by Howard Pyle
“One thing will make all easy in a trice. Her Uncle Bartlemy, whom you know, would serve her an he saw the way; and even to the last she has looked for some secret help from him. You shall therefore begin by saying you come from her Uncle Bartlemy, who bids her accept you as a husband. Say that his description of her beauty, and of her unhappy plight, hath so wrought upon your mind that you were deep in love ere you e’en saw her. And then say the reality so far outshines the description, your love is a thousand times confirmed and multiplied. She cannot but believe you are from her uncle, knowing you live in his part of the country. After that, if you have time for a few love speeches of a poetical nature, such as, no doubt, this work is full of” (he held up the manuscript) —
“Troth,” said the poet, “‘twere easier for me to write whole folios of love than speak a line of it to a real maid!”
“Oh, heart up, man!” said Ravenshaw. “‘Twill be smooth sailing, once a start is made. But you will not have to say much. Your youth and figure will speak for you when she contrasts them with Sir Peregrine. In her present mind, any man were a sweet refuge from that old kex. I remember she said she would prefer a good swordman; tell her you are a good swordman, therefore. And then bid her meet you at her garden gate in Friday Street at dusk, ready for a journey. Not earlier, look you, for the men who will attend you may not be in waiting at the White Horse till sunset, and ‘twere dangerous to miss them.”
The scholar breathed fast and hard, as if a burden were being forced upon him, under which he must surely faint, and his eyes roved about as if seeking a way of evasion.
“Now all this must be agreed upon betwixt you and the maid a full hour before noon,” proceeded Ravenshaw, “so that you may come to me with the news ere I set out from London. I wish to go to my new affairs with an easy mind. The place I go to is not far from that to which you and the maid shall go, and I will meet you in proper time. But take note of one thing. She is not to know that I have the least hand in this business; if she did, she would not stir a step in it, for she abhors the very name of Ravenshaw. Therefore, when you are with her, if my name comes up, be sure you vilify me roundly.”
“I could vilify you now, for pushing me into this business!”
“Very like; and think not to get out of it till it’s done; for, mark well, I shall not be far from you while you are in the goldsmith’s house. I shall bring you in sight of the house, and shall wait in sight of it till you come out; and if you come not out by eleven o’clock, and with word that all is planned, then, by these two hands, I know not what will happen!”
The poor scholar shrank at the captain’s fierce manner.
“And now, for your flight and marriage,” resumed Ravenshaw, after an impressive pause; and he set forth particulars as to their being joined by Cutting Tom and his men, their taking boat, their trip down the river with the vantage of tide and moonlight, their landing at whatever point Holyday, in his knowledge of the country, should deem best. “You will then find your way as fast as may be,” he continued, “to the house of your friend Sir Nicholas, the parson. Prevail upon him to keep you hid there till he can marry you by license, which can be quickly had of the bishop’s commissary of Rochester. Being so much your friend, Sir Nicholas will wink at little shortcomings, — such as the consent of the girl’s parents being omitted, and that of her friends sufficing. The maid can swear she is not precontracted; there is truly no consanguinity, and for names to a bond, the parson can scrape up another besides your own. And so, safely tied, you shall bear her to your father’s house, and defy the world.”
Master Holyday looked as if he fancied himself bound to the seat of a galley for life.
“The parson must lodge your attendants till the next day,” added Ravenshaw, “when I will come and dismiss them. Stable room will do. Belike I will see you when I come; but she must not set eyes on me. When all’s done, you may tell her what you will. Her uncle will stand your friend, I think. And so, a rascal’s blessing on you both!”
The poet was silent and miserable. But after a time he looked up, and, stretching forth his hand, said, in a supplicating way:
“Give me back my puppet-play, then. ’Tis my masterwork, I think.”
“You shall have it back when you are married,” replied Ravenshaw, placing it carefully inside his doublet.
Master Holyday groaned, as one who gives himself up for lost.
CHAPTER XIII.
A RIOT IN CHEAPSIDE.
“Down with them! Cry clubs for prentices!”
— The Shoemaker’s Holiday.
Wan and tremulous, after a night of half-sleep varied by ominous dreams, Master Holyday was led by the captain, in the early morning, to the wharf where was to be found the waterman whom Ravenshaw knew he could trust. The scholar attended in a kind of dumb trance to the interview between Ravenshaw and the boatman, who was a powerful, leather-faced fellow, one that listened intently, scrutinised keenly, and expressed himself in quick nods and short grunts. Even the unwonted sight of gold in the captain’s hands did not stir the unhappy poet to more than a transient look of faint wonder.
Ravenshaw pulled him by the sleeve to a cook’s shop in Thames Street, but the wretched graduate had difficulty in gulping down his food, and scarce could have told whether it was hot pork pie or cold pease porridge. It went differently with the ale which the captain caused to be set before them afterward. Holyday poured this down his throat with feverish avidity, and pushed forth his pot for more. At last Ravenshaw, considering it time for the goldsmith’s family to be up, grasped his companion firmly by the crook of the arm, and said, curtly:
“Come!”
The poor scholar, limp and sinking, turned gray in the face, and went forth with the look of a prisoner dragged to execution. The captain had to exert force to keep him from lagging behind, as the two went northward through Bread Street. They stopped once, to buy a cheap sword, scabbard, and hanger; which Holyday dreamily suffered the shopman to attach to his girdle. Nearing Cheapside, the doomed bachelor hung back more and more, and when finally they turned into that thoroughfare, his face all terror, he suddenly jerked from Ravenshaw’s hold, and made a bolt toward Cornhill.
But the captain, giving chase, caught him by the collar, in front of Bow church, seized his neck as in a vice, turned him about toward the goldsmith’s house, took a tighter hold of his arm, and impelled him relentlessly forward. From his affrighted eyes, ashen cheeks, and dragging gait, people in the street supposed he was being taken to Newgate prison by a queen’s officer.
“Now, look you,” said the captain, with grim earnestness, as they approached Master Etheridge’s shop, “I durst not go too near the place. I shall leave you in a moment; but I shall go over the way, and take my post behind the cross, where I can watch the house in safety. Mark this: my hand shall be upon my sword-hilt, and if you try flight, or come forth unsuccessful, you shall find yourself as dead a poet as Virgil — what though I swing for you, I care not! Come forth not later than the stroke of eleven; walk toward the Poultry, and I will join you. Keep me not waiting, or, by this hand — Go; and remember!”
He gave the scholar a parting push, and strode across the street; a few seconds later he was peering around the corner of the cross, and Master Holyday was lurching into the goldsmith’s shop.
The shop, as has been said, extended back to where a passage separated it from domestic regions of the house; but it was, itself, in two parts, — a front part, open to the street, and a more private part, where the master usually stayed, with his most valuable wares.
In entering the outer shop, Holyday had to pass the end of a case, at which a flat-capped, snub-nosed, solid-bodied apprentice was arranging gold cups, chains, and trinkets.
“What is’t you lack?” demanded this youth, squaring up to the scholar.
“God knows,” thought Holyday. “My wits, I think.” And then he found voice to say that he desired speech of Master Etheridge.
The shopman pointed to the open d
oor leading to the farther apartment, and thither Holyday went. The place was mainly lighted by a side window; the poet could not fail to distinguish the master, by his rich cloth doublet and air of authority, from the journeymen who sat working upon shining pieces of plate.
“What is it you lack, sir?” inquired Master Etheridge.
“Sir,” replied Holyday, in a small, trembling voice, “I must pray you, bear with me if I speak wildly. I am sick from a sleeping-drug that a villain abused me with three days ago, — one Captain Ravenshaw—”
At this name the goldsmith, who had received elaborate accounts from Sir Peregrine of last night’s incident in the garden, suddenly warmed out of his air of coldness and distrust, and began to show a sympathetic curiosity which made it easier for Holyday to proceed with his tale. When the scholar announced who he was, the goldsmith lapsed for a moment into a hard incredulity; but this passed away as Holyday, not daring to stop now that he had so good an impetus, deftly alluded to his father,— “whom, they say, I scarce resemble, being all my mother in face,” quoth he parenthetically, — and hoped that Master Etheridge had forgiven him his water-spaniel’s bite the last time the two had met.
“Aha! I knew it was a water-spaniel,” said Master Etheridge, triumphantly. “The rogue would have it a terrier.” This hasty speech required that the goldsmith should relate how the impostor had played upon him and his household; at which news Master Holyday had to open his eyes, and feign great astonishment and indignation. He found this kind of acting easier than he had supposed, and was beginning to feel like a live, normal creature; when suddenly his mind was brought back to the real task before him by Master Etheridge, saying:
“Well, the rascal failed of his purpose here, whatever it was; and now ‘twill please the women to see the true after the counterfeit. This way, pray — what, art so ill? Tom, Dickon, hold him up!”
“Nay, I can walk, I thank ye,” said poor Holyday, faintly, and accompanied his host into the passage, and up the stairs to the large room overlooking Cheapside. No one being there, the goldsmith went elsewhere in search of his wife, leaving the scholar to a discomfiting solitude. He gazed out of the window at the cross, and fancied he saw the edge of a hat-brim that he knew, protruding from the other side. He cursed the hour when he had fallen in with Ravenshaw, and wished an earthquake might swallow the goldsmith’s house.
When he heard Master Etheridge returning, and the swish of a feminine gown, he felt that the awful moment had come. But it was only the goldsmith’s wife, and she proved such a motherly person that he found it quite tolerable to sit answering her questions. Presently Master Etheridge was called down to the shop, and his wife had some sewing brought to her, at which she set to work, keeping up with Holyday a conversation oft broken by many long pauses.
Each time the door opened, the scholar trembled for fear Mistress Millicent would enter. But as time passed and she came not, a new fear assailed him, — that he might not be able to see her at all, and that the dread stroke of eleven should bring some catastrophe not to be imagined. He was now as anxious for her arrival on the scene as he had first dreaded it. His heart went up to his throat when the door opened again; and down to his shoes when it let in nobody but Sir Peregrine Medway.
The old knight inspected Holyday for a moment with the curiosity due to genuine ware after one has been imposed upon by spurious; and then he dropped the youth from attention as a person of no consequence, and asked for Mistress Millicent.
“Troth,” said Mistress Etheridge, “the baggage must needs be keeping her bed two hours or so; said she was not well. She has missed her lesson on the virginals. I know not what ails her of late. I’m sure ’twas not so with me when I was toward marriage, — but she sha’n’t mope longer in her chamber. Lettice!” she called, going to the door, and gave orders to the woman.
Holyday breathed fast, and stared at the door. After a short while Millicent entered, with pouting lips, crimson cheeks, and angry eyes; she came forward in a reluctant way, and submitted to the tremulous embrace of the old knight. Not until she was free of his shaking arms did she take note of Master Holyday, and then she looked at him with the faintest sign of inquiry.
As for the scholar, a single glance had given him a sweeping sense of her beauty; daunted by it, he had dropped his eyes, and he dared not raise them from the tips of her neatly shod feet, which showed themselves beneath the curtain of her pink petticoat.
“’Tis my daughter, Master Holyday,” said Mistress Etheridge, “and soon to be Sir Peregrine’s lady.” Holyday bowed vaguely at the pretty shoes, and cast a vacuous smile upon the old knight.
“What, another Master Holyday?” said Millicent, in an ironical manner suited to her perverse mood.
“The true one,” replied her mother; “that rogue cozened him as he did us. Well, ’twas a lesson, Master Holyday, not to prate of your affairs to strangers.”
“The rogue shall pay for giving me the lesson,” ventured Holyday, bracing himself to play his part.
Mistress Millicent looked as if she doubted this.
“I know he is a much-vaunted swordman,” added Holyday, catching her expression; “but I have some acquaintance with steel weapons myself.”
His small, unnatural voice was at such variance with his words, that Millicent looked amused as well as doubting. He felt he was not getting on well, and was for sinking into despair; but the thought of Ravenshaw waiting behind the cross, hand on hilt, acted as a goad, and raised the wretched poet to a desperate alertness.
Master Etheridge came in, holding out his hollowed palm. At sight of its contents Mistress Millicent turned pale, and caught the back of a chair. Sir Peregrine bent his eyes over them gloatingly, and took them up in his lean fingers.
“The wedding-ring, sooth,” he said. “Good lack, ’twas speedy work, father. But which of the two is it?”
“Which you choose,” replied the goldsmith. “They are like as twins. I had the two made to the same measurement; ’tis so small, one of them will be a pretty thing to keep in the shop for show. Belike there may be another bride’s finger in London ‘twill fit.”
“Troth now, my first wife had just such another finger,” said the knight. “I know not which to take; ’tis a pity both cannot be used.”
Master Holyday was suddenly inspired with an impish thought, the very conception of which brought courage with it.
“An you please, Master Etheridge,” he said, “the lady I wish to marry hath such another hand, in size, as your sweet daughter here can boast of. It were a pleasant thing, now, an I might buy one of these rings.”
“Nay, by my knighthood,” quoth Sir Peregrine, with a burst of that magniloquent generosity which went with his vanity, “buy it thou shalt not, but have it thou shalt. I buy ’em both, father; see ’em both put down to me. Here, young sir; and let thy bride know what ’tis the mate of.” And he tossed one of the rings to Holyday, not graciously, but as one throws a bone to a dog.
“She will hold herself much honoured,” said Holyday, coolly, picking up the little circlet from among the rushes, and inwardly glad to make a fool of such a supercilious old fop. Noticing that Millicent observed his irony and approved it, he went on: “Of a truth, though, I am somewhat beforehand in the matter; the maid’s consent yet hangs fire.” And he cast her a look which he thought would set her thinking.
“Troth, then,” said the goldsmith, good-humouredly, “you go the right way to carry her by storm. Show her the wedding-ring, and tell her ’tis for her, and I warrant all’s done.”
“I will take your counsel,” said Holyday, glancing from the ring to Millicent’s finger. “She might be afflicted with a worse husband, I tell her.”
“Ay, young man,” put in Sir Peregrine, for the sake of showing his wisdom in such matters, “be not afraid to sound your own praises to her. If you do not so yourself, who will? — except, of course, your merits were such as show without being spoken for.” The knight unconsciously glanced down at himself.
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“Oh, I have those to recommend me that have authority with her,” said the scholar. “She hath an uncle will plead my suit; and truly he ought to, for ’twas he set me to wooing her, and from his account I became her servant ere ever I had seen her.”
“Hath the lady no parents, then?” queried Master Etheridge.
“Oh, yes; they are well inclined to me, too; I spoke of the uncle because ’twas his word made me first seek her out.”
“And did you find her all he had said?” asked Mistress Etheridge.
“Oh, even more beautiful. ’Tis her beauty makes me bashful in commending myself to her.”
“Oh, never be afraid,” said Mistress Etheridge. “You have a good figure, for one thing, and a modest mien.”
“So her mother says,” acquiesced Holyday, innocently.
“Your father hath a good estate,” said Master Etheridge, “and that speaks louder for you than modesty or figure.”
“That is what her father hath the goodness to say for me. I hope she will take her parents’ words to mind. But I doubt not, in her heart she thinks me better than some.”
“Well, her parents are the best judges,” said Master Etheridge. “I must go down to the shop; you will eat dinner with us, friend Ralph?”
“I thank you, sir; but I must meet a gentleman elsewhere at eleven o’clock.”
If Mistress Millicent had taken his meaning, he thought, she would now see the necessity of speedily having a word with him alone.
After the goldsmith had left the room, Sir Peregrine directed the conversation into such channels that Holyday was perforce out of it. The old knight evidently thought that enough talk had gone to the affairs of this young gentleman from Kent.
The scholar, wondering how matters would go, agitated within but maintaining a kind of preternatural calm without, ventured to scan Millicent’s face for a sign. She was regarding him furtively, as if she apprehended, yet feared to find herself deceived; in truth, her experience with Captain Ravenshaw had made it difficult for her to hope, or trust, anew. But surely fate could not twice abuse her so; this must indeed be Ralph Holyday, — her father was not likely to be deceived a second time, — and the Holydays were neighbours of her uncle, from whom she had not entirely ceased to look for aid. In any case, there, in the shape of Sir Peregrine, was a horrible certainty, to which a new risk was preferable. With a swift motion, therefore, she put her finger to her lip; and Master Holyday felt a great load lifted from his mind.