‘Ay,’ said he—‘ay, she’s there——’ and, looking over his head, ‘a tall slip, minister,’ says he, ‘and as fair informed within, I trow, as his looks are telling. He credits you, i’faith.’
‘Sir,’ said the pedagogue, ‘we claim to have done naught by him but after our nature and the terms of the bond, for which he hath repaid us, in his love and duty, a thousandfold. For the rest I have asked no questions and sought no knowledge—no, not even of your relationship, which appears to me now for the first time; no, not even of why, on that first evening, you demanded of my fear what my humanity would not have dreamed to deny you. Take him; he deserves the best; I can say no more—save that we shall miss him sorely. What day will it please you that he leaves us?’
‘Here and now, thou most faithful steward,’ said Bagott, reddening under that mild rebuke. ‘And as to that my first policy, I took the short way, as I thought it, using the means to my hand at once to gag and bind thee, lest thou shouldst prove refractory. Well, I say not but that suaver methods might have served, and meekness lessoned pride. Who makes a god of overbearing shall himself be overborne. Enough, I have horses without, and the occasion is pressing. For the boy’s baggage, it can follow.’
Then, indeed, was shock and lamentation; but, for all his urbanity, the visitor was inexorable. So Brion must go to make his last adieux of the house and people that for thirteen years had sheltered and loved him, while his uncle and foster-father were at discussion to close the account embracing all that ministering tenderness. It is idle to dwell on the sad, fond scene, the more so as the spirit of youth is elastic, and easily extended to new interests, so that, even at the worst, there was a measure of consolation to be foreseen in the prospect of unknown adventuring. But presently they all came out into the road; and there in the blown evening was a man standing, and three horses held by him in a group; at sight of whom some spark of ancient memory glowed in the boy, and the name Clerivault sprang out of nowhere into his mind. It was indeed that very cavalier who had made his sword hiss from its scabbard like a snake on the day preceding that of the beautiful lady’s appearance; and in an instant all that forgotten episode came back into Brion’s mind, so that his heart leaped to this comfort of one whom, in his great forlornness, he might cling to as a friend.
Now the question rose of his knowledge to manage a horse; but he had learnt that lesson, and learnt it well, of friendly neighbours, and so was to be trusted. And in a moment he was astride, and, the others following, turned, even with some pride of place in him, to cry his last farewells. Whereafter they all rode away, the boy’s parting vision being of good Mrs Angell, her face puffed and blowzed with grief, the caul on her head awry, a napkin stuffed into her mouth, or taken out of it to wave, and the little Alse, all tearful, clinging to her skirts.
And so into the night and the unknown went Brion Middleton.
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.