Complete Works of Howard Pyle

by Howard Pyle

  “Nay,” said Meg, holding it away from him; “hospitality ever, even to them you quarrel with!”

  Whereupon she walked gravely over to the captain and offered him the cup.

  Ravenshaw had thought he detected approbation of himself in this woman’s looks at the time of his arrival; and now he thought he might flatter himself the approbation still existed. Attributing all to her good nature toward him, and not suspecting wine in the same vessel, and from the same flagon, as had supplied his enemies but a moment since, he grasped the cup with a hearty smile of gratitude, and emptied it swiftly down his throat.

  Meg received back the cup, placed it on the table beside the flagon, and passed silently to the kitchen, followed by a faint smile of mirth on the part of Jerningham. The smile was supplanted by a look of expectant curiosity as Jerningham turned his eyes upon Ravenshaw. The captain sat as before, rapier in one hand, dagger in the other. Jerningham himself had resumed his chair near the table, and Sir Clement retained his old attitude. In the little room, Millicent relapsed into a dreamy half-consciousness, wherein she seemed borne by rough winds through black and red clouds; the room appeared a vast space wherein this occurred; and yet always she was vaguely aware of her actual surroundings.

  Ravenshaw felt serenely comfortable; a delicious ease of mind and body came over him; the beat of the rain softened into a soothing lull; the hall grew dark before him. He opened his eyes with a start, amazed at himself for having let them close. A mist seemed to fill the place; through it appeared the faces of his two enemies, a curious smiling expression upon each.

  “What is it?” cried the captain, sharply, and gave his head a shake to throw off the drowsiness that invaded him.

  Jerningham’s eyes shone with elation.

  “God’s death, the wine!” cried Ravenshaw, staggering madly to his feet. “Methought there was an aftertaste. Ye’ve played foul with me!”

  He put his arms against the wall to keep himself from falling; his head swayed, and sank forward; the floor seemed to yield beneath him; darkness surged in upon him, and for an instant he knew not where he was or what he was about. But he flung himself back to life with a fierce effort, and began walking vigorously back and forth in front of his doorway. He knew that his sole hope of resisting the drug, if it was what he guessed, lay in constant action of body and mind.

  Jerningham sat still; he had but to wait till the captain succumbed, delude Meg with the tale that the philtre sometimes began its operation by inducing a long sleep, find means to administer the rest of the potion to Millicent, and carry out his original design. The beggars were little to be feared without Ravenshaw; they would drink themselves stupid, and on the morrow, while they were snoring or bousing, the unconscious maid could be carried to the ship. As for Ravenshaw, once the drug overcame him he would be virtually out of the world for two days, at least. He could be locked in a chamber, and the beggars informed by Meg that he was gone. They would doubtless take themselves off when they had drunk the place dry. Meg would await with interest the termination of the captain’s sleep. Thus all would pass without bloodshed and without any scandal reaching the bishop’s ears too soon. Meanwhile, the slightest movement against Ravenshaw, or toward Millicent’s room, was to be avoided; it would only stir the captain to action opposed to the effects of the drug. He was still striving against those effects, pacing with rapid steps the small stretch of floor he allowed himself, and thrusting in the air with his weapons.

  He was continually losing his mental grasp and regaining it with effort. He wondered how they had contrived to drug his wine alone; doubtless the woman had the arts of a witch; a woman who talked so little was not natural.

  How if, in spite of all his resolution, the drug should prove too potent for him? What of the maid then? He shuddered to think of her at the mercy of Jerningham, who had doubtless provided all means of dealing with her in safety from consequences. Should he, Ravenshaw, consign her to the protection of the beggars? Without his masterful and resourceful presence, they were like to prove fickle rogues. Should he remove Jerningham forthwith by killing him? If he did so, and then succumbed to the drug or to Jerningham’s men, how might she fare at the hands of the survivors, rascals on both sides? This friend of Jerningham’s was the only gentleman in the house, and he was without doubt a bird of Jerningham’s feather. Where had the captain met him before? Ravenshaw, calling up anew his energies, stopped in his walk to stare at the man, and lurched toward him drunkenly. Suddenly the captain’s face cleared, he stumbled back to the doorway, and cried:

  “Mistress, look, look!”

  So sudden and imperative a cry brought Millicent to the threshold, startled, white of face.

  “Look!” went on Ravenshaw. “’Tis he — that night in the street — in February — they would not let you go — but I compelled them! And one gave me the slip — a man with a Spanish hat — a thick-bearded — Ah! ’twas you, you, you!” He had turned his gaze upon Jerningham. “That was the beginning, I trow! Ah, mistress, who were your enemies that night, and who was your friend?”

  She stood bereft of speech, her hand against the door-post, recognising Sir Clement indeed, and dismayed at the frown — which to suddenly enlightened eyes was a betrayal of the truth — on Jerningham’s face. And then she wondered at the wild, drunken movements of Ravenshaw, who had resumed his rapid pacing of the floor in a fresh struggle with the persistent opiate.

  “The man will never sleep,” said Ermsby, in a low tone, to Jerningham. “He will outwalk your medicine. You are not like to have him in a worse state than he is in now. Let me put an end to him while he is thus.”

  “But Meg—” objected Jerningham.

  “If I give him a thrust in my own quarrel, she cannot blame you. Come; my weapons are itching.”

  “Why do you wish to slay him?”

  “For the sport of it, i’ faith.” Sir Clement’s face lighted up with cruelty. “’Tis your only sure way. He’ll walk out of this cloud presently.”

  “As you will,” said Jerningham, abruptly, after a moment’s thought. “But ’tis between you and him.”

  Sir Clement, without moving, said aloud to the captain:

  “I remember our meeting. You boasted you could be my teacher with the rapier. I knew not then you were Ravenshaw, the roaring captain; else I had not put off the lesson.”

  “Lesson — put off lesson — what lesson?” murmured the captain, dreamily, swaying and plunging as he strode.

  “I said a time might come when I should see your skill,” Ermsby went on. “I am bound on a far journey to-morrow, and may never meet you again.” He drew his rapier and dagger, and stepped forward. “Come, knave! Remember your insolence that night; for I shall make you swallow it!”

  However vague an impression the previous words had made on the captain’s mind, the sight of sword and dagger in threatening position roused and steadied him. Not fully sensible of how he had come to be opposed by these weapons at this stage, he met them with the promptitude of habit. The steel of his dagger clashed against the other’s sword-point; his own rapier shot forth to be narrowly diverted in like manner. There was exchange of thrust and parry till the place sang with the ring of steel. The jocund heat of battle woke in the captain’s blood, its fierce thrill gladdened his soul and invigorated his body. And yet he went as one in a dream, with the lurches of a drunken man. But dazed as he appeared in countenance, wild and uncontrolled as his movements looked, his eye was never false as to the swift dartings of his enemy’s weapons, his hand never failed to meet steel with steel. Some spirit within him, offspring of nature and practice conjoined, seemed to clear his eye and guide his arm, however his body plunged or his legs went awry.

  Meg ran in from the kitchen at the first sound of steel. Jerningham hastened back and drew her out of the way of the fighters, saying:

  “They fell a-quarrelling; I could not part them. See what effect the potion hath upon him; he should sleep now, but for this fighting. I hope ‘twil
l end without blood.”

  The beggars, now drunk, were looking over one another’s heads from the kitchen, not daring to enter without the order; and Jerningham’s men, drawn from their dice by the noise, were crowded together beyond the left-hand doorway. Jerningham hoped that Ravenshaw would yet, in a moment of exhaustion, yield to the opiate ere Sir Clement found opportunity for a home thrust. So he stood with Meg at the fireplace, while Millicent, held by the interest and import of the scene, watched from her threshold. The fighters tramped up and down the hall.

  “Never with that thrust, good teacher!” said Ermsby, blocking a peculiar deviation of his opponent’s blade from its apparent mark — his right groin — toward his left breast.

  “Nor you with that feint, boy!” retorted the captain, ignoring a half-thrust, and catching on his dagger the lightning-swift lunge that followed.

  Furiously they gave and took, panting, dripping with sweat, their faces red and tense, their blazing eyes fixed. Now the captain threw himself forward when there seemed an opening in the other’s guard; now he sprang back before a similar onslaught on his adversary’s part. He swayed and staggered, and sometimes appeared to stop himself in the nick of time from falling headlong, but always his attack and guard were as true as those of Sir Clement, whose body and limbs moved as by springs of steel. It seemed as if neither’s point could ever reach flesh, so sure and swift was the defence; the pair might have been clad in steel.

  Ravenshaw had worked back to the front of the hall; suddenly he sprang forward, driving Sir Clement toward the fireplace. Ermsby made the usual feint, the usual swift-following lunge. Ravenshaw caught it, but with a sharp turn of the wrist that loosened his grip so that his dagger was struck from his hand by the deflected sword-point. Sir Clement uttered a shout of triumph, and thereby put himself back in the game by the hundredth part of a second; in that infinitesimal time the captain drove his old thrust home. Sir Clement dropped, limp and heavy, his cry of victory scarce having ceased to resound.

  Ravenshaw turned fiercely about, his sword ready for new foes. Startled at the movement, Jerningham called his men to seize the slayer. The captain shouted to the beggars. These came staggering in from the kitchen, but he saw they were helpless with drink. The white-bearded fellow was feebly brandishing a pistol which he had made ready for firing, — the weapon he had pointed at Ravenshaw in the road. The captain seized it, turned toward Jerningham’s advancing adherents, and fired into the band. A man fell with a groan, but his comrades passed over him, and Millicent recognised, as his false beard became displaced in his struggles, the fellow who had denounced Ravenshaw in her father’s garden. The captain hurled himself upon the other men; brought down Cutting Tom with the sting of his rapier; felled Goodcole with a blow of the pistol; dashed through the opening he had thus made in their ranks; pitched forward as if at last all sense had left him; spun around, and grasped at the air like one drowning, and fell heavily against the front door, closing it with his weight. He stood leaning, his head hanging forward, his arms and jaw falling loose.

  “No more, men!” cried Jerningham, though the half-dozen appalled survivors needed no command to refrain, any more than the beggars, who were stumbling over their staves. “The knave hath slain Sir Clement Ermsby, but he is done for, too. Now, mistress, for a better lodging!”

  The captain, mistily, as if at a great distance, saw his enemy clasp the girl’s waist. He tried to move, but could not even keep his feet save by bracing himself against the door. Suddenly, as the maid drew away from Jerningham’s face of hot desire, Ravenshaw was thrown forward by a violent push of the door from without. Staggering to the table, he turned and looked. In stepped the old cripple, soaking wet; behind him was a portly, fat-faced gentleman, followed by several rustic varlets armed with pikes and broadswords. Lights flared in the porch, and with the sound of the rain came that of snorting, pawing horses.

  “Well met, Master Etheridge,” spoke Ravenshaw, thickly. “Look to your niece.”

  Jerningham stared in chagrin; Millicent ran with a cry of joy to her Uncle Bartlemy. Then the captain said, “Thank God, I may now go asleep!” and fell full length upon the floor.

  CHAPTER XX.

  HOLYDAY’S FURTHER ADVENTURES.

  “O, WHEN WILL this same year of night have end?”

  — The Two Angry Women of Abington.

  Master Holyday at first thought himself lucky to be left alive, though naked to his shirt and bound to a tree by hempen cords which were tied around his wrists behind him, and around his ankles. But he soon began to doubt the pleasures of existence, and the possibility of its long continuance, in his situation. There was a smarting pain between his eyes, his face felt swollen all around those organs, his arms ached from their enforced position, the chill of the night assailed his naked skin.

  He bemoaned the inconveniences of a stationary condition, and for the first time in his life realised what it was to be a tree, rooted to one spot all its days. He no longer deemed it a happy fate that the gods bestowed on the old couple as a reward for their hospitality, in the Metamorphoses, — that of being turned, at their death, into oaks. And he became swiftly of opinion that the damsel who escaped the pursuit of Apollo by transforming herself into a laurel would have been wiser to endure the god’s embraces. And yet, as an accession of dampness — mist, if one could have seen it in the blackness of the forest — set his bare legs trembling and shrinking, he envied the trees their bark; and as each arm felt its cramped state the more intolerably, he coveted their freedom of waving their limbs about in the wind. At this, he strained petulantly to move his wrists apart, and, to his amazement, the cord yielded a little. He exerted his muscles again, and the hemp eased yet more. A few further efforts enabled him to slip free his hands. In their haste his two despoilers had made their knots carelessly. They had been more thorough in fastening his ankles. But, bending his knees, and lowering his body, he set to work with his fingers, and after many a scrape of his skin against the bark, many a protest of discomfort on the part of his strained legs, he set himself at liberty. Surprised at having been capable of so much, he stepped forward with the joy of regained freedom, but struck his toe against a fallen bough, and went headlong into a brake of brambles.

  Cursing the darkness, and his fate, with every one of the hundred scratches that gave him anguish of limb and body, he backed out of the thicket, and moved cautiously in the opposite direction, holding his hands before him, and feeling the earth with his toes before setting foot in a new place.

  “This is what it is to be a blind man,” quoth he. Often, despite his precautions, he hurt his feet with roots and sticks, and cut them upon sharp-edged stones. He began to think he was doomed to a perpetual labour of wandering through a pitch-dark forest; it seemed so long since he had known peace of body and mind that he fancied he should never again be restored to the knowledge. He knew not, in the darkness, which way he was going; he moved on mainly from a disinclination to remain in one place, lest he should experience again the feelings of a rooted plant.

  He began to speculate upon his chances of falling in with dangerous beasts, and upon the probable outcome of such an encounter. He had known of a man upon whom a threatened buck had once wrought the vengeance so vastly overdue from its race to mankind; in his poaching expeditions with Sir Nicholas the vicar he had often shuddered with a transient fear of a similar fate. In those expeditions he had always had company, had been armed and clad; the strange sense of helplessness that besets an undressed man was a new feeling to him.

  At last, to his temporary relief, he came out of the wood, as he knew by the less degree of darkness, the change of air, and the smooth turf which was delicious to his torn feet. But presently the turf became spongy; water oozed out as it gave beneath his feet. He turned to the left, thinking to avoid the marsh without entering the wood again; but the ground became still softer; a few more steps brought him into sedgy pools several inches deep.

  “This is worse than the wood,�
� he groaned, and put his face in what he took to be the direction of the trees. But the farther he went, the deeper he sank in water. He now knew not which way to go in order to find the wood, or even the comparatively solid turf on which he had formerly been. So he stood, railing inwardly against the spiteful destiny that had selected him for the butt of its mirth. He had a sensation of being drawn downward; he remembered, with horror, the stories of people sucked under by the marshes, and he lifted first one foot and then the other. He kept up this alternate motion, trying each time to set his foot in a fresh place, and yet fearing to move backward or forward lest he find himself worse off. The dread of becoming a fixture in the earth came over him again, as a greater probability than before, and impelled him to move his legs faster.

  “Would I were a morris-dancer now, with practice of this motion,” he thought, as the muscles of his legs became more and more weary; and he marvelled understandingly at Will Kempe’s famous dance to pipe and tabor from London to Norwich. “Better, after all, to be a tree,” he sighed, “and not have to toil thus all night lest the earth swallow me.”

  His legs finally rebelling against this monotonous exercise, he resolved to go forward whatever befall; and just at that moment he saw, at what distance he could not determine, a faint light. He uttered a cry of satisfaction, supposing it to be a cottage window, or a lantern borne by some night-walking countryman. As it moved not at his cry, he decided it was a cottage window, and he hastened toward it, through the tall grass, careless how far he sank into the marsh. But, as he drew near, it started away from him; then he told himself it was a lantern, and he called out to its bearer not to be afraid, as he was but a poor scholar lost in the fen. The light fled all the faster. As he increased his pace, so did it. At last, out of breath, he stopped in despair. The lantern stopped, also. He started again; it started, too.