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.
Suddenly, as if to some instinct, he pulled off his cap and louted to
the little fellow, who responded with a grave ‘Good-morrow, stranger.’
‘Good-morrow, my brave little master,’ answered the man, and bent over
as if to signify his desire for a closer confidence (his voice, Brion
noticed, had a queer high huskiness in it, like a rusty hinge with an
intermittent squeak). ‘A word in your ear,’ says he, behind his hand,
and in a forced whisper. ‘’Tis one Master Robert Angell that I seek.
You’ll not know, perchance, where he inhabits?’
Brion smiled, and pointed up the bridle path. The stranger sat up,
drawing back his shoulders and stiffening his neck, like one happily
confirmed in a surmise. ‘Ha!’ said he, and stooped again. ‘I should
like a word with him.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ said the boy. ‘I live there myself, you know.’
The stranger was amazed and gratified. ‘Who,’ he said, ‘would have
laid on such a leap-frog chance now! I take a back at random, and lo,
’tis a back-friend!’ All the time he spoke his spots of pupils never
ceased to probe the face beneath him. He observed its eyes--to which
the sight of lethal weapons were as yet little familiar--fix
themselves curiously on his sword. ‘Ah!’ he said; ‘you are there, are
you?’ and slapped the hilt with his gauntleted hand. ‘Mayst have as
good a friend thyself one day, little master.’
‘I will have a rapier,’ said Brion, ‘and a baselard with a sheath of
red to hang at my waist.’
‘And so thou shalt, by token of thy gentility,’ cried the stranger.
‘Of scarlet cuirbouilli shall it be, and on it a device of bears with
rubies set for eyes.’
‘How has your sword been a friend to you?’ asked Brion.
‘How!’ cried the other. ‘Why, as friends go--a champion at need, true
as steel, quick to interpose between myself and danger.’ He whisked
out the blade, so as to make it hiss. ‘Hearest?’ he demanded. ‘“What
is toward?” it whispers--“some lurking knave, a damsel in distress, an
insult to avenge? Slid! but I’ll answer for you and to the point.” It
is a friend, I say; a watchdog with a tooth that it hath whetted on a
twenty-score of rib-bones in its time. Mark you its edge.’
‘It is a clean edge,’ said Brion. ‘From its newness it might have been
bought yesterday.’
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.’
In the meanwhile, down by the gate, the stranger had stated his
business, and the divine acquiesced in it, much as it bewildered that
honest old head.
‘It shall be done, Master Clerivault,’ he said, ‘even as you direct.
The child shall be there; though for the why or the wherefore I am in
no sort to concern myself.’
‘Spoken wisely,’ said the stranger, ‘and in good earnest of the trust
which, from the first, hath well reposed itself in thee. Discretion is
long life; what thou seest see, but draw no conclusion from it, lest,
like the fool’s fen-candle, it lure thee in the mire. _Dictum
sapienti_: I have said. A brave child, master, and a fair credit to
his guardians. Farewell.’
He kissed his glove, with a very Malvolio simper, turned his horse’s
head for London, and rode away.
Now it was announced by the pedagogue on the following morning that
her Majesty was to travel that day by road for Richmond; wherefore all
were to don of their best, and, standing together by the wayside,
salute her Grace in proper respect as she passed with her train. It
was an occasion not the first of its kind, and, like an earlier one,
full of excitement and expectancy. Great preparation there was, the
little scholars all arriving in their smartest; and indeed when
collected they made a pretty group. Only one was wanting, and that was
Brion. As the time for the Queen’s coming approached, Mr Angell,
taking the boy aside, had bade him follow him by a private path which
discharged them into the highway at a point some quarter of a mile
westward of the house, and, from its position, well out of range of
any chance espial. And this they did, and stood waiting, the elder in
some agitation, the younger much marvelling in his baby mind that he
was separated from his comrades, and allotted a distinction he could
well have done without. However, he was of a philosophical
temperament, and averse from denying a meaning to things because he
did not understand them.
It was the month of June, and a sweet merry day, with a wind like
laughter blowing among the roadside flowers. And of a keeping with its
cheeriness was the child, gay under all his sleek sobriety. His
doublet was of white satin, puffed at the shoulders as if they were
budding into wings, and so were his breeches, all being seamed with
black velvet having a marvellous pattern in gold thread embroidered on
it. His little cloak was of black velvet lined with white; white were
his hose, and white his shoe-roses of lace with a gold thread in it;
and in his _copotain_ hat was a white feather which the wind ruffled
like froth. He was fair and pale, without insipidity--a delicate
picture.
Now the two had not long to wait before there came to them a sound of
distant shrill acclamation; by which they knew that her Majesty was
arrived and that the little scholars were cheering her as she passed.
And indeed within a minute or so there hove into sight along the road
the first of the procession that accompanied her, being a cavalcade of
gentlemen of the Queen’s guard, handsome in buff and steel, curiously
adorned, in that martial connexion, with ribbons and tassels of gold.
Upon whom followed such a miscellaneous company of knights and ladies
as it is impossible to discriminate; nor can one describe the gorgeous
flood of them in that narrow way, save as a river discharged from the
very vats of Tyre, and staining its whole course with a thousand dyes.
So, all mounted, they sparkled by, flashing and chattering; and many
remarked the little boy, and blew him smiling kisses. Palanquins there
were, bearing high ladies; and falconers, and hounds running in leash,
and a solemn jester riding an ass; and all along, enclosing the
concourse, went a double file of pikemen--and then at once, the Queen.
Her Majesty, who loved to exhibit herself to her people, travelled in
an open horse litter, the gilded poles of which were borne by four red
Galloways, near stifled under their housings of cloth of gold, and led
each one at his bridle by a golden groom. The roof over her head,
supported on shining rods, was emblazoned with an intricate device of
lions caught in roses, the sheen whereof struck down upon her hair,
which was very fine and thin, and made of it a misty flame. In the
entering sunlight her face, so pale was it, looked like tinted silver,
the eyes of staring agate, as if she were some carried idol; but the
high vivacity of her glance, on nearer seeing, dispelled that
illusion. She was in her thirty-first year at this time, and all grace
and ingratiation; but resolved to play the Queen no less in her
outward trappings than in her inward conscience. Wherefore she outdid
all in the magnificence and extravagance of her costume, being so
cased and bombasted in costly materials of all sorts, and so roped and
sewn with gems, that she bore no resemblance to the human form, but
appeared, as she would have desired, a shape apart, a star unique and
without peer. By her side rode four or five of the great lords,
waiting on what words she chose to speak, and in her royal wake
followed first her led barb, in case she were minded to mount, and
afterwards a repetition of the former silken concourse, a Company of
the guards closing all. So she shone into view of four bedazzled eyes,
and cast a ray of her graciousness, with a nod and smile, on the
little standing boy.
Brion never forgot that smile, nor the strange episode, so startling
by contrast, which succeeded. The procession went by, and passed, and
taking a bend of the road was lost to sight; and then, gazing up in
his master’s face, he assumed dumbly that they were to return home.
But the pedagogue, answering the look nervously, told him to tarry yet
a little while, lest perchance some late stragglers should follow and
be missed by them. And so, indeed, it turned out; for there appeared
presently, coming unhasted along the road, a gentleman and his lady,
who, it seemed, had lagged behind the stream, or so far failed to join
it. They rode leisurely, looking about them, until, espying the couple
standing there, the lady, it seemed, gave a little start, and,
speaking to her companion, the two came on and drew rein, as if
carelessly, close over against the waiting pair. Brion could have
thought some sign of intelligence passed between the gentleman and Mr
Angell; but his attention was immediately drawn to the lady, who was
dwelling on him with a very strange expression. She was pale and sad
to look at, like chastened youth, but of so sweet a cast of features
that he loved her then and there. In years she might have numbered
some six less than her cavalier--who was a man of thirty-three
thereabouts--as surely as in attractiveness she exceeded him; for
though he was a bold and handsome man, and carried the splendour of
his apparel with a great air, there was such a look of craft and
hardness in his eyes as discounted all the rest. He sat impatiently,
as if unwillingly conceding something to a weakness; but he too stared
at the boy, and with strange unfriendly vision, which yet seemed to
find something whimsical in their object.
The lady leaned from her saddle, murmuring:--
‘A very flower to greet us by the way. Hast seen the sweet Queen pass
by, my babe?’
The word seemed to linger on her lips. She gazed at Brion as if she
would have devoured him.
He answered: ‘Yes, Madam; but thou art the prettier.’
She put her finger to her lips, while the gentleman laughed.
‘Hush!’ she said. ‘Talk’st treason, my pretty one. Shall I be thy
first lover, then? Mount hither, while I buss thee.’
Mr Angell put his hands under the child’s armpits, and lifted him up.
‘Set thy little foot in the stirrup,’ said the lady, and she wound an
arm about him, and, holding him tightly, first searched him in the
face, then pressed her lips to his. ‘Art happy?’ she whispered in his
ear, and something seemed to trickle down his cheek. ‘Yes, Madam,’ he
answered in likewise low, for in his heart he felt this to be a
confidence. ‘That is well,’ she whispered back; and at that moment
there was a sound of returning hoofs on the road, and a varlet came
spurring towards them and drew up close beside.
‘My Lord of Leicester,’ said the man: ‘the Queen’s Majesty asks for
you.’
The gentleman held a riding switch in his hand: he put heel to his
horse, approached the messenger, and slashed the thong with a vicious
oath across his face. His teeth showed, and the wings of his nose
lifted like a cat’s. The fellow swayed, almost blinded, and near lost
his seat.
‘That is to learn thee discretion,’ quoth his master; and turned to
the lady. ‘Hearest? Drop that brat and give rein.’
She complied hurriedly, returning Brion to his guardian. The boy was
pale, and his lip quivered. His young looks spoke hatred of the cruel
act.
‘What!’ cried the gentleman, quite smoothly and pleasantly, noting
that expression: ‘wouldst dare me, by-slip?’
‘No, no,’ said the lady: ‘he meant it not. Take him away, good Sir.
There, we be going.’
She put her horse between, and smiled, with difficulty, in the face of
her comrade. He, for his part, laughed, shrugging contemptuous
shoulders; then, before he went, turned with one look on the
pedagogue.
‘_Cave ursum_,’ said he, and no more, but, with a threatening and
comprehensive gesture of his hand, imposed silence on those trembling
lips. And with that they departed all three, the lady not once looking
round, and in a little were lost to view.
‘Who were they, Sir?’ says Brion, his baby breast still full to tears
with the agitation of it all. But the other put the question away
hurriedly.
‘I know not, child; we are not to consider; forget it all and dismiss
the matter from thy mind and memory.’
But that Brion could not altogether do, though, being a reserved and
somewhat silent boy, he never spoke of the incident, not even to his
kind stupid foster-mother, but kept the thought of it to himself,
locked in his little breast. And there it lay, like a flower in a
secret cabinet, fading and withering till it was little more than a
faint sweet memory, suggesting something infinitely tender but
forgotten; and the face of the beautiful pale lady receded in his mind
to a distant dream.
He saw the Queen after this, and more than once, travelling with her
Court to Richmond--latterly in a great chariot, like a catafalque on
wheels, only then first coming into use--but at these times he stood
among the other scholars, and, though at first he would look for the
lady, never again did he mark her; and gradually, absorbed more and
more into the interests of boyhood, he forgot all about the episode.
So the years passed with him until he was fifteen; and never grew boy
to that age in a happier atmosphere. He was loved by his preceptor,
petted by his lady, popular with their children and the others, in
himself interested in everything, of a bold and adventurous spirit,
yet constitutionally quiet and reasonable. There was a great waste
common, south of the village, and consisting largely of morass, which
lent itself gloriously to the exploration of youth. This place was
much infested by Egyptians, and teemed moreover with small savage life
in infinite profusion, being consequently irresistibly attractive to
such as Brion and his playmates. Many were the adventures they
experienced in this wild, in hunting and trapping, in extemporising
rafts for the countless ponds, and thereon pushing to unknown shores,
in penetrating thickets in search of animal surprises, and all in the
delicious fear of kidnappings and lurking ambuscades. It was a good
education for the spirit, fostering courage and self-reliance, and
physically a wholesome counteraction to the Greek and Latin their
minds absorbed. The cultured sportsman is ever the soundest product of
civilization.
And then, all in a moment, and without a word of warning, the good
life ended. It happened on a memorable evening in March, when one, who
had been there once before, came a second time to visit the school.
He was a big man, with a heavy bloated face and dark restless eyes. He
had been handsome in his time; but years of passion and
self-indulgence had impaired the symmetry of features once comely in
their strength. Some sickness of soul, moreover, would seem to have
cowed an arrogance formidable enough in its day. His looks were
furtive, his manner propitiatory, as he stood up before the pedagogue
and stated his business. In fact, Mr Justice Bagott was a disgraced
and fallen man. He had been disbenched for that obliquity which in a
few decades time was to bring to the ground a far greater lawyer than
he. In accepting a heavy bribe from a litigant he had dishonoured
himself and disgraced his profession. And it had been no amelioration
of the offence that the litigant in question was a Papist. The
scandal, which might well have cost the Justice his head, had been
notorious enough to penetrate into the by-ways, along which it had
even come to reach the ears of Brion’s guardian himself. It had
agitated that simple soul, even into some fatalistic premonition of
what had actually come to pass. And now the blow had fallen: his
charge was demanded of him.
He went out of the room to seek the child--the pleasant parlour, with
its wainscotted walls and low timbered ceiling, which would always
thenceforth be associated in Brion’s mind with a dream of peace and
security--and returned in a little, downcast and sorrowful, holding
him by the hand. He had evidently, in that brief interval, broken the
fatal news. The boy seemed dazed and stunned; but he lifted his head
manfully to look the stranger in the face. He did not recall him: how
could he, who had seen him but once before? yet he read enough there
to recognise the finality of his sentence. And Bagott, for his part,
perceived a girlish-faced youngster, slim and tall for his age, with
fair hair and mouse-coloured eyebrows and lashes--personable material,
but giving so far no indication of the sort of spirit which informed
it. The boy was very pale, but whether by nature or through agitation
he could not tell.
‘Dost know me, child?’ he said--not unkindly, though his voice was
harsh.
Brion shook his head. ‘No, Sir.’
‘Troth,’ said the visitor, ‘eleven years may well wipe out
deeper-graven memories than that. I am thy uncle, Quentin Bagott,
child, who brought thee here, and am now to take thee hence. Wilt go
with me?’
The boy had to bite his lip to restrain his tears; yet he kept them
proudly back; and that the other noticed. For all at once he sighed,
raising his head and bowing it; and when he spoke his voice was
grievous.
‘Brion,’ said he; ‘of all of ours, we are the only two left to one
another.’
There spoke the broken soul, grasping in its fall at a child’s hand
where it would have flung away a man’s. And, in some rare way, the lad
understood. For he came forward, holding his head erect; and said he:
‘I will go with you.’
Bagott took the young face between his palms, and gazed searchingly
into the gray eyes.
‘Ay,’ said he--‘ay, she’s there----’ and, looking over his head, ‘a
tall slip, minister,’ says he, ‘and as fair informed within, I trow,
as his looks are telling. He credits you, i’faith.’
‘Sir,’ said the pedagogue, ‘we claim to have done naught by him but
after our nature and the terms of the bond, for which he hath repaid
us, in his love and duty, a thousandfold. For the rest I have asked no
questions and sought no knowledge--no, not even of your relationship,
which appears to me now for the first time; no, not even of why, on
that first evening, you demanded of my fear what my humanity would not
have dreamed to deny you. Take him; he deserves the best; I can say no
more--save that we shall miss him sorely. What day will it please you
that he leaves us?’
‘Here and now, thou most faithful steward,’ said Bagott, reddening
under that mild rebuke. ‘And as to that my first policy, I took the
short way, as I thought it, using the means to my hand at once to gag
and bind thee, lest thou shouldst prove refractory. Well, I say not
but that suaver methods might have served, and meekness lessoned
pride. Who makes a god of overbearing shall himself be overborne.
Enough, I have horses without, and the occasion is pressing. For the
boy’s baggage, it can follow.’
Then, indeed, was shock and lamentation; but, for all his urbanity,
the visitor was inexorable. So Brion must go to make his last adieux
of the house and people that for thirteen years had sheltered and
loved him, while his uncle and foster-father were at discussion to
close the account embracing all that ministering tenderness. It is
idle to dwell on the sad, fond scene, the more so as the spirit of
youth is elastic, and easily extended to new interests, so that, even
at the worst, there was a measure of consolation to be foreseen in the
prospect of unknown adventuring. But presently they all came out into
the road; and there in the blown evening was a man standing, and three
horses held by him in a group; at sight of whom some spark of ancient
memory glowed in the boy, and the name Clerivault sprang out of
nowhere into his mind. It was indeed that very cavalier who had made
his sword hiss from its scabbard like a snake on the day preceding
that of the beautiful lady’s appearance; and in an instant all that
forgotten episode came back into Brion’s mind, so that his heart
leaped to this comfort of one whom, in his great forlornness, he might
cling to as a friend.
Now the question rose of his knowledge to manage a horse; but he had
learnt that lesson, and learnt it well, of friendly neighbours, and so
was to be trusted. And in a moment he was astride, and, the others
following, turned, even with some pride of place in him, to cry his
last farewells. Whereafter they all rode away, the boy’s parting
vision being of good Mrs Angell, her face puffed and blowzed with
grief, the caul on her head awry, a napkin stuffed into her mouth, or
taken out of it to wave, and the little Alse, all tearful, clinging to
her skirts.
And so into the night and the unknown went Brion Middleton.