Chapter XIX: Marking Time

Brion put up at that same _Cock_ tavern in Westminster where he had slept on the first night of his journey westward. It was a well-served hostelry in a good locality, and it was within convenient call of his friend the Captain, who, by virtue of his appointment to the Queen’s Guard, had been allocated quarters in the royal palace of Whitehall, where her Majesty was now holding her Court. Moreover a certain tenderness of association inclined him to the place, whose reacquaintance, in the light of an enlarged vision, he was curious to make. It stood the test very agreeably, and proved as comfortable a headquarters for him and Clerivault as any more pretentious they might have chanced on.

The paragon was, of course, an experienced Londoner, and it was under his guidance that Brion made his first real acquaintance with the Town. It seemed to him the most beautiful city that mind could conceive. Perhaps that impression may have been partly due to his regarding it, during these first days, through a luminous mist of expectancy touching the person of her whose golden shrine it contained hid somewhere in the depths of its labyrinthine mysteries. But indeed it was a fair town; built up of colour and picturesqueness; beating with a fierce and palpitating life; full of a sort of dashing merriment which reminded Brion somehow of late-fallen raindrops on eaves, dancing and sparkling and shaking off under a race of wind and brave opened sky. Everybody seemed in a hurry--to sell, to buy, to show off, to fight, to enjoy; as if each day were the last day of the holidays, and the ultimate flavour and profit must be got out of it before the Fair closed. To look down any street was to see its perspective like a turning kaleidoscope, with colours and patterns perpetually changing and forming into new bewildering complications. And there were swinging signs and fluttering banners everywhere, with jingle of harness and blast of horns, as if victory in the abstract was always in the air, and rehearsals for its celebration were a never-ending occurrence.

While he waited, as composedly as he could, news from Raleigh, the youngster turned the time on his hands to the best account of exploration he and Clerivault could contrive. They visited the Abbey, and such parts of the ancient palace of Westminster as had survived the disastrous fire of fifty years before--the Hall, the beautiful Chapel, and the Star and Painted Chambers; they went to Charing village to view the noble cross erected by the first Edward to the memory of his dead Queen; and they pushed further, to the bar-gate which led into the liberties of the City, a great timber barrier mortised into the adjoining houses, and bearing on its roof a row of iron spikes, some with dried and blackened heads on them, like a grotesque sort of cocoanuts put up for any who listed to roll, bowl, or pitch at. There was one, cocked askew, that seemed to leer at Brion as he hurried beneath it, as if it speculated obscenely on the chances of having him up there for a companion some day; and another that, tilted back, appeared to be watching a flight of rooks winging overhead. Ugly memento mori they were in such a feast of colour, skulls and cross-bones on an emblazoned standard, yet not so dark a blot on the City as its living profanities. For in St Paul’s Church, which the two went to visit, they found the whole nave blocked with unhallowed traffic. Here was a hiring fair for low class servants; there a cheap-jack bawling his goods from a cart, the donkey that drew it standing blinking in the shafts, while a merry-Andrew intervened with coarse jests, or tumbled for the delectation of the gaping crowd. There were groups of thieves and harlots squatted on the pavement about the bases of the great columns, and drinking and quarrelling as they sat. Cheats, gulls, copper-captains, flaunting women and swaggering gallants; the hungry and the homeless; the fugitive and the spy; the clerical parasite and the convicted bankrupt, gathered and mingled here, whether for sanctuary or profit, and made of the Temple one vast house of abomination. Nor might the Queen herself, acting Heaven’s vicegerent, scourge the evil forth; for in spite of all her severe edicts for cleansing the place, the swarm would perpetually regather, like flies disturbed from carrion, the moment the interruption was past.

Brion, though willing to be an unimpassioned philosopher, found himself regarding the scene with a regret that the cleansing had not come in a wholesale holocaust, when fire--here also--had, not so many years before, consumed the lofty wooden spire and threatened the whole building with destruction. It had been struck by lightning during a great storm, and it seemed strange that the judgment of God should have withheld itself something short of its complete execution. But, perhaps, unlike Sodom, there had been found sufficient good men among its Chapter to qualify, for the time being, the Divine chastisement.

The two had soon enough of watching the throng, and of listening to its dull reverberating clamour. The sound, made up of countless volubility and the tramp of innumerable feet, all rising into inarticulate echoes, was like a roar of surf levelled by distance, or the drone of bees in a gigantic hive. It thudded on the brain, producing after a time a feeling of mental numbness, so that Brion was glad to escape into the open, and to draw in air uncontaminated by the foul breath of sacrilege. He had had enough of St Paul’s, and did not want to go there again. But that was only one disillusionment in a world of exciting novelties.

One day they went to see the house in Chancellor’s Lane where the great Cardinal had lived in the Queen’s father’s time; and, being so near, paid a visit to Gray’s Inn, where Clerivault pointed out to Brion his Uncle’s former residence. And the boy looked on the place in silence, a strange emotion at his heart; for were not those rooms known to his mother too, since it was thence the little Book of Hours had been dated? He had never once spoken to Clerivault on that subject, though he was well enough aware that for that faithful soul, being in his master’s confidence, it held no secrets. But he could not bring his mind to discuss with any one, however sympathetic, a tragedy so intimate and so sacred.

On another, and a memorable, day, they took boat at Westminster and were rowed down the river, passing by the way between the royal gardens of Whitehall and the Queen’s vineyards on the opposite shore, and thence dropping leisurely, by a succession of stately residences--themselves palaces in their degree, as the great lords who inhabited them were only lesser Kings--to the _Three Cranes_ Stairs in Southwark, where they went ashore, and saw a bear-baiting at the Ring in Bankside, and afterwards dined nobly at the Falcon Inn, beloved of wits and playwrights. Thence, returning by way of Blackfriars, they made for the theatre, and saw the Earl of Leicester’s servants play in a very tragic tragedy, called _Arden of Feversham_, by one Thomas Kyd--a performance which affected Brion’s imagination as vividly as the name of the company over-clouded it.

But it was not the only occasion on which a dark memory was to be recalled to him. For so it happened that, walking one morning with Clerivault in the precincts of Whitehall, they saw the Queen ride forth, with a company of gentlemen, to go a’hawking in the great guarded Chase which stretched away westwards from opposite the palace front, and which came afterwards to be called the Park of St James’s. Her Grace was all in green, very handsomely bedecked, and rode a white barb, which stepped and arched its neck as proudly as though it were conscious of the nature of its burden; but Brion had hardly eyes for that pleasant vision, before he was struck aback by the sight of a foremost member of the party who rode close at her Majesty’s left hand.

Seventeen transforming years had passed since that face had last appeared to him, yet he was as certain of it as though he again stood, a wondering child, on the Richmond road, and saw the servant ride up, and heard the vicious thwack across the blinded eyes. And, as then, hate and indignation surged up in his heart, and cried it alien from one so arrogant and so malignant. Splendour and daring were this man’s, but gained at every sacrifice of truth and humanity. He had grown in these years somewhat bald and portly, but the cold furtive eye was unchanged, as were the impassive vindictiveness and the measuring cruelty which underlay his whole expression. And yet women could be found to sacrifice to such an idol, and to yield their all to the wicked hypocrisy which, to the masculine observer, simply flaunted itself on that countenance. Truly there must be a blind spot in their psychology, which Love, for the benefit of his own villain sex, had once set there with a kiss. Else how could they so often overlook the obvious.

He passed so close to Brion that the young man could have touched him. He shrank back rather, as from something noisome and unclean, and with such a repellant frown on his face as it was fortunate, perhaps, the great man failed to observe. But he was in close converse with the Queen, and was as inattentive to the rabble about him as though they had been sheep.

But the moment the little party was well gone by, Brion felt his arm gripped by Clerivault. He looked, and saw the paragon’s face a sickly yellow, while his eyes were alight with panic.

‘God’s ’slid!’ said he, in a hoarse whisper: ‘Why did you do that--look like that? Come away, ere some flying rumour chance to reach his ear!’

‘Let it,’ answered Brion fiercely. ‘I budge for no man’s humour.’

‘Budge, budge!’ cried the other, in a sweat of despair. ‘The rack will make you budge a foot’s length ere you know it. Wist you not his name? Come for my sake, if not your own.’

That argument prevailed, and the boy allowed himself to be led away.

‘Clerivault,’ he said presently, in a stiff strait voice, when they were come into a quiet place; ‘you asked me but now if I knew him. I knew and know him, Clerivault.’

He stopped, looking full into the other’s face, and said not another word. But there had been that of significance in his tone which was unmistakable. Clerivault dropped his eyes before that revelation of understanding.

‘Well,’ he muttered lamely: ‘if you know him, you know what is better avoided. Once a bad man is always a bad man--that is a legal dictum. You will gain most by remembering it, and forgetting all the rest.’

But Brion, though he uttered no word further on the subject, did not forget. The shadow of that encounter darkened all the sunny days which had gone before, and made ominous even the delirious prospect which had lured him from his far retreat. Henceforth he could never feel himself secure from the chance of a meeting, to which accident, or his own hot young blood, might give a sinister turn.