The stranger looked a trifle disconcerted.
‘Not so,’ he answered. ‘It is its temper—ha! I tell you, young master, it hath drunk blood like six-shilling beer, and knocked on more breast-bones——’
His voice went out of him with a chuckle. There at the gate, come unnoticed over the grass, stood the ex-Vicar, weak astonishment in his eyes.
‘Master Clerivault!’ quoth he. ‘What brings you here, and, out of your wont, by day?’
He had on a black cassock, but green with age; his shoes were tied with string; one flap of his bonnet stood up, the other down; his pale, mild head, like a calf’s, lay on his ruff as it were on an unwashed platter. Good Mrs Angell, the blowzed and ineffectual, would rebuke him for his untidiness, as she straightened her own tumbled coiffure, or appeared with her kirtle on the wrong side before. It was that sort of thing which tickled little Brion hugely.
The stranger, first re-sheathing his blade, blew a kiss from his finger tips, half affable, half mocking.
‘I will acquaint you, worthy Master Angell,’ he answered: ‘only—I prithee; there’s a proverb anent the ears of little pitchers. Acta exteriora, as we say in the law, indicant interiora secreta. You smoke me?’
‘Child,’ said the puzzled pedagogue, turning to Brion, ‘your message lingers while you wait.’
He waved his hand, and the boy went on to the house. ‘What hidden secrets?’ thought the youngster, for at six one, in Eliza’s time, could translate Latin. Something, some ghost of a mystery concerning himself, which would haunt his subconscious perceptives even now occasionally, seemed to rise within him. It brought with it a confused memory of other things and other places, but too unreal to be localised, and dissipated almost as soon as felt. So also faded his momentary perplexity over the stranger’s pretence of asking his way, when all the time, it appeared, he and his foster-father were well acquainted. It was the sword which remained in his mind. He would have liked to ask more questions about that and its sanguinary adventures.
The Dame, hot and overcome from battling with malapert kitchen wenches, met him with uplifted hands: ‘Why, loveling! and as I am a sinner there was no need to despatch thee, seeing as I never lended Mrs Dapper the recipe after all, but found it in the cupboard where it wont to lie. Come hither, that we measure lips, poor lamb; and so forgive me.’