So at the end of four days they came into Devon, and found themselves towards a still bright evening riding into the little town of Ashburton, some three miles north of which lay the Moated Grange.
CHAPTER IV.
THE END OF THE JOURNEY
At the Golden Lion by the bull-ring the two halted to drink a sack-posset, for the boy was very spent and weary. Good fifteen miles had they ridden that last day, with three yet to cover to reach their journey’s end; yet his fatigue was as much of the mind as the body. The spirit which had sustained him throughout this long wayfaring seemed now, in the near achievement of its objective, to falter and lose heart. He realised all at once, as he had never yet done, his abysmal severance from the old familiar life. The thought came upon him with a force which certainly owed nothing to the dreariness or inhospitability of the country he was in, for it was a fair and friendly country, but to the felt unattainableness of his own. He was like a sleep-walker, who wakes to find himself naked and alone in spaces of impenetrable darkness, with his bed become a vague remoteness, a warm refuge impossible for his distraught mind ever again to locate or recover.
This reaction from a more expectant, or a more stoic, mood was due to many things—physical exhaustion, that sentiment of isolation, more than all, perhaps, to a doubt which had been slowly forming in his mind as to the reality of the prospect he had pictured for himself. That doubt had not until latterly come to haunt and disturb him; there had been no room for it to germinate in the fullness and novelty of the preceding days. He had found the greater world, on this his first excursion into it, wonderful enough, but wonderful more by reason of its spiritual renaissance than its material features. He did not, of course, put it in that way, or realise that the spirit abroad was in any sense other than the spirit he might have expected to encounter. But in fact it was different, and he himself was unconsciously infected by it. There was something stirring throughout the land which had not been there before, a mental enlargement, a broadening view, a sense of the wider aspects of nationality. It was like the wind that comes with the turn of the ebb tide, the waking breath of a dreamer who has been far and seen strange things, the burden of a rumour that the world was vaster than men had supposed, and that men were freer than they had supposed to explore it. Expansion was in the air, a throb of drums and ring of enterprise, a vision as of a new dawn breaking over the still smoking ruins of feudalism and intolerance. And of this sense of shining spaciousness, having England for its vivid nucleus, was somehow the prevalent atmosphere, into which Brion had entered to feel without knowing it its buoyancy and inspiration. He had ridden in it day by day; it had exalted his young spirit, and painted for him in befitting colours the goal for which they made. That he had always pictured to himself as something stately and important, meet dwelling for the dignified leisure of one who had been great but had done with greatness, a family seat in the ample sense. In vision, even, he had seen it as a mystic castle on a hill, with himself, a knight in silvery armour, riding up to its portcullis.
And now, with their near approach to their destination, had crept in this doubt, this depression, which was like a premonition of disillusionment. Was it, indeed, all to be as he had fancied, or something very notably and very sombrely different? He had questioned Clerivault as to the house and its life and surroundings, and it only now occurred to him for the first time that the answers he had received had been habitually reserved and evasive, general rather than specific. Had there been an intention to hide some ugly truth from him, or was it merely a lack of the descriptive faculty in his companion which gave his statements such an air of foreboding? Something, moreover, in the country itself seemed to deepen his impression of loneliness and melancholy. It was not that it was not beautiful, but that as they rode on they appeared to recede more and more from the signs of human occupation, and to penetrate ever deeper into the grip of a great solitariness. There was a sense of wild desolate spaces at hand, of inhospitable emptinesses, unpeopled and unexplored. The stretched resilience of his mind, like a released catapult, flew back to the extreme of laxity; and he feared the worst.
The fact and the comfort of the little town reassured him somewhat. Here was an oasis in the desert, and but three miles after all from the Grange. There might, too, be other dwellings between. Then the good drink warmed the cockles of his heart, and gave him renewed vigour and courage. But he was allowed no more than time to consume it, for evening was closing in, and his escort was nervous for the road. There was some curiosity about them, news of their coming having got abroad; but Clerivault refused to be drawn by the landlord or any other, and in a few minutes they were on their way again.
They rode out due north, following up the course of the little river Ashburn, which here was used to turn the wheels of a colony of fulling-mills; and presently came out into rising country, very wild and open. Nor was there any further sign of human habitation; but only a great still sky, and a waste of rolling land heaved under it. The sense of desolation increased; there was a call of strange birds from the shadows; no spark of light or welcome greeted them from ahead; but always the stark track went under, growing fainter and fainter. Presently Brion, with a little quiver in his voice, put a question:—
‘Are we near arrived, Clerivault?’
‘In a little,’ was the short answer.
The boy was silent for a while; then opened desperately on the subject in his mind:—