An hour later he came back. Phineas heard and ran out, to find him sitting, white and dripping, in the hall. He threw up his arms, with a great sigh of joy and relief:—
‘Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro!’
‘That is Church Latin,’ said Brion weakly.
The other hung his head.
‘Old habits will cling. ’Tis all one for the language of the heart.’
‘Well, you were right, Phineas, and I was wrong. I was lost as soon as started. Only good chance brought me presently back to the gate, and to the near fracture of my skull against it. In the interval I have followed spectres, I have had falls, I have soaked in water enough that if you wrung me in the moat it would overflow. I prithee give me something hot before I perish.’
‘Now, get you, if you can, rid of your clothes and into dry duds. I will bring you up with my own hands a stoup of broth and such mulled sack as shall persuade you half way into a tippler’—and he hurried off to his task, grunting relief and jubilance by the way. He was very much concerned, was Phineas—not only over this last piece of obstinacy, but over certain wayward moods which had preceded it. It had been patent to all the small household, and particularly to him through his profession, that matters had not been latterly as they should be with the boy. To put it as a case, Brion had eaten well when he was most repining, and ill when he was most elated, which, gastronomically, was all wrong. After Clerivault’s going, he had been sad with a glad appetite, and, later, glad with a bad appetite. What was the reason, and why had he, who for so long had hung disconsolate about the house, suddenly taken to being hardly ever at home? There must be a reason, and cogitating it, the wise cook shook his head. There seemed to him only one plausible explanation of the phenomenon—an intrigue with some moorland pottlepot.
Well, such eventualities had to be counted on, and, if it was the case, he could do nothing. But it should have restored all his theories of fitness, when, as came shortly to occur, Brion fell definitely into a state of being sad with a bad appetite.
Now, the damning mist and drizzle lasted for three days; and what the boy suffered in that time only his own passionate prematurity could tell. It was not simply that he was temporarily shut off, fettered and helpless, from his earthly paradise, but that he was tortured with anxiety as to what might be happening behind the veil. Then that sense of dark premonition would reassert itself, and paint the future for him in blackest colours. What if he were to find their worst apprehensions realised, and Joan torn from him in the very moment of their perfect understanding? No, Fate could not be so cruel!
But Fate was just so cruel, and a little more, since that was exactly what had happened. On the very day following that of the last meeting in the bower Sir John Medley had saddled up and departed for London, taking the whole of his household with him. Brion heard the news from William as a mere piece of local gossip, and bore it unflinching.