‘This,’ says he, ‘is already to break the spirit of the compact. Henceforth, silence—if for no other reason, Dame, because he hath us in his toils.’
She sighed, and caught the child to her bosom. ‘These be my toils,’ said she. ‘I will hold my tongue, lest by loosing it I loose them.’
This happened in the year 1560, and thereafter for the space of thirteen summers, his numbering but two when he arrived, Brion abode and throve sweetly under that friendly roof.
CHAPTER II.
THE PLEDGE REDEEMED
And for thirteen years the silence imposed upon that complaisant couple was faithfully observed by them. They adhered to the letter of their bond, neither seeking nor desiring information as to their charge, content, and soon for his own sake, to accept him, and love him, and contrive for him to the utmost extent of their ability. And he, for his part, repaid their devotion, growing a shapely slip in their midst, and developing as he grew a disposition as endearing as his form was attractive and his mind alert. He was a bright child, with a power of observance behind a staid manner, and a suspicion of humour twinkling under a gravity that seemed always to measure before it spoke. He had a respect for his foster-parents, as one may call them, tempered in the lady’s case with an inclination to laughter, and for both of them a well-deserved affection. And they, being under no directions but to treat him as one of their own progeny, were fain, nevertheless, to observe towards him a certain deference in their manner, due, as it were, to the entertainment of a mystery, and to concede to him as by right of birth a preference over their offspring, which were three in number, namely Gregory, Richard, and the little Alse the youngest. With these he grew from childhood, being regarded by them as an orphan of some unknown distinction, which, however, after the ways of youth, he was very ready to waive and they to disregard. They were all good comrades together, whether in school or sport, and shared, at least as regarded the boys, a fine spirit of adventure.
Now, during all this period, never, save once, was the ban of excommunication, as regarded the outside world, lifted; and then only for a brief moment; but faithfully to each quarter-day arrived a messenger from Gray’s Inn, bearing in a leathern bag the fourth of the allowance agreed upon for the child’s accommodation. That was ample, rather than sufficient, for his needs, which were to include in all respects the furniture of a gentleman, while leaving to his adopters a generous margin of profit. But, indeed, good souls, they took small advantage of the concession, barely, of their love, recouping themselves for the expenses to which they were put on his behalf, whom they were resolute to regard as naturally entitled to a style and consideration superior to their own. Wherefore the little Brion always went arrayed like a noble, while Gregory and the others must be content with the simpler dress of their condition, a fact which had alone sufficed to appoint him their leader, even were his boldness and quickness of invention less than they were.
And so he lived and learned, being trained without severity and indulged without hurt, a mystery and object of curiosity to the neighbours, with whom, nevertheless, scandal could get no hold, seeing that the Vicar himself, even had he been inveigled into telling, had nothing to tell. The child had been brought by an uncommunicative stranger, was there, and that was all. For the rest, the business was a lawyer’s business.
Now, it was somewhere about the boy’s sixth year when occurred that momentary lifting and dropping of the veil referred to; and by then whatever memories of a brief past he had brought with him into exile had long flickered into extinction. For all that survived to his mind he might have drawn his first breath in the house to which destiny had consigned him.
This house stood a little off the great west road by which the Queen’s Majesty would sometimes travel from Westminster to her Palace of Richmond in Surrey. It was a reasonably modest building, meet to the circumstances of an unbeneficed cleric, but with a pleasant garden croft attached, as well as an orchard, and a paddock which served for a playground. A bridle-track went from it down to the road, where was a swing-gate; and it was here that Brion, returning alone from an errand voluntarily run for his good-natured foster-mother—in whose unmethodicalness and forgetfulness he took, even thus early, a chuckling amusement—came for the first time upon the man who brought, though the boy did not know it, the periodic instalments of pieces to pay for his keep. Seeing him, he stopped, and the two looked at one another.
They looked, and the man’s face took on a queer expression, arrested and questioning. His eyes were light jellies, with pupils that somehow reminded Brion of the black staring pits in the frog-spawn he was used to fish out of the ponds. He was extraordinarily lank and bony, though with a suggestion of sinewy swagger about him that was quite impressive until one examined his features; and then conviction halted. They seemed to betray an odd mixture of impudence and weakness, the two seeming epitomised, as it were, in the near conjunction of a slack mouth and an inverted moustache brushed boldly up from it to meet the nostrils of a long down-drooping nose. He wore a black bonnet with a short feather in it, and hose, breeches, and curtmanteau all black, as befitted a lawyer’s deputy. On his body was a peascod breastplate, more dull than polished, a short sword hung at his thigh, and he bestrode a heavy Flanders horse, plainly caparisoned. He had been in the act of dismounting at the moment of the boy’s appearance, but, seeing him, subsided again into his saddle and sat staring.