MARKING TIME
Brion put up at that same _Cock_ tavern in Westminster where he had
slept on the first night of his journey westward. It was a well-served
hostelry in a good locality, and it was within convenient call of his
friend the Captain, who, by virtue of his appointment to the Queen’s
Guard, had been allocated quarters in the royal palace of Whitehall,
where her Majesty was now holding her Court. Moreover a certain
tenderness of association inclined him to the place, whose
reacquaintance, in the light of an enlarged vision, he was curious to
make. It stood the test very agreeably, and proved as comfortable a
headquarters for him and Clerivault as any more pretentious they might
have chanced on.
The paragon was, of course, an experienced Londoner, and it was under
his guidance that Brion made his first real acquaintance with the
Town. It seemed to him the most beautiful city that mind could
conceive. Perhaps that impression may have been partly due to his
regarding it, during these first days, through a luminous mist of
expectancy touching the person of her whose golden shrine it contained
hid somewhere in the depths of its labyrinthine mysteries. But indeed
it was a fair town; built up of colour and picturesqueness; beating
with a fierce and palpitating life; full of a sort of dashing
merriment which reminded Brion somehow of late-fallen raindrops on
eaves, dancing and sparkling and shaking off under a race of wind and
brave opened sky. Everybody seemed in a hurry--to sell, to buy, to
show off, to fight, to enjoy; as if each day were the last day of the
holidays, and the ultimate flavour and profit must be got out of it
before the Fair closed. To look down any street was to see its
perspective like a turning kaleidoscope, with colours and patterns
perpetually changing and forming into new bewildering complications.
And there were swinging signs and fluttering banners everywhere, with
jingle of harness and blast of horns, as if victory in the abstract
was always in the air, and rehearsals for its celebration were a
never-ending occurrence.
While he waited, as composedly as he could, news from Raleigh, the
youngster turned the time on his hands to the best account of
exploration he and Clerivault could contrive. They visited the Abbey,
and such parts of the ancient palace of Westminster as had survived
the disastrous fire of fifty years before--the Hall, the beautiful
Chapel, and the Star and Painted Chambers; they went to Charing
village to view the noble cross erected by the first Edward to the
memory of his dead Queen; and they pushed further, to the bar-gate
which led into the liberties of the City, a great timber barrier
mortised into the adjoining houses, and bearing on its roof a row of
iron spikes, some with dried and blackened heads on them, like a
grotesque sort of cocoanuts put up for any who listed to roll, bowl,
or pitch at. There was one, cocked askew, that seemed to leer at Brion
as he hurried beneath it, as if it speculated obscenely on the chances
of having him up there for a companion some day; and another that,
tilted back, appeared to be watching a flight of rooks winging
overhead. Ugly memento mori they were in such a feast of colour,
skulls and cross-bones on an emblazoned standard, yet not so dark a
blot on the City as its living profanities. For in St Paul’s Church,
which the two went to visit, they found the whole nave blocked with
unhallowed traffic. Here was a hiring fair for low class servants;
there a cheap-jack bawling his goods from a cart, the donkey that drew
it standing blinking in the shafts, while a merry-Andrew intervened
with coarse jests, or tumbled for the delectation of the gaping crowd.
There were groups of thieves and harlots squatted on the pavement
about the bases of the great columns, and drinking and quarrelling as
they sat. Cheats, gulls, copper-captains, flaunting women and
swaggering gallants; the hungry and the homeless; the fugitive and the
spy; the clerical parasite and the convicted bankrupt, gathered and
mingled here, whether for sanctuary or profit, and made of the Temple
one vast house of abomination. Nor might the Queen herself, acting
Heaven’s vicegerent, scourge the evil forth; for in spite of all her
severe edicts for cleansing the place, the swarm would perpetually
regather, like flies disturbed from carrion, the moment the
interruption was past.
Brion, though willing to be an unimpassioned philosopher, found
himself regarding the scene with a regret that the cleansing had not
come in a wholesale holocaust, when fire--here also--had, not so many
years before, consumed the lofty wooden spire and threatened the whole
building with destruction. It had been struck by lightning during a
great storm, and it seemed strange that the judgment of God should
have withheld itself something short of its complete execution. But,
perhaps, unlike Sodom, there had been found sufficient good men among
its Chapter to qualify, for the time being, the Divine chastisement.
The two had soon enough of watching the throng, and of listening to
its dull reverberating clamour. The sound, made up of countless
volubility and the tramp of innumerable feet, all rising into
inarticulate echoes, was like a roar of surf levelled by distance, or
the drone of bees in a gigantic hive. It thudded on the brain,
producing after a time a feeling of mental numbness, so that Brion was
glad to escape into the open, and to draw in air uncontaminated by the
foul breath of sacrilege. He had had enough of St Paul’s, and did not
want to go there again. But that was only one disillusionment in a
world of exciting novelties.
One day they went to see the house in Chancellor’s Lane where the
great Cardinal had lived in the Queen’s father’s time; and, being so
near, paid a visit to Gray’s Inn, where Clerivault pointed out to
Brion his Uncle’s former residence. And the boy looked on the place in
silence, a strange emotion at his heart; for were not those rooms
known to his mother too, since it was thence the little Book of Hours
had been dated? He had never once spoken to Clerivault on that
subject, though he was well enough aware that for that faithful soul,
being in his master’s confidence, it held no secrets. But he could not
bring his mind to discuss with any one, however sympathetic, a tragedy
so intimate and so sacred.
On another, and a memorable, day, they took boat at Westminster and
were rowed down the river, passing by the way between the royal
gardens of Whitehall and the Queen’s vineyards on the opposite shore,
and thence dropping leisurely, by a succession of stately
residences--themselves palaces in their degree, as the great lords who
inhabited them were only lesser Kings--to the _Three Cranes_ Stairs in
Southwark, where they went ashore, and saw a bear-baiting at the Ring
in Bankside, and afterwards dined nobly at the Falcon Inn, beloved of
wits and playwrights. Thence, returning by way of Blackfriars, they
made for the theatre, and saw the Earl of Leicester’s servants play in
a very tragic tragedy, called _Arden of Feversham_, by one Thomas
Kyd--a performance which affected Brion’s imagination as vividly as
the name of the company over-clouded it.
But it was not the only occasion on which a dark memory was to be
recalled to him. For so it happened that, walking one morning with
Clerivault in the precincts of Whitehall, they saw the Queen ride
forth, with a company of gentlemen, to go a’hawking in the great
guarded Chase which stretched away westwards from opposite the palace
front, and which came afterwards to be called the Park of St James’s.
Her Grace was all in green, very handsomely bedecked, and rode a white
barb, which stepped and arched its neck as proudly as though it were
conscious of the nature of its burden; but Brion had hardly eyes for
that pleasant vision, before he was struck aback by the sight of a
foremost member of the party who rode close at her Majesty’s left
hand.
Seventeen transforming years had passed since that face had last
appeared to him, yet he was as certain of it as though he again stood,
a wondering child, on the Richmond road, and saw the servant ride up,
and heard the vicious thwack across the blinded eyes. And, as then,
hate and indignation surged up in his heart, and cried it alien from
one so arrogant and so malignant. Splendour and daring were this
man’s, but gained at every sacrifice of truth and humanity. He had
grown in these years somewhat bald and portly, but the cold furtive
eye was unchanged, as were the impassive vindictiveness and the
measuring cruelty which underlay his whole expression. And yet women
could be found to sacrifice to such an idol, and to yield their all to
the wicked hypocrisy which, to the masculine observer, simply flaunted
itself on that countenance. Truly there must be a blind spot in their
psychology, which Love, for the benefit of his own villain sex, had
once set there with a kiss. Else how could they so often overlook the
obvious.
He passed so close to Brion that the young man could have touched him.
He shrank back rather, as from something noisome and unclean, and with
such a repellant frown on his face as it was fortunate, perhaps, the
great man failed to observe. But he was in close converse with the
Queen, and was as inattentive to the rabble about him as though they
had been sheep.
But the moment the little party was well gone by, Brion felt his arm
gripped by Clerivault. He looked, and saw the paragon’s face a sickly
yellow, while his eyes were alight with panic.
‘God’s ’slid!’ said he, in a hoarse whisper: ‘Why did you do
that--look like that? Come away, ere some flying rumour chance to
reach his ear!’
‘Let it,’ answered Brion fiercely. ‘I budge for no man’s humour.’
‘Budge, budge!’ cried the other, in a sweat of despair. ‘The rack will
make you budge a foot’s length ere you know it. Wist you not his name?
Come for my sake, if not your own.’
That argument prevailed, and the boy allowed himself to be led away.
‘Clerivault,’ he said presently, in a stiff strait voice, when they
were come into a quiet place; ‘you asked me but now if I knew him. I
knew and know him, Clerivault.’
He stopped, looking full into the other’s face, and said not another
word. But there had been that of significance in his tone which was
unmistakable. Clerivault dropped his eyes before that revelation of
understanding.
‘Well,’ he muttered lamely: ‘if you know him, you know what is better
avoided. Once a bad man is always a bad man--that is a legal dictum.
You will gain most by remembering it, and forgetting all the rest.’
But Brion, though he uttered no word further on the subject, did not
forget. The shadow of that encounter darkened all the sunny days which
had gone before, and made ominous even the delirious prospect which
had lured him from his far retreat. Henceforth he could never feel
himself secure from the chance of a meeting, to which accident, or his
own hot young blood, might give a sinister turn.