THE DECOY
‘Are there two Joan Medleys in the world; and both----’
Brion stopped, and fell into such a deep and frowning reverie that the
Captain would not venture to break into it for a while, but sat
sipping his mulled wine, and glancing from time to time, with a
curious amused expression, at the absorbed young figure. They were
back at the _Cock_, and drinking a _night-cap_ in company.
‘You do not,’ said Raleigh at last, seeing the other stir, ‘blame me
for this fiasco?’
Brion shook a disconsolate noddle.
‘I blame nobody. We are victims all, in different degree. But of what
or whom?’
Seeing him inclined to a fresh fit of abstraction, Raleigh put in
hastily:--
‘Well, now it is resolved, I will confess it seemed to me an
infatuation passing strange, and accountable to nothing, unless it
were the worship of a golden idol. But there I wronged thee, and do
ask thy pardon for it.’
‘What else could you think? Yet, thy romantic mystery, forsooth, and
poetry reduced to prose! O, God mend us all! Why would you not tell me
how she looked to you?’
‘Looks are like gospels, for each to construe according to his faith.
Had my interpretation differed from yours, you’d ha’ damned me for a
heretic.’
‘But to dream I could have thought _that_ beautiful!’
His expression was so dismayed that Raleigh, after a vain attempt to
control himself, went into a shout of laughter.
‘Well----’ began Brion; and his face quivered, and in a moment he was
shaking too.
‘This riddle,’ said the soldier presently, gasping himself into
sobriety--‘we must seek the clue to it.’
But on that Brion, returning to an instant seriousness, put a definite
veto.
‘No further,’ said he. ‘I prithee from this moment let the whole
question drop. I say it with all earnestness, and do entreat thee to
let it rest as final.’
The other nodded: ‘Well, if you wish it’--and at that moment
Clerivault, coming in with a faggot to lay on the embers, ended the
discussion.
‘Signor Clerivault,’ said Raleigh, ‘is not beauty, in your opinion, a
question of taste?’
Clerivault, depositing the log in its place, came frigidly upright.
‘I have no claim to a foreign title, Sir.’
‘I should have said Master.’
The paragon bowed stately:--
‘Sir, how taste?’
‘Why, thus. I call a woman beautiful: another shakes his head. His
eyes cannot see it; mine do. Therefore her beauty is not intrinsically
in her, but in mine eyes. There is no standard to judge by.’
‘There would be no beauty, Sir, if there were. Eternal conformation to
a rigid model would make very deformity desirable by contrast.’
‘Very true’--he showed an inclination to chuckle--‘I think some of us
feel that. It is human to like change--even to pursue it on occasion
to extremes. The loveliest of her sex will sometimes attach herself to
the most repulsive of ours--and vice versa, it may hap. Hast ever been
in love with a monstrosity yourself, Master Clerivault?’
‘Nay, not so far, Sir, not so far.’ He lifted his chin, handling his
throat as if he traced its contours luxuriously. ‘Yet I may have
felt--I do not say--the lure--what I may call the fascination of
abnormity.’
‘Instance, instance!’
‘Hem! It was in the days--but all’s one for that. My quarters--no
matter for what occasion--were at Dunster, one side the British
Channel; and hers on the opposite shore. She had a siren voice--I’ll
say so much--and sang me with it daily across the water.’
‘A siren fog-horn rather. Well, you took boat and back--daily?’
‘No, I swam.’
‘My God! Fifteen miles if a yard. And back, too. A very quintuple
Leander.’
‘Not back.’
‘O, not back! You disappoint me.’
‘Why, Clerivault!’ cried Brion, aghast over this enormous invention.
‘You cannot swim but a yard or two, and that with one foot on the
bottom. Have I not seen you floundering in the Dart?’
‘Fresh water, Sir, fresh water. There’s no comparison between fresh
water and salt. In certain seasons of the brine ’tis just to lie and
paddle.’
‘Or to lie and not paddle,’ said Raleigh.
He loved this creature, loved to _draw_ him, whether for vanity or
inspiration. It was all fruit, he saw, of the same quality of
imagination, and had within it for eternal condonation the living
kernel of truth and loyalty.
He spoke to him, chancing across him a day or two later, on the
subject of his young master’s obduracy in a certain matter. Raleigh
had urged his friend to make his début at Court under his aegis,
promising him a favourable reception. His youth and gallant bearing,
he said, would be his certain passports to notice and advancement. It
was a kind insistence, and generous on the part of one whose interests
were not in creating rival fetiches; but he had conceived a great
affection for the boy, and really wished him well.
But Brion had declined, with every courtesy, the proffered service. He
refused to give reasons; called it a question of sentiment; declared
he had no wish to be a Courtier, and was generally as obstinate as a
young mule, impervious to any persuasion but that of his own
inclinations. The Captain was a little hurt, and when he ran across
Clerivault, expatiated on the opportunity his master was deliberately
throwing away, and urged him to exert _his_ influence over him to
persuade him to a reconsideration of the proposal. But, to his
surprise, Clerivault supported the other in his resolution. He
declared, with emphasis, that he thought he had decided rightly, and
that he, for his part, would certainly do nothing to dissuade him from
his determination. And then, being pressed, he gave his reasons, only
developing the truth to one who was already in possession of the gist
of it:--
‘How accident,’ said he, ‘brought him to knowledge of his parentage is
a true story but a past one. Let it suffice, Sir, that he knows, and
eke is bitter hostile to one author of his invalidity, and that not
the dead one. His blood is proud and hot, and I should dread beyond
measure their meeting. No, he’s better from Court--’ and he told
Raleigh of the little contretemps the day the Queen went a’hawking,
and of Brion’s gesture of hate and repulsion, and of how he had been
in terror ever since of some evil befalling his charge.
The Captain bent his brows over the recital. It was true he had not
guessed of this knowledge of Brion’s, and it altered the case for him.
It might affect--perhaps he debated, if there were truth in the report
of his cordial relations with a certain great nobleman--his own
favoured position, and evoke animosity where had been friendship.
‘Well, on the whole,’ said he, ‘mayhap he is right, and thou,
excellent servitor’--and from that time he made no other attempt to
shake the young man’s resolution.
But the fear of some catastrophe still nervously abode with
Clerivault, in spite of that confidence now shared with a sympathetic
and influential friend, and he was never easy when the young man was
out of his sight. He would follow him like his shadow; impose himself
on him uninvited in a way that presently drove Brion to rebellion, and
later to exasperation. He had no need, he said, to go in
leading-strings to a male nurse; he had the wit to find his own way
about, and a preference, on occasion, for his own company above any
other that might attach itself to him. He was not always kind in the
way he vented his irritability on the poor fellow. But Clerivault
uttered no complaint; he took all rebuffs with a stoical
impassibility, indifferent to wounds received in what his duty told
him was an indispensable service. He had not, it is true, the clue to
one motive inclining his young master to fits of restless moodiness,
in which he desired to be, and wander, alone. Since the night of that
absurd but rather shattering escapade a sense of some disaster
threatening a long cherished ideal had haunted Brion’s mind like a
secret shadow. He would stoutly deride its menace, would refuse to
admit or analyse it, but it remained there all the time, and he could
not throw off the consciousness of its possession. His faith had been
shaken, and in a very unpalatable manner. That shrill and vulgar
little termagant seemed to have blown away at a blast all that
sentiment which had wafted him on wings of rapture towards an imagined
goal. The whole thing was cheapened and vulgarised. A sense of his own
credulous folly, of the necessity of eschewing for the future all such
illusive enthusiasms, and setting worldly wisdom in their place,
gripped and resolved him. He must rise from this time superior to the
rather exotic romanticism which for so long had affected his outlook,
and must become that independent and self-reliant entity which
practical manhood demanded. Hence his impatience of supervision.
‘No, my friend,’ he said one morning, turning on the faithful
watch-dog who was about to follow him out: ‘I need no escort, by your
leave.’
‘No question of need, Sir, but of sociability,’ answered Clerivault
sweetly. ‘You may favour your own company more than I do mine.’
‘I do for the nonce. I would be alone, my good fellow. You hear?’
‘With difficulty, Sir. I am dull o’ the lug this morning. I shall hear
better in the fresh air.’
‘Clerivault, I would not have us quarrel.’
‘God forbid!’
‘I say God forbid.’
‘May I not follow, even at a distance?’
‘To stick in my thoughts like a pursuing conscience! No, stay where
you are. I shall be back anon.’
The man looked after him wistfully as he disappeared; but Brion’s mood
had been so peremptory that he dared not disobey. He only groaned and
shook his head, as he turned back into the yard from which the other
had gone forth. As he did so, he was passed by a stranger who had
risen hastily from drinking a mug of ale at one of the tables hard by,
and who also vanished through the archway leading into the street.
Brion, loitering eastward, was aware of some excitement in the town. A
press of people, all moving his way, gathered volume as he advanced.
He asked the reason of a neighbour, and was told that Her Majesty was
to go that morning in state to Paul’s Cross to hear a notable Reformer
preach. He pushed on, and somewhere beyond the Palace gained a
position in the crowd whence, obscurely situated himself, he could see
the procession pass. He had no desire to risk a second meeting at
close quarters with the man from whom, of all souls in the teeming
city, he felt the most alienated and apart.
He had not long to wait before a vast blare of horns announced the
Queen’s coming. She was preceded by a great company of halberdiers, on
whose heels followed a band of drummers and trumpeters, a little army
in number, from whose hundreds of instruments arose--for Her Majesty
liked her music strong--a shattering din which tore the very air into
tatters. Thereafter appeared a company of morris dancers, men and
girls, in full beribboned panoply--Maid Marian, Morisco, Franciscan
friar and the lot--all reeling and capering and intertwining as they
flowed on with the procession, of which the very next instalment was
Her Grace herself, a gorgeous idol in a gorgeous palanquin, borne on
the shoulders of six high gentlemen of the Court, and smiling on her
good people as she passed. Before the litter walked my Lord Hunsdon,
carrying the sword of State, and beside and behind it thronged an
immense train of lords and ladies on foot, every one bareheaded and
resplendent in velvet and satin and flashing jewels. To these again
succeeded soldiers, a full thousand of them and divided into
companies, between which came rumbling behind their prancing teams no
less than ten great pieces of ordnance, whose purpose was peaceful
display, while, to finish all, a couple of great white bears in
shining collars, ten keepers holding by gilded chains to each collar,
shuffled out the climax, their heads hanging, their red tongues
lolling, their eyes smouldering helpless animosity.
It was a stupendous exhibition; yet Brion found himself wondering what
connexion it could possibly have with the pious object which had
evoked it. Perhaps the morris dancers might have found precedent in
the dance of David before the Ark; but what of the cannon and the
bears? There was nothing of ritual about them. He was forced to the
conclusion that when Her Majesty had a mind for an impressive display
of herself--which was not infrequently the case--the nearest pretext
was made to serve her purpose.
Well, he watched it all go by, and without distinguishing amid the
glittering mob the person of him he least desired to look on; and,
being satisfied with what he had seen, extricated himself from the
crowd, and turned into one of the side lanes which led down to the
river. He had hardly entered it, when he heard himself accosted from
behind, and turned to see a breathless stranger addressing him.
‘Master Middleton, if I may venture the surmise?’
He was sallow and lank-featured, with an air of such nervous hurry
about him that his voice shook in putting the question. He wore a dark
cloak huddled about his shoulders, as if he were cold, and the slouch
of his hat barely allowed his eyes to be seen. Brion bowed, wondering.
‘I carry a message from a friend of yours,’ said the stranger
quickly--‘one Clerivault. He wished me to say that he followed you,
despite your desire, and, having observed where you stood among the
crowd, was able to give me directions, together with a description of
your person, which led to this fortunate encounter. Your friend, I
regret to say, has met with a mishap, and asks you to come to him.’
The frown which, on Brion’s face, had greeted the first part of this
sentence, was changed to a look of pallor and alarm at the end.
‘Clerivault! Hurt!’ said he. ‘O! where is he?’
‘He has been carried into a house,’ said the stranger. ‘I will show
you where. It is not a stone’s throw away.’
They went off at a race together, down the very lane they were in. It
was a mere deserted wynd, sunk like a deep ravine in a hill of gloomy
stone. As he hurried on, the young man put an agitated question:--
‘How hurt? You did not say.’
‘A moment,’ said the stranger, stopping. ‘You will see for yourself in
a moment.’
They had come to an iron-studded door set in the blank wall of a great
building, and with a couple of steps leading up to it. The stranger
took the steps at a bound, and knocked on the door. It was opened
immediately, and he beckoned Brion to mount and follow. The boy, an
easy prey in his excitement and inexperience, complied, unsuspecting.
The moment he was in, the door slammed to behind him with a noise of
thunder, which seemed to reverberate through adjacent halls; and
darkness, profound after the sunshine of the streets, rushed upon him
like a blinding night. He stood paralysed a moment, and then, ‘Where
am I?’ he said aloud, groping out with his hands. And even in the act,
as if he had proffered those for manacling, they were seized on either
side in an iron grip, and he knew himself a prisoner to some unknown
power. He gave a little gasp--he was only a boy, after all--struggled
a little; and then, feeling the futility of his efforts, resigned
himself to what Fate might develop.
‘That’s wise,’ said a gruff low voice in his ear. ‘Twenty to one’s too
great odds for even a gentleman game cock, young master.’