‘And Mars Phineas says as they du say,’ added William, ‘that Sir John he be a-leaving the Chase for good, and not intending to come back to it never again no more.’

So the worst was not the worst, after all, and the tragedy not so complete but that Fate must provide an anticlimax to it. She was gone from him, and that was not enough: she must be lost to him for ever and ever. Any miserable hope he might have entertained of another season renewing the rapture of this must be forgone and stoically renounced. The end of all things had come.

He thought so, indeed, poor lad, and wisdom shall have no smile for his delusion. If this was, after all, but a boy and girl romance, to magnify the importance of which were to misuse one’s sense of proportion, it was a thing as intensely felt, and far more purely, than many an older passion. His life, his loneliness, his own reserved temperament had made of Brion a boy with something of a man’s heart, and it was as a man rather than as a boy he suffered.

But it was as a boy that, when at last the bitter delayed sun made his appearance through the clouds, he climbed to the empty bower, and wept and wept childish tears to know his sweet love gone from it. What would be her fate, so ravished beyond the reach of his influence, besieged and persecuted, perhaps, to force her into compliance with an unnatural demand? How he hated that unknown suitor; how he despised and scorned the commercial-souled parent who could stoop to barter his own flesh and blood (for to that unwarrantable conclusion he had jumped) against some worldly consideration. In alternations of mood he would sorrow dumbly, or burst into wild imprecations over the inhuman destiny which had uplifted him only to cast him down. At first, in spite of a fact stated and verified, he would cherish some mad hope that the family had not really departed—at least that she had been left behind, and that he would go to the bower one day and find her awaiting him with shining eyes and soft enamoured looks. But that dream was of brief duration: it could not survive the testimony of witnesses who knew the truth and could have no object in distorting it. And so, reconvinced of its emptiness, he would to his ravings again.

Well, the tumultuous time passed, and was succeeded in due course by a sad and settled resignation. The habit of sorrow comes, like other habits, to fit the more easily the longer it is worn. There was reached a day of half sweet, half melancholy reveries, when past joys began to assume an air of dim peacefulness, more of regret than of anguish. Old looks, old tones took on a mystic glamour, like happy things remembered from a dream. Most of all, queerly enough, there lingered in the boy’s mind a thought, humorously pathetic, of those quaint misterms which had issued so funnily from the girl’s lips. He put them down, young learned clerk that he was, to a faulty education; but he would not have his memory of his Joan without them. They seemed an essential part of the sweet thing she was.

And so, for what she had been and remained, he locked his dream away in his breast, only to be taken out and sorrowed over in rare relapses on emotion, but otherwise quietly possessed as a gift of ancient beauty. Always it abode with him, and was not the less there because other interests and desires, fruit of his growing life, appeared to absorb him. But he never forgot his early love, or forgot that he had dedicated his service, true knight and champion, to her honour and renown. That consciousness, though it ceased in time to be insistent, kept him brave and pure.

CHAPTER XIV.
AN EMOTION AND A DISCOVERY

It happened timely that there arrived from London at this pass that great consignment of goods and furniture before referred to. The unloading and distribution of the stuff, for all the boy’s professed repudiation of any interest in it, came presently, however, irresistibly to engage his curiosity, and he won a certain wintry distraction from his own thoughts by directing the placing of the multifarious items in the spots most fancied by his sense of fitness or caprice. He showed a good deal of captiousness in the matter, being in no mood to consider other people’s feelings when his own had been so rasped and wounded; but his obedient henchmen, influenced, perhaps—at least in the Cook’s case—by their sympathy with something loosely approximating the truth, submitted meekly to his tyranny, and lugged heavy objects at his bidding into all sorts of inconvenient nooks and eyries. And, not until every piece was disposed to their young despot’s liking, were they permitted to relax their efforts and conclude their task fulfilled; when he thanked and praised them so sweetly, with a hint of remorse for his own inconsiderateness, that they forgave him offhand, and withdrew luminously to submit their bruised thumbs and abraded fingers to the ministrations of Mrs Harlock.

Brion wondered, and without any great excitement, if this arrival might portend the return of his Uncle and Clerivault to the Grange. He did not seem to care much, one way or the other; but certainly the practical business of thus preparing for them was useful in keeping his mind occupied with something other than its own unhappiness. Especially was he pleased with the books—of which there was a considerable number—and with the promise they held out to him of a temporary forgetfulness in their absorption. He took much time and thought over their classification and shelving, and was gratified to discover amongst them some old friends, together with others he had heard of whose acquaintance he was interested to make. For he had always been a reader, appreciative and discriminative above his years, and in that respect owed to his good old preceptor, who had done much to direct his tastes.

Now amongst the volumes familiar to him through knowledge or repute he counted to his satisfaction the following items:—