Chapter V: The House by the Moor

With a snore like the grinding on shingle of a boat’s nose which has been run ashore at the end of a long smooth journey, Brion opened his eyes from a period of the profoundest repose he had ever enjoyed in his life. All the fever and the weariness were gone from him, though a strange sense of lightness and giddiness had succeeded, so that he lay blinking and yawning, incurious about his situation, and contentedly waiting for it to develop itself as it listed.

There is a self-healing balm in the ‘liquid dew of youth’ whose essence is a short memory, for when an evil is forgotten it is over. Yesterday’s fret and exhaustion were no more to the boy now than the bed on which his body rested--a pretext to luxuriate; and he remained as he was until the balance between pleasure and curiosity insensibly inclining the latter’s way spoiled the blissful equilibrium, when he sat up, all at once actively interested in his surroundings.

The room in which he found himself was small and, as he assumed, high up, for the low broad casement commanded from his position an unbroken oblong of grey cloud. Its walls were panelled in dark oak, and the ceiling was beautifully groined, with the cusps picked out in gold leaf. Bed, press and the two chairs were all of the same rich wood, carved and elaborated, and over the head of the first was a tester, with hangings of purple damask having a gold border. A prince could not have asked for more; and, if the rest of the house were in keeping, he had reason enough to congratulate himself at least on the quality of his exile. He slid to the floor, and ran to look from the window.

His room was an eyrie, sure enough, and commanding a wild bird’s view. He saw beneath him a space of bewildered land, bounded by dense low trees, and thence and thereover, as far as his sight could reach, fold upon fold of heathery country, like a great ground-swell breaking on the horizon in a line of light, or revealing, as waves reveal in their troughs, deep mysteries of sunken forests, and streaming rocks, and clusters of upstanding birches that might have been the masts of foundered ships. Once, twice, above the swell rose a mightier crest crowned with stone, and a level cold sky roofed all. But, though wide and liberal, it was desolate--no chimney or rising smoke to be seen above the green anywhere.

Brion opened the casement, and looked down. The click of the latch caught the attention of a man standing on a sward below, and their eyes met.

‘Clerivault!’ cried the boy.

The paragon clapped his hands, exultant.

‘Wait,’ he cried, ‘while I come to you--’ and disappeared into the house.

Brion hung out. He could make little of his position, save that it was somewhere aloft in a medley of building, of which a projecting gable cut off all but a narrow section. But to his right, where the house ended, stretched a wide garden, less reassuring in its aspect than the room in which he stood. For it was very tangled and overgrown, and so run to a waste of weed that its flower and vegetable parts could no longer be distinguished from one another; but all rioted in a dank disorder, made more melancholy by the gloom of encircling trees, which for ages, it seemed, had not been topped or pruned.

As he gazed, feeling a doubt creep over him, he heard a step climbing the wooden stairs, and turned to greet his good comrade.

Clerivault’s eyes shone bright as he entered the room.

‘Ha!’ said he: ‘all’s well if thou art well.’

‘Well, but something giddy,’ said Brion.

‘’Tis food thou needest,’ said the other, taking him by the shoulders and looking fondly in his face. ‘’Slid, but you frightened us, with your tossing and babbling, There was witch Harlock would ha’ set a poultice of black hellebore to thy midriff, to draw out the devil in possession; but I would have none of it, and she cursed me for a fool. “A must sweat or die,” quoth she: and, “My life for his,” I answered. It was thy brain sought rest, poor wight; and what for that like good burnt sack, mulled hot? And so we gave you, Phineas and I, and saw the blessed dew come forth, even as you raved, and all thereafter peace. God’s ’slid! but I was thankful. And did I overtax my trust, sweetheart? Go to! you missed a rare supper. That Phineas knows his part. But I could eat none of it till my heart was eased.’ His hands moved on the young shoulders; he withdrew one of them to pass its back across his wild eyes. ‘Come,’ he continued, in a husky voice: ‘the morn is well advanced, and the board waits. There be arrears, ha! to make up. Despatch, despatch!’

‘He loves me,’ thought Brion. ‘Poor Clerivault!’

A true tenderness was growing in his heart for this strange creature. It was a comfort to think of their reciprocal attachment, binding them comrades, in whatever trials might be in store for him. He dressed quickly, eager, now the fact was achieved, to make the acquaintance of the house. He would ask no questions, trusting better the witness of his eyes, and came out of his room prepared for anything.

His general impression of what he saw, then and thereafter, may be described as a mournful rather than a dejected one. It was of a queer rambling place, tossed together without much system or coherence, as if each succeeding owner had brought his own section with him to tack on to the rest. The stairs and passages were labyrinthine; the rooms for the most part mean though including a fine dining hall and ample kitchens. Indeed the offices seemed disproportionately capacious, as pointing to an original design on a larger scale. And as was this structural incongruity, so was it with the furniture. The kitchens were nobly provided; the living rooms for the greater part empty and forlorn. The fire in the former burned in a huge range, the draught from which turned a windmill which turned the spit; in the latter was no accommodation for warmth whatever, save what braziers might afford. Only in the great hall was a hearth, meet to its capacities; and only there, and in one or two of the rooms, including his own bedchamber, did Brion discover any signs of suggested occupation, such as chairs, tables, cabinets and the like; and, in the hall, some hangings of tapestry. The whole feeling the place gave him was one of quiet sadness, of a wild and rather sweet desolation; and this from the position and aspect of the house, when he came to be familiar with them, no less than from the loneliness of its deserted chambers.

This Moated Grange was situated some three miles N. by E. of Ashburton, in the midst of a lonely pasture, whose western limit touched the moor. There was no house nearer than the last house of the town. It stood on a tiny tributary of the Ashburn, which supplied the moat surrounding it with water; but both sluice and ditch, long years neglected, were choked with moss and growth, and the water slept stagnant, black between its islands of duckweed, and overshadowed throughout its whole compass by a rank luxuriance of bush and tree, whose lower branches dipped in liquid slime. From the inner circle of this moat--provision in long past days against the depredations of wolves--the ground rose somewhat to the wall, scarce seen for foliage, which ringed the whole estate; and here and there in its circumference great masses of ilex had gathered and flourished, building a darkness against the sky. Only in one spot was the fence of thicket broken, and that was where the bridle track, branching from the main road, crossed the moat by a stone bridge of a single span, and green with lichen, to the great entrance gate of the court. This gate was set in a tall rectangular turret of three sections, the uppermost plain, with a good window, the middle ornamented with crosses and lozenges in timber, its window square and small, the lowest containing the door, strong oak in a massive frame and studded with iron nuts. A low peaked roof, crested with a weathercock, surmounted this tower, which was moreover supported on its right by a building in which were the stables, and on its left by a shallow lean to, which served both as a buttress and for the porter’s lodge. Thence on both sides ran the containing wall of the property, whose whole aspect, in truth, suggested melancholy and decay. Between the outer gate and the house itself--the latter a heterogeneous congeries of parts, gabled and timbered--there was no stone in the narrow court but was green with moss, no broken shard which had fallen from a roof but had dulled its sharp edges against a generation of rain. Grass grew in the crannies of the walls, in the stone mullions of the windows, in the joints of the semi-circular steps before the main door. A strange still place, very remote in its sorrowful isolation from the picture the boy’s fancy had painted; yet, to the explorative soul of youth, not altogether without its uneasy charm.

Brion, wondering a good deal, after his first curious inspection of the home which was henceforth to be his for good fortune or ill, put a wistful question or two to Clerivault, who had been playing the silent cicerone to his charge, furtively watchful the while of the impression things made on him:--

‘Is it to be just you, and me, and Phineas, and William, and old Harlock and Uncle Quentin--only us, always, living alone here together?’

‘And Nol porter,’ cried Clerivault cheerily: ‘Art forgetting him--the jolliest he of us all, and thrice the man in bulk of any other.’

The boy was silent awhile. Perhaps he was thinking of kind Mrs Angell, and of Alse, and of what sort of substitute the old witch woman would make for those gentle ministrants.

‘Yes,’ he said presently, ‘I shall like to see Nol porter,’ and was quiet again, turning over something in his mind. ‘Clerivault,’ he said then, ‘was what is in the house, my--my bed, I mean, and the rest of the things, here before we and the others came?’

‘Narry one, Sir,’ was the answer. ‘The place was as naked as my hand. What thou seest was sent down from his Honour’s house in London. Think not but there’ll be more despatched anon. We’ll have a cosy nest before we’re finished.’

It came to be as he said, indeed, a great cargo of furniture, including many pictures and a quantity of valuable plate and knicknacks, arriving presently by convoy; yet there was never enough, all told, to make more than a scanty show about the house, and to the last the majority of the rooms remained as when Brion first saw them, vacant of everything but dust and spiders.

‘What makes you to ask?’ questioned Clerivault, a little curiously.

‘I was thinking,’ said Brion, ‘of him that lived here before us.’

The man’s countenance fell.

‘Who told you of him?’

‘It was Gammer Harlock.’

‘A murrain on her withered tongue!’ exclaimed the other irritably. ‘Lived, lived! Why, what is a house but to live in!’

‘She told me his name,’ said Brion. ‘It was Matthew Fulk, and he was a sad miser. He has been dead a year and more now; but all during the latter half of his dwelling here she lived with him alone as his servant--only she and none other. This house had been his for twenty years, maybe; and in the first of that time there was a young maid, his niece, that abode with him. But her he murdered, and cast her body down the well in the well-house, and gave out that she had gone off with one of the rebel troopers that marched to the siege of Exeter in the time of the great riots.’

‘And why should she not have?’ The pupils of Clerivault’s eyes stared like a cat’s.

‘Because,’ said Brion, ‘after his death they would cleanse the well of its foulness, seeing the water had rotted there undrawn since the maid was lost; and in its slime were found bones--human bones, Clerivault.’

‘More liker some dog’s or sheep’s,’ said the other scornfully. ‘Why should he murder her?’

‘Because the devil whom he served asked a sacrifice of him.’

Clerivault snorted.

‘Ah, hold your peace! This is the very lunacy of superstition. I knew the man, Sir--was here with him on legal business four, or it may be five years ago, and plumbed his very soul. A gripping, sour-lidded curmudgeon: but murder! He feared the law too much. These be old wives’ tales, and she who utters them a potion-brewing witch. Give her no credit, I entreat you.’

Brion did not answer, pursuing his own train of thought.

‘Clerivault,’ said he in a little, ‘it must be long since my Uncle dwelt here.’

‘How?’ asked the other.

‘Why, if this Fulk was twenty years a tenant?’

‘Was he? Well, we’ll not quarrel to a hair. But ’tis long as thou sayest--since he was a boy, in truth.’

‘A boy!’ Brion actually laughed. It seemed so impossible that that tremendous being could ever have been a boy--like himself.

‘The Bagotts,’ went on Clerivault, ‘were big people here in the past, portreeves, and lords of the Stannary Court in Ashburton. They owned mines, and prospered. But, on one cause or another, they were for ever at litigation, and in the end that cracked them. The law was in their blood, i’faith, and imposthumated, as it were, in thine Uncle--came to a great head, and burst, imperilling his life. It was time for him to withdraw from it.’

‘Was his life imperilled?’

‘Say his reason, at least.’

‘Had he never brothers or sisters, Clerivault?’

The man glanced quickly at the boy before answering.

‘One sister,’ said he, in a restrained voice; ‘but she died. Art his sole kin in all the world, young master. Be thankful for it. Love him and he’ll repay thy love. To those he trusts he’s ever gentle and considerate, fierce and proud though he profess in the world’s eye. Do we not know him--Phineas a master cook, and the boy William, and honest Nol and myself? Else should we, brilliant children of our parts, have been content to follow him into this exile, to sink our gifts in solitude, to serve him in sour misfortune as in prosperity? He has the trick of attachment, like some men with animals.’

‘What misfortune?’ asked the boy wonderingly.

Clerivault bit his lip.

‘Did I not tell thee?’ said he. ‘The law, taken in excess, like wine affects the reason, and he was too full of it for health--it impaired his judgments. Wherefore his decision to resign, and to seek amid these scenes of peace the restoration of his faculties. Misfortune enough--ha! to be reduced, in plenitude of one’s power, to a sick nonentity.’

Brion, though marvelling a little that it should have been deemed necessary to hide so simple an explanation from him, was satisfied with it now it had come. He understood at last the meaning of their withdrawal into these country seclusions, and was both sorry and proud for this great-souled relative of his, who had so nobly resolved to put conscience before self-interest.

The two walked on a little; and then said Clerivault, breaking a silence between them: ‘This place consorts not with your dreams, mayhap, of what was to be; yet shall you come to be as happy as the day in it. We are few, but the moor is big. It is a wild free life thou shalt lead, and content and lustihood shalt thou draw from it. Now mount with me, I prithee, to thy chamber once again, and I will show thee things.’

So they went up together, and there found Gammer Harlock busy bed-making. She was an old woman, bent and bony, but with an amazing vigour in her attenuated frame. Her face was of the hatchet shape, with an aquiline nose and slow projecting eyes, and the compressed austerity of her mouth so drooped at the corners as to make her chin appear a separate attachment, moving on a pivot as in a mask. But she was scrupulously neat, no rent in her cloth of frieze gown, no stain on her close linen coif or the partlet about her withered neck. She showed no knowledge of their presence, but went on with her work.

Clerivault sniffed and scowled.

‘Better employed in making his bed, Gammer,’ said he, ‘than in poisoning his mind.’

‘Eh, jackanapes!’ she answered; ‘are ye there, and talking?’

She did not turn her head. Her voice was like a low whine, harsh yet thin.

‘Talk and hang,’ said he, ‘you old devil. Will you tell me this: Why, if Fulk committed murder and you knew it, you shouldn’t be broke for an accessory after the fact?’

Her eyes turned on him like a crab’s.

‘Because he was dead when I knew it, ye fine lawyer.’

‘And being dead,’ said Clerivault, ‘you think it safe to asperse his character, which is slander and defamation. Art on the horns of a dilemma, old witch.’

She made a sound of thin derision.

‘Call his character to witness, and call again. Ye’ll get no answer, for he had none.’ She turned on him with some repressed fury. ‘Attend you to your business and leave me to mine. Nine year come Pentecost have I lived and served in this house; doing by it what was never asked in the bond; sweeping and garnishing throughout, though Fulk he lived in no more than two of its rooms; and all for a scant pittance and less meat. Do I know its every rat and shadow, think you, ay and its ghosts that walk and its voices that whisper, to be told by a niddipol lawyer’s clerk, that hath scarce set foot in these silences, what to make of them but scorn and mockery. There are eyes for those that can see and ears for those that can hear: but it is aye the fool that misdoubts others, and the wise man himself.’

‘Misdoubts what?’ said Clerivault. ‘These maggots of a flyblown brain? Well, God quit you of your “shadows”; but not by way of my charge here, who looks to a homely home, and beings of flesh and blood for company, and not the fancied wraiths of fancied crimes. To call a house possessed is an offence at law; and when the house is a judge’s house--take heed, gossip, take heed, I warn you. His Honour is not the man to suffer the corruption of his kin or the branding of his property.’

He ended harshly, and turned to Brion, leaving the old woman muttering.

The boy had heard his comrade, half shocked and half amused. The castigation seemed to him to exceed the transgression. After all, though he had been fascinated and thrilled by the tale she had told him, he had not been frightened. He was a level-headed youngster, and not easily scared. Clerivault pointed from the open casement.

‘See yonder,’ said he, signifying a hill some mile and a half north-west of the Grange: ‘Rippon Tor, they call it, that hath its logging-stone; and, farther north, that’s Hey Tor, with its mighty crown of rock. We’ll climb it together, and get a view will do you good. Out west there stands Buckland Beacon, that we may yet live to see fired, and south of it the waters of the Dart, where they bend about Holne Chase. That’s a sweet and noble demesne, owned by the lords of Buckland, but the house let now to Sir John Medley, a rich City Knight and rogue from London, that hath a fair young daughter, Mistress Joan yclept, his sole child and heiress.’

So he continued, expatiating on the beauties of the moor, and planning expeditions here and there to gorge, or glen, or hidden hamlet, where draughts of golden cider were to reward the sweet and happy toil of adventure. He was eager to dwell on the near approach of the long warm days, eager not only to reconcile the boy to his lot, but to kindle in him an enthusiasm for it. And Brion, in face of those fervent adjurations, was not slow to catch fire, or to forget, in bright anticipation of long walks and rides, and hawkings, perhaps, and fishings in the clear tumbling streams, the sadness of his home surroundings.

As presently they turned from the window, a thought occurred to him, not for the first time.

‘Clerivault,’ he said, ‘why is this my room so fair above all others in the house?’

‘Well, it was a chapel in the old days,’ answered the man, but after a moment’s pause, and with, it would seem, a certain reluctance.