Here Gerard made acquaintance with a monk, who had constructed the great dial in the prior's garden, and a wheel for drawing water, and a winnowing machine for the grain, etc., and had ever some ingenious mechanism on hand. He had made several psalteries and two dulcimers, and was now attempting a set of regalles, or little organ for the choir.
Now Gerard played the humble psaltery a little; but the monk touched that instrument divinely, and showed him most agreeably what a novice he was in music. He also illuminated finely, but could not write so beautifully as Gerard. Comparing their acquirements with the earnestness and simplicity of an age in which accomplishments implied a true natural bent, Youth and Age soon became like brothers, and Gerard was pressed hard to stay that night. He consulted Denys, who assented with a rueful shrug.
Gerard told his old new friend whither he was going, and described their late adventures, softening down the bolster.
“Alack!” said the good old man, “I have been a great traveller in my day, but none molested me.” He then told him to avoid inns; they were always haunted by rogues and roysterers, whence his soul might take harm even did his body escape, and to manage each day's journey so as to lie at some peaceful monastery; then suddenly breaking off and looking as sharp as a needle at Gerard, he asked him how long since he had been shriven? Gerard coloured up and replied feebly—
“Better than a fortnight.”
“And thou an exorcist! No wonder perils have overtaken thee. Come, thou must be assoiled out of hand.”
“Yes, father,” said Gerard, “and with all mine heart;” and was sinking down to his knees, with his hands joined, but the monk stopped him half fretfully—
“Not to me! not to me! not to me! I am as full of the world as thou or any be that lives in't. My whole soul it is in these wooden pipes, and sorry leathern stops, which shall perish—with them whose minds are fixed on such like vanities.”
“Dear father,” said Gerard, “they are for the use of the Church, and surely that sanctifies the pains and labour spent on them?”
“That is just what the devil has been whispering in mine ear this while,” said the monk, putting one hand behind his back and shaking his finger half threateningly, half playfully, at Gerard. “He was even so kind and thoughtful as to mind me that Solomon built the Lord a house with rare hangings, and that this in him was counted gracious and no sin. Oh! he can quote Scripture rarely. But I am not so simple a monk as you think, my lad,” cried the good father, with sudden defiance, addressing not Gerard but—Vacancy. “This one toy finished, vigils, fasts, and prayers for me; prayers standing, prayers lying on the chapel floor, and prayers in a right good tub of cold water.” He nudged Gerard and winked his eye knowingly. “Nothing he hates and dreads like seeing us monks at our orisons up to our chins in cold water. For corpus domat aqua. So now go confess thy little trumpery sins, pardonable in youth and secularity, and leave me to mine, sweet to me as honey, and to be expiated in proportion.”
Gerard bowed his head, but could not help saying, “Where shall I find a confessor more holy and clement?”
“In each of these cells,” replied the monk simply (they were now in the corridor) “there, go to Brother Anselm, yonder.”
Gerard followed the monk's direction, and made for a cell; but the doors were pretty close to one another, and it seems he mistook; for just as he was about to tap, he heard his old friend crying to him in an agitated whisper, “Nay! nay! nay!” He turned, and there was the monk at his cell-door, in a strange state of anxiety, going up and down and beating the air double-handed, like a bottom sawyer. Gerard really thought the cell he was at must be inhabited by some dangerous wild beast, if not by that personage whose presence in the convent had been so distinctly proclaimed. He looked back inquiringly and went on to the next door. Then his old friend nodded his head rapidly, bursting in a moment into a comparatively blissful expression of face, and shot back into his den. He took his hour-glass, turned it, and went to work on his regalles; and often he looked up, and said to himself, “Well-a-day, the sands how swift they run when the man is bent over earthly toys.”
Father Anselm was a venerable monk, with an ample head, and a face all dignity and love. Therefore Gerard in confessing to him, and replying to his gentle though searching questions, could not help thinking, “Here is a head!—Oh dear! oh dear! I wonder whether you will let me draw it when I have done confessing.” And so his own head got confused, and he forgot a crime or two. However, he did not lower the bolstering this time, nor was he so uncandid as to detract from the pagan character of the bolstered.
The penance inflicted was this: he was to enter the convent church, and prostrating himself, kiss the lowest step of the altar three times; then kneeling on the floor, to say three paternosters and a credo: “this done, come back to me on the instant.”
Accordingly, his short mortification performed, Gerard returned, and found Father Anselm spreading plaster.
“After the soul the body,” said he; “know that I am the chirurgeon here, for want of a better. This is going on thy leg; to cool it, not to burn it; the saints forbid.”
During the operation the monastic leech, who had naturally been interested by the Dusseldorf branch of Gerard's confession, rather sided with Denys upon “bleeding.” “We Dominicans seldom let blood nowadays; the lay leeches say 'tis from timidity and want of skill; but, in sooth, we have long found that simples will cure most of the ills that can be cured at all. Besides, they never kill in capable hands; and other remedies slay like thunderbolts. As for the blood, the Vulgate saith expressly it is the life of a man.' And in medicine or law, as in divinity, to be wiser than the All-wise is to be a fool. Moreover, simples are mighty. The little four-footed creature that kills the poisonous snake, if bitten herself, finds an herb powerful enough to quell that poison, though stronger and of swifter operation than any mortal malady; and we, taught by her wisdom, and our own traditions, still search and try the virtues of those plants the good God hath strewed this earth with, some to feed men's bodies, some to heal them. Only in desperate ills we mix heavenly with earthly virtue. We steep the hair or the bones of some dead saint in the medicine, and thus work marvellous cures.”
“Think you, father, it is along of the reliques? for Peter a Floris, a learned leech and no pagan, denies it stoutly.”
“What knows Peter a Floris? And what know I? I take not on me to say we can command the saints, and will they nill they, can draw corporal virtue from their blest remains. But I see that the patient drinking thus in faith is often bettered as by a charm. Doubtless faith in the recipient is for much in all these cures. But so 'twas ever. A sick woman, that all the Jewish leeches failed to cure, did but touch Christ's garment and was healed in a moment. Had she not touched that sacred piece of cloth she had never been healed. Had she without faith not touched it only, but worn it to her grave, I trow she had been none the better for't. But we do ill to search these things too curiously. All we see around us calls for faith. Have then a little patience. We shall soon know all. Meantime, I, thy confessor for the nonce, do strictly forbid thee, on thy soul's health, to hearken learned lay folk on things religious. Arrogance is their bane; with it they shut heaven's open door in their own faces. Mind, I say, learned laics. Unlearned ones have often been my masters in humility, and may be thine. Thy wound is cared for; in three days 'twill be but a scar. And now God speed thee, and the saints make thee as good and as happy as thou art thoughtful and gracious.” Gerard hoped there was no need to part yet, for he was to dine in the refectory. But Father Anselm told him, with a shade of regret just perceptible and no more, that he did not leave his cell this week, being himself in penitence; and with this he took Gerard's head delicately in both hands, and kissed him on the brow, and almost before the cell door had closed on him, was back to his pious offices. Gerard went away chilled to the heart by the isolation of the monastic life, and saddened too. “Alas!” he thought, “here is a kind face I must never look to see again on earth; a kind voice gone from mine ear and my heart for ever. There is nothing but meeting and parting in this sorrowful world. Well-a-day! well-a-day!” This pensive mood was interrupted by a young monk who came for him and took him to the refectory; there he found several monks seated at a table, and Denys standing like a poker, being examined as to the towns he should pass through: the friars then clubbed their knowledge, and marked out the route, noting all the religious houses on or near that road; and this they gave Gerard. Then supper, and after it the old monk carried Gerard to his cell, and they had an eager chat, and the friar incidentally revealed the cause of his pantomime in the corridor. “Ye had well-nigh fallen into Brother Jerome's clutches. Yon was his cell.”
“Is Father Jerome an ill man, then?”
“An ill man!” and the friar crossed himself; “a saint, an anchorite, the very pillar of this house! He had sent ye barefoot to Loretto. Nay, I forgot, y'are bound for Italy; the spiteful old saint upon earth, had sent ye to Canterbury or Compostella. But Jerome was born old and with a cowl; Anselm and I were boys once, and wicked beyond anything you can imagine” (Gerard wore a somewhat incredulous look): “this keeps us humble more or less, and makes us reasonably lenient to youth and hot blood.”
Then, at Gerard's earnest request, one more heavenly strain upon the psalterion, and so to bed, the troubled spirit calmed, and the sore heart soothed.
I have described in full this day, marked only by contrast, a day that came like oil on waves after so many passions and perils—because it must stand in this narrative as the representative of many such days which now succeeded to it. For our travellers on their weary way experienced that which most of my readers will find in the longer journey of life, viz., that stirring events are not evenly distributed over the whole road, but come by fits and starts, and as it were, in clusters. To some extent this may be because they draw one another by links more or less subtle. But there is more in it than that. It happens so. Life is an intermittent fever. Now all narrators, whether of history or fiction, are compelled to slur these barren portions of time or else line trunks. The practice, however, tends to give the unguarded reader a wrong arithmetical impression, which there is a particular reason for avoiding in these pages as far as possible. I invite therefore your intelligence to my aid, and ask you to try and realize that, although there were no more vivid adventures for a long while, one day's march succeeded another; one monastery after another fed and lodged them gratis with a welcome always charitable, sometimes genial; and though they met no enemy but winter and rough weather, antagonists not always contemptible, yet they trudged over a much larger tract of territory than that, their passage through which I have described so minutely. And so the pair, Gerard bronzed in the face and travel-stained from head to foot, and Denys with his shoes in tatters, stiff and footsore both of them, drew near the Burgundian frontier.
Gerard was almost as eager for this promised land as Denys; for the latter constantly chanted its praises, and at every little annoyance showed him “they did things better in Burgundy;” and above all played on his foible by guaranteeing clean bedclothes at the inns of that polished nation. “I ask no more,” the Hollander would say; “to think that I have not lain once in a naked bed since I left home! When I look at their linen, instead of doffing habit and hose, it is mine eyes and nose I would fain be shut of.”
Denys carried his love of country so far as to walk twenty leagues in shoes that had exploded, rather than buy of a German churl, who would throw all manner of obstacles in a customer's way, his incivility, his dinner, his body.
Towards sunset they found themselves at equal distances from a little town and a monastery, only the latter was off the road. Denys was for the inn, Gerard for the convent. Denys gave way, but on condition that once in Burgundy they should always stop at an inn. Gerard consented to this the more readily that his chart with its list of convents ended here. So they turned off the road. And now Gerard asked with surprise whence this sudden aversion to places that had fed and lodged them gratis so often. The soldier hemmed and hawed at first, but at last his wrongs burst forth. It came out that this was no sudden aversion, but an ancient and abiding horror, which he had suppressed till now, but with infinite difficulty, and out of politeness: “I saw they had put powder in your drink,” said he, “so I forbore them. However, being the last, why not ease my mind? Know then I have been like a fish out of water in all those great dungeons. You straightway levant with some old shaveling: so you see not my purgatory.”
“Forgive me! I have been selfish.”
“Ay, ay, I forgive thee, little one; 'tis not thy fault: art not the first fool that has been priest-rid, and monk-hit. But I'll not forgive them my misery.” Then, about a century before Henry VIII.'s commissioners, he delivered his indictment. These gloomy piles were all built alike. Inns differed, but here all was monotony. Great gate, little gate, so many steps and then a gloomy cloister. Here the dortour, there the great cold refectory, where you must sit mumchance, or at least inaudible, he who liked to speak his mind out; “and then,” said he, “nobody is a man here, but all are slaves, and of what? of a peevish, tinkling bell, that never sleeps. An 'twere a trumpet now, aye sounding alarums, 'twouldn't freeze a man's heart so. Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, and you must sit to meat with may be no stomach for food. Ere your meat settles in your stomach, tinkle, tinkle! and ye must to church with may be no stomach for devotion: I am not a hog at prayers, for one. Tinkle, tinkle, and now you must to bed with your eyes open. Well, by then you have contrived to shut them, some uneasy imp of darkness has got to the bell-rope, and tinkle, tinkle, it behoves you say a prayer in the dark, whether you know one or not. If they heard the sort of prayers I mutter when they break my rest with their tinkle! Well, you drop off again and get about an eyeful of sleep: lo, it is tinkle, tinkle, for matins.”
“And the only clapper you love is a woman's,” put in Gerard half contemptuously.
“Because there is some music in that even when it scolds,” was the stout reply. “And then to be always checked. If I do but put my finger in the salt-cellar, straightway I hear, 'Have you no knife that you finger the salt?' And if I but wipe my knife on the cloth to save time, then 'tis, 'Wipe thy knife dirty on the bread, and clean upon the cloth!' Oh small of soul! these little peevish pedantries fall chill upon good fellowship like wee icicles a-melting down from strawen eaves.”
“I hold cleanliness no pedantry,” said Gerard. “Shouldst learn better manners once for all.”
“Nay; 'tis they who lack manners. They stop a fellow's mouth at every word.”
“At every other word, you mean; every obscene or blasphemous one.”
“Exaggerator, go to! Why, at the very last of these dungeons I found the poor travellers sitting all chilled and mute round one shaveling, like rogues awaiting their turn to be hanged; so to cheer them up, I did but cry out, 'Courage, tout le monde, le dia—
“Connu! what befell?”
“Marry, this. 'Blaspheme not!' quo' the bourreau. 'Plait-il,' say I. Doesn't he wheel and wyte on me in a sort of Alsatian French, turning all the P's into B's. I had much ado not to laugh in his face.”
“Being thyself unable to speak ten words of his language without a fault.”
“Well, all the world ought to speak French. What avail so many jargons except to put a frontier atwixt men's hearts?”
“But what said he?”
“What signifies it what a fool says?”
“Oh, not all the words of a fool are folly, or I should not listen to you.”
“Well, then, he said, 'Such as begin by making free with the devil's name, aye end by doing it with all the names in heaven.' 'Father,' said I, 'I am a soldier, and this is but my “consigne” or watchword.” 'Oh, then, it is just a custom?' said he. I not divining the old fox, and thinking to clear myself, said, 'Ay, it was.' 'Then that is ten times worse,' said he. ''Twill bring him about your ears one of these days. He still comes where he hears his name often called.' Observe! no gratitude for the tidings which neither his missals nor his breviary had ever let him know. Then he was so good as to tell me, soldiers do commonly the crimes for which all other men are broke on the wheel; a savoir murder, rape, and pillage.”
“And is't not true?”
“True or not, it was ill manners,” replied Denys guardedly. “And so says this courteous host of mine, 'Being the foes of mankind, why make enemies of good spirits into the bargain, by still shouting the names of evil ones?' and a lot more stuff.”
“Well, but, Denys, whether you hearken his rede, or slight it, wherefore blame a man for raising his voice to save your soul?”
“How can his voice save my soul, when he keeps turning of his P's into B's.”
Gerard was staggered: ere he could recover at this thunderbolt of Gallicism, Denys went triumphant off at a tangent, and stigmatized all monks as hypocrites. “Do but look at them, how they creep about and cannot eye you like honest men.”
“Nay,” said Gerard eagerly, “that modest downcast gaze is part of their discipline, 'tis 'custodia oculorum'.”
“Cussed toads eating hoc hac horum? No such thing; just so looks a cut-purse. Can't meet a true man's eye. Doff cowl, monk; and behold, a thief; don cowl thief, and lo, a monk. Tell me not they will ever be able to look God Almighty in the face, when they can't even look a true man in the face down here. Ah, here it is, black as ink! into the well we go, comrade. Misericorde, there goes the tinkle already. 'Tis the best of tinkles though; 'tis for dinner: stay, listen! I thought so: the wolf in my stomach cried 'Amen!'” This last statement he confirmed with two oaths, and marched like a victorious gamecock into the convent, thinking by Gerard's silence he had convinced him, and not dreaming how profoundly he had disgusted him.
该作者的其它作品
《white lies》
In the refectory allusion was made, at the table where Gerard sat, to the sudden death of the monk who had undertaken to write out fresh copies of the charter of the monastery, and the rule, etc.
Gerard caught this, and timidly offered his services. There was a hesitation which he mistook. “Nay, not for hire, my lords, but for love, and as a trifling return for many a good night's lodging the brethren of your order have bestowed on me a poor wayfarer.”
A monk smiled approvingly; but hinted that the late brother was an excellent penman, and his work could not be continued but by a master. Gerard on this drew from his wallet with some trepidation a vellum deed, the back of which he had cleaned and written upon by way of specimen. The monk gave quite a start at sight of it, and very hastily went up the hall to the high table, and bending his knee so as just to touch in passing the fifth step and the tenth, or last, presented it to the prior with comments. Instantly a dozen knowing eyes were fixed on it, and a buzz of voices was heard; and soon Gerard saw the prior point more than once, and the monk came back, looking as proud as Punch, with a savoury crustade ryal, or game pie gravied and spiced, for Gerard, and a silver grace cup full of rich pimentum. This latter Gerard took, and bowing low, first to the distant prior, then to his own company, quaffed, and circulated the cup.
Instantly, to his surprise, the whole table hailed him as a brother: “Art convent bred, deny it not?” He acknowledged it, and gave Heaven thanks for it, for otherwise he had been as rude and ignorant as his brothers, Sybrandt and Cornelis.
“But 'tis passing strange how you could know,” said he.
“You drank with the cup in both hands,” said two monks, speaking together.
The voices had for some time been loudish round a table at the bottom of the hall; but presently came a burst of mirth so obstreperous and prolonged, that the prior sent the very sub-prior all down the hall to check it, and inflict penance on every monk at the table. And Gerard's cheek burned with shame; for in the heart of the unruly merriment his ear had caught the word “courage!” and the trumpet tones of Denys of Burgundy.
Soon Gerard was installed in feu Werter's cell, with wax lights, and a little frame that could be set at any angle, and all the materials of caligraphy. The work, however, was too much for one evening. Then came the question, how could he ask Denys, the monk-hater, to stay longer? However, he told him, and offered to abide by his decision. He was agreeably surprised when Denys said graciously, “A day's rest will do neither of us harm. Write thou, and I'll pass the time as I may.”
Gerard's work was vastly admired; they agreed that the records of the monastery had gained by poor Werter's death. The sub-prior forced a rix-dollar on Gerard, and several brushes and colours out of the convent stock, which was very large. He resumed his march warm at heart, for this was of good omen; since it was on the pen he relied to make his fortune and recover his well-beloved. “Come, Denys,” said he good-humouredly, “see what the good monks have given me; now, do try to be fairer to them; for to be round with you, it chilled my friendship for a moment to hear even you call my benefactors 'hypocrites.'”
“I recant,” said Denys.
“Thank you! thank you! Good Denys.”
“I was a scurrilous vagabond.”
“Nay, nay, say not so, neither!”
“But we soldiers are rude and hasty. I give myself the lie, and I offer those I misunderstood all my esteem. 'Tis unjust that thousands should be defamed for the hypocrisy of a few.”
“Now are you reasonable. You have pondered what I said?”
“Nay, it is their own doing.”
Gerard crowed a little, we all like to be proved in the right; and was all attention when Denys offered to relate how his conversion was effected.
“Well then, at dinner the first day a young monk beside me did open his jaws and laughed right out and most musically. 'Good,' said I, 'at last I have fallen on a man and not a shorn ape.' So, to sound him further, I slapped his broad back and administered my consigne. 'Heaven forbid!' says he. I stared. For the dog looked as sad as Solomon; a better mime saw you never, even at a Mystery. 'I see war is no sharpener of the wits,' said he. 'What are the clergy for but to fight the foul fiend? and what else are the monks for?
“The fiend being dead,
The friars are sped.”
You may plough up the convents, and we poor monks shall have nought to do—but turn soldiers, and so bring him to life again.' Then there was a great laugh at my expense. 'Well, you are the monk for me,' said I. 'And you are the crossbowman for me,' quo' he. 'And I'll be bound you could tell us tales of the war should make our hair stand on end.' 'Excusez! the barber has put that out of the question,' quoth I, and then I had the laugh.”
“What wretched ribaldry!” observed Gerard pensively.
The candid Denys at once admitted he had seen merrier jests hatched with less cackle. “'Twas a great matter to have got rid of hypocrisy. 'So,' said I, 'I can give you the chaire de poule, if that may content ye.' 'That we will see,' was the cry, and a signal went round.”
Denys then related, bursting with glee, how at bedtime he had been taken to a cell instead of the great dortour, and strictly forbidden to sleep; and to aid his vigil, a book had been lent him of pictures representing a hundred merry adventures of monks in pursuit of the female laity; and how in due course he had been taken out barefooted and down to the parlour, where was a supper fit for the duke, and at it twelve jolly friars, the roaringest boys he had ever met in peace or war. How the story, the toast, the jest, the wine-cup had gone round, and some had played cards with a gorgeous pack, where Saint Theresa, and Saint Catherine, etc., bedizened with gold, stood for the four queens; and black, white, grey, and crutched friars for the four knaves; and had staked their very rosaries, swearing like troopers when they lost. And how about midnight a sly monk had stolen out, but had by him and others been as cannily followed into the garden, and seen to thrust his hand into the ivy and out with a rope-ladder. With this he had run up on the wall, which was ten feet broad, yet not so nimbly but what a russet kirtle had popped up from the outer world as quick as he; and so to billing and cooing: that this situation had struck him as rather feline than ecclesiastical, and drawn from him the appropriate comment of a “mew!” The monks had joined the mewsical chorus, and the lay visitor shrieked and been sore discomforted; but Abelard only cried, “What, are ye there, ye jealous miauling knaves? ye shall caterwaul to some tune to-morrow night. I'll fit every man-jack of ye with a fardingale.” That this brutal threat had reconciled him to stay another day—at Gerard's request.
Gerard groaned.
Meantime, unable to disconcert so brazen a monk, and the demoiselle beginning to whimper, they had danced caterwauling in a circle, then bestowed a solemn benediction on the two wall-flowers, and off to the parlour, where they found a pair lying dead drunk, and other two affectionate to tears. That they had straightway carried off the inanimate, and dragged off the loving and lachymose, kicked them all merrily each into his cell.
“And so shut up in measureless content.”
Gerard was disgusted: and said so.
Denys chuckled, and proceeded to tell him how the next day he and the young monks had drawn the fish-ponds and secreted much pike, carp, tench, and eel for their own use: and how, in the dead of night, he had been taken shoeless by crooked ways into the chapel, a ghost-like place, being dark, and then down some steps into a crypt below the chapel floor, where suddenly paradise had burst on him.
“'Tis there the holy fathers retire to pray,” put in Gerard.
“Not always,” said Denys; “wax candles by the dozen were lighted, and princely cheer; fifteen soups maigre, with marvellous twangs of venison, grouse, and hare in them, and twenty different fishes (being Friday), cooked with wondrous art, and each he between two buxom lasses, and each lass between two lads with a cowl; all but me: and to think I had to woo by interpreter. I doubt the knave put in three words for himself and one for me; if he didn't, hang him for a fool. And some of the weaker vessels were novices, and not wont to hold good wine; had to be coaxed ere they would put it to their white teeth; mais elles s'y faisaient; and the story, and the jest, and the cup went round (by-the-by, they had flagons made to simulate breviaries); and a monk touched the cittern, and sang ditties with a voice tunable as a lark in spring. The posies did turn the faces of the women folk bright red at first: but elles s'y faisaient.”
Here Gerard exploded.
“Miserable wretches! Corrupters of youth! Perverters of innocence! but for your being there, Denys, who have been taught no better, oh, would God the church had fallen on the whole gang. Impious, abominable hypocrites!”
“Hypocrites?” cried Denys, with unfeigned surprise. “Why, that is what I clept them ere I knew them: and you withstood me. Nay, they are sinners; all good fellows are that; but, by St. Denys his helmeted skull, no hypocrites, but right jolly roaring blades.”
“Denys,” said Gerard solemnly, “you little know the peril you ran that night. That church you defiled amongst you is haunted; I had it from one of the elder monks. The dead walk there, their light feet have been heard to patter o'er the stones.”
“Misericorde!” whispered Denys.
“Ay, more,” said Gerard, lowering his voice almost to a whisper; “celestial sounds have issued from the purlieus of that very crypt you turned into a tavern. Voices of the dead holding unearthly communion have chilled the ear of midnight, and at times, Denys, the faithful in their nightly watches have even heard music from dead lips; and chords, made by no mortal finger, swept by no mortal hand, have rung faintly, like echoes, deep among the dead in those sacred vaults.”
Denys wore a look of dismay. “Ugh! if I had known, mules and wain-ropes had not hauled me thither; and so” (with a sigh) “I had lost a merry time.”
Whether further discussion might have thrown any more light upon these ghostly sounds, who can tell? for up came a “bearded brother” from the monastery, spurring his mule, and waving a piece of vellum in his hand. It was the deed between Ghysbrecht and Floris Brandt. Gerard valued it deeply as a remembrance of home: he turned pale at first but to think he had so nearly lost it, and to Denys's infinite amusement not only gave a piece of money to the lay brother, but kissed the mule's nose.
“I'll read you now,” said Gerard, “were you twice as ill written; and—to make sure of never losing you”—here he sat down, and taking out needle and thread, sewed it with feminine dexterity to his doublet, and his mind, and heart, and soul were away to Sevenbergen.
They reached the promised land, and Denys, who was in high spirits, doffed his bonnet to all the females; who curtsied and smiled in return; fired his consigne at most of the men; at which some stared, some grinned, some both; and finally landed his friend at one of the long-promised Burgundian inns.
“It is a little one,” said he, “but I know it of old for a good one; Les Trois Poissons.' But what is this writ up? I mind not this;” and he pointed to an inscription that ran across the whole building in a single line of huge letters. “Oh, I see. 'Ici on loge a pied et a cheval,'” said Denys, going minutely through the inscription, and looking bumptious when he had effected it.
Gerard did look, and the sentence in question ran thus:
“ON NE LOGE CEANS A CREDIT; CE BONHOMME EST MORT, LES MAUVAIS PAIEURS L'ONT TUE.”
“Welcome, messieurs,” said he, taking off his cap, with a low bow.
“Come, we are not in Germany,” said Gerard.
In the public room they found the mistress, a buxom woman of forty. She curtsied to them, and smiled right cordially “Give yourself the trouble of sitting ye down, fair sir,” said she to Gerard, and dusted two chairs with her apron, not that they needed it.
“Thank you, dame,” said Gerard. “Well,” thought he, “this is a polite nation: the trouble of sitting down? That will I with singular patience; and presently the labour of eating, also the toil of digestion, and finally, by Hercules his aid, the strain of going to bed, and the struggle of sinking fast asleep.
“Why, Denys, what are you doing? ordering supper for only two?”
“Why not?”
“What, can we sup without waiting for forty more? Burgundy forever!”
“Aha! Courage, camarade. Le dia—”
“C'est convenu.”
The salic law seemed not to have penetrated to French inns. In this one at least wimple and kirtle reigned supreme; doublets and hose were few in number, and feeble in act. The landlord himself wandered objectless, eternally taking off his cap to folk for want of thought; and the women, as they passed him in turn, thrust him quietly aside without looking at him, as we remove a live twig in bustling through a wood.
A maid brought in supper, and the mistress followed her, empty handed.
“Fall to, my masters,” said she cheerily; “y'have but one enemy here; and he lies under your knife.” (I shrewdly suspect this of formula.)
They fell to. The mistress drew her chair a little toward the table; and provided company as well as meat; gossiped genially with them like old acquaintances: but this form gone through, the busy dame was soon off and sent in her daughter, a beautiful young woman of about twenty, who took the vacant seat. She was not quite so broad and genial as the elder, but gentle and cheerful, and showed a womanly tenderness for Gerard on learning the distance the poor boy had come, and had to go. She stayed nearly half-an-hour, and when she left them Gerard said, “This an inn? Why, it is like home.”
“Qui fit Francois il fit courtois,” said Denys, bursting with gratified pride.
“Courteous? nay, Christian; to welcome us like home guests and old friends, us vagrants, here to-day and gone to-morrow. But indeed who better merits pity and kindness than the worn traveller far from his folk? Hola! here's another.”
The new-comer was the chambermaid, a woman of about twenty-five, with a cocked nose, a large laughing mouth, and a sparkling black eye, and a bare arm very stout but not very shapely.
The moment she came in, one of the travellers passed a somewhat free jest on her; the next the whole company were roaring at his expense, so swiftly had her practised tongue done his business. Even as, in a passage of arms between a novice and a master of fence, foils clash—novice pinked. On this another, and then another, must break a lance with her; but Marion stuck her great arms upon her haunches, and held the whole room in play. This country girl possessed in perfection that rude and ready humour which looks mean and vulgar on paper, but carries all before it spoken: not wit's rapier; its bludgeon. Nature had done much for her in this way, and daily practice in an inn the rest.
Yet shall she not be photographed by me, but feebly indicated: for it was just four hundred years ago, the raillery was coarse, she returned every stroke in kind, and though a virtuous woman, said things without winking, which no decent man of our day would say even among men.
Gerard sat gaping with astonishment. This was to him almost a new variety of “that interesting species,” homo. He whispered “Denys, Now I see why you Frenchmen say 'a woman's tongue is her sword:'” just then she levelled another assailant; and the chivalrous Denys, to console and support “the weaker vessel,” the iron kettle among the clay pots, administered his consigne, “Courage, ma mie, le—-” etc.
She turned on him directly. “How can he be dead as long as there is an archer left alive?” (General laughter at her ally's expense.)
“It is 'washing day,' my masters,” said she, with sudden gravity.
“Apres? We travellers cannot strip and go bare while you wash our clothes,” objected a peevish old fellow by the fireside, who had kept mumchance during the raillery, but crept out into the sunshine of commonplaces.
“I aimed not your way, ancient man,” replied Marion superciliously. “But since you ask me” (here she scanned him slowly from head to foot), “I trow you might take a turn in the tub, clothes and all, and no harm done” (laughter). “But what I spoke for, I thought this young sire might like his beard starched.”
Poor Gerard's turn had come; his chin crop was thin and silky.
The loudest of all the laughers this time was the traitor Denys, whose beard was of a good length, and singularly stiff and bristly; so that Shakespeare, though he never saw him, hit him in the bull's eye.
“Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard.”
—As You Like It.
Gerard bore the Amazonian satire mighty calmly. He had little personal vanity. “Nay, 'chambriere,'” said he, with a smile, “mine is all unworthy your pains; take you this fair growth in hand!” and he pointed to Denys's vegetable.
“Oh, time for that, when I starch the besoms.”
Whilst they were all shouting over this palpable hit, the mistress returned, and in no more time than it took her to cross the threshold, did our Amazon turn to a seeming Madonna meek and mild.
Mistresses are wonderful subjugators. Their like I think breathes not on the globe. Housemaids, decide! It was a waste of histrionic ability though; for the landlady had heard, and did not at heart disapprove, the peals of laughter.
“Ah, Marion, lass,” said she good-humouredly, “if you laid me an egg every time you cackle, 'L'es Trois Poissons' would never lack an omelet.”
“Now, dame,” said Gerard, “what is to pay?”
“What for?”
“Our supper.”
“Where is the hurry? cannot you be content to pay when you go? lose the guest, find the money, is the rule of 'The Three Fish.'”
“But, dame, outside 'The Three Fish' it is thus written—'Ici-on ne loge—”
“Bah! Let that flea stick on the wall! Look hither,” and she pointed to the smoky ceiling, which was covered with hieroglyphics. These were accounts, vulgo scores; intelligible to this dame and her daughter, who wrote them at need by simply mounting a low stool, and scratching with a knife so as to show lines of ceiling through the deposit of smoke. The dame explained that the writing on the wall was put there to frighten moneyless folk from the inn altogether, or to be acted on at odd times when a non-paying face should come in and insist on being served. “We can't refuse them plump, you know. The law forbids us.”
“And how know you mine is not such a face?”
“Out fie! it is the best face that has entered 'The Three Fish' this autumn.”
“And mine, dame?” said Denys; “dost see no knavery here?”
She eyed him calmly. “Not such a good one as the lad's; nor ever will be. But it is the face of a true man. For all that,” added she drily, “an I were ten years younger, I'd as lieve not meet that face on a dark night too far from home.”
Gerard stared. Denys laughed. “Why, dame, I would but sip the night dew off the flower; and you needn't take ten years off, nor ten days, to be worth risking a scratched face for.”
“There, our mistress,” said Marion, who had just come in, “said I not t'other day you could make a fool of them still, an if you were properly minded?”
“I dare say ye did; it sounds like some daft wench's speech.”
“Dame,” said Gerard, “this is wonderful.”
“What? Oh! no, no, that is no wonder at all. Why, I have been here all my life; and reading faces is the first thing a girl picks up in an inn.”
Marion. “And frying eggs the second; no, telling lies; frying eggs is the third, though.”
The Mistress. “And holding her tongue the last, and modesty the day after never at all.”
Marion. “Alack! Talk of my tongue. But I say no more. She under whose wing I live now deals the blow. I'm sped—'tis but a chambermaid gone. Catch what's left on't!” and she staggered and sank backwards on to the handsomest fellow in the room, which happened to be Gerard.
“Tic! tic!” cried he peevishly; “there, don't be stupid! that is too heavy a jest for me. See you not I am talking to the mistress?”
Marion resumed her elasticity with a grimace, made two little bounds into the middle of the floor, and there turned a pirouette. “There, mistress,” said she, “I give in; 'tis you that reigns supreme with the men, leastways with male children.”
“Young man,” said the mistress, “this girl is not so stupid as her deportment; in reading of faces, and frying of omelets, there we are great. 'Twould be hard if we failed at these arts, since they are about all we do know.”
“You do not quite take me, dame,” said Gerard. “That honesty in a face should shine forth to your experienced eye, that seems reasonable: but how by looking on Denys here could you learn his one little foible, his insanity, his miserable mulierosity?” Poor Gerard got angrier the more he thought of it.
“His mule—his what?” (crossing herself with superstitious awe at the polysyllable).
“Nay, 'tis but the word I was fain to invent for him.”
“Invent? What, can a child like you make other words than grow in Burgundy by nature? Take heed what ye do! why, we are overrun with them already, especially bad ones. Lord, these be times. I look to hear of a new thistle invented next.”
“Well then, dame, mulierose—that means wrapped up, body and soul, in women. So prithee tell me; how did you ever detect the noodle's mulierosity?”
“Alas! good youth, you make a mountain of a molehill. We that are women be notice-takers; and out of the tail of our eye see more than most men can, glaring through a prospect glass. Whiles I move to and fro doing this and that, my glance is still on my guests, and I did notice that this soldier's eyes were never off the womenfolk: my daughter, or Marion, or even an old woman like me, all was gold to him: and there a sat glowering; oh, you foolish, foolish man! Now you still turned to the speaker, her or him, and that is common sense.”
Denys burst into a hoarse laugh. “You never were more out. Why, this silky, smooth-faced companion is a very Turk—all but his beard. He is what d'ye call 'em oser than ere an archer in the Duke's body-guard. He is more wrapped up in one single Dutch lass called Margaret, than I am in the whole bundle of ye, brown and fair.”
“Man alive, that is just the contrary,” said the hostess. “Yourn is the bane, and hisn the cure. Cling you still to Margaret, my dear. I hope she is an honest girl.”
“Dame, she is an angel.”
“Ay, ay, they are all that till better acquainted. I'd as lieve have her no more than honest, and then she will serve to keep you out of worse company. As for you, soldier, there is trouble in store for you. Your eyes were never made for the good of your soul.”
“Nor of his pouch either,” said Marion, striking in, “and his lips, they will sip the dew, as he calls it, off many a bramble bush.”
“Overmuch clack! Marion overmuch clack.”
“Ods bodikins, mistress; ye didn't hire me to be one o' your three fishes, did ye?” and Marion sulked thirty seconds.
“Is that the way to speak to our mistress?” remonstrated the landlord, who had slipped in.
“Hold your whisht,” said his wife sharply; “it is not your business to check the girl; she is a good servant to you.”
“What, is the cock never to crow, and the hens at it all day?”
“You can crow as loud as you like, my man out o' doors. But the hen means to rule the roost.”
“I know a byword to that tune.” said Gerard.
“Do ye, now? out wi't then.”
“Femme veut en toute saison,
Estre dame en sa mason.”
“I never heard it afore; but 'tis as sooth as gospel. Ay, they that set these bywords a rolling had eyes and tongues, and tongues and eyes. Before all the world give me an old saw.”
“And me a young husband,” said Marion. “Now there was a chance for you all, and nobody spoke. Oh! it is too late now, I've changed my mind.”
“All the better for some poor fellow,” suggested Denys.
And now the arrival of the young mistress, or, as she was called, the little mistress, was the signal for them all to draw round the fire, like one happy family, travellers, host, hostess, and even servants in the outer ring, and tell stories till bedtime. And Gerard in his turn told a tremendous one out of his repertory, a MS. collection of “acts of the saints,” and made them all shudder deliciously; but soon after began to nod, exhausted by the effort, I should say. The young mistress saw, and gave Marion a look. She instantly lighted a rush, and laying her hand on Gerard's shoulder, invited him to follow her. She showed him a room where were two nice white beds, and bade him choose.
“Either is paradise,” said he. “I'll take this one. Do you know, I have not lain in a naked bed once since I left my home in Holland.”
“Alack! poor soul!” said she; “well, then, the sooner my flax and your down (he! he!) come together, the better; so—allons!” and she held out her cheek as business-like as if it had been her hand for a fee.
“Allons? what does that mean?”
“It means 'good-night.' Ahem! What, don't they salute the chambermaid in your part?”
“Not all in a moment.”
“What, do they make a business on't?”
“Nay, perverter of words, I mean we make not so free with strange women.
“They must be strange women if they do not think you strange fools, then. Here is a coil. Why, all the old greasy greybeards that lie at our inn do kiss us chambermaids; faugh! and what have we poor wretches to set on t'other side the compt but now and then a nice young——? Alack! time flies, chambermaids can't be spared long in the nursery, so how is't to be?”
“An't please you arrange with my comrade for both. He is mulierose; I am not.”
“Nay, 'tis the curb he will want, not the spur. Well! well! you shall to bed without paying the usual toll; and oh, but 'tis sweet to fall in with a young man who can withstand these ancient ill customs, and gainsay brazen hussies. Shalt have thy reward.”
“Thank you! But what are you doing with my bed?”
“Me? oh, only taking off these sheets, and going to put on the pair the drunken miller slept in last night.”
“Oh, no! no! You cruel, black-hearted thing! There! there!”
“A la bonne heure! What will not perseverance effect? But note now the frowardness of a mad wench! I cared not for't a button. I am dead sick of that sport this five years. But you denied me; so then forthwith I behoved to have it; belike had gone through fire and water for't. Alas, young sir, we women are kittle cattle; poor perverse toads: excuse us: and keep us in our place, savoir, at arm's length; and so good-night!”
At the door she turned and said, with a complete change of tone and manner: “The Virgin guard thy head, and the holy Evangelists watch the bed where lies a poor young wanderer far from home! Amen!”
And the next moment he heard her run tearing down the stairs, and soon a peal of laughter from the salle betrayed her whereabouts.
“Now that is a character,” said Gerard profoundly, and yawned over the discovery.
In a very few minutes he was in a dry bath of cold, clean linen, inexpressibly refreshing to him after so long disuse: then came a delicious glow; and then—Sevenbergen.
In the morning Gerard awoke infinitely refreshed, and was for rising, but found himself a close prisoner. His linen had vanished. Now this was paralysis; for the nightgown is a recent institution. In Gerard's century, and indeed long after, men did not play fast and loose with clean sheets (when they could get them), but crept into them clothed with their innocence, like Adam: out of bed they seem to have taken most after his eldest son.
Gerard bewailed his captivity to Denys; but that instant the door opened, and in sailed Marion with their linen, newly washed and ironed, on her two arms, and set it down on the table.
“Oh you good girl,” cried Gerard.
“Alack, have you found me out at last?”
“Yes, indeed. Is this another custom?”
“Nay, not to take them unbidden: but at night we aye question travellers, are they for linen washed. So I came into you, but you were both sound. Then said I to the little mistress, 'La! where is the sense of waking wearied men, t'ask them is Charles the Great dead, and would they liever carry foul linen or clean, especially this one with a skin like cream? 'And so he has, I declare,' said the young mistress.”
“That was me,” remarked Denys, with the air of a commentator.
“Guess once more, and you'll hit the mark.”
“Notice him not, Marion, he is an impudent fellow; and I am sure we cannot be grateful enough for your goodness, and I am sorry I ever refused you—anything you fancied you should like.”
“Oh, are ye there,” said l'espiegle. “I take that to mean you would fain brush the morning dew off, as your bashful companion calls it; well then, excuse me, 'tis customary, but not prudent. I decline. Quits with you, lad.”
“Stop! stop!” cried Denys, as she was making off victorious, “I am curious to know how many, of ye were here last night a-feasting your eyes on us twain.
“'Twas so satisfactory a feast as we weren't half a minute over't. Who? why the big mistress, the little mistress, Janet, and me, and the whole posse comitatus, on tiptoe. We mostly make our rounds the last thing, not to get burned down; and in prodigious numbers. Somehow that maketh us bolder, especially where archers lie scattered about.”
“Why did not you tell me? I'd have lain awake.”
“Beau sire, the saying goes that the good and the ill are all one while their lids are closed. So we said, 'Here is one who will serve God best asleep, Break not his rest!'”
“She is funny,” said Gerard dictatorially.
“I must be either that or knavish.”
“How so?”
“Because 'The Three Fish' pay me to be funny. You will eat before you part? Good! then I'll go see the meat be fit for such worshipful teeth.”
“Denys!”
“What is your will?”
“I wish that was a great boy, and going along with us, to keep us cheery.”
“So do not I. But I wish it was going along with us as it is.”
“Now Heaven forefend! A fine fool you would make of yourself.”
They broke their fast, settled their score, and said farewell. Then it was they found that Marion had not exaggerated the “custom of the country.” The three principal women took and kissed them right heartily, and they kissed the three principal women. The landlord took and kissed them, and they kissed the landlord; and the cry was, “Come back, the sooner the better!”
“Never pass 'The Three Fish'; should your purses be void, bring yourselves: 'le sieur credit' is not dead for you.”
And they took the road again.
They came to a little town, and Denys went to buy shoes. The shopkeeper was in the doorway, but wide awake. He received Denys with a bow down to the ground. The customer was soon fitted, and followed to the street, and dismissed with graceful salutes from the doorstep.
The friends agreed it was Elysium to deal with such a shoemaker as this. “Not but what my German shoes have lasted well enough,” said Gerard the just.
Outside the town was a pebbled walk.
“This is to keep the burghers's feet dry, a-walking o' Sundays with their wives and daughters,” said Denys.
Those simple words of Denys, one stroke of a careless tongue, painted “home” in Gerard's heart. “Oh, how sweet!” said he.
“Mercy! what is this? A gibbet! and ugh, two skeletons thereon! Oh, Denys, what a sorry sight to woo by!”
“Nay,” said Denys, “a comfortable sight; for every rogue i' the air there is one the less a-foot.”
A little farther on they came to two pillars, and between these was a huge wheel closely studded with iron prongs; and entangled in these were bones and fragments of cloth miserably dispersed over the wheel.
Gerard hid his face in his hands. “Oh, to think those patches and bones are all that is left of a man! of one who was what we are now.”
“Excusez! a thing that went on two legs and stole; are we no more than that?”
“How know ye he stole? Have true men never suffered death and torture too?”
“None of my kith ever found their way to the gibbet, I know.”
“The better their luck. Prithee, how died the saints?”
“Hard. But not in Burgundy.”
“Ye massacred them wholesale at Lyons, and that is on Burgundy's threshold. To you the gibbet proves the crime, because you read not story. Alas! had you stood on Calvary that bloody day we sigh for to this hour, I tremble to think you had perhaps shouted for joy at the gibbet builded there; for the cross was but the Roman gallows, Father Martin says.”
“The blaspheming old hound!”
“Oh, fie! fie! a holy and a book-learned man. Ay, Denys, y'had read them, that suffered there, by the bare light of the gibbet. 'Drive in the nails!' y'had cried: 'drive in the spear!' Here be three malefactors. Three 'roues.' Yet of those little three one was the first Christian saint, and another was the Saviour of the world which gibbeted him.”
Denys assured him on his honour they managed things better in Burgundy. He added, too, after profound reflection, that the horrors Gerard had alluded to had more than once made him curse and swear with rage when told by the good cure in his native village at Eastertide: “but they chanced in an outlandish nation, and near a thousand years agone. Mort de ma vie, let us hope it is not true; or at least sore exaggerated. Do but see how all tales gather as they roll!”
Then he reflected again, and all in a moment turned red with ire. “Do ye not blush to play with your book-craft on your unlettered friend, and throw dust in his eyes, evening the saints with these reptiles?”
Then suddenly he recovered his good humour. “Since your heart beats for vermin, feel for the carrion crows! they be as good vermin as these; would ye send them to bed supperless, poor pretty poppets? Why, these be their larder; the pangs of hunger would gnaw them dead, but for cold cut-purse hung up here and there.”
Gerard, who had for some time maintained a dead silence, informed him the subject was closed between them, and for ever. “There are things,” said he, “in which our hearts seem wide as the poles asunder, and eke our heads. But I love thee dearly all the same,” he added, with infinite grace and tenderness.
Towards afternoon they heard a faint wailing noise on ahead; it grew distincter as they proceeded. Being fast walkers they soon came up with its cause: a score of pikemen, accompanied by several constables, were marching along, and in advance of them was a herd of animals they were driving. These creatures, in number rather more than a hundred, were of various ages, only very few were downright old: the males were downcast and silent. It was the females from whom all the outcry came. In other words, the animals thus driven along at the law's point were men and women.
“Good Heaven!” cried Gerard, “what a band of them! But stay, surely all those children cannot be thieves; why, there are some in arms. What on earth is this, Denys?”
Denys advised him to ask that “bourgeois” with the badge; “This is Burgundy: here a civil question ever draws a civil reply.”
Gerard went up to the officer, and removing his cap, a civility which was immediately returned, said, “For our Lady's sake, sir, what do ye with these poor folk?”
“Nay, what is that to you, my lad?” replied the functionary suspiciously.
“Master, I'm a stranger, and athirst for knowledge.”
“That is another matter. What are we doing? ahem. Why we—Dost hear, Jacques? Here is a stranger seeks to know what we are doing,” and the two machines were tickled that there should be a man who did not know something they happened to know. In all ages this has tickled. However, the chuckle was brief and moderated by the native courtesy, and the official turned to Gerard again. “What we are doing? hum!” and now he hesitated, not from any doubt as to what he was doing, but because he was hunting for a single word that should convey the matter.
“Ce que nous faisons, mon gars?—Mais—dam—NOUS TRANSVASONS.”
“You decant? that should mean you pour from one vessel to another.”
“Precisely.” He explained that last year the town of Charmes had been sore thinned by a pestilence, whole houses emptied and trades short of hands. Much ado to get in the rye, and the flax half spoiled. So the bailiff and aldermen had written to the duke's secretary; and the duke he sent far and wide to know what town was too full. “That are we,” had the baillie of Toul writ back. “Then send four or five score of your townsfolk,” was the order. “Was not this to decant the full town into the empty, and is not the good duke the father of his people, and will not let the duchy be weakened, nor its fair towns laid waste by sword nor pestilence; but meets the one with pike, and arbalest (touching his cap to the sergeant and Denys alternately), and t'other with policy? LONG LIVE THE DUKE!”
The pikemen of course were not to be outdone in loyalty; so they shouted with stentorian lungs “LONG LIVE THE DUKE!” Then the decanted ones, partly because loyalty was a non-reasoning sentiment in those days, partly perhaps because they feared some further ill consequence should they alone be mute, raised a feeble, tremulous shout, “Long live the Duke!”
But, at this, insulted nature rebelled. Perhaps indeed the sham sentiment drew out the real, for, on the very heels of that royal noise, a loud and piercing wail burst from every woman's bosom, and a deep, deep groan from every man's; oh! the air filled in a moment with womanly and manly anguish. Judge what it must have been when the rude pikemen halted unbidden, all confused; as if a wall of sorrow had started up before them.
“En avant,” roared the sergeant, and they marched again, but muttering and cursing.
“Ah the ugly sound,” said the civilian, wincing. “Les malheureux!” cried he ruefully: for where is the single man can hear the sudden agony of a multitude and not be moved? “Les ingrats! They are going whence they were de trop to where they will be welcome: from starvation to plenty—and they object. They even make dismal noises. One would think we were thrusting them forth from Burgundy.”
“Come away,” whispered Gerard, trembling; “come away,” and the friends strode forward.
When they passed the head of the column, and saw the men walk with their eyes bent in bitter gloom upon the ground, and the women, some carrying, some leading little children, and weeping as they went, and the poor bairns, some frolicking, some weeping because “their mammies” wept, Gerard tried hard to say a word of comfort, but choked and could utter nothing to the mourners; but gasped, “Come on, Denys, I cannot mock such sorrow with little words of comfort.” And now, artist-like, all his aim was to get swiftly out of the grief he could not soothe. He almost ran not to hear these sighs and sobs.
“Why, mate,” said Denys, “art the colour of a lemon. Man alive, take not other folk's troubles to heart! not one of those whining milksops there but would see thee, a stranger, hanged without winking.”
Gerard scarce listened to him.
“Decant them?” he groaned; “ay, if blood were no thicker than wine. Princes, ye are wolves. Poor things! Poor things! Ah, Denys! Denys! with looking on their grief mine own comes home to me. Well-a-day! ah, well-a-day!”
“Ay, now you talk reason. That you, poor lad, should be driven all the way from Holland to Rome is pitiful indeed. But these snivelling curs, where is their hurt? There is six score of 'em to keep one another company: besides, they are not going out of Burgundy.”
“Better for them if they had never been in it.”
“Mechant, va! they are but going from one village to another, a mule's journey! whilst thou—there, no more. Courage, camarade, le diable est mort.”
Gerard shook his head very doubtfully, but kept silence for about a mile, and then he said thoughtfully, “Ay, Denys, but then I am sustained by booklearning. These are simple folk that likely thought their village was the world: now what is this? more weeping. Oh! 'tis a sweet world Humph! A little girl that hath broke her pipkin. Now may I hang on one of your gibbets but I'll dry somebody's tears,” and he pounced savagely upon this little martyr, like a kite on a chick, but with more generous intentions. It was a pretty little lass of about twelve; the tears were raining down her two peaches, and her palms lifted to heaven in that utter, though temporary, desolation which attends calamity at twelve; and at her feet the fatal cause, a broken pot, worth, say the fifth of a modern farthing.
“What, hast broken thy pot, little one?” said Gerard, acting intensest sympathy.
“Helas! bel gars; as you behold;” and the hands came down from the sky and both pointed at the fragments. A statuette of adversity.
“And you weep so for that?”
“Needs I must, bel gars. My mammy will massacre me. Do they not already” (with a fresh burst of woe) “c-c-call me J-J-Jean-net-on C-c-casse tout? It wanted but this; that I should break my poor pot. Helas! fallait-il donc, mere de Dieu?”
“Courage, little love,” said Gerard; “'tis not thy heart lies broken; money will soon mend pots. See now, here is a piece of silver, and there, scarce a stone's throw off, is a potter; take the bit of silver to him, and buy another pot, and the copper the potter will give thee keep that to play with thy comrades.”
The little mind took in all this, and smiles began to struggle with the tears: but spasms are like waves, they cannot go down the very moment the wind of trouble is lulled. So Denys thought well to bring up his reserve of consolation “Courage, ma mie, le diable est mort!” cried that inventive warrior gaily. Gerard shrugged his shoulders at such a way of cheering a little girl,
“What a fine thing
Is a lute with one string,”
said he.
The little girl's face broke into warm sunshine.
“Oh, the good news! oh, the good news!” she sang out with such heartfelt joy, it went off into a honeyed whine; even as our gay old tunes have a pathos underneath “So then,” said she, “they will no longer be able to threaten us little girls with him, making our lives a burden!” And she bounded off “to tell Nanette,” she said.
There is a theory that everything has its counterpart; if true, Denys it would seem had found the mind his consigne fitted.
While he was roaring with laughter at its unexpected success and Gerard's amazement, a little hand pulled his jerkin and a little face peeped round his waist. Curiosity was now the dominant passion in that small but vivid countenance.
“Est-ce toi qui l'a tue, beau soldat?”
“Oui, ma mie,” said Denys, as gruffly as ever he could, rightly deeming this would smack of supernatural puissance to owners of bell-like trebles. “C'est moi. Ca vaut une petite embrassade—pas?”
“Je crois ben. Aie! aie!”
“Qu'as-tu?”
“Ca pique! ca pique!”
“Quel dommage! je vais la couper.”
“Nein, ce n'est rien; et pisque t'as tue ce mechant. T'es fierement beau, tout d' meme, toi; t'es lien miex que ma grande soeur.
“Will you not kiss me, too, ma mie?” said Gerard.
“Je ne demande par miex. Tiens, tiens, tiens! c'est doulce celle-ci. Ah! que j'aimons les hommes! Des fames, ca ne m'aurait jamais donne l'arjan, blanc, plutot ca m'aurait ri au nez. C'est si peu de chose, les fames. Serviteur, beaulx sires! Bon voiage; et n'oubliez point la Jeanneton!”
“Adieu, petit coeur,” said Gerard, and on they marched; but presently looking back they saw the contemner of women in the middle of the road, making them a reverence, and blowing them kisses with little May morning face.
“Come on,” cried Gerard lustily. “I shall win to Rome yet. Holy St. Bavon, what a sunbeam of innocence hath shot across our bloodthirsty road! Forget thee, little Jeanneton? not likely, amidst all this slobbering, and gibbeting, and decanting. Come on, thou laggard! forward!”
“Dost call this marching?” remonstrated Denys; “why, we shall walk o'er Christmas Day and never see it.”
At the next town they came to, suddenly an arbalestrier ran out of a tavern after them, and in a moment his beard and Denys's were like two brushes stuck together. It was a comrade. He insisted on their coming into the tavern with him, and breaking a bottle of wine. In course of conversation, he told Denys there was an insurrection in the Duke's Flemish provinces, and soldiers were ordered thither from all parts of Burgundy. “Indeed, I marvelled to see thy face turned this way.
“I go to embrace my folk that I have not seen these three years. Ye can quell a bit of a rising without me I trow.”
Suddenly Denys gave a start. “Dost hear Gerard? this comrade is bound for Holland.”
“What then? ah, a letter! a letter to Margaret! but will he be so good, so kind?”
The soldier with a torrent of blasphemy informed him he would not only take it, but go a league or two out of his way to do it.
In an instant out came inkhorn and paper from Gerard's wallet; and he wrote a long letter to Margaret, and told her briefly what I fear I have spun too tediously; dwelt most on the bear, and the plunge in the Rhine, and the character of Denys, whom he painted to the life. And with many endearing expressions bade her to be of good cheer; some trouble and peril there had been, but all that was over now, and his only grief left was, that he could not hope to have a word from her hand till he should reach Rome. He ended with comforting her again as hard as he could. And so absorbed was he in his love and his work, that he did not see all the people in the room were standing peeping, to watch the nimble and true finger execute such rare penmanship.
Denys, proud of his friend's skill, let him alone, till presently the writer's face worked, and soon the scalding tears began to run down his young cheeks, one after another, on the paper where he was then writing comfort, comfort. Then Denys rudely repulsed the curious, and asked his comrade with a faltering voice whether he had the heart to let so sweet a love-letter miscarry? The other swore by the face of St. Luke he would lose the forefinger of his right hand sooner.
Seeing him so ready, Gerard charged him also with a short, cold letter to his parents; and in it he drew hastily with his pen two hands grasping each other, to signify farewell. By-the-by, one drop of bitterness found its way into his letter to Margaret. But of that anon.
Gerard now offered money to the soldier. He hesitated, but declined it. “No, no! art comrade of my comrade; and may” (etc.) “but thy love for the wench touches me. I'll break another bottle at thy charge an thou wilt, and so cry quits.”
“Well said, comrade,” cried Denys. “Hadst taken money, I had invited thee to walk in the courtyard and cross swords with me.”
“Whereupon I had cut thy comb for thee,” retorted the other.
“Hadst done thy endeavour, drole, I doubt not.”
They drank the new bottle, shook hands, adhered to custom, and parted on opposite routes.
This delay, however, somewhat put out Denys's calculations, and evening surprised them ere they reached a little town he was making for, where was a famous hotel. However, they fell in with a roadside auberge, and Denys, seeing a buxom girl at the door, said, “This seems a decent inn,” and led the way into the kitchen. They ordered supper, to which no objection was raised, only the landlord requested them to pay for it beforehand. It was not an uncommon proposal in any part of the world. Still it was not universal, and Denys was nettled, and dashed his hand somewhat ostentatiously into his purse and pulled out a gold angel. “Count me the change, and speedily,” said he. “You tavern-keepers are more likely to rob me than I you.”
While the supper was preparing, Denys disappeared, and was eventually found by Gerard in the yard, helping Manon, his plump but not bright decoy duck, to draw water, and pouring extravagant compliments into her dullish ear. Gerard grunted and returned to table, but Denys did not come in for a good quarter of an hour.
“Uphill work at the end of a march,” said he, shrugging his shoulders.
“What matters that to you!” said Gerard drily. “The mad dog bites all the world.”
“Exaggerator. You know I bite but the fairer half. Well, here comes supper; that is better worth biting.”
During supper the girl kept constantly coming in and out, and looking point-blank at them, especially at Denys; and at last in leaning over him to remove a dish, dropped a word in his ear; and he replied with a nod.
As soon as supper was cleared away, Denys rose and strolled to the door, telling Gerard the sullen fair had relented, and given him a little rendezvous in the stable-yard.
Gerard suggested that the calf-pen would have been a more appropriate locality. “I shall go to bed, then,” said he, a little crossly. “Where is the landlord? out at this time of night? no matter. I know our room. Shall you be long, pray?”
“Not I. I grudge leaving the fire and thee. But what can I do? There are two sorts of invitations a Burgundian never declines.”
Denys found a figure seated by the well. It was Manon; but instead of receiving him as he thought he had a right to expect, coming by invitation, all she did was to sob. He asked her what ailed her? She sobbed. Could he do anything for her? She sobbed.
The good-natured Denys, driven to his wits' end, which was no great distance, proffered the custom of the country by way of consolation. She repulsed him roughly. “Is it a time for fooling?” said she, and sobbed.
“You seem to think so,” said Denys, waxing wroth. But the next moment he added tenderly, “and I, who could never bear to see beauty in distress.”
“It is not for myself.”
“Who then? your sweetheart?”
“Oh, que nenni. My sweetheart is not on earth now: and to think I have not an ecu to buy masses for his soul;” and in this shallow nature the grief seemed now to be all turned in another direction.
“Come, come,” said Denys, “shalt have money to buy masses for thy dead lad; I swear it. Meantime tell me why you weep.”
“For you.”
“For me? Art mad?”
“No; I am not mad. 'Tis you that were mad to open your purse before him.”
The mystery seemed to thicken, and Denys, wearied of stirring up the mud by questions, held his peace to see if it would not clear of itself. Then the girl, finding herself no longer questioned, seemed to go through some internal combat. At last she said, doggedly and aloud, “I will. The Virgin give me courage? What matters it if they kill me, since he is dead? Soldier, the landlord is out.”
“Oh, is he?”
“What, do landlords leave their taverns at this time of night? also see what a tempest! We are sheltered here, but t'other side it blows a hurricane.”
Denys said nothing.
“He is gone to fetch the band.”
“The band! what band?”
“Those who will cut your throat and take your gold. Wretched man; to go and shake gold in an innkeeper's face!”
The blow came so unexpectedly it staggered even Denys, accustomed as he was to sudden perils. He muttered a single word, but in it a volume.
“Gerard!”
“Gerard! What is that? Oh, 'tis thy comrade's name, poor lad. Get him out quick ere they come; and fly to the next town.”
“And thou?”
“They will kill me.”
“That shall they not. Fly with us.”
“'Twill avail me nought: one of the band will be sent to kill me. They are sworn to slay all who betray them.”
“I'll take thee to my native place full thirty leagues from hence, and put thee under my own mother's wing, ere they shall hurt a hair o' thy head. But first Gerard. Stay thou here whilst I fetch him!”
As he was darting off, the girl seized him convulsively, and with all the iron strength excitement lends to women. “Stay me not! for pity's sake,” he cried; “'tis life or death.”
“Sh!—sh!” whispered the girl, shutting his mouth hard with her hand, and putting her pale lips close to him, and her eyes, that seemed to turn backwards, straining towards some indistinct sound.
He listened.
He heard footsteps, many footsteps, and no voices. She whispered in his ear, “They are come.” And trembled like a leaf.
Denys felt it was so. Travellers in that number would never have come in dead silence.
The feet were now at the very door.
“How many?” said he, in a hollow whisper.
“Hush!” and she put her mouth to his very ear. And who, that had seen this man and woman in that attitude, would have guessed what freezing hearts were theirs, and what terrible whispers passed between them?
“How armed?”
“Sword and dagger: and the giant with his axe. They call him the Abbot.”
“And my comrade?”
“Nothing can save him. Better lose one life than two. Fly!”
Denys's blood froze at this cynical advice. “Poor creature, you know not a soldier's heart.”
He put his head in his hands a moment, and a hundred thoughts of dangers baffled whirled through his brain.
“Listen, girl! There is one chance for our lives, if thou wilt but be true to us. Run to the town; to the nearest tavern, and tell the first soldier there, that a soldier here is sore beset, but armed, and his life to be saved if they will but run. Then to the bailiff. But first to the soldiers. Nay, not a word, but buss me, good lass, and fly! men's lives hang on thy heels.”
She kilted up her gown to run. He came round to the road with her, saw her cross the road cringing with fear, then glide away, then turn into an erect shadow, then melt away in the storm.
And now he must get to Gerard. But how? He had to run the gauntlet of the whole band. He asked himself, what was the worst thing they could do? for he had learned in war that an enemy does, not what you hope he will do, but what you hope he will not do. “Attack me as I enter the kitchen! Then I must not give them time.”
Just as he drew near to the latch, a terrible thought crossed him. “Suppose they had already dealt with Gerard. Why, then,” thought he, “nought is left but to kill, and be killed;” and he strung his bow, and walked rapidly into the kitchen. There were seven hideous faces seated round the fire, and the landlord pouring them out neat brandy, blood's forerunner in every age.
“What? company!” cried Denys gaily; “one minute, my lads, and I'll be with you;” and he snatched up a lighted candle off the table, opened the door that led to the staircase, and went up it hallooing. “What, Gerard! whither hast thou skulked to?” There was no answer. He hallooed louder, “Gerard, where art thou?”
After a moment, in which Denys lived an hour of agony, a peevish, half-inarticulate noise issued from the room at the head of the little stairs. Denys burst in, and there was Gerard asleep.
“Thank God!” he said, in a choking voice, then began to sing loud, untuneful ditties. Gerard put his fingers into his ears; but presently he saw in Denys's face a horror that contrasted strangely with this sudden merriment.
“What ails thee?” said he, sitting up and staring.
“Hush!” said Denys, and his hand spoke even more plainly than his lips. “Listen to me.”
Denys then pointing significantly to the door, to show Gerard sharp ears were listening hard by, continued his song aloud but under cover of it threw in short muttered syllables.
“(Our lives are in peril.)
“(Thieves.)
“(Thy doublet.)
“(Thy sword.)
“Aid.
“Coming.
“Put off time.” Then aloud—
“Well, now, wilt have t'other bottle?—Say nay.”
“No, not I.”
“But I tell thee, there are half-a-dozen jolly fellows. Tired.”
“Ay, but I am too wearied,” said Gerard. “Go thou.”
“Nay, nay!” Then he went to the door and called out cheerfully “Landlord, the young milksop will not rise. Give those honest fellows t'other bottle. I will pay for't in the morning.”
He heard a brutal and fierce chuckle.
Having thus by observation made sure the kitchen door was shut, and the miscreants were not actually listening, he examined the chamber door closely: then quietly shut it, but did not bolt it; and went and inspected the window.
It was too small to get out of, and yet a thick bar of iron had been let in the stone to make it smaller; and just as he made this chilling discovery, the outer door of the house was bolted with a loud clang.
Denys groaned. “The beasts are in the shambles.”
But would the thieves attack them while they were awake? Probably not.
Not to throw away this their best chance, the poor souls now made a series of desperate efforts to converse, as if discussing ordinary matters; and by this means Gerard learned all that had passed, and that the girl was gone for aid.
“Pray Heaven she may not lose heart by the way,” said Denys, sorrowfully.
And Denys begged Gerard's forgiveness for bringing him out of his way for this.
Gerard forgave him.
“I would fear them less, Gerard, but for one they call the Abbot. I picked him out at once. Taller than you, bigger than us both put together. Fights with an axe. Gerard, a man to lead a herd of deer to battle. I shall kill that man to-night, or he will kill me. I think somehow 'tis he will kill me.”
“Saints forbid! Shoot him at the door! What avails his strength against your weapon?”
“I shall pick him out; but if it comes to hand fighting, run swiftly under his guard, or you are a dead man. I tell thee neither of us may stand a blow of that axe: thou never sawest such a body of a man.”
Gerard was for bolting the door; but Denys with a sign showed him that half the door-post turned outward on a hinge, and the great bolt was little more than a blind. “I have forborne to bolt it,” said he, “that they may think us the less suspicious.”
Near an hour rolled away thus. It seemed an age. Yet it was but a little hour, and the town was a league distant. And some of the voices in the kitchen became angry and impatient.
“They will not wait much longer,” said Denys, “and we have no chance at all unless we surprise them.”
“I will do whate'er you bid,” said Gerard meekly.
There was a cupboard on the same side as the door; but between it and the window. It reached nearly to the ground, but not quite. Denys opened the cupboard door and placed Gerard on a chair behind it. “If they run for the bed, strike at the napes of their necks! a sword cut there always kills or disables.” He then arranged the bolsters and their shoes in the bed so as to deceive a person peeping from a distance, and drew the short curtains at the head.
Meantime Gerard was on his knees. Denys looked round and saw him.
“Ah!” said Denys, “above all, pray them to forgive me for bringing you into this guet-apens!”
And now they grasped hands and looked in one another's eyes oh, such a look! Denys's hand was cold, and Gerard's warm.
They took their posts.
Denys blew out the candle.
“We must keep silence now.”
But in the terrible tension of their nerves and very souls they found they could hear a whisper fainter than any man could catch at all outside that door. They could hear each other's hearts thump at times.
“Good news!” breathed Denys, listening at the door. “They are casting lots.”
“Pray that it may be the Abbot.”
“Yes. Why?
“If he comes alone I can make sure of him.”
“Denys!”
“Ay!”
“I fear I shall go mad, if they do not come soon.”
“Shall I feign sleep? Shall I snore?”
“Will that———-?
“Perhaps”
“Do then and God have mercy on us!”
Denys snored at intervals.
There was a scuffling of feet heard in the kitchen, and then all was still.
Denys snored again. Then took up his position behind the door.
But he, or they, who had drawn the lot, seemed determined to run no foolish risks. Nothing was attempted in a hurry.
When they were almost starved with cold, and waiting for the attack, the door on the stairs opened softly and closed again. Nothing more.
There was another harrowing silence.
Then a single light footstep on the stair; and nothing more.
Then a light crept under the door and nothing more.
Presently there was a gentle scratching, not half so loud as a mouse's, and the false door-post opened by degrees, and left a perpendicular space, through which the light streamed in. The door, had it been bolted, would now have hung by the bare tip of the bolt, which went into the real door-post, but as it was, it swung gently open of itself. It opened inwards, so Denys did not raise his crossbow from the ground, but merely grasped his dagger.
The candle was held up, and shaded from behind by a man's hand.
He was inspecting the beds from the threshold, satisfied that his victims were both in bed.
The man glided into the apartment. But at the first step something in the position of the cupboard and chair made him uneasy. He ventured no further, but put the candle on the floor and stooped to peer under the chair; but as he stooped, an iron hand grasped his shoulder, and a dagger was driven so fiercely through his neck that the point came out at his gullet. There was a terrible hiccough, but no cry; and half-a-dozen silent strokes followed in swift succession, each a death-blow, and the assassin was laid noiselessly on the floor.
Denys closed the door, bolted it gently, drew the post to, and even while he was going whispered Gerard to bring a chair. It was done.
“Help me set him up.”
“Dead?”
“Parbleu.”
“What for?”
“Frighten them! Gain time.”
Even while saying this, Denys had whipped a piece of string round the dead man's neck, and tied him to the chair, and there the ghastly figure sat fronting the door.
“Denys, I can do better. Saints forgive me!”
“What? Be quick then, we have not many moments.”
And Denys got his crossbow ready, and tearing off his straw mattress, reared it before him and prepared to shoot the moment the door should open, for he had no hope any more would come singly, when they found the first did not return.
While thus employed, Gerard was busy about the seated corpse, and to his amazement Denys saw a luminous glow spreading rapidly over the white face.
Gerard blew out the candle; and on this the corpse's face shone still more like a glowworm's head.
Denys shook in his shoes, and his teeth chattered.
“What, in Heaven's name, is this?” he whispered.
“Hush! 'tis but phosphorus, but 'twill serve.”
“Away! they will surprise thee.”
In fact, uneasy mutterings were heard below, and at last a deep voice said, “What makes him so long? is the drole rifling them?”
It was their comrade they suspected then, not the enemy. Soon a step came softly but rapidly up the stairs: the door was gently tried.
When this resisted, which was clearly not expected, the sham post was very cautiously moved, and an eye no doubt peeped through the aperture: for there was a howl of dismay, and the man was heard to stumble back and burst into the kitchen, here a Babel of voices rose directly on his return.
Gerard ran to the dead thief and began to work on him again.
“Back, madman!” whispered Denys.
“Nay, nay. I know these ignorant brutes; they will not venture here awhile. I can make him ten times more fearful.”
“At least close that opening! Let them not see you at your devilish work.”
Gerard closed the sham post, and in half a minute his brush gave the dead head a sight to strike any man with dismay. He put his art to a strange use, and one unparalleled perhaps in the history of mankind. He illuminated his dead enemy's face to frighten his living foe: the staring eyeballs he made globes of fire; the teeth he left white, for so they were more terrible by the contrast; but the palate and tongue he tipped with fire, and made one lurid cavern of the red depths the chapfallen jaw revealed: and on the brow he wrote in burning letters “La Mort.” And, while he was doing it, the stout Denys was quaking, and fearing the vengeance of Heaven; for one mans courage is not another's; and the band of miscreants below were quarrelling and disputing loudly, and now without disguise.
The steps that led down to the kitchen were fifteen, but they were nearly perpendicular: there was therefore in point of fact no distance between the besiegers and besieged, and the latter now caught almost every word. At last one was heard to cry out, “I tell ye the devil has got him and branded him with hellfire. I am more like to leave this cursed house than go again into a room that is full of fiends.”
“Art drunk? or mad? or a coward?” said another.
“Call me a coward, I'll give thee my dagger's point, and send thee where Pierre sits o' fire for ever.
“Come, no quarrelling when work is afoot,” roared a tremendous diapason, “or I'll brain ye both with my fist, and send ye where we shall all go soon or late.”
“The Abbot,” whispered Denys gravely.
He felt the voice he had just heard could belong to no man but the colossus he had seen in passing through the kitchen. It made the place vibrate. The quarrelling continued some time, and then there was a dead silence.
“Look out, Gerard.”
“Ay. What will they do next?”
“We shall soon know.”
“Shall I wait for you, or cut down the first that opens the door?”
“Wait for me, lest we strike the same and waste a blow. Alas! we cannot afford that.”
Dead silence.
Sudden came into the room a thing that made them start and their hearts quiver.
And what was it? A moonbeam.
Even so can this machine, the body, by the soul's action, be strung up to start and quiver. The sudden ray shot keen and pure into that shamble.
Its calm, cold, silvery soul traversed the apartment in a stream of no great volume, for the window was narrow.
After the first tremor Gerard whispered, “Courage, Denys! God's eye is on us even here.” And he fell upon his knees with his face turned towards the window.
Ay it was like a holy eye opening suddenly on human crime and human passions. Many a scene of blood and crime that pure cold eye had rested on; but on few more ghastly than this, where two men, with a lighted corpse between them, waited panting, to kill and be killed. Nor did the moonlight deaden that horrible corpse-light. If anything it added to its ghastliness: for the body sat at the edge of the moonbeam, which cut sharp across the shoulder and the ear, and seemed blue and ghastly and unnatural by the side of that lurid glow in which the face and eyes and teeth shone horribly. But Denys dared not look that way.
The moon drew a broad stripe of light across the door, and on that his eyes were glued. Presently he whispered, “Gerard!”
Gerard looked and raised his sword.
Acutely as they had listened, they had heard of late no sound on the stair. Yet therein the door-post, at the edge of the stream of moonlight, were the tips of the fingers of a hand.
The nails glistened.
Presently they began to crawl and crawl down towards the bolt, but with infinite slowness and caution. In so doing they crept into the moonlight. The actual motion was imperceptible, but slowly, slowly, the fingers came out whiter and whiter; but the hand between the main knuckles and the wrist remained dark.
Denys slowly raised his crossbow.
He levelled it. He took a long steady aim.
Gerard palpitated. At last the crossbow twanged. The hand was instantly nailed, with a stern jar, to the quivering door-post. There was a scream of anguish. “Cut,” whispered Denys eagerly, and Gerard's uplifted sword descended and severed the wrist with two swift blows. A body sank down moaning outside.
The hand remained inside, immovable, with blood trickling from it down the wall. The fierce bolt, slightly barbed, had gone through it and deep into the real door-post.
“Two,” said Denys, with terrible cynicism.
He strung his crossbow, and kneeled behind his cover again.
“The next will be the Abbot.”
The wounded man moved, and presently crawled down to his companions on the stairs, and the kitchen door was shut.
There nothing was heard now but low muttering. The last incident had revealed the mortal character of the weapons used by the besieged.
“I begin to think the Abbot's stomach is not so great as his body,” said Denys.
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the following events happened all in a couple of seconds. The kitchen door was opened roughly, a heavy but active man darted up the stairs without any manner of disguise, and a single ponderous blow sent the door not only off its hinges, but right across the room on to Denys's fortification, which it struck so rudely as nearly to lay him flat. And in the doorway stood a colossus with a glittering axe.
He saw the dead man with the moon's blue light on half his face, and the red light on the other half and inside his chapfallen jaws: he stared, his arms fell, his knees knocked together, and he crouched with terror.
“LA MORT!” he cried, in tones of terror, and turned and fled. In which act Denys started up and shot him through both jaws. He sprang with one bound into the kitchen, and there leaned on his axe, spitting blood and teeth and curses.
Denys strung his bow and put his hand into his breast.
He drew it out dismayed.
“My last bolt is gone,” he groaned.
“But we have our swords, and you have slain the giant.”
“No, Gerard,” said Denys gravely, “I have not. And the worst is I have wounded him. Fool! to shoot at a retreating lion. He had never faced thy handiwork again, but for my meddling.”
“Ha! to your guard! I hear them open the door.”
Then Denys, depressed by the one error he had committed in all this fearful night, felt convinced his last hour had come. He drew his sword, but like one doomed. But what is this? a red light flickers on the ceiling. Gerard flew to the window and looked out. There were men with torches, and breastplates gleaming red. “We are saved! Armed men!” And he dashed his sword through the window shouting, “Quick! quick! we are sore pressed.”
“Back!” yelled Denys; “they come! strike none but him!”
That very moment the Abbot and two men with naked weapons rushed into the room. Even as they came, the outer door was hammered fiercely, and the Abbot's comrades hearing it, and seeing the torchlight, turned and fled. Not so the terrible Abbot: wild with rage and pain, he spurned his dead comrade, chair and all, across the room, then, as the men faced him on each side with kindling eyeballs, he waved his tremendous axe like a feather right and left, and cleared a space, then lifted it to hew them both in pieces.
His antagonists were inferior in strength, but not in swiftness and daring, and above all they had settled how to attack him. The moment he reared his axe, they flew at him like cats, and both together. If he struck a full blow with his weapon he would most likely kill one, but the other would certainly kill him: he saw this, and intelligent as well as powerful, he thrust the handle fiercely in Denys's face, and, turning, jobbed with the steel at Gerard. Denys went staggering back covered with blood. Gerard had rushed in like lightning, and, just as the axe turned to descend on him, drove his sword so fiercely through the giant's body, that the very hilt sounded on his ribs like the blow of a pugilist, and Denys, staggering back to help his friend, saw a steel point come out of the Abbot behind.
The stricken giant bellowed like a bull, dropped his axe, and clutching Gerard's throat tremendously, shook him like a child. Then Denys with a fierce snarl drove his sword into the giant's back. “Stand firm now!” and he pushed the cold steel through and through the giant and out at his breast.
Thus horribly spitted on both sides, the Abbot gave a violent shudder, and his heels hammered the ground convulsively. His lips, fast turning blue, opened wide and deep, and he cried, “LA MORT!-LA MORT!-LA MORT!!” the first time in a roar of despair, and then twice in a horror-stricken whisper, never to be forgotten.
Just then the street door was forced.
Suddenly the Abbot's arms whirled like windmills, and his huge body wrenched wildly and carried them to the doorway, twisting their wrists and nearly throwing them off their legs.
“He'll win clear yet,” cried Denys: “out steel! and in again!”
They tore out their smoking swords, but ere they could stab again, the Abbot leaped full five feet high, and fell with a tremendous crash against the door below, carrying it away with him like a sheet of paper, and through the aperture the glare of torches burst on the awe-struck faces above, half blinding them.
The thieves at the first alarm had made for the back door, but driven thence by a strong guard ran back to the kitchen, just in time to see the lock forced out of the socket, and half-a-dozen mailed archers burst in upon them. On these in pure despair they drew their swords.
But ere a blow was struck on either side, the staircase door behind them was battered into their midst with one ponderous blow, and with it the Abbot's body came flying, hurled as they thought by no mortal hand, and rolled on the floor spouting blood from back and bosom in two furious jets, and quivered, but breathed no more.
The thieves smitten with dismay fell on their knees directly, and the archers bound them, while, above, the rescued ones still stood like statues rooted to the spot, their dripping swords extended in the red torchlight, expecting their indomitable enemy to leap back on them as wonderfully as he had gone.
“Here be we. God bless you all! God bless you!”
There was a rush to the stairs, and half-a-dozen hard but friendly hands were held out and grasped them warmly.
“Y'have saved our lives, lads,” cried Denys, “y'have saved our lives this night.”
A wild sight met the eyes of the rescued pair. The room flaring with torches, the glittering breastplates of the archers, their bronzed faces, the white cheeks of the bound thieves, and the bleeding giant, whose dead body these hard men left lying there in its own gore.
Gerard went round the archers and took them each by the hand with glistening eyes, and on this they all kissed him; and this time he kissed them in return. Then he said to one handsome archer of his own age, “Prithee, good soldier, have an eye to me. A strange drowsiness overcomes me. Let no one cut my throat while I sleep—for pity's sake.”
The archer promised with a laugh; for he thought Gerard was jesting: and the latter went off into a deep sleep almost immediately.
Denys was surprised at this: but did not interfere; for it suited his immediate purpose. A couple of archers were inspecting the Abbot's body, turning it half over with their feet, and inquiring, “Which of the two had flung this enormous rogue down from an upper storey like that; they would fain have the trick of his arm.”
Denys at first pished and pshawed, but dared not play the braggart, for he said to himself, “That young vagabond will break in and say 'twas the finger of Heaven, and no mortal arm, or some such stuff, and make me look like a fool.” But now, seeing Gerard unconscious, he suddenly gave this required information.
“Well, then, you see, comrades, I had run my sword through this one up to the hilt, and one or two more of 'em came buzzing about me; so it behoved me have my sword or die: so I just put my foot against his stomach, gave a tug with my hand and a spring with my foot, and sent him flying to kingdom come! He died in the air, and his carrion rolled in amongst you without ceremony: made you jump, I warrant me. But pikestaves and pillage! what avails prattling of, these trifles once they are gone by? buvons, camarades, buvons.”
The archers remarked that it was easy to say “buvons” where no liquor was, but not so easy to do it.
“Nay, I'll soon find you liquor. My nose hath a natural alacrity at scenting out the wine. You follow me: and I my nose: bring a torch!” And they left the room, and finding a short flight of stone steps, descended them and entered a large, low, damp cellar.
It smelt close and dank: and the walls were encrusted here and there with what seemed cobwebs; but proved to be saltpetre that had oozed out of the damp stones and crystallized.
“Oh! the fine mouldy smell,” said Denys; “in such places still lurks the good wine; advance thy torch. Diable! what is that in the corner? A pile of rags? No: 'tis a man.”
They gathered round with the torch, and lo! a figure crouched on a heap in the corner, pale as ashes and shivering.
“Why, it is the landlord,” said Denys.
“Get up, thou craven heart!” shouted one of the archers.
“Why, man, the thieves are bound, and we are dry that bound them. Up! and show us thy wine; for no bottles see here.”
“What, be the rascals bound?” stammered the pale landlord; “good news. W-w-wine? that will I, honest sirs.”
And he rose with unsure joints and offered to lead the way to the wine cellar. But Denys interposed. “You are all in the dark, comrades. He is in league with the thieves.”
“Alack, good soldier, me in league with the accursed robbers! Is that reasonable?”
“The girl said so anyway.”
“The girl! What girl? Ah! Curse her, traitress!”
“Well,” interposed the other archer; “the girl is not here, but gone on to the bailiff. So let the burghers settle whether this craven be guilty or no: for we caught him not in the act: and let him draw us our wine.”
“One moment,” said Denys shrewdly. “Why cursed he the girl? If he be a true man, he should bless her as we do.”
“Alas, sir!” said the landlord, “I have but my good name to live by, and I cursed her to you, because you said she had belied me.”
“Humph! I trow thou art a thief, and where is the thief that cannot lie with a smooth face? Therefore hold him, comrades: a prisoner can draw wine an if his hands be not bound.”
The landlord offered no objection; but on the contrary said he would with pleasure show them where his little stock of wine was, but hoped they would pay for what they should drink, for his rent was due this two months.
The archers smiled grimly at his simplicity, as they thought it; one of them laid a hand quietly but firmly on his shoulder, the other led on with the torch.
They had reached the threshold when Denys cried “Halt!”
“What is't?”
“Here be bottles in this corner; advance thy light.”
The torch-bearer went towards him. He had just taken off his scabbard and was probing the heap the landlord had just been crouched upon.
“Nay, nay,” cried the landlord, “the wine is in the next cellar. There is nothing there.”
“Nothing is mighty hard, then,” said Denys, and drew out something with his hand from the heap.
It proved to be only a bone.
Denys threw it on the floor: it rattled.
“There is nought there but the bones of the house,” said the landlord.
“Just now 'twas nothing. Now that we have found something 'tis nothing but bones. Here's another. Humph? look at this one, comrade; and you come too and look at it, and bring you smooth knave along.”
The archer with the torch, whose name was Philippe, held the bone to the light and turned it round and round.
“Well?” said Denys.
“Well, if this was a field of battle, I should say 'twas the shankbone of a man; no more, no less. But 'tisn't a battlefield, nor a churchyard; 'tis an inn.”
“True, mate; but yon knave's ashy face is as good a light to me as a field of battle. I read the bone by it, Bring yon face nearer, I say. When the chine is amissing, and the house dog can't look at you without his tail creeping between his legs, who was the thief? Good brothers mine, my mind it doth misgive me. The deeper I thrust the more there be. Mayhap if these bones could tell their tale they would make true men's flesh creep that heard it.”
“Alas! young man, what hideous fancies are these! The bones are bones of beeves, and sheep, and kids, and not, as you think, of men and women. Holy saints preserve us!”
“Hold thy peace! thy words are air. Thou hast not got burghers by the ear, that know not a veal knuckle from their grandsire's ribs; but soldiers-men that have gone to look for their dear comrades, and found their bones picked as clean by the crows as these I doubt have been by thee and thy mates. Men and women, saidst thou? And prithee, when spake I a word of women's bones? Wouldst make a child suspect thee. Field of battle, comrade! Was not this house a field of battle half an hour agone? Drag him close to me, let me read his face: now then, what is this, thou knave?” and he thrust a small object suddenly in his face.
“Alas! I know not.”
“Well, I would not swear neither: but it is too like the thumb bone of a man's hand; mates, my flesh it creeps. Churchyard! how know I this is not one?”
And he now drew his sword out of the scabbard and began to rake the heap of earth and broken crockery and bones out on the floor.
The landlord assured him he but wasted his time. “We poor innkeepers are sinners,” said he; “we give short measure and baptize the wine: we are fain to do these things; the laws are so unjust to us; but we are not assassins. How could we afford to kill our customers? May Heaven's lightning strike me dead if there be any bones there but such as have been used for meat. 'Tis the kitchen wench flings them here: I swear by God's holy mother, by holy Paul, by holy Dominic, and Denys my patron saint—ah!”
Denys held out a bone under his eye in dead silence. It was a bone no man, however ignorant, however lying, could confound with those of sheep or oxen. The sight of it shut the lying lips, and palsied the heartless heart.
The landlord's hair rose visibly on his head like spikes, and his knees gave way as if his limbs had been struck from under him. But the archers dragged him fiercely up, and kept him erect under the torch, staring fascinated at the dead skull which, white as the living cheek opposed, but no whiter, glared back again at its murderer, whose pale lip now opened and opened, but could utter no sound.
“Ah!” said Denys solemnly, and trembling now with rage, “look on the sockets out of which thou hast picked the eyes, and let them blast thine eyes, that crows shall pick out ere this week shall end. Now, hold thou that while I search on. Hold it, I say, or here I rob the gallows—” and he threatened the quaking wretch with his naked sword, till with a groan he took the skull and held it, almost fainting.
Oh! that every murderer, and contriver of murder, could see him, sick, and staggering with terror, and with his hair on end, holding the cold skull, and feeling that his own head would soon be like it. And soon the heap was scattered, and alas! not one nor two, but many skulls were brought to light, the culprit moaning at each discovery.
Suddenly Denys uttered a strange cry of distress to come from so bold and hard a man; and held up to the torch a mass of human hair. It was long, glossy, and golden. A woman's beautiful hair. At the sight of it the archers instinctively shook the craven wretch in their hands: and he whined.
“I have a little sister with hair just so fair and shining as this,” gulped Denys. “Jesu! if it should be hers! There quick, take my sword and dagger, and keep them from my hand, lest I strike him dead and wrong the gibbet. And thou, poor innocent victim, on whose head this most lovely hair did grow, hear me swear this, on bended knee, never to leave this man till I see him broken to pieces on the wheel even for thy sake.”
He rose from his knee. “Ay, had he as many lives as here be hairs, I'd have them all, by God,” and he put the hair into his bosom. Then in a sudden fury seized the landlord fiercely by the neck, and forced him to his knees; and foot on head ground his face savagely among the bones of his victims, where they lay thickest; and the assassin first yelled, then whined and whimpered, just as a dog first yells, then whines, when his nose is so forced into some leveret or other innocent he has killed.
“Now lend me thy bowstring, Philippe!” He passed it through the eyes of a skull alternately, and hung the ghastly relic of mortality and crime round the man's neck; then pulled him up and kicked him industriously into the kitchen, where one of the aldermen of the burgh had arrived with constables, and was even now taking an archer's deposition.
The grave burgher was much startled at sight of the landlord driven in bleeding from a dozen scratches inflicted by the bones of his own victims, and carrying his horrible collar. But Denys came panting after, and in a few fiery words soon made all clear.
“Bind him like the rest,” said the alderman sternly. “I count him the blackest of them all.”
While his hands were being bound, the poor wretch begged piteously that “the skull might be taken from him.”
“Humph!” said the alderman. “Certes I had not ordered such a thing to be put on mortal man. Yet being there, I will not lift voice nor finger to doff it. Methinks it fits thee truly, thou bloody dog. 'Tis thy ensign, and hangs well above a heart so foul as thine.”
He then inquired of Denys if he thought they had secured the whole gang, or but a part.
“Your worship,” said Denys, “there are but seven of them, and this landlord. One we slew upstairs, one we trundled down dead, the rest are bound before you.”
“Good! go fetch the dead one from upstairs, and lay him beside him I caused to be removed.”
Here a voice like a guinea-fowl's broke peevishly in. “Now, now, now, where is the hand? that is what I want to see.” The speaker was a little pettifogging clerk.
“You will find it above, nailed to the door-post by a crossbow bolt.”
“Good!” said the clerk. He whispered his master, “What a goodly show will the 'pieces de conviction' make!” and with this he wrote them down, enumerating them in separate squeaks as he penned them. Skulls—Bones—A woman's hair—A thief's hands 1 axe—2 carcasses—1 crossbow bolt. This done, he itched to search the cellar himself: there might be other invaluable morsels of evidence, an ear, or even an earring. The alderman assenting, he caught up a torch and was hurrying thither, when an accident stopped him, and indeed carried him a step or two in the opposite direction.
The constables had gone up the stair in single file.
But the head constable no sooner saw the phosphorescent corpse seated by the bedside, than he stood stupefied; and next he began to shake like one in an ague, and, terror gaining on him more and more, he uttered a sort of howl and recoiled swiftly. Forgetting the steps in his recoil, he tumbled over backward on his nearest companion; but he, shaken by the shout of dismay, and catching a glimpse of something horrid, was already staggering back, and in no condition to sustain the head constable, who, like most head constables, was a ponderous man. The two carried away the third, and the three the fourth, and they streamed into the kitchen, and settled on the floor, overlapping each other like a sequence laid out on a card-table. The clerk coming hastily with his torch ran an involuntary tilt against the fourth man, who, sharing the momentum of the mass, knocked him instantly on his back, the ace of that fair quint; and there he lay kicking and waving his torch, apparently in triumph, but really in convulsion, sense and wind being driven out together by the concussion.
“What is to do now, in Heaven's name?” cried the alderman, starting up with considerable alarm. But Denys explained, and offered to accompany his worship. “So be it,” said the latter. His men picked themselves ruefully up, and the alderman put himself at their head and examined the premises above and below. As for the prisoners, their interrogatory was postponed till they could be confronted with the servant.
Before dawn, the thieves, alive and dead, and all the relics and evidences of crime and retribution, were swept away into the law's net, and the inn was silent and almost deserted. There remained but one constable, and Denys and Gerard, the latter still sleeping heavily.
“It is you for sleeping! Why, 'tis high noon.”
“It was a blessed sleep,” said Gerard; “methinks Heaven sent it me. It hath put as it were a veil between me and that awful night. To think that you and I sit here alive and well. How terrible a dream I seem to have had!”
“Ay, lad, that is the wise way to look at these things when once they are past, why, they are dreams, shadows. Break thy fast, and then thou wilt think no more on't. Moreover, I promised to bring thee on to the town by noon, and take thee to his worship.”
Gerard then sopped some rye bread in red wine and ate it to break his fast: then went with Denys over the scene of combat, and came back shuddering, and finally took the road with his friend, and kept peering through the hedges, and expecting sudden attacks unreasonably, till they reached the little town. Denys took him to “The White Hart”.
“No fear of cut-throats here,” said he. “I know the landlord this many a year. He is a burgess, and looks to be bailiff. 'Tis here I was making for yestreen. But we lost time, and night o'ertook us—and—
“And you saw a woman at the door, and would be wiser than a Jeanneton; she told us they were nought.”
“Why, what saved our lives if not a woman? Ay, and risked her own to do it.”
“That is true, Denys; and though women are nothing to me, I long to thank this poor girl, and reward her, ay, though I share every doit in my purse with her. Do not you?”
“Parbleu.”
“Where shall we find her?”
“Mayhap the alderman will tell us. We must go to him first.”
The alderman received them with a most singular and inexplicable expression of countenance. However, after a moment's reflection, he wore a grim smile, and finally proceeded to put interrogatories to Gerard, and took down the answers. This done, he told them that they must stay in the town till the thieves were tried, and be at hand to give evidence, on peril of fine and imprisonment. They looked very blank at this.
“However,” said he, “'twill not be long, the culprits having been taken red-handed.” He added, “And you know, in any case you could not leave the place this week.”
Denys stared at this remark, and Gerard smiled at what he thought the simplicity of the old gentleman in dreaming that a provincial town of Burgundy had attraction to detain him from Rome and Margaret.
He now went to that which was nearest both their hearts.
“Your worship,” said he, “we cannot find our benefactress in the town.”
“Nay, but who is your benefactress?”
“Who? why the good girl that came to you by night and saved our lives at peril of her own. Oh sir, our hearts burn within us to thank and bless her; where is she?”