THE HOUSE BY THE MOOR
With a snore like the grinding on shingle of a boat’s nose which has
been run ashore at the end of a long smooth journey, Brion opened his
eyes from a period of the profoundest repose he had ever enjoyed in
his life. All the fever and the weariness were gone from him, though a
strange sense of lightness and giddiness had succeeded, so that he lay
blinking and yawning, incurious about his situation, and contentedly
waiting for it to develop itself as it listed.
There is a self-healing balm in the ‘liquid dew of youth’ whose
essence is a short memory, for when an evil is forgotten it is over.
Yesterday’s fret and exhaustion were no more to the boy now than the
bed on which his body rested--a pretext to luxuriate; and he remained
as he was until the balance between pleasure and curiosity insensibly
inclining the latter’s way spoiled the blissful equilibrium, when he
sat up, all at once actively interested in his surroundings.
The room in which he found himself was small and, as he assumed, high
up, for the low broad casement commanded from his position an unbroken
oblong of grey cloud. Its walls were panelled in dark oak, and the
ceiling was beautifully groined, with the cusps picked out in gold
leaf. Bed, press and the two chairs were all of the same rich wood,
carved and elaborated, and over the head of the first was a tester,
with hangings of purple damask having a gold border. A prince could
not have asked for more; and, if the rest of the house were in
keeping, he had reason enough to congratulate himself at least on the
quality of his exile. He slid to the floor, and ran to look from the
window.
His room was an eyrie, sure enough, and commanding a wild bird’s view.
He saw beneath him a space of bewildered land, bounded by dense low
trees, and thence and thereover, as far as his sight could reach, fold
upon fold of heathery country, like a great ground-swell breaking on
the horizon in a line of light, or revealing, as waves reveal in their
troughs, deep mysteries of sunken forests, and streaming rocks, and
clusters of upstanding birches that might have been the masts of
foundered ships. Once, twice, above the swell rose a mightier crest
crowned with stone, and a level cold sky roofed all. But, though wide
and liberal, it was desolate--no chimney or rising smoke to be seen
above the green anywhere.
Brion opened the casement, and looked down. The click of the latch
caught the attention of a man standing on a sward below, and their
eyes met.
‘Clerivault!’ cried the boy.
The paragon clapped his hands, exultant.
‘Wait,’ he cried, ‘while I come to you--’ and disappeared into the
house.
Brion hung out. He could make little of his position, save that it was
somewhere aloft in a medley of building, of which a projecting gable
cut off all but a narrow section. But to his right, where the house
ended, stretched a wide garden, less reassuring in its aspect than the
room in which he stood. For it was very tangled and overgrown, and so
run to a waste of weed that its flower and vegetable parts could no
longer be distinguished from one another; but all rioted in a dank
disorder, made more melancholy by the gloom of encircling trees, which
for ages, it seemed, had not been topped or pruned.
As he gazed, feeling a doubt creep over him, he heard a step climbing
the wooden stairs, and turned to greet his good comrade.
Clerivault’s eyes shone bright as he entered the room.
‘Ha!’ said he: ‘all’s well if thou art well.’
‘Well, but something giddy,’ said Brion.
‘’Tis food thou needest,’ said the other, taking him by the shoulders
and looking fondly in his face. ‘’Slid, but you frightened us, with
your tossing and babbling, There was witch Harlock would ha’ set a
poultice of black hellebore to thy midriff, to draw out the devil in
possession; but I would have none of it, and she cursed me for a fool.
“A must sweat or die,” quoth she: and, “My life for his,” I answered.
It was thy brain sought rest, poor wight; and what for that like good
burnt sack, mulled hot? And so we gave you, Phineas and I, and saw the
blessed dew come forth, even as you raved, and all thereafter peace.
God’s ’slid! but I was thankful. And did I overtax my trust,
sweetheart? Go to! you missed a rare supper. That Phineas knows his
part. But I could eat none of it till my heart was eased.’ His hands
moved on the young shoulders; he withdrew one of them to pass its back
across his wild eyes. ‘Come,’ he continued, in a husky voice: ‘the
morn is well advanced, and the board waits. There be arrears, ha! to
make up. Despatch, despatch!’
‘He loves me,’ thought Brion. ‘Poor Clerivault!’
A true tenderness was growing in his heart for this strange creature.
It was a comfort to think of their reciprocal attachment, binding them
comrades, in whatever trials might be in store for him. He dressed
quickly, eager, now the fact was achieved, to make the acquaintance of
the house. He would ask no questions, trusting better the witness of
his eyes, and came out of his room prepared for anything.
His general impression of what he saw, then and thereafter, may be
described as a mournful rather than a dejected one. It was of a queer
rambling place, tossed together without much system or coherence, as
if each succeeding owner had brought his own section with him to tack
on to the rest. The stairs and passages were labyrinthine; the rooms
for the most part mean though including a fine dining hall and ample
kitchens. Indeed the offices seemed disproportionately capacious, as
pointing to an original design on a larger scale. And as was this
structural incongruity, so was it with the furniture. The kitchens
were nobly provided; the living rooms for the greater part empty and
forlorn. The fire in the former burned in a huge range, the draught
from which turned a windmill which turned the spit; in the latter was
no accommodation for warmth whatever, save what braziers might afford.
Only in the great hall was a hearth, meet to its capacities; and only
there, and in one or two of the rooms, including his own bedchamber,
did Brion discover any signs of suggested occupation, such as chairs,
tables, cabinets and the like; and, in the hall, some hangings of
tapestry. The whole feeling the place gave him was one of quiet
sadness, of a wild and rather sweet desolation; and this from the
position and aspect of the house, when he came to be familiar with
them, no less than from the loneliness of its deserted chambers.
This Moated Grange was situated some three miles N. by E. of
Ashburton, in the midst of a lonely pasture, whose western limit
touched the moor. There was no house nearer than the last house of the
town. It stood on a tiny tributary of the Ashburn, which supplied the
moat surrounding it with water; but both sluice and ditch, long years
neglected, were choked with moss and growth, and the water slept
stagnant, black between its islands of duckweed, and overshadowed
throughout its whole compass by a rank luxuriance of bush and tree,
whose lower branches dipped in liquid slime. From the inner circle of
this moat--provision in long past days against the depredations of
wolves--the ground rose somewhat to the wall, scarce seen for foliage,
which ringed the whole estate; and here and there in its circumference
great masses of ilex had gathered and flourished, building a darkness
against the sky. Only in one spot was the fence of thicket broken, and
that was where the bridle track, branching from the main road, crossed
the moat by a stone bridge of a single span, and green with lichen, to
the great entrance gate of the court. This gate was set in a tall
rectangular turret of three sections, the uppermost plain, with a good
window, the middle ornamented with crosses and lozenges in timber, its
window square and small, the lowest containing the door, strong oak in
a massive frame and studded with iron nuts. A low peaked roof, crested
with a weathercock, surmounted this tower, which was moreover
supported on its right by a building in which were the stables, and on
its left by a shallow lean to, which served both as a buttress and for
the porter’s lodge. Thence on both sides ran the containing wall of
the property, whose whole aspect, in truth, suggested melancholy and
decay. Between the outer gate and the house itself--the latter a
heterogeneous congeries of parts, gabled and timbered--there was no
stone in the narrow court but was green with moss, no broken shard
which had fallen from a roof but had dulled its sharp edges against a
generation of rain. Grass grew in the crannies of the walls, in the
stone mullions of the windows, in the joints of the semi-circular
steps before the main door. A strange still place, very remote in its
sorrowful isolation from the picture the boy’s fancy had painted; yet,
to the explorative soul of youth, not altogether without its uneasy
charm.
Brion, wondering a good deal, after his first curious inspection of
the home which was henceforth to be his for good fortune or ill, put a
wistful question or two to Clerivault, who had been playing the silent
cicerone to his charge, furtively watchful the while of the impression
things made on him:--
‘Is it to be just you, and me, and Phineas, and William, and old
Harlock and Uncle Quentin--only us, always, living alone here
together?’
‘And Nol porter,’ cried Clerivault cheerily: ‘Art forgetting him--the
jolliest he of us all, and thrice the man in bulk of any other.’
The boy was silent awhile. Perhaps he was thinking of kind Mrs Angell,
and of Alse, and of what sort of substitute the old witch woman would
make for those gentle ministrants.
‘Yes,’ he said presently, ‘I shall like to see Nol porter,’ and was
quiet again, turning over something in his mind. ‘Clerivault,’ he said
then, ‘was what is in the house, my--my bed, I mean, and the rest of
the things, here before we and the others came?’
‘Narry one, Sir,’ was the answer. ‘The place was as naked as my hand.
What thou seest was sent down from his Honour’s house in London. Think
not but there’ll be more despatched anon. We’ll have a cosy nest
before we’re finished.’
It came to be as he said, indeed, a great cargo of furniture,
including many pictures and a quantity of valuable plate and
knicknacks, arriving presently by convoy; yet there was never enough,
all told, to make more than a scanty show about the house, and to the
last the majority of the rooms remained as when Brion first saw them,
vacant of everything but dust and spiders.
‘What makes you to ask?’ questioned Clerivault, a little curiously.
‘I was thinking,’ said Brion, ‘of him that lived here before us.’
The man’s countenance fell.
‘Who told you of him?’
‘It was Gammer Harlock.’
‘A murrain on her withered tongue!’ exclaimed the other irritably.
‘Lived, lived! Why, what is a house but to live in!’
‘She told me his name,’ said Brion. ‘It was Matthew Fulk, and he was a
sad miser. He has been dead a year and more now; but all during the
latter half of his dwelling here she lived with him alone as his
servant--only she and none other. This house had been his for twenty
years, maybe; and in the first of that time there was a young maid,
his niece, that abode with him. But her he murdered, and cast her body
down the well in the well-house, and gave out that she had gone off
with one of the rebel troopers that marched to the siege of Exeter in
the time of the great riots.’
‘And why should she not have?’ The pupils of Clerivault’s eyes stared
like a cat’s.
‘Because,’ said Brion, ‘after his death they would cleanse the well of
its foulness, seeing the water had rotted there undrawn since the maid
was lost; and in its slime were found bones--human bones, Clerivault.’
‘More liker some dog’s or sheep’s,’ said the other scornfully. ‘Why
should he murder her?’
‘Because the devil whom he served asked a sacrifice of him.’
Clerivault snorted.
‘Ah, hold your peace! This is the very lunacy of superstition. I knew
the man, Sir--was here with him on legal business four, or it may be
five years ago, and plumbed his very soul. A gripping, sour-lidded
curmudgeon: but murder! He feared the law too much. These be old
wives’ tales, and she who utters them a potion-brewing witch. Give her
no credit, I entreat you.’
Brion did not answer, pursuing his own train of thought.
‘Clerivault,’ said he in a little, ‘it must be long since my Uncle
dwelt here.’
‘How?’ asked the other.
‘Why, if this Fulk was twenty years a tenant?’
‘Was he? Well, we’ll not quarrel to a hair. But ’tis long as thou
sayest--since he was a boy, in truth.’
‘A boy!’ Brion actually laughed. It seemed so impossible that that
tremendous being could ever have been a boy--like himself.
‘The Bagotts,’ went on Clerivault, ‘were big people here in the past,
portreeves, and lords of the Stannary Court in Ashburton. They owned
mines, and prospered. But, on one cause or another, they were for ever
at litigation, and in the end that cracked them. The law was in their
blood, i’faith, and imposthumated, as it were, in thine Uncle--came to
a great head, and burst, imperilling his life. It was time for him to
withdraw from it.’
‘Was his life imperilled?’
‘Say his reason, at least.’
‘Had he never brothers or sisters, Clerivault?’
The man glanced quickly at the boy before answering.
‘One sister,’ said he, in a restrained voice; ‘but she died. Art his
sole kin in all the world, young master. Be thankful for it. Love him
and he’ll repay thy love. To those he trusts he’s ever gentle and
considerate, fierce and proud though he profess in the world’s eye. Do
we not know him--Phineas a master cook, and the boy William, and
honest Nol and myself? Else should we, brilliant children of our
parts, have been content to follow him into this exile, to sink our
gifts in solitude, to serve him in sour misfortune as in prosperity?
He has the trick of attachment, like some men with animals.’
‘What misfortune?’ asked the boy wonderingly.
Clerivault bit his lip.
‘Did I not tell thee?’ said he. ‘The law, taken in excess, like wine
affects the reason, and he was too full of it for health--it impaired
his judgments. Wherefore his decision to resign, and to seek amid
these scenes of peace the restoration of his faculties. Misfortune
enough--ha! to be reduced, in plenitude of one’s power, to a sick
nonentity.’
Brion, though marvelling a little that it should have been deemed
necessary to hide so simple an explanation from him, was satisfied
with it now it had come. He understood at last the meaning of their
withdrawal into these country seclusions, and was both sorry and proud
for this great-souled relative of his, who had so nobly resolved to
put conscience before self-interest.
The two walked on a little; and then said Clerivault, breaking a
silence between them: ‘This place consorts not with your dreams,
mayhap, of what was to be; yet shall you come to be as happy as the
day in it. We are few, but the moor is big. It is a wild free life
thou shalt lead, and content and lustihood shalt thou draw from it.
Now mount with me, I prithee, to thy chamber once again, and I will
show thee things.’
So they went up together, and there found Gammer Harlock busy
bed-making. She was an old woman, bent and bony, but with an amazing
vigour in her attenuated frame. Her face was of the hatchet shape,
with an aquiline nose and slow projecting eyes, and the compressed
austerity of her mouth so drooped at the corners as to make her chin
appear a separate attachment, moving on a pivot as in a mask. But she
was scrupulously neat, no rent in her cloth of frieze gown, no stain
on her close linen coif or the partlet about her withered neck. She
showed no knowledge of their presence, but went on with her work.
Clerivault sniffed and scowled.
‘Better employed in making his bed, Gammer,’ said he, ‘than in
poisoning his mind.’
‘Eh, jackanapes!’ she answered; ‘are ye there, and talking?’
She did not turn her head. Her voice was like a low whine, harsh yet
thin.
‘Talk and hang,’ said he, ‘you old devil. Will you tell me this: Why,
if Fulk committed murder and you knew it, you shouldn’t be broke for
an accessory after the fact?’
Her eyes turned on him like a crab’s.
‘Because he was dead when I knew it, ye fine lawyer.’
‘And being dead,’ said Clerivault, ‘you think it safe to asperse his
character, which is slander and defamation. Art on the horns of a
dilemma, old witch.’
She made a sound of thin derision.
‘Call his character to witness, and call again. Ye’ll get no answer,
for he had none.’ She turned on him with some repressed fury. ‘Attend
you to your business and leave me to mine. Nine year come Pentecost
have I lived and served in this house; doing by it what was never
asked in the bond; sweeping and garnishing throughout, though Fulk he
lived in no more than two of its rooms; and all for a scant pittance
and less meat. Do I know its every rat and shadow, think you, ay and
its ghosts that walk and its voices that whisper, to be told by a
niddipol lawyer’s clerk, that hath scarce set foot in these silences,
what to make of them but scorn and mockery. There are eyes for those
that can see and ears for those that can hear: but it is aye the fool
that misdoubts others, and the wise man himself.’
‘Misdoubts what?’ said Clerivault. ‘These maggots of a flyblown brain?
Well, God quit you of your “shadows”; but not by way of my charge
here, who looks to a homely home, and beings of flesh and blood for
company, and not the fancied wraiths of fancied crimes. To call a
house possessed is an offence at law; and when the house is a judge’s
house--take heed, gossip, take heed, I warn you. His Honour is not the
man to suffer the corruption of his kin or the branding of his
property.’
He ended harshly, and turned to Brion, leaving the old woman
muttering.
The boy had heard his comrade, half shocked and half amused. The
castigation seemed to him to exceed the transgression. After all,
though he had been fascinated and thrilled by the tale she had told
him, he had not been frightened. He was a level-headed youngster, and
not easily scared. Clerivault pointed from the open casement.
‘See yonder,’ said he, signifying a hill some mile and a half
north-west of the Grange: ‘Rippon Tor, they call it, that hath its
logging-stone; and, farther north, that’s Hey Tor, with its mighty
crown of rock. We’ll climb it together, and get a view will do you
good. Out west there stands Buckland Beacon, that we may yet live to
see fired, and south of it the waters of the Dart, where they bend
about Holne Chase. That’s a sweet and noble demesne, owned by the
lords of Buckland, but the house let now to Sir John Medley, a rich
City Knight and rogue from London, that hath a fair young daughter,
Mistress Joan yclept, his sole child and heiress.’
So he continued, expatiating on the beauties of the moor, and planning
expeditions here and there to gorge, or glen, or hidden hamlet, where
draughts of golden cider were to reward the sweet and happy toil of
adventure. He was eager to dwell on the near approach of the long warm
days, eager not only to reconcile the boy to his lot, but to kindle in
him an enthusiasm for it. And Brion, in face of those fervent
adjurations, was not slow to catch fire, or to forget, in bright
anticipation of long walks and rides, and hawkings, perhaps, and
fishings in the clear tumbling streams, the sadness of his home
surroundings.
As presently they turned from the window, a thought occurred to him,
not for the first time.
‘Clerivault,’ he said, ‘why is this my room so fair above all others
in the house?’
‘Well, it was a chapel in the old days,’ answered the man, but after a
moment’s pause, and with, it would seem, a certain reluctance.