Chapter XX: Mistress Joan Medley

‘Lucidus ordo!’ cried Raleigh. ‘I drink to the happy sequel!’

He was as good as his word, and in enthusiastic measure. He was come at last, and sat with his young friend in a private room of the _Cock_ tavern, as brilliant a figure as that dark wainscotting had ever been called on to enshrine. He lolled easily back, one leg crossed over the other, and lifted his cup high, gazing benevolently at the excited eager face of the boy, as it regarded him across the table. He had but just been describing his tactics, conceived and developed--with a rather unnecessary elaboration, Brion could not help but think--for the most romantic reception of a lover by his mistress. The lover had winced a little over the necessity of accepting any such outside means, however devoted, to the attainment of an end so sensitively personal; but he had to remember that it was he himself who, in the first instance, had volunteered the confidence; and in any case the enrapturing prospect silenced all scruples as to the methods of its evoking. He was to see Joan again, and that was ecstasy enough.

Raleigh had explained how he had gone to work to lead up to this ravishing consummation. He had got his friend, the ‘certain popinjay’ before mentioned, to carry him into Mistress Medley’s own presence, on the score that he must satisfy himself as to the lady’s person and manners before he could presume to give him advice, while repudiating any suspicion the other might conceive as to his absolute disinterestedness in the matter; and, having once procured that introduction, had followed it up with a private visit to the heiress on his own account, which, with his name and reputation, and the glamour of the Court about him, was a thing very easily effected. And then, no sooner was that interview secured, than he had opened with all his arts upon his gentle hearer, first interesting, then exciting her mind on the subject of a dear friend of his--one who for the present must go nameless--who had seen her and been smitten to the heart, whose cause he pleaded with all the passionate eloquence at his command, and who craved, he said, but one brief meeting, that he might press a suit which, lacking the romantic atmosphere of night and secrecy, he must despair of ever urging with a hope to move her. In short, he had sped his plea so well, and with such imaginative enlargement of the case, making himself almost believe in his own picture, that the lady, much moved, had consented, after a show of reluctance, to see her unknown admirer that very night, and to admit him, by a private way--position and hour defined--to a short interview in the presence of a third party--which was the _lucidus ordo_ acclaimed.

Now, in this transporting statement there were, nevertheless, an implication or so which jarred, just a thought, on its hearer’s sensibilities. Brion did not, for one thing, quite see the necessity for all this elaborate secrecy in a matter which had been much more simply settled by the plain process of his friend’s furnishing him with Joan’s address, after having paved the way,--if he so wished it, and as he had at first proposed--by a melting invocation to the spirit of a past and vanished passion. Still, that point he--suspecting, perhaps, by this time, something of the Captain’s temperament, and knowing how men of his romantic complexion valued a love affair only in proportion as it was roundabout and complicated--was quite ready to waive. Another which, only half consciously, disturbed him more, was the thought of Joan, that artless child of his memory, permitting to the ‘glamour of the Court’, like any vulgar cit, familiarities which, in one of her own order, she might have resented; while yet a third turned upon the unquestionable fact that she could make a tryst with a gentleman who, for all she knew to the contrary, was utterly unknown to her.

But he extinguished all these misgivings, as rapidly as they flickered into his mind, and would have nothing of them, as disloyalties to his love. Perhaps she guessed; perhaps, even, she had heard of his friendship with Raleigh, and had formed her own conclusions as to the meaning of the promise won from her. That was a wonderful inspiration. He built upon it. He was to see his Joan again--there was the one solid splendid fact--and possibly to discover that he himself was the visitor she expected. And if his friend had brought this about by means that seemed to him unduly fanciful, he would not carp and be ungrateful if they were justified by such an end.

And in the meanwhile, time, place and procedure were all settled things, and he had only to wait and prepare himself against the blissful moment. It was arranged that Raleigh was to be at Westminster Stairs, with a party of his own fellows and his private barge, at seven o’clock that same evening, and that Brion was to embark with them, and be pulled down the river to a certain point, where he was to land and follow the directions given him, while the others watched out his return by the waterside. He was very grateful for this arrangement and said so; it was a real act of kindness and self-sacrifice on the part of a friend so greatly in request as Master Walter; but why would not that friend give him the address offhand, so that he might achieve his own mission in his own way, without putting others to the trouble and tedium of seeing him through with the business?

But Raleigh only laughed. He would tell him nothing about the house; only that it was a merchant’s house in a mercantile quarter--a very fine house, fitting to the position of such a civic dignitary as the late Sir John Medley--and that it was situated somewhere between Puddle Dock and London Bridge. Of course, said he, Master Middleton might easily, if he liked, and if he were minded to discard the advice of a friend, discover the house for himself, and present himself to its inmate in the ordinary way of civility; only, in that case, he would make bold to say, the enterprise would be robbed of all that romantic mystery which was ever a leading fascination in ladies’ eyes, and from poetry would be reduced to the dullest prose. Whereat Brion, seeing they were on ticklish ground, very wisely withdrew the suggestion, with the assurance that he had only made it from a desire to save the other trouble, and that, convinced now of the truth, he wholly deferred to a judgment which had all the shrewd experience of a master in the art of philandering to back it.

‘To the happy sequel!’ responded he, with a great bright sigh; and drained his own mug to the toast.

‘Is the patriot to be in the secret?’ asked Raleigh.

Brion shook his head. ‘He hath never heard our names coupled by me. Thou art the only one who knows of her, Walter.’ He had been invited to that familiarity by the companionable soldier.

Raleigh looked pleased. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I’ll not say I’m flattered till I’ve proved myself.’

‘Walter’--his eyes desperately coaxed: ‘you’ll not tell me anything, I know.’

‘Not a word.’

‘Not of how she appeared to you?’

‘She appeared to me walking on two feet, like any other woman.’

‘Ah! but is she not beautiful?’

‘Beauty, my friend’--he was drinking again, as if to avoid a direct encounter with the look which sought his--‘is in the eyes which perceive it.’

‘Well, did not yours perceive it?’

‘I am not in love with her. From the child we find chief beauty in those we love.’

‘How cold you are.’

‘Discreet.’

‘How spoke she?’

‘With her lips and tongue--in the English language.’

‘There you are wrong. It is love’s own music.’

‘It did not warble for me, i’faith.’

‘Alack, you mean?’

‘Alack, of course.’

‘Well, I will question you no more.’

‘I would not, for your mind’s peace, since you will get nothing. What! appraise another man’s mistress to his face? Not I. She is Joan Medley: it is all summed up in that.’

It was for Brion. He spent a restless time, after the other had gone, waiting for the evening to come. He could settle to no occupation, but dawdled out the slow hours, feeling their length unbearable. He had informed Clerivault that he was for a jaunt with Captain Raleigh that night, but had not explained what there was in the prospect to make him so excited and impatient. His mood puzzled the good fellow; but since there was a sign in it of that imperious temper to which it was occasionally subject, he held his tongue, and obeyed all his directions without comment.

At last evening fell, and the young gentleman with it to a consideration of his toilet. He had never spent so much time and care over that in his life before, but had out all his suits--the gray with lace of silver tissue, the plum-colour slashed with white satin, the black velvet, and the steel blue with miniver--and debated them, deciding, after profound cogitation, upon the last, as the one in which, most fancying himself, he would most honour the occasion. His short hair then received his attention, and not less the short mustachio on his lip. He hung his rapier at his thigh; disposed his black velvet curtmanteau to the best effect on his left shoulder, cocked his black velvet bonnet, with the blue jay’s feather and the blue beryl in it, at a telling angle, and, so arrayed, strode forth to conquer. And indeed he was a pretty figure, and one to mirror itself very alluringly in bright eyes.

He was early at the rendezvous, of course, and had to wait some minutes on the stairs before the barge appeared to take him off. But at length it hove out of the shadows, and received him on board; and the great thrilling adventure was launched. They dropped down with the tide, so cautiously, for the night was cloudy and dark, that his impatience could scarce brook the delay; but, since ‘all overs,’ as the proverb saith, ‘are ill, but over the water,’ the happy end came at last, and at the moment when Brion was abandoning hope of any end at all. Raleigh gave a low order, and the men pulled in silently to a point on the shore he indicated. Here ran a stone slip into the water, descending from the gullet of a narrow lane where a dismal lantern hung and blinked, like a corpse-candle drowzy with watching. The shore was thick with a throng of houses, timbered and gabled, ghosts in the dim-lit darkness--great buildings some, and redolent of civic prosperity. Barges, piled with merchandise, slumbered at anchor in the stream. The roar of the waters under London Bridge droned in their ears, though the monster himself was invisible. It was a crowded, huddled settlement, with veins of the leanest cut through its substance to connect it with the great artery of Thames Street half a furlong away. They grounded on the slip, and, while a fellow leaped out to hold the boat’s nose secure, Raleigh and his young friend disembarked, and climbed the slope to the level stones above.

‘Where are we?’ asked Brion, in a low voice.

‘Dowgate,’ answered the other--‘a rich and prolific quarter. Yonder’s the Steel yard, stronghold of the Hanse League. A murrain on them--German swine, crunching our good English acorns, in each of which might sleep the cradle of a lusty ship! But we’ve ringed their snouts of late, to limit their grubbing in our native soil, and give our own merchant adventurers a chance. Better still were they all packed neck and crop out of the country.’ He kicked at a barrel, an outlying one of many that littered the wharf hard by. ‘We’ve let them rob us,’ he growled, ‘the while our tolerant courtesy hath passed for folly or weakness with these hogs it favoured; like as though some petted guest brazenly repaid his host by bearing off the silver plate he’d fed on, and was honoured for his treachery. God’s truth! we can do our own trading, I hope, and farther, it may chance, than any Hanseatic shark can follow us. When that expedition of ours is launched----’

‘We shall be over with to-night’s business,’ put in Brion. He was near dancing with impatience. What were all the sixty-six Hanse towns and their confederates to this one present corner of his own.

A distant bell struck the three-quarters. Raleigh laughed and exclaimed:--

‘Cry you mercy, poor lover! Do you perish while I prose? Well, we are betimes, but not more than she in her impatience, I’ll warrant. Come, now, and I’ll set thee on thy way.’

He led the young man to the opening of the lane--which appeared as a mere channel furrowed through a field of houses--and, bidding him traverse it some fifty yards, take the first turning to the right, and knock at a door he should see on his dexter hand, where was carved a rebus of a hotchpot, signifying a medley of good things. The password was _speedwell_, said he; and so giving him his blessing, and urging him to make the best of his opportunity, and not consider his friend, who in such a cause was prepared to linger out the night by the water if need be, he thrust the lantern into his hand, and, wishing him God-speed, went back to the boat.

Brion, his heart beating high, his feet seeming to step on air, entered the lane and walked on. Twenty yards in he heard a casement opened overhead, and, to a shrill cry of ‘gardy-loo,’ a pail of slops was emptied into the street. It fell behind, and only just missed him; but it doused his mood of exaltation as effectually as if it had made a foul wet clout of the blue and miniver. As he sped on, keeping as near the middle of the way as practicable, he thought of nothing else than a possible, and more catastrophic, repetition of the performance; and he was still agitated by the memory of it, when he found the door and took shelter under its overhanging penthouse.

But answer came soon enough to his cautious knock to ease his mind and justify Master Raleigh in his prediction: and there in the doorway stood a capacious dame, who seemed to regard him with curiosity before she spoke.

‘How now, young man?’ she said at last, in a voice half stifled behind walls of fat. ‘What is your business here, an it please you?’

Her eyes were moist and lushy; her face was like a great red ham, with the little ruff about her neck for a frill to it; she leaned on a gold-knobbed cane, and for support, for she was corpulent and rheumatic.

‘What all business wishes--to speedwell,’ answered the youth, feeling, despite himself, a little shame in this masquerading.

She put a finger to her lips instantly, and, nodding and leering, made way for him to enter, and closed the door behind him.

‘Leave your lantern there,’ she whispered, and, waddling heavily before, with a little sighing groan or two, led him down a panelled passage into a room that opened from it, and, bidding him wait there till her return, shut him in and disappeared. He heard her going painfully and complainingly up the flight of stairs he had observed before him on entering, and waited glowingly for the abounding vision which was to signalize her return.

The room in which he found himself was bare and empty, but bore traces of some honoured occupation in the past history of the house. Its walls, though streaked and faded, had once been gilt, and on them rods for tapestry still rusted in their sockets. There was a noble carved stone fireplace, with a great hood roofing it, and dogs upon the hearth; but only a brazier burned there now, as if for the makeshift accommodation of some casual watcher. That and the single chair set before it, the only article of furniture in the place, saving a couple of tapers that flared in sconces on the wall, seemed to point to a vigil just kept in expectation of this particular visit. But kept by whom? Obviously by her who had answered to his knock, and who had been stationed here for that very purpose. The thought thrilled him through and through. For that very purpose! So, she had provided for the meeting as anxiously, with as great an excitement of expectation, as he had felt in speeding to it.

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.

_Was_ she 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, while _she_ looks 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.’