Chapter XVII: Certain Visitors

Somewhere in 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:--

First Course.

Calves’ foot soup Poached eggs with hop-tops Roasted hare and forcemeat balls Fried hasty pudding Mushrooms done in batter Black-caps (or applejohns--baked apples served in custard).

Second Course.

Fried lampreys A mess of cocks’ combs Roasted crane Spiced vegetables with eggs A great pasty of boar’s head Radishes Flavons, or open cheesecakes

--with copious canary, malmsey, and flagons of strong October ale to wash all down. The host, bareheaded, muttered for grace a brief _Benedictus Benedicat_, to which all, save Grenville, removed their hats--to put them on again to dine in.

‘I doff to no Latin,’ said the Sheriff, with a scowl.

Bagott moistened his unsteady lips with his tongue. He looked ill and agitated. The unexpectedness of this visit, with the moral of watchfulness and suspicion it implied, had sent his nerves by the board. He was the mere delapidated ruin of his former self, bloated, coarsened, discoloured. He could not control the twitching of his features or the aphasia which muddled his speech. The signs of his infirmity were too patent on him for any to mistake the cause. He only stared, hearing the rebuke, as if at a loss for its provocation. But Raleigh came to the rescue.

‘Unless to _caput aperio_,’ said he gaily. ‘For my part I would not be so churlish to an old friend.’

‘No friend of mine,’ growled the other. ‘I always hated it--a Popish crafty language. I was no College ape’ (Raleigh had been at Oriel) ‘to learn to mince and lisp in tricked-up phrases. A dead language, forsooth! Ay, and vampires they that feed on it. Give me full-blooded English for my share.’

‘To bless the food, withal? An you spoke your fullest, we’d see it blasted rather. I’ll say _Benedicat_ with all my heart, and see no more craft in it than a short cut to the joint. Come, Dick: a pledge to our host in better grace.’

Grenville drank it--surlily enough; but it warmed him to a reluctant if temporary urbanity. He was one of those who cannot concede a thing gracefully. He had suspected, perhaps wished to suspect, this man; his suspicions allayed, he grudged himself his own convincement. But already his civility was tempered with contempt when he saw the sort of creature he had to deal with. He had no eyes for any tragedy in this ruin; but only for the baseness of its material aspect; and when, as the dinner proceeded, and the ex-Judge, stimulated by copious libations, steadied, and ran a brief spasmodic stage of brilliancy, only to slide unexpectedly into a condition of maudlin incoherence, he shrugged his shoulders disdainfully, and, virtually turning them on his host, addressed himself for the remainder of the meal to Brion. Raleigh seemed to feel the young man’s discomfort, and to sympathise with it; but he could do no more than endeavour to keep the conversation on as natural a plane as possible.

‘This house?’ he asked once, interested in some chance allusion to the place: ‘it is a rare and old one?’

Brion did not know; but Grenville, who was well posted in local history, answered dogmatically for him:--

‘’Twas re-built in the Crookback’s reign, by one Miles Bagott, a Yorkist franklin. That was always a family, cry you mercy, young gentleman, to back the wrong horse.’

Bagott, some spark rekindling in his fuddled brain, looked the length of the table, with glazed eyes and a tipsy leer.

‘The wrong horse,’ said he, in a thick disjointed voice--‘the wrong horse may suttimes have the better tidle, and may hap to come to its own in the end.’

All eyes were turned on the speaker.

‘The better title, master?’ asked Grenville, with a sneer. ‘What better title? To the crown?’

The drunkard pursed his lips and nodded his head extravagantly. He had said, his manner expressed, all he meant to say.

The two visitors exchanged a quick glance; and then Grenville remarked, as if by design:--

‘Nathless I would not put Queen Mary of Scotland’s chance at a copper-mite.’

Both he and Raleigh seemed to wait for an answer; but none coming, save in more inebrious nods and chuckles, the former, with a ‘Bah!’ contemptuously uttered under his breath, turned again to Brion, who sat quite at a loss for the meaning of this passage, and continued:--

‘Withal this family _hath_ been’--with a significant emphasis on the ‘hath’--‘more creditable in its members than always in its tenants. You’ve heard of him that lived and died here before your day?’

‘Matthew Fulk the miser, Sir?’

‘So they called him. It might be. ’Twas the name of a bloody picaroon, had sailed the seas and pillaged and murdered in his time. He was said to have treasure hid here; and to have killed and pitched down the well some young conveniency that lived with him, and that came to learn too much. Wives’ tales, I doubt not. There was nothing found after his death. I saw him once, an old sanctimonious buck-fitch, in whose mouth butter had not melted.’

Brion listened, with open eyes. Here was a new garnish to an old tale which greatly enhanced its savour. A pirate! And the poor maid had found out his secret! At least that was a more plausible story than the demoniac immolation imagined by Mother Harlock.

‘_I_ should like to sail the seas,’ said he, his eyes shining; ‘but for a better purpose than robbery and murder.’

For the first time the grim Sheriff looked at him with interest.

‘What purpose?’ said he.

‘To carry England’s fame from land to land,’ answered the young man, ‘and, as doughty knighthood used, to uphold my mistress peerless against all the world.’

‘God’s ’slid! and so she is!’ cried Clerivault, in a high ecstatic voice. He had remained, a privileged attendant, when the meal was over, to carry the wine about. The Sheriff bent astonished wrathful brows on the daring interjector; but Raleigh regarded him with an amused curiosity.

‘What’s that, Sir donzel?’ said he. ‘You love your England?’

It was to put spark to tow, and set it flaring unquenchably. Clerivault forgot his duty, his company, his place, and broke forthwith, his eyes glittering, into a wild rhapsodic paean on his native land:--

‘Love her--ha! As the flower loves the sun, the parched soul water, the woman her way, the kid its milky dam. To carry England’s fame? Aye, thou dear gentle--through all the lands, like a sweet western gale that rains life and health on the dearth it visits. She shall make conquests, ha! but such as the liberal light makes of cramped darkness. We’ll go together; teach the world to know her for what she is; so sing her sweet and pastoral praises that whole peoples shall lay down their arms for very love, and yield themselves her subjects and her slaves. Earth shall surrender to her beauty, as willingly as it yields its frozen winters to spring with her daffodils and milk-white hawthorns. For where England sets her feet, does not the primrose break? She brings the atmosphere of her free and equitable fields into where’er she enters; and straight from that lovely invasion are born the darling wind-flower that is Our Lady’s child, and cowslips known for St Peter’s keys to Heaven, and wild hyacinth, our own St George’s bells that fought and slew the beast, and radiant mary-buds that cure most ills. These shall spring up, where’er we go, like Thebes its towers, to our song, and win the soils we tread to England. Or if we die, we die for England’s sake, and take possession with our fruitful bodies. All lands where English blood is shed and England’s sons lie buried are in part fiefs to England; for there each grave becomes a plat of English mould, rich breeding-ground of truth and chivalry, fair play, honour to the better man, forbearance in strength--all qualities summed up in this, the heart to conquer and the hate to pain. O, it is good to live for England, but sweeter still to die and be her prolific dust! Peerless, in truth, our fair mother--I take the word, sweet soul, from thee, as I would have thee take me with thee in the sharing of thy quest.’

He ceased; his voice fell; but silence still seemed to ripple on his lips, while the rapt exaltation in his eyes died slowly out. Raleigh applauded, with a somewhat kindling vision:--

‘Well sung!’ he said: ‘Here is another as passionate lover of his land.’

But the practical Sheriff snorted, finding little to understand in these dithyrambics.

‘I know naught of your cowslips and wind-flowers,’ he grumbled. ‘A general were best to take wheat and barley with him, where he foresees a long besiegement, and sow them in the open ground. And as to atmospheres, for all I’m a loyal Devon man, I’d liefer chance the fortunes of another climate than take my own with me.’

Raleigh laughed out: ‘O, thou rare Dick!’ and Brion, fearing to follow his example, rose, and went to Clerivault, and, gripping his hand, looked in his face with a whispered word:--

‘It shall be share and share alike, friend, when the time comes.’

The dinner finished, and Clerivault left to care for his master, who had fallen fast asleep with his head on the table, Brion went with his guests into the open air, where, strolling in the Courtyard, they came upon Nol porter at friendly trials of strength with Raleigh’s servant, one Nicholas Wright, a bulky Yorkshireman. And them they provoked to a wrestling bout on the sward, in which neither could best the other; after which the Sheriff, in his turn, fell asleep on a bench and snored in the sun. Then did this Mr Raleigh, with a very winning way he had, inviting and giving confidence in one, slip his arm under the young man’s, and ask him to come with him a little walk towards the moors, for that he had something of moment for his private ear. And Brion, foreseeing, perhaps, what was to follow, and naturally pleased, as a boy, over the condescension of so superlative a gallant, very willingly consented.

‘That is a rare fellow of thine, the patriot cup-bearer,’ said the soldier, as, leaving the bridge, they walked on together. ‘It warmed my heart to hear him.’

Brion smiled. ‘It was one Harlequin Clerivault, a creature as fantastic as his name, but with a heart of gold. You touched him on the quick, Sir. To start his brain on the subject of England is like laying open an emmet heap with your foot. It is a house gone wild at a blow.’

‘Well, I love him for it. Whence came the oddity?’

‘I know not; but the first of him for us was’--he paused, remembering his bond, and his cheek reddened.

‘Nay,’ said the other, quietly observant, ‘no need for you to answer. No need, mayhap, in the double sense, chancing I know already.’

‘You know?’

‘Why, what a tone? Think you it is no part of the duties of my friend the Sheriff to acquire some knowledge of his neighbours’ antecedents? Well, if this man of yours ought his peril to the monks he favoured, and his neck to your Uncle, that was long days ago, and certes in these he plays the part, with you, of a good Churchman. But why, lad, does your kinsman, the ex-Judge, never worship with his nephew in St Andrew’s Church in Ashburton?’

‘Because,’ began Brion--and stuck. He felt stupefied. This revelation of a sort of furtive vehmgericht sitting on their conduct, the while they had been living untroubled and unsuspecting, took him like a blow. But Raleigh laughed good-humouredly:--

‘Judge me for no inquisitor: only, remembering things, and setting this with that--you have never heard, mayhap, what put him out of favour with the Court?’

‘I heed no gossips, Sir,’ said the boy proudly; and then, remembering who had been his informant, blushed again, in grief at having so belied his innocent dear.

‘Well,’ said the other; ‘I say no more--only that it were a small wisdom on his part to condescend to bridle those same gossips by attending the reformed service now and again. Yet he may say he knows his own business better than I can tell him--and that’s the truth. For me, who both come and give advice uninvited, it is reassurance enough to have heard that passionist declaim. No schism worth the name in a house where such sentiment could answer such sentiment as his answered thine! That is the true orthodoxy for me--and eke shall be for my kinsman Dick Grenville. Loves England, quotha! By God he does--by God he does. And you’--he stopped in his walk, and looked Brion very honestly in the face. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘I am going to be as frank with you as I dare trust you will be with me; and I do entreat you to believe in my well-meaning candour, the which is designed to no insidious end, but wholly to serve one whom I am greatly inclined to love, and who I desire shall accept me for a true friend--yourself.’

What young fellow in Brion’s case would not have been touched by such a declaration from such a man? He answered, much moved, that his friendship was Master Raleigh’s for the asking.

‘And confidence,’ said the other, ‘as between two brothers, the elder of whom hath gained some wisdom in the world.’

‘And confidence,’ repeated Brion in a low voice.

‘Then,’ said Raleigh, ‘here’s at it. Your Uncle let fall but now at dinner a remark somewhat pertinent to the matter which brought us hither. You heard it, and Grenville’s answer. I’ll be open with you. There are whispers of some plot toward to dethrone the Queen and put Mary of Scotland in her place. You know nothing of it?’

‘Nothing--just Heaven!’

‘Nor your Uncle?’

Brion looked at him sadly.

‘You see what he is.’

‘I see,’ said the other, ‘and pity him and you. Then you think he is not involved?’

‘Not possible. He receives no correspondence; sees nobody, unless enforced; for years has held himself quite secluded.’

‘No midnight priests--no disguised emissaries of Spain?’

‘None. O!’ said the boy, ‘that I should have to say it. He hath become the very nerveless ruin of a man, incapable of plotting, of resisting even for one brief hour the enemy that kills him. If he had cunning in those words at all, I trow it was the cunning of a lawyer’s brain, haunted in its decay with old thoughts of deeds and titles.’

Raleigh, pondering the speaker, did not answer for some moments; then he heaved a great sigh, as of relief, and, recapturing the boy’s arm, the two resumed their stroll.

‘That’s like enow,’ said he--‘and so I’ll acquaint Grenville. ’Tis happily resolved; and now we’ll talk of other things.’

And so he did, and charmingly. He was full of life and anecdote. He was on his way to London shortly, where, he said, his pack of small accomplishments would find their most profitable market. ‘For,’ said he, ‘in all the world it is the little things gain great rewards, since man, being little, judges by little. But greatness must be content even with itself, since it cannot be content with little.’ He urged Brion to come with him; to persuade his impossible kinsman to let him go; to throw off the shackles of imagined duty which kept him wasting his young life among boors in a rustic isolation, and take that place in the world to which his gentle breeding and physical graces entitled him. He was frankly complimentary: he had obviously taken a fancy to the young fellow. He even hinted to him, though with a subtle delicacy, that he might find his bar sinister _no_ bar to his social advancement, but rather the contrary. And Brion understood without resentment. He had long decided his own attitude towards that question: for one thing to accept it as, virtually, an open secret; for another, to refuse to suffer for it in any way to himself, since honour was a matter of conscience, and not of arbitrary bestowal. But he only thanked his new friend, and answered that, like that friend himself, he must win his spurs before he took his reputation to market.

‘And so thou shalt,’ said the other admiringly. ‘Thou shalt carry thy quest knight-errantly, and strike for England’s name. Would I could go with thee to bruit her virtues. But the time may come. I see a vision in the West of a land great for adventure--the arena, it may hap, where shall be fought to a final settlement our quarrel with idolatrous Spain. Shall we leave all this and sail there together? Who knows what may come to pass. But first--the spurs. Is England, I am fain to ask, thine only love? A paladin so devout should wear a lady’s sleeve about his helm.’

Brion gave a little gasp, and the blood rushed to his heart. He had never yet spoken his secret to living soul. Should he break that silence now? He was suddenly and irresistibly tempted, such surety of earnest faith and sympathy he felt in this young soldier. Before he could resolve, the words were out of him:--

‘Mayhap I do.’

‘That’s well,’ said Raleigh. ‘No such incitement to chivalry in all the world. She’s sweet and fair, I know. Her name, that thy boon comrade may hold it housed and honoured in his heart!’

The young man hesitated one moment, then turned and looked the other glowingly in the eyes.

‘Joan Medley,’ he said.

‘Joan Medley!’ repeated Raleigh, and struck his breast: ‘There it lies shrined.’

‘You know her--have heard of her, perchance?’ asked Brion, the blood flushing his skin now that the murder was out. But the soldier shook his head.

‘Is she of this side? My home is _Fardel_ in Cornwood, east of Plymouth; and even so I am but late returned to it, having been long in France and the Low Countries.’

And then Brion told him all his secret, for what was the use to withhold the rest, when he had confessed so much. And as he spoke, the glamour of that sweet time returned upon him, so that his voice grew husky with passion and grief, and the recognition of that loss which could never now be made good.

‘Nay,’ said his comforter at the end: ‘never’s no word for love. A City knight, and I for London! I’ll get you news of her--contrive you meet again. She’s not forgot thee--take my word on’t. That face would linger in a maiden’s heart. Be of best cheer. Shalt hear from me within the month.’

His bright confidence had its effect upon the lover. Hope, like a blown-on-spark, began to glow and travel in his breast again. But still he shook his head:--

‘What an he hath forced her to wed where she abhorred?’

‘What an he hath not?’ was the answer. ‘I detect a touch of self-will in your lady. She would have her way on occasion. And she a spoilt and only child. Come, brave heart! We’ll pledge a silent toast to your re-meeting, at table this night.’

And they did so, their eyes encountering, while Brion thrilled all through.

There was little talk at supper--from which the host was absent--save for the young soldier’s recounting some of his experiences in the Low Countries. And, of those, what most impressed itself on Brion’s mind was a description of a certain engagement with the forces of Don John of Austria, natural son to the Emperor, in which, the day being sultry, the English--among whom was Raleigh--had flung off their armour and hacketons, and fought in their shirts, with a fury that had routed the enemy, though superior in numbers, and driven him to flight and confusion. And that was to be Englishmen all over, bold and reckless to folly, yet having confidence in nothing so much as the clean sheer force of their English blood to carry them through.

The little company went to bed early; and early next morning the gentlemen took their departure, Raleigh with many expressions of affection and reassurance to his young host, and even Sir Richard, gruffly unbending, with a word of what he meant to be courtly acknowledgement of the hospitality vouchsafed them.

Brion, with a kindling heart, watched them ride away.