Where England sets her feet: a romance

by Bernard Capes

Suddenly his eyes were hot with tears: they had come unexpected, from out of nowhere, and had taken him by surprise. He sat very still, battling with his emotion; and in a little he had quite mastered it. Then he took up the Book of Hours, and rose to return it to its place; but first, in a quick impulse, he bent and kissed the name upon the title.

‘She called herself my first lover,’ he whispered—‘I remember it now so well—and her pretty one, and her babe. She was sad and beautiful; and I hated him that rode with her.’

And now in thought he hated the handsome sinister cavalier more than ever—hated him with the hatred of a child’s rebellion against misused authority and immitigable wrong.

All the rest of that day Brion went very quiet. He seemed preoccupied; he was grateful for little ordinary services; almost submissive to those who rendered them. It was as if some shock to his young pride had humbled him to the dust. But his mind was restlessly busy. He had never seen his Uncle since he parted from him in the Cock tavern; he had felt some anticipatory awe over their re-meeting; now he wanted him to return, that he might face him with a direct question. He meant to put that question; whencesoever he derived it, he had an imperious spirit.

There was another associated matter, too, which gave him food for uneasy reflection, especially in the light of certain remarks once made by his girl love—and that was the Romish savour of much of the Judge’s literature. Was this Uncle of his really at heart, or had been, a Papist? It was a dangerous thing to be suspect of such sympathies in these days. Yet there was that story of his disgrace, which might not be calumny, and there were these pious evidences, which might, after all, be no more than the evidences of an enthusiastic book-lover. It would seem at least that the little ‘Horae Beatae’ had been personal to the devotions of Jane Middleton, for the marks of frequent use were visible on its pages. He thought of the slender fingers turning the leaves, of the wistful face bent above them, with a strange indulgent feeling that was like protection. Well, she anyhow was dead, and beyond the reach of persecution. He felt the tears very near his eyes again.

So the books had taught him something which he had never looked to find in them. They could not, alas! teach him how to forget, but rather, through this discovery, had aggravated his memory. Was it to be his fate always to be forsaken of his womankind? For a time again the anguish of his recent loss drove him to desperation. He wandered incessantly abroad, visiting, with melancholy iteration, every spot connected with his lost love’s presence—the glen, the copse, the old well-house. That place held no terrors for him at last. If he had felt any hesitation about re-entering it, he had savagely turned on himself for suspecting what was for ever now made lovable through her association with it. It was the sanctum where, recalling her sweetness and her endearingness, he could most let his emotions free. His own sad spirit haunted it in a way, with a force, to overbear and extinguish all lesser ghosts.

He was in there, one day, leaning against the rim of the big wheel and indulging his most twilight mood, when something occurred of a sufficient interest to afford his mind at least a temporary surcease from its dejection. He had been recalling, for the hundredth time, that unforgettable morning of the adventure, and how resolute she had been, the darling, and how clear-headed; and how her bright temerity had been innocent of all moral-pointing, when she might have despised him for his cowardice. Would the contempt come now, he thought, if she could know him for what he was? Or did she already know—or guess? There must have been some half-conscious purpose in her assurance to him, so quaintly expressed, of her indifference to the name given him by her father. Pondering it all, he fell into a fit of profound musing, from which he was suddenly startled by the sound of the well laughing.

He gave a violent start—not of panic, for he was long familiar now with that weird throaty chuckle and its cause, but of mere nervous repercussion—and, coming erect, found himself caught at the back. Some part of his dress had hitched in a projection of the wood-work, and held him prisoner. He pulled, and the object, whatever it was, appeared to come away. Suddenly it yielded, and fell heavily at his heels. He turned to see what it was, and discovered that he had drawn out from the circumference of the wheel one of the short boards or panels of which it was composed.

For the moment, stooping to lift the thing, he imagined that its detachment was due to mere accident or decay; but suddenly, as he idly handled it, his fingers touched on something which set him oddly thinking. This was a notch or groove on the underside of the board—representing the outside of the wheel—which had been intentionally cut there, it would seem, to facilitate its removal. But for what purpose? A little excited, he made a quick examination of the gap exposed, and saw at once that chance had led him on a curious discovery. The board, a stout one, some eighteen inches in width, was furnished with a tongue on each side, the two being formed to slide into corresponding grooves cut in the adjacent sections, in the manner of a ‘match-joint,’ and it was fitted on its outer edge, like a box-lid, with a flange which, when the panel was pushed home, came up flush with the wheel-rim. Brion tried it in and out, and found that it ran quite easily. But why was it there, and what was the meaning of the notch?

Now the lowest segment of the wheel, as already said, turned, for a foot or more below the surface, in a little oblong pit cut to receive it in the pavement, as if some miscalculation of the diameter had necessitated that stratagem. Brion had always so looked upon it as a makeshift, but now he began to wonder. After a minute of thrilling reflection, he slid out the panel, laid it aside, and, turning the wheel until the gap in it came over the pit, steadied the slowly rotating monster and looked down. And instantly, with a little shock of the blood, he understood. The pit was no shallow depression made to receive the wheel, but the entrance to an underground chamber of unknown depth and significance.