‘No more?’
‘Cry you mercy, Sir! I’m what God made me. If I could be a host in myself, I would be it to please you.’
The boy was too worn and mind-weary to seek for words to mend his meaning; but others broke from him in an impulse of despair:—
‘I think I shall fall and die if the end is not soon.’
The cry went to the good fellow’s heart. He brought his horse close alongside, and put out a reassuring hand.
‘Nay,’ said he, ‘nay. Keep a brave spirit, sweetheart. ’Tis but a short effort, and the goal is won. There have been others gone before to prepare for us—Phineas cook, and young William scullion, not to speak of great Nol the porter, who follows presently with his Honour, and Gammer Harlock which hath rooted in the house so long that, like the mandrake, she would shriek to be torn from it. God so! but we will have gay company, with lights to greet us, and warmth and rich fare.’
He stooped to the boy’s bridle as he spoke, and, fetching away from the little stream, whose course they had followed till now, swerved a point or two to the north-east. Brion stiffened his neck, and sought with his weary eyes to penetrate the gathered glooms, which as yet yielded no sign of cheer or welcome. Only, at some indefinite point ahead, they seemed to heap themselves into a blur of blackness, like a stain of ink on wet gray blotting paper. The track beneath them was hardly now to be distinguished; the irregular ground called for wary riding, and their progress was slow. He looked up and thought he saw a star falling in the sky; but it was a light crossing his brain. Then he seemed to reel, and clutching at the saddle bow, ‘Clerivault!’ he cried.
A cheery shout answered him: ‘The Moated Grange—ha!’ and in the same moment his rein was caught by his companion, and they stopped. He might scarcely give a sigh of joy, though discerning with his dim eyes only shadow and confusion, when the other leapt to the ground, and he heard the furious battering of his sword-hilt on echoing wood. Then after an interval came a great flare of light, and a sense of figures gesticulating in a swirl of red smoke, and of voices in deep altercation. Whereafter he remembered nothing more, but only a sigh of yielding and collapse, followed by a stillness which at first seemed the rest of heaven, until things began to move in it, and faces to appear, and inarticulate voices to babble and rage. He wearied to escape them, to get deep down underground where he would find peace and utter silence; but they came between, and forced him to stay and listen. Then suddenly he was raised, for all that he felt himself turned to a stone figure, heavy and enormous, with nothing alive in him but his brain, and a gush of molten fire went down his throat, setting him all ablaze. Sparks poured from his eyes; he could hear his whole being crackling within like a burning gorse-bush—faster and faster, while he whirled about in a mad frenzy. At the height, a flood of warm water was flung, which extinguished the flames in a moment, and, released and blissful, he sank away into an oblivion as sweet as death.
CHAPTER V.
THE HOUSE BY THE MOOR
With a snore like the grinding on shingle of a boat’s nose which has been run ashore at the end of a long smooth journey, Brion opened his eyes from a period of the profoundest repose he had ever enjoyed in his life. All the fever and the weariness were gone from him, though a strange sense of lightness and giddiness had succeeded, so that he lay blinking and yawning, incurious about his situation, and contentedly waiting for it to develop itself as it listed.