But Brion, though he uttered no word further on the subject, did not forget. The shadow of that encounter darkened all the sunny days which had gone before, and made ominous even the delirious prospect which had lured him from his far retreat. Henceforth he could never feel himself secure from the chance of a meeting, to which accident, or his own hot young blood, might give a sinister turn.
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.