It was a wonderful time, so full of novelty and excitement for Brion that there was no room in him for brooding or apprehension; but, when they rode forth, his eyes were for twenty things at once, and least for his own company, who were in truth as safe and sober-sided a set of gravities as ever combined to make a prose of venturing. For which reason Brion soon forgot them for the livelier interests about him. He observed much, putting few questions to his companion—for that was not his way, except he had a definite purpose in asking—but measuring and marking in silence. The great buildings took him with wonder—and most, naturally, the congregated cluster of the Abbey, with its fair eastern chapel only then recently finished, and Margaret’s church, and the half-ruined royal palace and hall, approached through a gateway with octagonal towers which led into a mighty quadrangle with the river shining beyond. But more he liked to note the people, and the tumult and the multiformity of the crowds through which he passed. The jolly sellers at their booths (each hung over with its insignia, like the Cathedral stall of a knight-banneret), and their eternal chaunt of “What d’ye lack”; the ballad singers bawling their wares, and the loaded oyster-wenches dragging theirs; the gingerbread wife, the fiddler at a street corner—no commonplace of them all but figured as a very lusus naturae to these young emancipated eyes. Once and again a knight in armour, with his scarf at his shoulder and a plume in his velvet cap, would come riding over the cobbles, scattering the crowd right and left; and that to Brion was the finest sight of all. But there was a funnier, which made him presently stare, and then go off into a fit of giggling which he tried vainly to repress. For suddenly he saw coming towards them the oddest figure of a woman he had ever seen. She was old and pinched and raddled, with a great ruff round her neck, and a high-crowned hat set askew on a wig as red as rhubarb. Her stomacher stuck a foot below her waist, supporting an oval frame, over which was draped a padded farthingale like a great swinging bell that ended at her ankles; and thence projected a pair of gilt and painted shanks, which were like nothing in the world so much as a couple of enormous marrow-bones. It was only on her near approach that Brion perceived these to be a sort of fantastic clogs, half a yard in height, which she wore to the soles of her embroidered slippers, over which they were strapped; but so little gravity did they afford to the poor body that she needed the prop of a walking cane on the one side, and on the other of a sweet ape of fashion in a French doublet, who was her cicisbeo, to hold her up; in despite of which buttresses, she had a hard ado to keep her equilibrium as she passed, smirking and ogling.
‘Ay,’ said Clerivault, with an answering smile, hearing the boy unable to suppress his merriment. ‘Only laugh small, if thou must laugh. When oldest age mates with youngest fashion, she rightly bears derision for her pains. Yet, for the fashion itself, it finds favour in exalted quarters.’
‘What,’ said Brion: ‘those painted clogs?’
‘Not clogs, my young master, but chopines so called—a fashion brought from Venice. You will see them once and again and mark their indication. She was a small lady, that, yet a great lady.’
‘How, great, do you mean?’
‘Why, by the altitude of her chopine, Sir, which was as much higher than a patten as her ladyship was above a fishwife. The measure of that folly is the measure of its wearer’s rank.’
‘And does the Queen wear them?’
‘God forbid! She would have to go on stilts by the token. But when I spoke of fashion, I meant these new-found farthingales, which, by’r lady, are the very nadir of inelegance. Well, there is virtue in them, they say; and what are we to carp at virtue, though in a fantastic form. Let our maids go ugly, so they go chaste.’
Brion was puzzled, but he said no more; and other distractions quickly engaged him. They were soon out of Westminster, going by the north bank of the river, and, making in a little the village of Chelsea—dear to bathers for its clear water and pleasant meadows—rode through it and in no long while after reached the ferry at Putney, where, at the cost of a halfpenny a head, they crossed the river into the Manor of Wimbledon, seeing some men net and haul in a brace of great salmon by the way. For the river here yielded not only that excellent fish, but eke much smelt, and an occasional sturgeon or porpoise, for which reason its waters were exceedingly prized by anglers. Thence, going over an extended heath in close order, they reached the royal town of Kingston, where, passing by the church—whose great paschal candle, once kept perpetually burning through the halfpennies of the faithful, the Reformation had at last extinguished—Brion saw the very stone on which the Anglo-Saxon Kings were wont to sit to receive their crowns, and was properly impressed though not excited thereby. And here, at the Castle inn, they dined on calvered salmon and a huge baron of beef, with ale and sack to wash them down, after which the young gentleman rode so sleepily in his saddle that for miles he offered but a glazed eye to his surroundings, and only looked forward to bed and the journey’s end.
They lay that night at Farnborough, whence they were to journey by way of Salisbury and Dorchester to Bridport, and there take boat for the Devon coast, crossing Lyme Bay to a little fishing village named Torquay, which was the point nearest to their destination on the moors. And all that they did, nor am I going to recount the details of the journey, which was sufficiently tedious and without event. But here one of their party would leave them, and there another, making for the big towns, until from Dorchester they two issued alone, and were so together till the end was reached. The weather all this time was fine but cold, and Brion took his destiny manfully, though sometimes his heart would fail him a little over the weariness of it all. But whatever he might think or feel, there was the paragon always at hand to hearten and entertain him, to paint the future in roseate colours or improve the present with tales of his own past prowess and extraordinary experiences.