Chapter XXX: L’allegro

To the market-place of Plymouth, up in the high town, twice a week the country folk brought their produce, consisting of eggs and fresh butter, great jars of scalded cream, fat ducks and capons, brawn in marbled columns, apples by the barrel, and vegetables, such as were grown, by the crate. These were laid out on trestles, with alleys between, and thither flocked the housewives of every condition and age, the sedate on business bent, and the frivolous on enjoyment. It made an animated scene in the bright sunshine, to which Brion was irresistibly drawn. He had not cast his melancholy; but he felt it good to be among his own blossom-cheeked countrywomen again, and indeed to be alive; for after all he was young, and Youth finds it hard to resist the influences of jollity and fine weather. So he moved among the stalls, forgetful and happy for the time being, and leaving behind him, like a very human craft, a swell of soft bosoms and following eyes, that dwelt tenderly on the passing of a form so gallant and a face so manly attractive--but of all that he was unconscious.

‘Come buy, come buy,’ cried a shrill buxom dame, presiding over a counter of gingerbread, and speaking across the shoulder of a young woman, who, busy with her purse, stood with her back to Brion.

‘Alack, I lack a ha’penny, mother,’ answered a soft voice, ‘to buy me my gingerbread ship withal. So I must e’en go fasting for to-day.’

She _seemed_ a comely young woman, judging by what is not always to be trusted, the human reverse. She had a quantity of bright hair, insufficiently confined within a little staid Puritanical coif, which released certain tendrils of it to nestle in the nape of a neck like ivory. She wore a dress of plain stone blue, with a short white linen tippet about her shoulders, and might have been a country wench, were it not for the smooth delicacy of her skin, and some quality in her voice which spoke of a better refinement. A small basket hung on her arm, and she looked into it.

‘I’faith,’ she said, with a little crow, and producing the coin, ‘it is here after all. I cried out, mother, before my chickens were hatched.’

Brion gasped, and stood as if stricken. What was this wonder--this delirious wonder? A sob--laughter--were in his throat together. As the vendee, having received her gingerbread ship and placed it in her basket, went off down the alley, he followed in pursuit, stumbling, half blind. She passed out into the sunlight and he after. He had not yet seen her face, but he looked for tell-tale characteristics, agonised for them, and, identifying them, as he believed, felt a very sickness of joy. She walked like one who _did not love violent exercise_ for its own sake; there was a tranquil placidity in her movements; he thought of the white rabbit he had once possessed, ‘warm and soft and cuddlesome,’ and felt a thrill in his arms. She turned into a quiet street, going down-hill towards the Hoe, and he was closing on her. She seemed to become conscious of his pursuit, for her steps suddenly faltered, hesitated and slowed down, as if to let him pass. But he did not pass, and she turned, a shadow of apprehension in her eyes; she turned--and stopped.

He uttered a little irresistible cry:--

‘Joan--Joan! O, after all these years!’

She stood looking wide-eyed at him, as if he were an apparition; but she did not speak--a woman where had been a child; ripeness where had been promise. Yet he would have laughed to scorn the thought of one doubt possessing his heart. How could it, seeing that her image had never ceased to dwell there?

‘Do you not know me?’ he pleaded. Drollery quivered in him. ‘One does not cry out,’ he said, ‘before one’s chickens are hatched. The moment I heard that, “Joan for a ducat!” says I; and without your turning I knew you.’

He searched her face, grown in knowledge and in sweet self-consciousness; but unchanged in its flower-like complexion, its dear blue eyes, its straight level brows: he searched it, pleading for recognition and remembrance, and, searching, there suddenly were the little flickering betraying dimples at the wings of the short nose.

‘Ah! you do know me?’ he said, with a great jubilant sigh. ‘Say who I am, Joan.’

‘Brion,’ she half whispered, and something seemed to throb in her white throat.

‘Yes, Brion, Joan. How sweet it is to hear my name upon your lips again! Is not this wonderful? Come where we can talk in quiet. We have such thousands of things to tell one another. What are you doing with gingerbread ships at your age?’

He laughed, and choked, and bantered, dancing with excitement.

‘I was going to eat it on the Hoe,’ she said. ‘I have eaten one near every week since you sailed away in a ship. I used to eat men.’

‘What is that? How did you know I sailed?’

‘I was on the Quay. I saw you go down to the boat. I was sure it was you; and then I heard one point to you by name.’

‘And you were so close, and I never guessed! Curst fortune, that; but never mind, since I have found you. Six months ago it was, Joan, and such things have happened to me, wonderful and sad. I am only this moment returned--but yesterday. But we will speak of all that anon. It is not the first, nor best nor worst, of what we have to say. Where have you been all these long years? And did you in truth eat a gingerbread ship every week in pretty pledge to me, you dear? My thoughts and words tumble over one another. They all push to be first out, because I am wild with such joy. Come where we can be quiet. Your colour comes and goes. Are you as madly happy as I am? Joan, had you never seen me once again since we parted, before that day of the sailing?’

‘Never once, Brion.’

‘Nor heard of me?’

‘No, never.’

‘Nor I of you. It near broke my heart. Well, where were you?’

‘Here, in Plymouth.’

‘My God! Not all the time?’

‘Near all the time, indeed.’

‘O, monstrous and incredible fate! So near and yet so divorced! And to think of all the suffering of these years! Who brought you here?’

‘’Twas a maiden sister of Sir John’s. She had me to live with her after his death, and I am with her still. She ought that duty, she believed, to him and me.’

‘And she loves you, Joan?’

‘Not greatly, Brion, I fear. She loves atonement.’

‘For what?’

The girl was silent, hanging her head a little.

‘Ah!’ said Brion. ‘Well, sit thee down.’

She was glad to do so, being more overcome than her looks confessed. They had found a warm grassy hollow, overlooking the Sound, where they could rest and talk without fear of interruption. Joan sat clasping her hands about her knees--a characteristic position which Brion observed with a laughing bliss. He flung himself beside her, and, resting on his elbow, feasted and feasted his starved eyes on all that recovered dearness.

‘You are not changed in the least,’ he said--‘only taller and a little fuller. You are one of those, I think, Joan, who hang at lovely ripeness all their lives.’

A faint pink mantled her cheek. She turned to him with a caressing reproof:--

‘I am a woman now, Brion. It is not right you should speak to me so. And you have grown too, and into a fine man. I think you very handsome.’

‘Do you?’ He laughed. ‘Why don’t you eat your gingerbread?’

‘I don’t think I want it now.’

‘Let us share it together, and be shipmates.’

‘Very well.’

They broke and munched--or pretended to. They were both far too agitated to eat. ‘I have seen squawks, real squawks, since last we met,’ he said; and then suddenly, recalling the association the word conveyed, his eyes filled with gravity.

‘Now, tell me, Joan,’ he said, ‘why does this lady not love you?’

He sought to take her hand in his, but she would not let him.

‘I would not meet their wishes,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘That is one reason why.’

‘What wishes?’

She looked him full in the face without answering.

‘Ah!’ he cried: ‘the suitor failed?’

‘He was fat and mottled like a toad,’ she said pleadingly. ‘He was Sir John’s, my father’s, shipping-agent.’

He conned her queerly, and a little sadly.

‘Your father’s, Joan? Do you still say so?’

‘Why should I not?’ she answered, wondering. ‘I don’t understand you.’

‘Joan, do you remember that first day we met in the beautiful glen?’

‘Yes, Brion.’

‘And you said, as we parted, that I had guessed your secret.’

‘Brion, I never did. I remember every word. I said “Have you guessed my secret?” Which was not to say you had.’

‘That is but a quibble, after all. Why would you not be candid with me?’

She dropped her lids, plucking at the blades of grass, in a way which recalled, O, so pathetically, the sorrow of an earlier day.

‘I’faith and in truth I _am_ Joan, Brion,’ she said piteously.

‘What, two Joan Medleys?’

‘Yes, two Joans. I cannot help it if my mother named me so.’

‘Your mother? She would have two daughters named Joan?’

‘Nay, but one. It was my father had the two.’

She raised the blue eyes, with a line of appealing pain between them, to his. O, _will_ you not understand? they said.

‘Joan!’ whispered Brion, in a voice of amazed comprehension: ‘are you--are _you_ a “bustard” too?’

She did not answer, and he heaved himself a thought nearer her.

‘You poor dear! And I never thought or guessed, blockhead that I am. Why, to be sure’--he laid a compassionate hand on her arm. ‘Did you never know _her_, Joan?’

The girl shook her head.

‘Only in dreams. I think she died very young.’

‘Like mine. O, Joan! were we not guided by these two to meet one another? I think we need not have feared the spirits of the ilex grove. Tell me, dear’--he pressed closer, and laid his cheek coaxingly against the soft shoulder; and she flushed, but suffered him--even leaned a little, irresistibly, towards the caress. ‘I have been longing, yet agonising, from the first to put one question to you--just one. Joan--you are still unwed?’

Looking straight before her, she whispered yes--it stood to reason.

‘Why?’ he asked rapturously.

‘If you do not know, Brion, how can I tell you?’

Every nerve in his body thrilled with ecstasy.

‘You need not,’ he said. ‘I hide my eyes before such loving constancy--I will, Joan, yes, I will, in your hair, in your neck. O, how could I ever have doubted you, my own maid!’

‘Did you doubt me, Brion?’

‘The way of parting has been long, sweetheart, and sometimes unhappy; but it finds me at the blissful end, as at the beginning, thy maiden knight. Yet there have been moments when despair and loneliness--O, Joan! will you forgive me, not that I broke my plight, but that ever I thought I could?’

‘Poor boy! It is different with a man.’

‘You sweet! Then, sometimes, thinking you--what I thought you, it seemed a mad presumption on my part--O, I have such a tale to tell you, Joan! But now, two nameless things together----’

‘It was that, Brion, which made me afraid to set you right. I thought, if you knew the truth, you would not want to love me any more.’

‘What has loving _you_ to do with titles? A man, save his veins were arctic ice, could love and desire you for your own self, I think. Did your father treat you kindly?’

‘He had not been unkind, I trow, unless for my lady sister, who liked me not. He gave me my little Gritty. O, Brion, the day I had to go, and could not keep my tryst! He was ever so in his decisions, sudden and inexorable. I thought I should have wept myself to death.’

She turned to him, bewildered even with the memory: he held out passionate arms, unable to contain himself longer.

‘Come to your true-mate, pretty bird--Nay, I will have you. O, darling, after all these years--ten, if a day, Joan--and I have all that hunger to make good!’

‘O, forbear, Brion! We shall be seen. O, I love you so.’ And then, all rosy and ruffled, she looked up in his face, and said, as she had said once before, so quaintly and trustingly: ‘Will you marry me, Brion?’

He laughed with joy.

‘How can such constancy live in such lovely kindness? Is it all for me--all? If I said no, Joan, would you love me still?’

‘Yes, Brion.’

‘Did ever “yes” sigh so sweetly from troubled lips! Shall we go to the church now?’

‘I would we might.’

‘Why not? I have friends of weight here. Hist, Joan--shall we, in good sooth? Are we not ten years betrothed, to justify a little haste at the end? Will you meet me again this afternoon?’

She whispered that she would, ashamed, now she had spoken, of her forwardness. The poor child had suffered in these years, made the bait and foil of a frigid and intolerant Pharisaism. The Mistress Medley who had undertaken her charge had never ceased to point in her the moral of ungodly appetites, or to hold her responsible, as it were, for her father’s sin. She had led a dull, disregarded life--on a penny a week pocket money--and could have suffered it only, as she told Brion, on the sure conviction that he would return to her some day. In that faith she had never wavered; it had kept her heart alive, and supported her through every desolate tribulation.

And Brion, remembering his own errant thoughts, bowed ashamed before that whole-hearted fidelity. He could not give his tender maid enough love and fondling, but longed only for the moment when she should be secured to him, with nothing but death ever again to part them. They talked together yet awhile before they separated, for of what, in simple volume, had they not to deliver their souls--explanation, story, confession, all the crowded details of that long interval? Yet the stupendous thing of all was that their idyll, begun in the perfection of blossom, was about to consummate itself in the perfection of fruit. None could look at them, lovely things, and doubt it, and not envy either.

Brion sought and found an accommodating chaplain--a jolly fellow, whom he had already met, the eve before his sailing, in Raleigh’s company. The pleasant cleric, very willing to oblige the friend of so great a friend, made no demur, was willing to take his handsome fee and eschew ceremonial, and in fact bound the couple man and wife that very afternoon in his own parlour. It was the merest formality, like signing a deed of gift to one already in possession of the property: and so, I think, the two regarded it. They had always been one.

Then Brion, resolute to finish the business offhand, took his young bride to lodgings prepared for her, while he went alone to face the old harpy, her kinswoman, with the deed they had done. He went, armed with indignation and authority, to the handsome dwelling overlooking Sutton Pool and the Catwater where the abhorrent spinster lived, and saw her, and delivered himself. There was a scene. It seemed Mistress Medley knew of the ex-Judge by name, and held him in loathing as a reputed Papish recusant. She heaped terms of foulest abuse on Quentin Bagott’s head and on his house, which was already, she was rejoiced to know--if rumours which had been wafted across the moor were to be trusted--approaching the retribution which its iniquities deserved, and a choice example of which was to witness in this deed of infamy wrought by one of its nameless scions. Seduction and defilement, she was pleased to say, were natural to one bred in that atmosphere, and the will to surrender to them as natural in a child of Shame. But, as the girl had chosen her bed, so might she lie in it. For her part, she had only to declare that from that moment she cast the graceless bastard from her door, and desired never to see her face again.

And then Brion spoke, in his quiet level way, in which, however, he could be pretty poisonous when he chose. He began by putting the lady right on certain points. Seduction, he said, was always a jealous term in the mouths of those whose unwomanliness had never had reason to fear it, and whose spite, it seemed, could go so far as to apply it to the very Sacrament of Wedlock. And as to children of shame, said he, the shame was in those who made and kept them so, and the truer justice in his opinion would be to disinherit the father who begot a child unlawfully, and endow with his forfeited name that innocent victim of his wrong-doing. ‘’Tis ever,’ he went on, ‘old loveless virginity that most hates the child of love; but to do it in the name of religion is a beastly Pharisaism. Go on thy knees to Heaven, old woman, and pray it forgive thee for thy harsh and narrow persecution of one entrusted by it to thee as an instrument of atonement for a wickedness perpetrated. Remember, ’twas Fortune, not thine own virtue, gave thee a name, else had thou stood a sorry chance of any. And now I have but this to say. I shake, on my Joan’s behalf, the dust of this cruel bondage from my feet. She leaves it joyously for one pledged long years ago, and now confirmed by Heaven’s sanction. And with that I end.’

He did, and gained the street unhurried, leaving behind him a picture of such baffled and speechless venom as, when he came to recall it, made him shake with laughter. For, the business once accomplished, he had no mind to let its memory disturb him, but recaptured at once all that mood of exultant rapture to which it had been but a brief disagreeable interlude. It had left him all he sought and desired, absolute independent possession of the sweetest wife in the world. Only one thing remained to cloud his thoughts with some shadowy disquiet--that triumphant allusion to disturbances threatening across the moors. Was it true, and could it be possible they had the Grange for their objective? Remembering his own uneasiness before he left, and the precautions he had taken, he could not but feel a certain inquietude. At the same time he trusted to Raleigh’s promise to nip any such demonstrations, should they occur, in the bud. But he felt it necessary to the setting of his mind at rest to go at once. He and Joan must bid good-bye to Plymouth on the morrow.

And so, having resolved, he abandoned himself to the happiness of the moment. It seemed too stupendously incredible that after all these weary years of separation he and Joan were found, rejoined and wedded, and all in one day. Yes, wedded--the mad, preposterous thing! He chuckled in mere helpless ecstasy to think of it.