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:--
_A Christian exhortacion unto customable swearers_: by Miles Coverdale
(A more or less recent tract whose title tickled him).
_Cooper’s Chronicle_, of the Kings’ Successions, ‘wyth divers
profitable Histories’ (Also recent, as brought up to date to the
seventh year of the Queen’s Majesty’s reign).
Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, with the Caxton imprint.
Sir Thomas More’s _Utopia_ (done into English by Robynson, with the
date 1551, though, if in the original Latin, it had possessed small
difficulties for him).
_The Bayte and Snare of Fortune_: by Roger Bieston (a highly moral
discourse, ‘treated in a Dialogue betwene man and money,’ and printed
‘At the signe of the Sunne over against the conduite in Fletestrete’).
_The obedyence of a Chrysten Man_: by William Tyndale, translator of
the Bible--
And some others. There were also a good many books, contentious or
expository, on Romish theology, and quite a number of illuminated
Vulgates, Psalters, Passionales, Lectionariums, Graduals, Breviaries
and Books of Hours, most of which were of extreme value and beauty.
All these gave him great satisfaction in prospect, as, with one
possible exception, they most certainly would not do to a Brion of
to-day; but the small reading of 1574, excluding such levities as the
_Decamerone_ and the impossible extravagances of Sir John Mandeville,
to be seemly had to be dull. Even the unprecedented Knight of la
Mancha had not yet stalked into print; and Gulliver and Robinson
Crusoe were decades away.
The boy was browsing one afternoon among these illuminated volumes,
enjoying the beauty of their convoluted designs and
brilliantly-pictured legends, when he saw something which sent the
blood back upon his heart in a curious little shock. He had taken down
a Book of Hours, _Horae Beatae Virginis Mariae ad Usum Romanum, cum
Calendario_--a fair little volume in Roman letter with splendid
wood-cuts--when, in turning over the leaves he discovered a name upon
the title page--_Jane Middleton Baggott: her booke:_ 1554: _at Gray’s
Inne_.
He was squatting on the floor. Gently he put the little volume down in
his lap, and turned his head to gaze out of the great west window,
which looked into the Court. It was very still; a light brooding mist
filled the air; there were swallows skimming and diving under the
eaves. But he saw nothing material: only the softness and quietude of
things seemed consonant with the wistful abstraction his eyes
expressed.
‘One sister; but she died.’ Clerivault’s unwilling words came back to
his mind--and again others spoken by his Uncle, when he had taken his
face between his hands and read some likeness there. Jane
Middleton--had that been her name; and was it the memory of that dead
sister which had seemed to move the brother so deeply when gazing into
his eyes? Middleton! and he himself was so called--why? A queer
unforgotten word once uttered by his lost love recurred to him--not
for the first time. Was here the clue to the long riddle? Some shadowy
suspicion of the truth had already flitted through his soul--from ages
ago--from the day when the pale pretty lady had stopped her horse to
speak to him. He felt again her kiss upon his baby lips; he felt----
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.
For some moments he leaned over, staring, his heart going like an
excited bird’s. In that dim and melancholy twilight he could not make
out much, but quite unmistakably the outline of rough stone steps
descending. Still he did not quite understand. It was obvious now that
the notch was for the use of anyone hidden below and desirous of
emerging; yet the position of that sunken part of the wheel would
preclude the possibility of the panel being pushed outward. How was it
managed? There was nothing for it but to go down and see. Only he must
have a light. He shivered with impatience: he could hardly command it
to hurry away, and make for the house, and, as privately as he could,
procure tinder and taper. But he did it, and got back unobserved.
The aperture left by the dislodged board was not great, yet it was
more than sufficient for an ordinary person to pass. Brion descending
through it, in a state far too wrought up for perturbation, easily
gained the upper step; and there he crouched, to look for the first
solution of the puzzle. It was simple enough, after all. There was a
slot cut in the side of the pit into which the panel could be run,
and, when there, it anchored the wheel in place. The boy, elate with
his discovery, came out and put the device to an immediate test. He
turned the wheel, slipped in the panel, brought it over the hole, and,
manipulating it from the upper side, found the slot and slid the board
in. The whole thing, it seemed to him, had the virtues of
extraordinary simplicity combined with absolute secrecy. Who would
dream that the wheel, an engine of everyday use, covered the entrance
to a subterranean hiding-place? He would never have discovered it
himself but for that accident of his jerkin hooking itself on a tough
splinter.
But now there faced him the deeper essay. He did not hesitate over it
a moment, but, entering and descending with his light, found himself,
at some three yards down, in a little stone-lined chamber excavated
out of the soil. It might have measured a cubic nine feet or so, and
was quite empty. Its walls were dank, there was a smell of the
unopened vault about it, and that was all. There appeared to be no
egress from it in any direction but up the steps. Probably it had been
devised for a hiding-place in the days so far back as the Wars of the
Roses, when it was convenient for all militant gentry to possess a
handy burrow.
Satisfied that he had seen all that was to be seen, Brion ascended
again to the light, pushed the panel into place, revolved the wheel a
little so as to shuffle, as it were, the cards, and retired, rich in
the possession of the second of two secrets with which that Spring had
endowed him. True, there seemed small object in reserving this latest
to himself; yet one never knew.