—nor such an one as, lapped in self-sufficiency, forgets past benefits—old claims and affections—a toad of ingratitude——’
He broke off with a choke, and spurring his horse in a quick fury, sprang on ahead. The other thought it wise to trail behind and let the subject be.
On the day following this visit Brion went to say good-bye to his friend, the Captain of the Queen’s Guard. Raleigh came out to see him at the postern-gate which lay near his quarters. He was splendidly equipped, being just about to attend the Queen’s Majesty on some ceremonial visit, and his manner in consequence was a little abstracted and hurried, though smilingly genial.
‘Well,’ said he, ‘I should be the last to traverse that decision, who lured thee hither with a bait so false. Acquit me of that. I am not of those who would rather lose a friend than a jest. May the next enterprise I draw thee on to be more fortunate. You’ll remember your pledge to that?’
‘The expedition? Did I pledge myself?’
‘Or I thee,forthyself. It shall take shape in no long time. ’Tis such as thou I’ll need, dear lad. And the patriot—above all the immense patriot.’
Brion laughed, and they parted. That same afternoon he and Clerivault started on their long journey homeward.
Thethree or four years immediately succeeding that of Brion’s first visit to London were ominous years for England—a fact which she did not fail to appreciate.