They proved to be more substantial than I had expected, for, as I was on my way upstairs to bed, the landlord preceding me with a light, a man accosted me, and beckoned me aside mysteriously.
“The Bailiff is very much annoyed,” he said, speaking in a muffled voice behind his hand, while his eyes peered into mine.
“Well, what is that to me?” I replied, looking sternly at him. I was tired and sleepy after my meal. “He should not make such a fool of himself.”
“Tut, tut, tut, tut! You misunderstood me, young sir,” the man answered, plucking my sleeve as I turned away. “He regrets the annoyance he has caused you. A mistake, he says, a pure mistake, and he hopes you will have forgotten it by morning.” Then, with a skillful hand, which seemed not unused to the task, he slid two coins into my palm. I looked at them, for a moment not perceiving his drift. Then I found they were two gold angels, and I began to understand. “Ahem!” I said, fingering them uneasily. “Yes. Well, well, I will look over it, I will look over it! Tell him from me,” I continued, gaining confidence as I proceeded with my new rôle, “that he shall hear no more about it. He is zealous — perhaps over zealous!”
“That is it!” muttered the envoy eagerly; “that is it, my dear sir! You see perfectly how it is. He is zealous. Zealous in the Queen’s service!”
“To be sure; and so I will report him. Tell him that so I will report him. And here, my good friend, take one of these for yourself,” I added, magnificently giving him back half my fortune — young donkey that I was. “Drink to the Queen’s health; and so good-night to you.”
He went away, bowing to the very ground, and, when the landlord likewise had left me, I was very merry over this, being in no mood for weighing words. The world seemed — to be sure, the ale was humming in my head, and I was in the landlord’s best room — easy enough to conquer, provided one possessed a white staff. The fact that I had no right to mine only added — be it remembered I was young and foolish — to my enjoyment of its power. I went to bed in all comfort with it under my pillow, and slept soundly, untroubled by any dream of a mischance. But when did a lie ever help a man in the end?
When I awoke, which I seemed to do on a sudden, it was still dark. I wondered for a moment where I was, and what was the meaning of the shouting and knocking I heard. Then, discerning the faint outline of the window, I remembered the place in which I had gone to bed, and I sat up and listened. Some one — nay, several people — were drumming and kicking against the wooden doors of the inn-yard, and shouting besides, loud enough to raise the dead. In the next room to mine I caught the grumbling voices of persons disturbed, like myself, from sleep. And by and by a window was opened, and I heard the landlord ask what was the matter.
“In the Queen’s name!” came the loud, impatient answer, given in a voice that rose above the ring of bridles and the stamping of iron hoofs, “open! and that quickly, Master Host. The watch are here, and we must search.”
I waited to hear no more. I was out of bed, and huddling on my clothes, and thrusting my feet into my boots, like one possessed. My heart was beating as fast as if I had been running in a race, and my hands were shaking with the shock of the alarm. The impatient voice without was Master Pritchard’s, and it rang with all the vengeful passion which I should have expected that gentleman, duped, ducked, and robbed, to be feeling. There would be little mercy to be had at his hands. Moreover, my ears, grown as keen for the moment as the hunted hare’s, distinguished the tramping of at least half-a-dozen horses, so that it was clear that he had come with a force at his back. Resistance would be useless. My sole chance lay in flight — if flight should still be possible.
Even in my haste I did not forsake the talisman which had served me so well, but stayed an instant to thrust it into my pocket. The Cluddes have, I fancy, a knack of keeping cool in emergencies, getting, indeed, the cooler the greater the stress.
By this time the inn was thoroughly aroused. Doors were opening and shutting on all sides of me, and questions were being shouted in different tones from room to room. In the midst of the hubbub I heard the landlord come out muttering, and go downstairs to open the door. Instantly I unlatched mine, slipped through it stealthily, sneaked a step or two down the passage, and then came plump in the dark against some one who was moving as softly as myself. The surprise was complete, and I should have cried out at the unexpected collision, had not the unknown laid a cold hand on my mouth, and gently pushed me back into my room.
Here there was now a faint glimmer of dawn, and by this I saw that my companion was the serving-maid. “Hist!” she said, speaking under her breath, “Is it you they want?”
I nodded.
“I thought so,” she muttered. “Then you must get out through your window. You cannot pass them. They are a dozen or more, and armed. Quick! knot this about the bars. It is no great depth to the bottom, and the ground is soft from the rain.”
She tore, as she spoke, the coverlet from the bed, and, twisting it into a kind of rope, helped me to secure one corner of it about the window-bar. “When you are down,” she whispered, “keep along the wall to the right until you come to a haystack. Turn to the left there — you will have to ford the water — and you will soon be clear of the town. Look about you then, and you will see a horse-track, which leads to Elstree, running in a line with the London Road, but a mile from it and through woods. At Elstree any path to the left will take you to Barnet, and not two miles lost.”
“Heaven bless you!” I said, turning from the gloom, the dark sky, and driving scud without to peer gratefully at her. “Heaven bless you for a good woman!”
“And God keep you for a bonny boy,” she whispered.
I kissed her, forcing into her hands — a thing the remembrance of which is very pleasant to me to this day — my last piece of gold.
A moment more, and I stood unhurt, but almost up to my knees in mud, in an alley bounded on both sides, as far as I could see, by blind walls. Stopping only to indicate by a low whistle that I was safe, I turned and sped away as fast as I could run in the direction which she had pointed out. There was no one abroad, and in a shorter time than I had expected I found myself outside the town, traveling over a kind of moorland tract bounded in the distance by woods.
Here I picked up the horse-track easily enough, and without stopping, save for a short breathing space, hurried along it, to gain the shelter of the trees. So far so good! I had reason to be thankful. But my case was still an indifferent one. More than once in getting out of the town I had slipped and fallen. I was wet through, and plastered with dirt owing to these mishaps; and my clothes were in a woeful plight. For a time excitement kept me up, however, and I made good way, warmed by the thought that I had again baffled the great Bishop. It was only when the day had come, and grown on to noon, and I saw no sign of any pursuers, that thought got the upper hand. Then I began to compare, with some bitterness of feeling, my present condition — wet, dirty, and homeless — with that which I had enjoyed only a week before; and it needed all my courage to support me. Skulking, half famished, between Barnet and Tottenham, often compelled to crouch in ditches or behind walls while travelers went by, and liable each instant to have to leave the highway and take to my heels, I had leisure to feel; and I did feel, more keenly, I think, that afternoon than at any later time, the bitterness of fortune. I cursed Stephen Gardiner a dozen times, and dared not let my thoughts wander to my father. I had said that I would build my house afresh. Well, truly I was building it from the foundation.
It added very much to my misery that it rained all day a cold, half-frozen rain. The whole afternoon I spent in hiding, shivering and shaking in a hole under a ledge near Tottenham; being afraid to go into London before nightfall, lest I should be waited for at the gate and be captured. Chilled and bedraggled as I was, and weak through want of food which I dared not go out to beg, the terrors of capture got hold of my mind and presented to me one by one every horrible form of humiliation, the stocks, the pillory, the cart
-tail; so that even Master Pritchard, could he have seen me and known my mind, might have pitied me; so that I loathe to this day the hours I spent in that foul hiding-place. Between a man’s best and worse, there is little but a platter of food.
The way this was put an end to, I well remember. An old woman came into the field where I lay hid, to drive home a cow. I had had my eyes on this cow for at least an hour, having made up my mind to milk it for my own benefit as soon as the dusk fell. In my disappointment at seeing it driven off, and also out of a desire to learn whether the old dame might not be going to milk it in a corner of the pasture, in which case I might still get an after taste, I crawled so far out of my hole that, turning suddenly, she caught sight of me. I expected to see her hurry off, but she did not. She took a long look, and then came back toward me, making, however, as it seemed to me, as if she did not see me. When she had come within a few feet of me, she looked down abruptly, and our eyes met. What she saw in mine I can only guess. In hers I read a divine pity. “Oh, poor lad!” she murmured; “oh, you poor, poor lad!” and there were tears in her voice.
I was so weak — it was almost twenty-four hours since I had tasted food, and I had come twenty-four miles in the time — that at that I broke down, and cried like a child.
I learned later that the old woman took me for just the same person for whom the Bailiff at St. Albans had mistaken me, a young apprentice named Hunter, who had got into trouble about religion, and was at this time hiding up and down the country; Bishop Bonner having clapped his father into jail until the son should come to hand. But her kind heart knew no distinction of creeds. She took me to her cottage as soon as night fell, and warmed, and dried, and fed me. She did not dare to keep me under her roof for longer than an hour or two, neither would I have stayed to endanger her. But she sent me out a new man, with a crust, moreover, in my pocket. A hundred times between Tottenham and Aldersgate I said “God bless her!” And I say so now.
So twice in one day, and that the gloomiest day of my life, I was succored by a woman. I have never forgotten it. I have tried to keep it always in mind; remembering too a saying of my uncle’s, that “there is nothing on earth so merciful as a good woman, or so pitiless as a bad one!”
CHAPTER V.
MISTRESS BERTRAM.
“Ding! ding! ding! Aid ye the poor! Pray for the dead! Five o’clock and a murky morning.”
The noise of the bell, and the cry which accompanied it, roused me from my first sleep in London, and that with a vengeance; the bell being rung and the words uttered within three feet of my head. Where did I sleep, then? Well, I had found a cozy resting-place behind some boards which stood propped against the wall of a baker’s oven in a street near Moorgate. The wall was warm and smelt of new bread, and another besides myself had discovered its advantages. This was the watchman, who had slumbered away most of his vigil cheek by jowl with me, but, morning approaching, had roused himself, and before he was well out of his bed, certainly before he had left his bedroom, had begun — the ungrateful wretch — to prove his watchfulness by disturbing every one else.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes, grinding my shoulders well against the wall for warmth. I had no need to turn out yet, but I began to think, and the more I thought the harder I stared at the planks six inches before my nose. My thoughts turned upon a very knotty point; one that I had never seriously considered before. What was I going to do next? How was I going to live or to rear the new house of which I have made mention? Hitherto I had aimed simply at reaching London. London had paraded itself before my mind — though my mind should have known better — not as a town of cold streets and dreary alleys and shops open from seven to four with perhaps here and there a vacant place for an apprentice; but as a gilded city of adventure and romance, in which a young man of enterprise, whether he wanted to go abroad or to rise at home, might be sure of finding his sword weighed, priced, and bought up on the instant, and himself valued at his own standard.
But London reached, the hoarding in Moorgate reached, and five o’clock in the morning reached, somehow these visions faded rapidly. In the cold reality left to me I felt myself astray. If I would stay at home, who was going to employ me? To whom should I apply? What patron had I? Or if I would go abroad, how was I to set about it? how find a vessel, seeing that I might expect to be arrested the moment I showed my face in daylight?
Here all my experience failed me. I did not know what to do, though the time had come for action, and I must do or starve. It had been all very well when I was at Coton, to propose that I would go up to London, and get across the water — such had been my dim notion — to the Courtenays and Killigrews, who, with other refugees, Protestants for the most part, were lying on the French coast, waiting for better times. But now that I was in London, and as good as an outlaw myself, I saw no means of going to them. I seemed farther from my goal than I had been in Warwickshire.
Thinking very blankly over this I began to munch the piece of bread which I owed to the old dame at Tottenham; and had solemnly got through half of it, when the sound of rapid footsteps — the footsteps of women, I judged from the lightness of the tread — caused me to hold my hand and listen. Whoever they were — and I wondered, for it was still early, and I had heard no one pass since the watchman left me — they came to a stand in front of my shelter, and one of them spoke. Her words made me start; unmistakably the voice was a gentlewoman’s, such as I had not heard for almost a week. And at this place and hour, on the raw borderland of day and night, a gentlewoman was the last person I expected to light upon. Yet if the speaker were not some one of station, Petronilla’s lessons had been thrown away upon me.
The words were uttered in a low voice; but the planks in front of me were thin, and the speaker was actually leaning against them. I caught every accent of what seemed to be the answer to a question. “Yes, yes! It is all right!” she said, a covert ring of impatience in her tone. “Take breath a moment. I do not see him now.”
“Thank Heaven!” muttered another voice. As I had fancied, there were two persons. The latter speaker’s tone smacked equally of breeding with the former’s, but was rounder and fuller, and more masterful; and she appeared to be out of breath. “Then perhaps we have thrown him off the trail,” she continued, after a short pause, in which she seemed to have somewhat recovered herself. “I distrusted him from the first, Anne — from the first. Yet, do you know, I never feared him as I did Master Clarence; and as it was too much to hope that we should be rid of both at once — they took good care of that — why, the attempt had to be made while he was at home. But I always felt he was a spy.”
“Who? Master Clarence?” asked she who had spoken first.
“Ay, he certainly. But I did not mean him, I meant Philip.”
“Well, I — I said at first, you remember, that it was a foolhardy enterprise, mistress!”
“Tut, tut, girl!” quoth the other tartly — this time the impatience lay with her, and she took no pains to conceal it— “we are not beaten yet. Come, look about! Cannot you remember where we are, nor which way the river should be? If the dawn were come, we could tell.”
“But with the dawn — —”
“The streets would fill. True, and, Master Philip giving the alarm, we should be detected before we had gone far. The more need, girl, to lose no time. I have my breath again, and the child is asleep. Let us venture one way or the other, and Heaven grant it be the right one!”
“Let me see,” the younger woman answered slowly, as if in doubt. “Did we come by the church? No; we came the other way. Let us try this turning, then.”
“Why, child, we came that way,” was the decided answer. “What are you thinking of? That would take us straight back into his arms, the wretch! Come, come! you loiter,” continued this, the more masculine speaker, “and a minute may make all the difference between a prison and freedom. If we can reach the Lion Wharf by seven — it is like to be a dark morning and foggy — we may still escape before Master Philip brings
the watch upon us.”
They moved briskly away as she spoke, and her words were already growing indistinct from distance, while I remained still, idly seeking the clew to their talk and muttering over and over again the name Clarence, which seemed familiar to me, when a cry of alarm, in which I recognized one of their voices, cut short my reverie. I crawled with all speed from my shelter, and stood up, being still in a line with the boards, and not easily distinguishable. As she had said, it was a dark morning; but the roofs of the houses — now high, now low — could be plainly discerned against a gray, drifting sky wherein the first signs of dawn were visible; and the blank outlines of the streets, which met at this point, could be seen. Six or seven yards from me, in the middle of the roadway, stood three dusky figures, of whom I judged the nearer, from their attitudes, to be the two women. The farthest seemed to be a man.
I was astonished to see that he was standing cap in hand; nay, I was disgusted as well, for I had crept out hot-fisted, expecting to be called upon to defend the women. But, despite the cry I had heard, they were talking to him quietly enough, as far as I could hear. And in a minute or so I saw the taller woman give him something.
He took it with a low bow, and appeared almost to sweep the dirt with his bonnet. She waved her hand in dismissal, and he stood back still uncovered. And — hey, presto! the women tripped swiftly away.
By this time my curiosity was intensely excited, but for a moment I thought it was doomed to disappointment. I thought that it was all over. It was not, by any means. The man stood looking after them until they reached the corner, and the moment they had passed it, he followed. His stealthy manner of going, and his fashion of peering after them, was enough for me. I guessed at once that he was dogging them, following them unknown to them and against their will; and with considerable elation I started after him, using the same precautions. What was sauce for the geese was sauce for the gander! So we went, two — one — one, slipping after one another through half a dozen dark streets, tending generally southward.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 47
