For answer—for his heart was full—Brion made but a caressing gesture. But it was enough.
‘God bless thee,’ said his kinsman in a broken voice. ‘Now leave me’—and he put a hand before his eyes. But, as the boy went from the room, too awed for the moment to put the question nearest his heart, the hand was lowered to the half-emptied beaker.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE TRUTH AT LAST
So the parts were cast, and the new life begun in earnest. What was over was prologue; the real business of the house dated from this moment. Its members fell into their places; the weeds were gathered from the Court; the giant in short time, putting his great back into the job, brought order out of Chaos in the garden, and the whole place began to assume an aspect of more homeliness than it had shown for years. Not that on slender means it was to be reclaimed to the prosperity it had once enjoyed; it was ever in Brion’s time a thin estate, a half vacant building; but at least the worst of its desolation was amended to a plausible patchwork, and the cheeriness and devotion of its denizens made up in volume for the emptiness that echoed them in unfurnished rooms.
At first the boy was restless under this transformation of surroundings which, however dreary, had been associated with some sweet times. A weight, moreover, was upon his mind, which, until he could find occasion to shift it, must still oppress and agitate him. If only he could put the question he longed to put, he would feel, he thought, whatever the nature of the answer, a more resigned harmony with his lot than ever he could attain to while that question was pending. And at length the opportunity he sought came to him, and he seized it.
Every morning he read with his uncle in the Classics—Livy’s History, Isocrates’ Pleadings, Cicero on Friendship and Old Age, or the Tragedies of Sophocles—showing a mind so well balanced and informed that the tutor, finding himself in danger of being surpassed by his pupil, fell more and more into the negative rôle of assenter rather than proposer, until there came a day when he withdrew unostentatiously from the partnership, leaving the boy to conduct his own education after the manner he thought best.
There was another sentiment, however, associated with this relinquishment which was neither so sagacious nor so humorous. Despondency, combined with mental inquietude and the means he took to allay them, were encouraging in Quentin Bagott at this time a habit of moody solitariness, which from an indulgence was to become an obsession, and which, in its extreme phases, only Brion could invade with impunity. The truth was that, in spite of all he had acclaimed, and wished to believe, to the contrary, an existence of pastoral seclusion and inaction, after the busy forceful life he had led, was impossible to the man, and had become only the more unendurable as his mind was gradually relieved of its apprehensions regarding a possible impeachment. A veritable mal du pays ensuing, he had had recourse for its alleviation to a remedy already only too familiar to him as a begetter of dreams and oblivion. Pride, too, and the bitter chagrin of a fallen power, conscious of his neighbours’ knowledge of his own equivocal position, and of the means they were not slow to take to enforce that knowledge on him, helped to aggravate the double evil, and to drive him ever more upon himself and the means to forgetfulness. He might profess to scorn, in his own self-contained strength and the devoted efficiency of his household, the ‘slings and arrows’ of extraneous malice: his professions could gain no confirmation from his habits. Whatever the case, however, it became soon enough patent to all about him that, of the great store of wine and strong waters had over from the Golden Lion in Ashburton, by far too great a proportion found its way to the ex-Judge’s table or, worse, into his private closet. And the effect was not long in revealing itself, or in pointing its own miserable moral of debasement. There is tragedy in the still smouldering ruins of a house, but only squalor in them quenched and sodden.
But long before this evil had become a thing to whisper and remark on, Brion had learned all that he was destined to learn about his own history. He was with his Uncle one day, reading, at the table (to love both books and sport is to be the admirable youth) from Melancthon’s Confession, and looking up occasionally to ask the other, who sat in his big chair by the escritoire, to expound for him some knotty passage from the gentle Reformer, when suddenly a look came into his eyes, and a thrill to his heart, with the knowledge that he had reached the way. He rose, breathing hard, his eyes shining, to his feet.
‘Uncle Quentin,’ he said.
‘Nephew,’ was the response.