‘Ha!’ said he: ‘all’s well if thou art well.’
‘Well, but something giddy,’ said Brion.
‘’Tis food thou needest,’ said the other, taking him by the shoulders and looking fondly in his face. ‘’Slid, but you frightened us, with your tossing and babbling, There was witch Harlock would ha’ set a poultice of black hellebore to thy midriff, to draw out the devil in possession; but I would have none of it, and she cursed me for a fool. “A must sweat or die,” quoth she: and, “My life for his,” I answered. It was thy brain sought rest, poor wight; and what for that like good burnt sack, mulled hot? And so we gave you, Phineas and I, and saw the blessed dew come forth, even as you raved, and all thereafter peace. God’s ’slid! but I was thankful. And did I overtax my trust, sweetheart? Go to! you missed a rare supper. That Phineas knows his part. But I could eat none of it till my heart was eased.’ His hands moved on the young shoulders; he withdrew one of them to pass its back across his wild eyes. ‘Come,’ he continued, in a husky voice: ‘the morn is well advanced, and the board waits. There be arrears, ha! to make up. Despatch, despatch!’
‘He loves me,’ thought Brion. ‘Poor Clerivault!’
A true tenderness was growing in his heart for this strange creature. It was a comfort to think of their reciprocal attachment, binding them comrades, in whatever trials might be in store for him. He dressed quickly, eager, now the fact was achieved, to make the acquaintance of the house. He would ask no questions, trusting better the witness of his eyes, and came out of his room prepared for anything.
His general impression of what he saw, then and thereafter, may be described as a mournful rather than a dejected one. It was of a queer rambling place, tossed together without much system or coherence, as if each succeeding owner had brought his own section with him to tack on to the rest. The stairs and passages were labyrinthine; the rooms for the most part mean though including a fine dining hall and ample kitchens. Indeed the offices seemed disproportionately capacious, as pointing to an original design on a larger scale. And as was this structural incongruity, so was it with the furniture. The kitchens were nobly provided; the living rooms for the greater part empty and forlorn. The fire in the former burned in a huge range, the draught from which turned a windmill which turned the spit; in the latter was no accommodation for warmth whatever, save what braziers might afford. Only in the great hall was a hearth, meet to its capacities; and only there, and in one or two of the rooms, including his own bedchamber, did Brion discover any signs of suggested occupation, such as chairs, tables, cabinets and the like; and, in the hall, some hangings of tapestry. The whole feeling the place gave him was one of quiet sadness, of a wild and rather sweet desolation; and this from the position and aspect of the house, when he came to be familiar with them, no less than from the loneliness of its deserted chambers.
This Moated Grange was situated some three miles N. by E. of Ashburton, in the midst of a lonely pasture, whose western limit touched the moor. There was no house nearer than the last house of the town. It stood on a tiny tributary of the Ashburn, which supplied the moat surrounding it with water; but both sluice and ditch, long years neglected, were choked with moss and growth, and the water slept stagnant, black between its islands of duckweed, and overshadowed throughout its whole compass by a rank luxuriance of bush and tree, whose lower branches dipped in liquid slime. From the inner circle of this moat—provision in long past days against the depredations of wolves—the ground rose somewhat to the wall, scarce seen for foliage, which ringed the whole estate; and here and there in its circumference great masses of ilex had gathered and flourished, building a darkness against the sky. Only in one spot was the fence of thicket broken, and that was where the bridle track, branching from the main road, crossed the moat by a stone bridge of a single span, and green with lichen, to the great entrance gate of the court. This gate was set in a tall rectangular turret of three sections, the uppermost plain, with a good window, the middle ornamented with crosses and lozenges in timber, its window square and small, the lowest containing the door, strong oak in a massive frame and studded with iron nuts. A low peaked roof, crested with a weathercock, surmounted this tower, which was moreover supported on its right by a building in which were the stables, and on its left by a shallow lean to, which served both as a buttress and for the porter’s lodge. Thence on both sides ran the containing wall of the property, whose whole aspect, in truth, suggested melancholy and decay. Between the outer gate and the house itself—the latter a heterogeneous congeries of parts, gabled and timbered—there was no stone in the narrow court but was green with moss, no broken shard which had fallen from a roof but had dulled its sharp edges against a generation of rain. Grass grew in the crannies of the walls, in the stone mullions of the windows, in the joints of the semi-circular steps before the main door. A strange still place, very remote in its sorrowful isolation from the picture the boy’s fancy had painted; yet, to the explorative soul of youth, not altogether without its uneasy charm.
Brion, wondering a good deal, after his first curious inspection of the home which was henceforth to be his for good fortune or ill, put a wistful question or two to Clerivault, who had been playing the silent cicerone to his charge, furtively watchful the while of the impression things made on him:—
‘Is it to be just you, and me, and Phineas, and William, and old Harlock and Uncle Quentin—only us, always, living alone here together?’
‘And Nol porter,’ cried Clerivault cheerily: ‘Art forgetting him—the jolliest he of us all, and thrice the man in bulk of any other.’