It was in the spring of the year, somewhere about the period which good old Chaucer describes in the beginning of his Canterbury Tales,
"Whanne that April with his shoures sote,
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swiche licour,
Of whiche vertue engendred is the flow'r:"
it was also towards the decline of the day, and the greater part of the travellers who visited the inn for an hour, on their way homeward from the neighbouring towns, had betaken themselves to the road, in order to get under the shelter of their own roof ere the night fell, when, at one of the tables in the low-pitched parlour--the beams of which must have caused any wayfarer of six feet high to bend his head--might still be seen a man in the garb of a countryman, sitting with a great, black leathern jug before him, and one or two horns round about, besides the one out of which he himself was drinking.
A slice of a brown loaf toasted at the embers, and which he dipped from time to time in his cup, was the only solid food that he seemed inclined to take; and, to say sooth, it probably might not have been very convenient for him to call for any very costly viands--at least, if one might judge by his dress, which, though good, and not very old, was of the poorest and the homeliest kind--plain hodden-grey cloth, of a coarse fabric, with leathern leggings and wooden-soled shoes.
The garb of the countryman, however, was not the only thing worthy of remark in his appearance. His form had that peculiarity which is not usually considered a perfection, and is termed a hump; not that there was exactly, upon either shoulder, one of those large knobs which is sometimes so designated, but there was a general roundness above his bladebones--a sort of domineering effort of his neck to keep down his head--which gave him a clear title to the appellation of hunchback.
In other respects he was not an unseemly man--his legs were stout and well turned, his arms brawny and long, his chest singularly wide for a deformed person, and his grey eyes large, bright and sparkling. His nose was somewhat long and pointed, and was not only a prominent feature, but a very distinguished one in his countenance. It was one of those noses which have a great deal of expression in them. There was a good deal of fun and sly merriment about the corners of his mouth and under his eyelids, but his nose was decidedly the point of the epigram, standing out a sort of sharp apex to a shrewd, merry ferret-like face; and, as high mountains generally catch the sunshine either in the rise or the decline of the day, and glow with the rosy hue of morning before the rest of the country round obtains the rays, so had the light of the vine settled in purple brightness on the highest feature of his face, gradually melting away into a healthy red over the rest of his countenance.
He wore his beard close shaven, as if he had been a priest; but his eyebrows, which were very prominent, and his hair, which hung in three or four detached locks over his sun-burnt brow and upon his aspiring neck, though they had once been as black as a raven's wing, were now very nearly white.
With this face and form sat the peasant at the table, sopping his bread in the contents of his jug, and from time to time looking down into the bottom of the pot with one eye, as if to ascertain how much was left. He stirred not from his seat, nor even turned his head away from the window, though a very pretty girl of some eighteen years of age looked in at him from time to time, and his was a face which announced that the owner thereof had at one time of his life had sweet things to say to all the black eyes he met with.
At length, however, the sound of a trotting horse was heard, and the peasant exclaimed, eagerly--"Here, Kate! Kate!--you merry compound of the woman and the serpent, take away the jack; they're coming now. Away with it, good girl! I mustn't be found drinking wine of Bourdeaux. Give me a tankard of ale, girl. How does the room smell?"
"Like a friar's cell," said the girl, taking up the black jack with a laugh. "Grape juice, well fermented, and a brown toast beside."
"Get thee gone, slut!" cried the peasant, "what dost thou know of friars' cells? Too much, I misdoubt me. Bring the ale, I say--and spill a drop on the floor, to give a new flavour to the room."
"I'll bring thee a sprig of rue, Hardy," said the girl; "it will give out odour enough. Put it in thy posset when thou gett'st home; it will sweeten thy blood, and whiten thy nose."
"Away with thee," cried the man she called Hardy, "or I'll kiss thee before company."
The girl darted away as her companion rose from his seat with an appearance of putting, at least, one part of his threat in execution, and returned a minute after, bearing in her hand the ale he had demanded.
"Spill some--spill some!" cried the peasant. But as she seemed to think such a proceeding, in respect to good liquor, a sin and a shame, the peasant was obliged to bring it about himself in a way which the manners of those days rendered not uncommon.
The girl set down the tankard on the table, and, with her pretty brown fingers still wet with a portion of the ale which had gone over, bestowed a buffet on the side of the peasant's head which made his ear tingle for a moment, and then carefully wiped her mouth with the corner of her apron, as if to remove every vestige of his salute.
As nearly as possible at the same moment that she was thus clearing her lips, the feet of the horse which had been heard coming, stopped at the door of the inn; and loud applications for attendance called the girl away from her coquettish sparring with Hardy, who, resuming his seat, put the tankard of ale to his lips, and did not seem to find it unpalatable, notwithstanding the Bourdeaux by which it had been preceded. At the same time, however, a considerable change took place in his appearance. His neck became more bent, his shoulders were thrown more forward; he untied the points at the back of his doublet, so that it appeared somewhat too loose for his figure; he drew the hair, too, more over his forehead, suffered his cheeks to fall in, and by these and other slight operations he contrived to make himself look fully fifteen years older than he had done the minute before.
While this was going on, there had been all that little bustle and noise at the door of the inn which usually accompanied the reception of a guest in those days, when landlords thought they could not testify sufficient honour and respect to an arriving customer without mingling their gratulations with scoldings of the horse-boys and tapsters, and manifold loud-tongued directions to chamberlains and maids.
At length the good host, with his stout, round person clothed in close-fitting garments, which displayed every weal of fat under his skin, led in a portly well-looking man, of about thirty, or five-and-thirty years of age, bearing the cognizance of some noble house embroidered on his shoulder. He was evidently, to judge by his dress and appearance, one of the favourite servants of some great man, and a stout, frank, hearty, English yeoman he seemed to be; a little consequential withal, and having a decidedly high opinion of his own powers, mental and corporeal, but good-humoured and gay, and as ready to take as to give.
"Not come!" he said, as he entered, talking over his shoulder to the landlord--"not come! That is strange enough. Why, I was kept more than half an hour at Barnsley Green to be the judge of a wrestling match. They would have me, God help us, so I was afraid they would be here before me. Well, give us a stoup of good liquor to discuss the time; I must not say give it of the best--the best is for my lord--but I do not see why the second best should not be for my lord's man; so let us have it quick, before these people come, and use your discretion as to the quality."
The wine that he demanded was soon supplied, and being set upon the table at which the peasant was seated, the lord's man took his place on the other side, and naturally looked for a moment in the face of his table-fellow; while the landlord stood by, with his fat stomach, over-hanging the board, and his eyes fixed upon the countenance of his new guest, to mark therein the approbation of his wine which he anticipated. The lord's man was not slow in proving the goodness of the liquor; but, without employing the horn cup, which the host set down beside the tankard, he lifted the latter to his mouth, drank a good deep draught, took a long sigh, drank again, and then nodded his head to the landlord, with a look expressive of perfect satisfaction.
After a few words between my host and his guest, in which Hardy took no part, but sat with his head bent over his ale, with the look of a man both tired and weakly, the landlord withdrew to his avocations, and the lord's man, fixing his eyes for a moment upon his opposite; neighbour, asked, in a kindly but patronising tone--
"What have you got there, ploughman? Thin ale,--isn't it? Come, take a cup of something better, to cheer thee. These are bad times, ar'n't they? Ay, I never yet met a delver in the earth that did not find fault with God's seasons. Here, drink that; it will make your wheat look ten times greener! Were I a ploughman, I'd water my fields with such showers as this, taken daily down my own throat. We should have no grumbling at bad crops then."
"I grumble not," replied the hunchback, taking the horn, and draining it slowly, sip by sip, "my crops grow green and plentiful. Little's the labour that my land costs in tillage, and yet I get a fat harvest in the season; and moreover, no offence, good sir, but I would rather be my own man and Heaven's, than any other person's."
"Not if you had as good a lord as I have," answered the serving-man, colouring a little, notwithstanding. "One is as free in his house as on Salisbury-plain; it's a pleasure to do his bidding. He's a friend, too, of the peasant and the citizen, and the good De Montfort. He's no foreign minion, but a true Englishman."
"Here's his health, then," said the peasant. "Is your lord down in these parts?"
"Ay, is he," replied the lord's man--"no farther off than Doncaster, and I am here to meet sundry gentlemen, who are riding down this way to York, to tell them that their assembling may not be quite safe there, so that they must fix upon another place."
"Ho, ho!" said the peasant, "some new outbreak toward, against the foreigners. Well, down with them, I say, and up with the English yeomen. But who have we here?--Some of those you come to seek, I'll warrant.--Let us look at their faces." And going round the table, with a slow, and somewhat feeble step, he placed his eye to one of the small lozenges of glass in the casement, and gazed out for a minute or two, while the serving-man followed his example, and took a survey of some new travellers who had arrived, before they were ushered into the general reception room.
"Do you know him?" asked the peasant. "I think I have seen that dark face down here before."
"Ay, I know him," answered the serving-man. "He's a kinsman of the Earl of Ashby, one of our people, whom I came principally to meet. He's a handsome gentleman, and fair spoken, though somewhat black about the muzzle."
"If his heart be as black as his face," said the peasant, "I would keep what I had got to say for the Earl's ears, before I gave it to his, were I in your place."
"Ha! say you so?" demanded the lord's man. "Methinks you know more of him, ploughman, than you tell us."
"Not much," replied the other, "and what I do know is not very good, so one must be careful in the telling."
"What keeps him, I wonder?" said the serving-man, after having returned to the table, and sipped some more of his wine.
"He's toying without, I'll aver," said the peasant, "with pretty Kate, the landlord's daughter. He had better not let young Harland, the franklin's son, see him, or his poll and a crab-stick cudgel may be better acquainted. It had well-nigh been so three months ago, when he was down here last."
These words were said in an undertone, for while one of two servants, who had accompanied the subject of their discourse, led away the horses to the stable, and the other kept the landlord talking before the inn, there was a sound of whispering and suppressed laughter behind the door of the room, which seemed to show that the Earl of Ashby's kinsman was not far off, and was employed in the precise occupation which the peasant had assigned to him.
The serving-man wisely held his tongue, and, in a minute after, the door opened, and gave entrance to a man somewhat above the middle size, of a slim and graceful figure, the thinness of which did not seem to indicate weakness, but rather sinewy activity. He was dressed in close-fitting garments of a dark marone tint, with riding-boots, and spurs without rowels. Over the tight coat I have mentioned, coming halfway down his thigh, was a loose garment called a tabard, of philimot colour, apparently to keep his dress from the dust, and above it again a green hood, which was now thrown back upon his shoulders. His sword peeped from under his tabard, and the hilt of his dagger showed itself, also, on the other side. His air was easy and self-possessed, but there was a quick and furtive glance of the eye from object to object, as he entered the room, which gave the impression that there was a cunning and inquisitive spirit within. His face was certainly handsome, though pale and dark; his beard was short and black, and his hair, which was remarkably fine and glossy, had been left to grow long, and was platted like that of a woman. His hand was white and fine, and it was evident that he paid no slight attention to his dress, by the tremendous length of the points of his boots, which were embroidered to represent a serpent, and buttoned to his knees with a small loop of gold. His hood, too, was strangely ornamented with various figures embroidered round the edge; and yet so great was the extravagance of the period, that his apparel would then have been considered much less costly than that of most men of his rank, for his revenues were by far too limited, and his other expenses too many and too frequent, to permit of his indulging to the full his taste for splendid garments.
As this personage entered the room, the sharp glance of the serving-man detected the figure of Kate, the host's daughter, gliding away from the opening door, but, turning his head discreetly, he fixed his eyes upon the new-comer with a low reverence, advancing at the same time towards him.
The Earl's kinsman, however, either did not, or affected not to know the person who approached him, and the lord's man was obliged to enter into explanations as to who he was, and what was his errand.
"Ha!" said Richard de Ashby, "danger at York, is there? My good lord, your master, has brought us down here for nothing, then, it seems. I know not how my kinsman, the Earl of Ashby, will take this, for he loves not journeying to be disappointed."
"My lord does not intend to disappoint the Earl," replied the serving-man; "he will give him the meeting in the course of to-morrow--somewhere."
"Know you not where?" demanded the gentleman; and, as the servant turned his eyes, with a doubtful glance, to the spot where the peasant was seated, the other added, "Come hither with me upon the green, where there are no idle ears to overhear."
If his words were meant as a hint for Hardy to quit the room, it was not taken; for the hunchback remained fixed to the table, having recourse from time to time to his jug of ale, and looking towards the door more than once, after Sir Richard and the lord's man had quitted the chamber.
Their conference was apparently long, and at length, first one of the gentleman's servants, and then another, entered the little low-roofed room, and approached the table at which the peasant sat.
"Hallo! what hast thou got here, bumpkin?" cried one of them--"wine for such a carle as thou art!" and, as he spoke, he took up the tankard from which the serving-man had been drinking.
"That is neither thine nor mine," replied Hardy, "so you had better let it alone."
"Heyday!" cried the servant of the great man's kinsman; "rated by a humpbacked ploughman! If it be not thine, fellow, hold thy tongue, for it can be nothing to thee! I shall take leave to make free with it, however," and, pouring out a cup, he tossed it off.
"You must be a poor rogue," said the peasant, "to be so fond of drinking at another man's cost, as not to pay for your liquor even by a civil word."
"What is that he says?" cried the man, turning to his companion--for, to say sooth, although he had heard every word, he was not quite prepared to act upon them, being one of those who are much more ready to bully and brawl, than to take part in a fray they have provoked--"what is that he says?"
"He called thee a poor rogue, Timothy," said his companion. "Turn him out by the heels, the misbegotten lump!"
"Out with him!" cried the other, seeing that his comrade was inclined to stand by him, "Out with him!" and he advanced, menacingly, upon the peasant.
"Hold your hands!--hold your hands!" said Hardy, shaking his head--"I am an old man, and not so well made as you two varlets, but I don't 'bide a blow from any poor kinsman's half-starved curs!--Take care, my men!" and as one of them approached rather too near, he struck him a blow, without rising from his stool, which made him measure his length upon the rushes that strewed the floor, crying out at the same time, in a whining tone, "To think of two huge fellows falling upon a poor, deformed old body."
It so happened that the personage whom the peasant had knocked down was the braver man of the two; and, starting up, he rushed fiercely upon his adversary; which his companion espying, darted upon Hardy at the same moment, and by a dexterous kick of his foot knocked the stool from under him, thus bringing the hunchback and his own comrade to the ground together. He then caught their enemy by the collar, and held his head firmly down upon the floor with both hands, as one has sometimes seen a child do with a refractory kitten.
"Baste him, Dickon--baste him!" he cried.
"I'll give him a dip in the horse-pond," said the other; "his nose will make the water fizz like a red-hot horseshoe."
At that moment, however, the noise occasioned by such boisterous proceedings called in pretty Kate Greenly, the landlord's daughter, who, although she had a great reverence and regard for all the serving men of Richard de Ashby, was not fond of seeing poor Hardy ill-treated. Glancing eagerly round, while the peasant strove with his two opponents, she seized a pail of water which stood behind the parlour door, and following the plan which she had seen her father pursue with the bulldog and mastiff which tenanted the back yard, she dashed the whole of the contents over the combatants as they lay struggling on the ground.
All three started up, panting; but the gain was certainly on the part of Hardy, who, freed from the grasp of his adversaries, caught up the three-legged stool on which he had been sitting, and whirling it lightly above his head, prepared to defend himself therewith against his assailants; who, on their part, with their rage heightened rather than assuaged by the cool libation which Kate had poured upon them, drew the short swords that they carried, and were rushing upon the old peasant with no very merciful intent.
Kate Greenly now screamed aloud, exerting her pretty little throat to the utmost, and her cries soon brought in the lord's man, followed, somewhat slowly, by Richard de Ashby. The good landlord himself--having established as a rule, both out of regard for his own person and for the custom of his house, never to interfere in any quarrels if he could possibly avoid it, which rule had produced, on certain occasions, great obtuseness in sight and in hearing--kept out of the way, and indeed removed himself to the stable upon the pretence of looking after his guests' horses.
The lord's man, however, with the true spirit of an English yeoman, dashed at once into the fray, taking instant part with the weakest.
"Come, come!" he cried, placing himself by Hardy's side, "two men against one--and he an old one! Out upon it! Stand off, or I'll break your jaws for you!"
This accession to the forces of their adversary staggered the two servants, and a momentary pause took place, in which their master's voice was at last heard.
"What! brawling, fools!" he exclaimed. "We have something else to think of now. Stand back, and let the old man go! Get you gone, ploughman; and don't let me find you snarling with a gentleman's servants again, or I will put you in the stocks for your pains."
"I will break his head before he's out of the house," said one of the men, who seemed to pay but little deference to his master's commands.
"I will break thine, if thou triest it," answered the lord's man, sturdily. "Come along, old man, come along; I will see thee safe out of the place, and let any one of them lay a finger on thee if he dare!"
Thus saying, he grasped Hardy's arm and led him forth from the inn, muttering as he did so, "By the shoulder-bone of St. Luke, the old fellow has got limbs enough to defend himself!--It's as thick as a roll of brawn, and as hard as a branch of oak! How goes it with thee, fellow?"
"Stiff--woundy stiff, sir," replied the hunchback; "but I thank you, with all my heart, for taking part with me; and I would fain give you a cup of good ale in return, such as you have never tasted out of London. If you could but contrive to come to my poor place to-morrow morning," he added, dropping his voice to a low tone, "I could shew some country sports, which, as you are a judge of such things, might please you."
"It must be early hours, then," replied the serving-man. "Those that don't come to-night will not be here till noon to-morrow, it is true: but still I think I had better wait for them."
"Nay, nay--come," said Hardy; "come and take a cup of ale with me," and, after a pause, he added, significantly, "besides, there's something I want to tell you which may profit your lord."
"But how shall I find my way?" demanded the serving-man, gazing inquiringly in his face, but with no expression of surprise at the intimation he received.
"Oh, I will shew you," answered the peasant. "Meet me at the church stile there, and I will guide you. It is not far. Be there a little before six, and you shall find me waiting. Give me your hand on't."
The serving-man held out his hand, and Hardy shook it in a grasp such as might be given by a set of iron pincers, at the same time advancing his head, and adding, in a low tone,
"Take care what you do--you have a traitor there! One of those men is a nidget, and the other is a false hound, come down to spy upon good men and true."
Thus saying, he relaxed his hold, and, turning away, was soon lost in the obscure twilight of the evening.
