Chapter III: The Journey West

The speed of the little party was the speed of Brion, but they made what haste they could, for dusk was closing down, and the road none too free of dangers. At first Bagott would have the boy to ride with him, part for kindness’ sake, and part to draw from him the particulars of his past life; but soon his questions lapsed into vagueness, and he sunk into a preoccupation which lost account of everything but its own dark melancholy. So Brion rode alone, Master Clerivault lacking any invitation to join him, and indulged his own unhappy fancies--which the cold wind and the gloomy road did nothing to assuage--to the limit of their bent. To be uprooted in a moment from that kindly soil, delivered to a relative of whose existence he had never even guessed hitherto, haled out into the night and the world, with an unknown future before him--it needed the utmost of his young resolution to bear up under such a battery of strokes. Sometimes, seizing him in gusts and spasms, his fate would seem to be monstrous, impossible, a nightmare from which he would waken in a little to hear Gregory breathing placidly in his bed by the window that overlooked the quiet garden; sometimes, realising the truth, he would be almost irresistibly moved to turn his horse’s head, and gallop desperately back the way he had come. But he had a high spirit to conquer, and a reason effectively to dismiss, such vain impulses. Yet, though he rode stiff, his chin up, his heart was full of misery and his soul of longing.

He was all at sea, too, as to the meaning of things. He had been wont to gather, from the attitude of his playmates, and from the little which, in his quiet observant way, he had managed to piece together, that he was an orphan and alone in the world--though why alone, and for what reason adopted, some instinct of pride in him forbade his inquiring. He had understood that his treatment was in a manner preferential, and may have childishly to himself debated the why and the wherefore; but since the facts, as his intelligence could not but comprehend, were designedly withheld from him, he would not seem to seek what it was not wanted to tell. Indeed, from hints let fall, he believed that his foster-parents knew really little more concerning him than he knew himself; and, in that, for whatever they might secretly surmise, he thought right; nor was the incident recorded as happening on a day of poignant memory allowed by them to affect their determination to close their minds to any conjecture or speculation whatever as to the possible truth. And so had Brion grown in content of ignorance, regarding his adoption as permanent, and never dreaming that there existed one on whose favour he continued, and to whom he owed duty and obedience as the solitary kinsman surviving to him, it seemed, in all the world. Out of the amazing dark had this figure risen, to claim and appropriate him--a great man, a Judge, as Mr Angell, though with some seeming reluctance and agitation, had whispered when he came to fetch him--and henceforth through this apparition was he to approach so much nearer the mystery of his own being. Well, there was attraction in that, but not so absorbing for the moment as to assuage the anguish of this sudden severance from all to which he was attached by the living ligaments of custom and affection. He felt very lost and very lonely.

They got down to Lambeth after dark, joining by the road a party happily met and agreed to combine against footpads, and took the horse-ferry, close by the Palace gates, to cross the river into the Honour of Westminster. And thence they wended their way through a maze of narrow crowded streets, with dim lights hanging overhead like ships’ lanterns suspended in shrouds, and presently, passing by the Abbey, and the walls and ruined towers of the old deserted Palace--vast cliffs of stone that loomed through the obscurity--turned into the yard of the _Cock_ tavern and dismounted.

Now, so spent with cold and emotion was the boy that his brain was insensible to any impressions save those of his own weariness; wherefore he took but little notice of the novel matters about him, but only obeyed blindly when he was directed up a flight of stairs into a comfortable chamber, where a meal lay ready spread on a table, and a good sea-coal fire burned in the hearth. He ate and drank as he was told, asking no questions and being put none, while Master Clerivault, appearing after attending to the horses, waited on him and his uncle. There seemed a mystery and a silence about everything--the place, the hour, the company he was in--and those, combining with the warmth and animal comfort, so operated upon his senses that in the midst of the meal he fell fast asleep, and thereafter remembered nothing more till he awoke to sunlight in a little room. He sat up in his bed, dazed for a moment, and then recollection rushed upon him in a flood, and he sank back again overwhelmed; when, lying so, with his eyes closed, presently he heard a footstep enter the room, and, without moving, raised his lids just so as to peer under them at the intruder. It was Master Clerivault, come in with a pile of clothes, which it seemed he had been brushing and folding, and these he proceeded to lay out ready, glancing in the act at the sleeper, as he thought him, and afterwards going soft-footed about the room, to open the casement and prepare the ewer for washing.

Now curiosity, ever the main tonic of youth, began to stir powerfully in the boy, stimulated, no doubt, by the fresh sunlight, and the unwonted sights and sounds about him; for with the opening of the window had risen a noise of cheery gossip and the stamping of horses from the yard below. So, widening his eyes, he took interested stock of this individual, who had so unexpectedly returned upon him out of the past. That past had been nine years ago, and without question the mental enlargement of the interval spoke in his new observation; for Master Clerivault did not seem to him at all what he had thought he remembered him to be. It was not that he looked older, for in fact he did not by a day; it was a question of the moral impression. The pale staring eyes appeared now a little mad; the grotesque weakness of the face, with its hanging underlip and its long nose dividing the sardonic moustache, was its definite feature; what had figured for martial in him suggested somehow the showy fustian of the stage. And yet, through all, his aspect was likeable, and such as seemed to invite confidences without fear of a rebuff. Watching him a moment, Brion spoke:--

‘Where am I, Master Clerivault?’

The intruder started, turned round, advanced with a mincing step, and leaning gracefully against the bedpost, one arm akimbo, answered in that queer rusty hinge voice of his:--

‘In a room of the _Cock_ tavern, Sir, in Westminster town.’

Brion looked about him. He lay in his shift in a comfortable bed, the appointments of the room were plain and clean, fresh rushes strewed the floor, and there was a great bunch of rosemary on the window-sill. Moreover, it was the morning of the day as of his own young life, and, pay what dole he would to sorrow, a sense of exhilaration would rise in him, to paint his fancy with bright anticipation. After all, a beard and a gruff voice came early to the stripling in Elizabeth’s time, and, though they were not yet for him, he was near enough to manhood, as they read it, to hear, in his mind’s ear, its distant shout to enterprise and glory. Suddenly he wanted to be up and afoot; but there was some curiosity to feed first.

‘I remember not my passage hither,’ he said.

‘Sense and memory were out of thee,’ replied the other, tapping his head twice. ‘Might have fired a great culverin in thy ear, and not awakened thee. I carried thee--ha! in these arms.’

‘Master Clerivault,’ said the boy, ‘will it please you to tell me?’

‘Anything,’ was the answer, ‘that my reason and my honour permits.’

‘Who and what art thou, then?’

‘Who but Harlequin Clerivault, please your Grace, some time gentleman of fortune, and since confidant and right-hand man to thine Uncle. He hangs on me, ha!’

‘His confidant, say you? In what way of speaking, Master Clerivault?’

‘In the law’s way of speaking, Sir, which is to say that, being a Judge, he hath judged most excellently of a paragon.’

‘Yourself, to wit?’

‘Thou hast said it, not I.’

‘What is it to be a paragon?’

‘It is to be the best of one’s kind, Sir, as a king most kingly, as a knight most knightly, as a retainer the most capable and to be trusted; to which mental graces those of the body should figure, as it were, in apposition, whereby a straight leg should express honesty, an arched brow love, or attachment, a chin slightly receding forbearance, and a fine shape signify proportion in all. Possessing the sum of which endowments, a man may call himself superlative, which is to be a paragon.’

His lids half closed; he pointed his moustache with an inimitable air. The corners of Brion’s mouth flickered.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘And of all that my uncle was the judge? I think he must be a great Judge, Master Clerivault.’

‘Great in judgment,’ answered the paragon, ‘but, alack, no longer a great Judge or a Judge at all.’

‘Not a Judge?’

‘We have resigned, Sir, our Commission. Let it rest at that. The question drops--in Law, _cadit quæstio_.’

Brion felt a momentary stupefaction; yet, after all, the news told him nothing where he knew nothing. After a brief consideration, he continued:--

‘Why do we stay here, Master Clerivault? Has not my uncle a house?’

The man coughed before answering:--

‘Ay, and to which we are wending.’

‘In London?’

‘Not so; but westwards in Devon--where his family was used to dwell. ’Tis called the Moated Grange.’

The boy sat with wide eyes. This was strange and bewildering enough, to be sure, and not less so for the obvious reserve with which it was all said. He thought again a little, then spoke out candidly:--

‘I see I can expect little satisfaction for my questions. Yet I am not very happy, Master Clerivault, and I think you might know it.’

The poor fellow looked at him kindly; there was the suggestion of a moist blink in his eyes.

‘Nay,’ he said: ‘all is well for thee; there is no need for unhappiness, but caution is the keynote of the legal mind. _Mutiana cautio._ What I may answer thee I will answer. Ask, in God’s name.’

‘Well,’ said Brion, ‘I would fain know why my uncle, after this long abandoning of me to ignorance of his very existence, hath come at this late hour to claim me for his own?’

‘Ha!’ cried the other: ‘I can satisfy thee there. It is sentiment, Sir--pure sentiment; the desire of a man made lonely, and something occupationless, to fasten to the only tie of kinship left remaining to him.’

The boy did not speak again for a while. There was something moving in his heart, some wonderful new sense of a warmth and meaning underlying the chill enigma of these happenings. That to _him_, for some mystic reason, this great overshadowing figure, with its dark preoccupations, could be looking for solace and affection, seemed pathetically incredible; yet the paragon spoke like one who knew, and he could not misdoubt him. I think from that moment all dread of his strange kinsman left him, and was supplanted by a shy confidence in his own tender ability to play the part desired of him. They were alone in the world, it appeared--just they two. The thought clung suddenly to him, as his arms already in spirit clung about the desolate man. Presently he sighed, and looked up.

‘What is to be done with me?’ said he. ‘May you tell me that?’

‘What duty and fondness may conspire,’ answered Clerivault, ‘and love repay. Learning thou hast, and swordmanship shalt have, to beat the brains of the world with a double edge. It is a fine place, the world, in these days, Sir. There is a greatness come into it for anyone to seize that hath the spirit and the courage. Dismiss what is lost with a snap of the fingers. What is office but confinement--to live in a Court when one might possess infinity. The horizons of the dawn arch upwards, revealing new prospects: there is a wind blows in under them, freighted with strange messages from gods and peoples never known before. The matrix of this sweet motherland of ours heaves with birth imminent: that great Triton of the sea that wed with her prepares a glory for his sons. There shall be wings--ha! to sweep the stars withal, or white as swans upon the waters, skimming down the moonlit levels. Enlargement is in the air, and our English lungs expand to it. Shall we not adventure with the rest, you and I? Here’s but a necessary interval, till we come, like mewing hawks, to burst our bars and rise to heaven.’

His wild eyes gleamed exultant; his voice squeaked and cracked; he flung one hand aloft, as if to point the upward way. And Brion sat regarding him, a little amazed, but still more curious. Presently he said:--

‘_Are_ you English, Master Clerivault? I had not thought it.’

The effect of that simple question startled him. Harlequin skipped as if a whip had lashed him. His eyebrows rose, his teeth set, incoherent maledictions came reverberating over his palate down his nose. It was moments before he could master his emotion.

‘Why?’ said he. There was actually moisture on his forehead.

‘I know not,’ said Brion, somewhat alarmed. ‘It was thy name, perhaps. What ails thee at my question? If there was hurt in it, my ignorance, not my will, was to blame.’

‘Fool, fool!’ muttered Clerivault, slapping his brow. ‘To quarrel with the lamb because it bleats!’ He passed a trembling hand across his mouth; his features stiffened into a mirthless smile. ‘God assoil thee,’ he said: ‘but never ask me so again. _I_ not English! Then England exists not save for curs and hybrids. Will it please you to rise, Sir?’

His voice sunk from high protest to the civility of a servitor; and indeed Brion knew not what he was nor how to treat him, his office seemed so menial yet his soul so great. He tumbled out of bed, however, and washed himself in cold water, with a ha’pennyworth of mottled soap, and, while dressing, peeped often and curiously from the window into the yard of the inn, where were ostlers rubbing down horses, and maids flitting--clean girls with unconfined necks as white as their aprons, and skirts close to their hips, which Brion thought ever so much prettier than the full kirtles worn by the quality--and here and there a blowzy carter staring owlishly over a mug of beer. When he was ready, his attendant conducted him to a little timbered room on the floor below, where he found Mr Bagott seated over a round of cold beef and a stoup of ale on which he was breakfasting. He nodded to the boy, and bade him be seated and fall to, for he had a long journey before him.

So Brion obeyed, conscious that the dark gloomy eyes were appraising him from under their heavy brows, yet feeling in some way secure and not put out of countenance. And presently, Clerivault being out of the room, his uncle spoke in a quick sudden manner:--

‘Hast slept sound, boy?’

‘Yes, Sir,’ he answered, looking the other straight and frank in the face.

‘And favoured thine attendant?’

‘He is strange, Sir; but I favoured him.’

‘Ay, and questioned him, moreover?’

‘I have asked him many questions.’

‘Instance?’

‘Why, who and what he was himself for one.’

‘And his answer?’

‘That he was thy confidant and right-hand man--in his sort a paragon; which was to say the best of his kind.’

A smile, like a tiny spasm, twitched the moody features.

‘Well, there’s no degree in him like best, since he’s himself alone. What next?’

‘He said you were no more a Judge, and I asked him why, and he answered you had resigned your Commission.’

He saw the eyes, as he spoke, blaze into an instant fire.

‘He said!’ cried Bagott. ‘A prating magpie, lacking tact and sense! No more a Judge, quotha? I’ll bridle him, by God!’ He fumed and rocked, muttering incoherences. ‘What further?’ he said presently.

The boy faced the question steadily.

‘Only that you would love me,’ said he, ‘if I would love you--as I will.’

The other put his knife from him, leaning back in his chair. A wonderful new softness had come to his face.

‘Thou wilt?’ said he. ‘Then that’s a bargain with us. Shall we be done henceforth with subterfuge? I like thy trusty eyes. They are thy--heart, but we’ll be friends! What if I am no longer Judge? You’ll love me none the less?’

‘No, Sir.’

‘That’s sweet and well. What other question put and answered? Whither we go?’

‘He told me ’twas to a house, the Moated Grange, where you was used to dwell in Devon.’

‘A fair country, Brion, where we may live in peace and comfort, forgetting all the plots and hateful toils that stretch to snare men’s feet in these cursed warrens of the town. Harlequin is to take you.’

‘Harlequin?’

‘And I’ll follow betimes.’

‘Uncle?’

‘Well, boy?’

‘Is not Master Clerivault mad?’

‘How, mad?’ The black eyes conned him whimsically.

‘I know not,’ answered Brion. ‘His speech is so strange; and when I misdoubted his English blood, he skipped and sweat with fury.’

Bagott nodded, smiling.

‘He did? He would, child: ’tis to touch him on the quick. Whatever hybrid he, call him but out of his imagined birthright, and you put a match to tow. England is not only all the world, but all the stars and all the heavens to him. But, mad?’--the humour left his face; his brows bent down--‘If madness is in devotion, then is he mad; if madness is in incorruptible fidelity, then is he mad. And so, perchance, would Reason call him, but not I his master, who saved him from the gallows.’

Brion’s eyes and red lips opened together.

‘O, how?’ he said. ‘Poor Clerivault.’

‘Poor Clerivault!’ echoed the other. ‘A mad fool, maybe, for that he held chivalry before self-interest. He was implicated in Ket’s rising against the gentry in ’49, and brought up at Norwich assizes to stand his trial. He would have been hanged, a mere tool of others, but that I won him off; and since he hath given me the devotion of a dog. Twenty years ago,’--his voice fell to rapt and wondering, as if he had forgotten his audience--‘through bright fortune and sour, and he hath never swerved from his allegiance. He hath learnt law; he is my liegeman, clerk and bodyguard in one. One third coxcomb, one gentleman, and one most rare poet and romantic--he dreams, and so lives in his dreams that he half believes them true. Vain as a peacock, simple as a child, sapient in vision--you must like poor Harlequin.’

‘I like him very well, Sir’ said Brion--‘if I but knew how to bear myself towards him. “One time gentleman of fortune,” quotha--’twas so he called himself.’

‘God knows what he was!’ exclaimed Bagott. ‘His conceit will make him twenty titles in a day, and not one to be believed. Only through all there’s the sound core to him, like the good white heart in a flaunting cabbage. He had a monkish schooling, that I know; and thereby came his fall; for to the houseless friars who fomented that rebellion he ought his foolish part in it. Well, he’s a fool i’faith.’

His eyes suddenly fixed his nephew’s in an unmoving stare; then he rose from his seat, walked to the door, came back, and bade the boy, with a commanding gesture, to stand up before him, when he regarded the young face hardly.

‘What,’ said he in a deep low voice, ‘hath surprised me into this confidence with a child? Small talk forsooth; yet, mark well, what I trust to thy ear, howsoever little, keep in trust.’

He lifted the soft chin with his forefinger, and searched the fearless eyes that did not flinch before his.

‘On my faith, Uncle,’ said Brion.

He answered, ‘That is well,’ and, waiting so a few moments, ‘Remain here till Harlequin comes; then follow his directions,’ he said, and turned, and left the room.

Brion would have liked to ask more questions, hinting at the mystery of his own past; but he might not dare, with those fierce looks probing him. Still, the sense of his being already in a measure privileged gave him confidence, and he felt as cheerful as this sudden transplanting of all his customs and affections to a new soil would let him be, so that he awaited Master Clerivault’s reappearance even with impatience.

The paragon returned in no long time, booted and cloaked for the journey, and bringing the stirring information that they were to set out within the hour from the inn yard, whence Mr Baggott had arranged for them to join in with a company of traders and bagmen, all well mounted and armed, which was to proceed by reasonable stages into the West country, and was already gathering for its start. So down they went, the boy being warmly clad against the cold, and found their horses ready waiting with the saddle-bags on them, and a good party assembled, most of them at their stirrup-cups, and all preparing, inside and out, for a quick departure.

It was a wonderful time, so full of novelty and excitement for Brion that there was no room in him for brooding or apprehension; but, when they rode forth, his eyes were for twenty things at once, and least for his own company, who were in truth as safe and sober-sided a set of gravities as ever combined to make a prose of venturing. For which reason Brion soon forgot them for the livelier interests about him. He observed much, putting few questions to his companion--for that was not his way, except he had a definite purpose in asking--but measuring and marking in silence. The great buildings took him with wonder--and most, naturally, the congregated cluster of the Abbey, with its fair eastern chapel only then recently finished, and Margaret’s church, and the half-ruined royal palace and hall, approached through a gateway with octagonal towers which led into a mighty quadrangle with the river shining beyond. But more he liked to note the people, and the tumult and the multiformity of the crowds through which he passed. The jolly sellers at their booths (each hung over with its insignia, like the Cathedral stall of a knight-banneret), and their eternal chaunt of “What d’ye lack”; the ballad singers bawling their wares, and the loaded oyster-wenches dragging theirs; the gingerbread wife, the fiddler at a street corner--no commonplace of them all but figured as a very _lusus naturae_ to these young emancipated eyes. Once and again a knight in armour, with his scarf at his shoulder and a plume in his velvet cap, would come riding over the cobbles, scattering the crowd right and left; and that to Brion was the finest sight of all. But there was a funnier, which made him presently stare, and then go off into a fit of giggling which he tried vainly to repress. For suddenly he saw coming towards them the oddest figure of a woman he had ever seen. She was old and pinched and raddled, with a great ruff round her neck, and a high-crowned hat set askew on a wig as red as rhubarb. Her stomacher stuck a foot below her waist, supporting an oval frame, over which was draped a padded farthingale like a great swinging bell that ended at her ankles; and thence projected a pair of gilt and painted shanks, which were like nothing in the world so much as a couple of enormous marrow-bones. It was only on her near approach that Brion perceived these to be a sort of fantastic clogs, half a yard in height, which she wore to the soles of her embroidered slippers, over which they were strapped; but so little gravity did they afford to the poor body that she needed the prop of a walking cane on the one side, and on the other of a sweet ape of fashion in a French doublet, who was her cicisbeo, to hold her up; in despite of which buttresses, she had a hard ado to keep her equilibrium as she passed, smirking and ogling.

‘Ay,’ said Clerivault, with an answering smile, hearing the boy unable to suppress his merriment. ‘Only laugh small, if thou must laugh. When oldest age mates with youngest fashion, she rightly bears derision for her pains. Yet, for the fashion itself, it finds favour in exalted quarters.’

‘What,’ said Brion: ‘those painted clogs?’

‘Not clogs, my young master, but chopines so called--a fashion brought from Venice. You will see them once and again and mark their indication. She was a small lady, that, yet a great lady.’

‘How, great, do you mean?’

‘Why, by the altitude of her chopine, Sir, which was as much higher than a patten as her ladyship was above a fishwife. The measure of that folly is the measure of its wearer’s rank.’

‘And does the Queen wear them?’

‘God forbid! She would have to go on stilts by the token. But when I spoke of fashion, I meant these new-found farthingales, which, by’r lady, are the very nadir of inelegance. Well, there is virtue in them, they say; and what are we to carp at virtue, though in a fantastic form. Let our maids go ugly, so they go chaste.’

Brion was puzzled, but he said no more; and other distractions quickly engaged him. They were soon out of Westminster, going by the north bank of the river, and, making in a little the village of Chelsea--dear to bathers for its clear water and pleasant meadows--rode through it and in no long while after reached the ferry at Putney, where, at the cost of a halfpenny a head, they crossed the river into the Manor of Wimbledon, seeing some men net and haul in a brace of great salmon by the way. For the river here yielded not only that excellent fish, but eke much smelt, and an occasional sturgeon or porpoise, for which reason its waters were exceedingly prized by anglers. Thence, going over an extended heath in close order, they reached the royal town of Kingston, where, passing by the church--whose great paschal candle, once kept perpetually burning through the halfpennies of the faithful, the Reformation had at last extinguished--Brion saw the very stone on which the Anglo-Saxon Kings were wont to sit to receive their crowns, and was properly impressed though not excited thereby. And here, at the _Castle_ inn, they dined on calvered salmon and a huge baron of beef, with ale and sack to wash them down, after which the young gentleman rode so sleepily in his saddle that for miles he offered but a glazed eye to his surroundings, and only looked forward to bed and the journey’s end.

They lay that night at Farnborough, whence they were to journey by way of Salisbury and Dorchester to Bridport, and there take boat for the Devon coast, crossing Lyme Bay to a little fishing village named Torquay, which was the point nearest to their destination on the moors. And all that they did, nor am I going to recount the details of the journey, which was sufficiently tedious and without event. But here one of their party would leave them, and there another, making for the big towns, until from Dorchester they two issued alone, and were so together till the end was reached. The weather all this time was fine but cold, and Brion took his destiny manfully, though sometimes his heart would fail him a little over the weariness of it all. But whatever he might think or feel, there was the paragon always at hand to hearten and entertain him, to paint the future in roseate colours or improve the present with tales of his own past prowess and extraordinary experiences.

So at the end of four days they came into Devon, and found themselves towards a still bright evening riding into the little town of Ashburton, some three miles north of which lay the Moated Grange.