Chapter XIII: Desolation

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 must _be_ a 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 that _she_ had 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.