by Howard Pyle
Holyday led across Knightrider Street obliquely, then down the lower part of Bread Street, along a little of Thames Street, and through a short passage to Queenhithe. This wharf enclosed three sides of a somewhat rounded basin, wherein a number of craft now lay at rest in the black water that lapped softly as stirred by the tide and a light wind. Houses were built close together on all three sides.
The poet made straight along the east side of the basin, and down a narrow flight of stairs to a large boat that lay there. A man started up in the boat, and held out his hand to help the maid aboard, lighting her steps with a lantern in his other hand, — for a veil of clouds had swept across the sky from the west, and the only considerable light upon the wharf was from a lantern before one of the gabled houses, and from the lattice windows of a tavern. Other boatmen steadied the vessel, so that Millicent boarded without accident; Holyday, coming next, and setting foot blindly upon the gunwale, rather fell than stepped in. Cutting Tom and his men huddled aboard, and the whole party crowded together astern, to leave room forward for the rowers.
“Whither?” asked the waterman in command.
“Why, down-stream, of course,” replied Holyday. “Know you not — how now? Where is Bill Tooby?”
“Bill Tooby? He is yonder in his boat, waiting for some that have bespoke him.” The man pointed across the basin.
Holyday was stricken faint of voice. “Oh, miserere!” he wailed. “He is waiting for us. We have come to the wrong stairs.”
“Hark!” cried Millicent.
Cries of “Runaways! Stop them! Stop the maid!” were approaching from, apparently, the vicinity of Knightrider Street.
“We must e’en change to the other boat,” said Holyday, despairingly.
“Oh, heaven, there is not time!” cried Millicent.
“If you be in haste,” said the waterman, “stay where ye are. Whither shall we carry ye?”
“Nay, nay, I durst not!” cried Holyday, and yet stood in helpless indecision.
“Come, then!” said Millicent, and leaped from the boat to the stairs. Reaching back for Holyday’s hand, she pulled him after her, dragged him up the steps, and led him around the three sides of the basin, their five protectors following close.
A larger boat, manned with a more numerous crew, was in waiting at the western stairs. The waterman with whom Ravenshaw had bargained in the morning, making sure of Holyday’s face in the light of a lantern, guided the fugitives aboard with orderly swiftness. But already the noise of pursuit was in Thames Street; ere the last man — a slim fellow with a thickly bearded face, which he carried well forward from his body — was embarked, the cries, swelling suddenly as the pursuers emerged from the narrow passage, were upon the wharf, and the red flare of torches came with them.
The party in chase was headed by the goldsmith himself, no covering on his head, his gray hair standing out in the breeze; then came his apprentices, and sundry persons who had joined in the hue and cry; the rear was brought up by Sir Peregrine, lamed and winded. Master Etheridge made out the party in the boat at once, and, with threatening commands to the waterman to stop, led his people around to the stairs.
“Cast off!” growled Bill Tooby, the waterman, pulling the slim fellow aboard. The order was obeyed, and Millicent, who had sat more dead than alive since her father had come into sight, saw the wharf recede, and a strip of black water spread between the boat and the torch-lit party that stood gazing from the stairs.
“Oh, wench, I’ll make thee rue this day!” cried the goldsmith, shaking his arms after the boat. As for Sir Peregrine, he looked utterly nonplussed.
Then her father spoke hurriedly to his followers, and called loudly for a boat. The waterman to whom Holyday had first led his own party was quick to respond. Meanwhile Tooby’s craft headed down-stream. Millicent, looking anxiously back over the water, saw the other boat, or its lantern and one of the torches, shoot out from the stairs.
“Think you they will catch us?” she asked Master Holyday.
“I think nothing,” said the poet, dejectedly, really thinking very small of himself for the mistake which had enabled the goldsmith to come upon their heels.
Surprised at the apparent change in Master Holyday since the forenoon, she turned to Tooby. “What think you, waterman?”
“Why, mistress, an they make better speed than we, belike they’ll catch us; but, an we make better speed than they, belike they’ll not catch us,” growled Tooby.
“And that’s the hell of it!” quoth Cutting Tom.
CHAPTER XVII.
DIRE THINGS BEFALL IN THE FOREST.
“‘Mistress, it grows somewhat pretty and dark.’
‘What then?’
‘Nay, nothing. Do not think I am afraid,
Although perhaps you are.’” — Beggars’ Bush.
The two large boats were not alone upon the river. Here and there, in the distance, moved the tiny lights of a wherry carrying a benighted fare; and up toward the palaces and Westminster more than one cluster of lanterns and torches swept along, where some party of ladies and gentlemen were rowed to a mask or other revels. From one such company the western breeze brought the strains of guitars; Bill Tooby and his comrades, infected with the spirit of melody, began to sing “Heave and ho, rumbelow,” in deep voices, in time with the movement of their bodies.
Along the northern bank of the river, where the dwellings and warehouses of merchants rose like a wall from the water’s edge, the dim lights of windows ran in a straggling, interrupted line. Farther west, where the river washed the stairs to the gardens of the great Strand residences and of the Temple, there were scarce any lights at all. On the south bank, a few glowing windows marked the row of taverns and other houses — many of them of questionable repute — which, set back a little from the river, concealed the bear-gardens and playhouses in the fields behind. But soon, as the boat sped down-stream, the buildings on that bank were flush with the shore, save where Winchester House showed a few lighted windows beyond its terrace. Little did Millicent imagine that anything bearing upon her destiny had ever been spoken or thought on that terrace or in that house. In front, spanning the river, another irregular row of window lights indicated the tall, close-built houses of London Bridge; and the roar of the water, first dammed by the piers and then falling in a kind of cataract through the twenty arches, was already loud in the ears.
Millicent kept her eyes on the lights of the boat behind, — only two lights, a lantern at the prow, and a torch held by some one near the stern. They came steadily on, seeming neither to lose nor gain. Suddenly she lost sense of them; but that was when her own boat plunged into one of the arches of the bridge, and seemed to be gulped down by a blacker night, a chill air, and a thunderous noise. Forward and slightly downward the boat flung itself, as if into some gulf of the underworld, but all of a sudden it was out again in the soft air and the calm water, and Millicent, looking up, saw the lit windows of the eastern side of the bridge. She continued gazing back, and very soon the two lights, the little yellow one and the trailing red one, came into view between the piers, still in pursuit at the same distance.
“They don’t gain upon us,” growled Cutting Tom, with a desire of making himself agreeable to the maid.
“But they do not lose,” said Millicent, in a troubled tone.
“Why, sooth, an they still gain not, ’tis sure they’ll ne’er catch us.”
“But they can see where we land,” said she, “and they can land there, too, and so follow us to the end.”
“Then we can e’en teach ’em better manners,” said Tom, grandly. “I’d as lief split a throat this night as another.”
“Oh, no; in heaven’s name, no!” she cried. “We must escape them without that. No blows, I beg of you, whate’er befall!”
“Yet you see how they stick to our heels. How is it, waterman? Shall we not give ’em the slip soon?”
“Belike, and belike not,” replied Tooby. “We can do our best, no more.”
Suddenly Master Holyday, thinking in some manner to redeem himself, had an inspiration.
“How if they couldn’t see to follow us?” he asked, abruptly. “How if we put out our lights and went on in the dark?”
“Not for ten pound a minute,” said Tooby, “would I row without lights, a night like this. ’Tis bad enow as it is, with all the ships and small boats lying in the Pool here. E’en with our lanterns, we shall do well an we bump not our nose.”
There was a silence, broken only by the plash of the oars, the creak of the rowlocks, the strange noises of the river, the lessening sound of what an obscure dramatist of those days describes as
“The bridge’s cataracts, and such-like murmurs
As night and sleep yield from a populous number.”
“But I will e’en try something better,” added Tooby, presently, and forthwith gave an inaudible order to his men.
They instantly stopped rowing, and even proceeded to stay the boat’s movement with the current, so that it remained almost stationary.
Millicent cried out in alarm as the lights behind came rapidly nearer.
“Peace, mistress,” said Tooby. “There will be no blood spilled.” He then spoke in a low tone to the men in the bow, and himself strode to the stern, where he stood with his long arms slightly crooked at the elbows as if to be in readiness for action.
Swiftly the other boat came alongside. Millicent, holding her breath, wondering what was about to occur, made out her father bending forward in the attitude of one ready to grasp and punish. The torch revealed Sir Peregrine also, limply huddled up so that his beard was between his knees, and two of the apprentices, one of whom held the torch.
“Ay, thou dost well to yield, wench!” spake the goldsmith, in tones so wrathful as rather to contradict his words.
“Ay, chick,” called out Sir Peregrine, reassuringly, “no need to run away from me; I’ll give thee no cause for jealousy, I promise thee.”
Master Etheridge stood up to reach out for his daughter. She had a fearful thought that Tooby had chosen to betray her. But at the same instant Tooby, leaning over to the other boat, violently struck the torch-bearing apprentice’s hand, and deftly caught the torch away. She heard a slight crash forward; and then her own boat shot through the water, leaving the other in complete darkness, one of Tooby’s men having knocked the lantern from its prow with an oar.
Millicent gave a quick breath of relief and put on her cloak; but then she thought of the other boat’s danger of running into something, or of being run down itself, and of this she spoke.
“Never fear,” said Tooby. “He’ll no more venture in the dark than I would. We’ll fast put yon ship’s hull ‘twixt them and us, and be out of their ken ere ever they can get a light. And now pull, hearts, for the honour of watermen!”
Soon the lights on the left bank, becoming fewer, took such height and shape that Millicent knew her boat was passing the Tower. Somewhere there the water plashed against the underground stairs of Traitors’ Gate, that arched cavern which had lifted its iron door often in nights as dark as this, to admit some noble prisoner whose face, redly pale in the torchlight, betokened a heart chilled with a feeling that those damp walls formed a vestibule of death. Master Holyday, for all that was upon his mind, thought of these things, and of much else in the night-clad surroundings; but Millicent kept her eyes fixed on the darkness behind, alert for any moving light that might appear in chase.
None such appeared; and by the time the boat had traversed the city of great ships, and had come to where the lights upon the banks were few, and the mysterious noises of the town had given place to those of the country, she had cast away all fear of danger from behind.
At Deptford they passed one ship, of which Millicent took no more note than she took of any other of the countless vessels whose lights dotted the gloom around her that night; but on which she might have bestowed a second look had she known all that was to be known.
The tide, the current, and the wind being with the rowers, it seemed not long till Tooby hinted that Master Holyday would do well to keep his eyes open for the place of landing. The scholar, scanning the blue-black darkness in perplexity, said that he could not for his life see anything of the shore. Tooby asked him whether he knew the different landmarks by name. The scholar was acquainted with those in the neighbourhood of where they should land. Thenceforth the waterman called out the name of each village, wharf, riverside tavern, hill, tributary, or well-known country-seat, the contents of the darkness being known to him perhaps by his sense of distance, perhaps by reference to some far-off light, perhaps sometimes by the smell of marsh or wood. Holyday began to recognise the names; and at last told the waterman to put ashore at the mouth of a certain creek.
The boat glided along a low bank and stopped. Tooby, standing up, held out his lantern to show where there was safe footing. Master Holyday, leaping out too hastily, alighted up to his knees in water. Millicent, aided by the waterman’s hand, stepped ashore. Cutting Tom and his men lost no time. Ere it seemed possible, the lights of the boat were moving swiftly away. Its departure, and especially that of Tooby, left Millicent with a sudden pang of loneliness and misgiving. But she reflected that the last stage of her flight was reached; taking new heart, she grasped Holyday’s sleeve, and waited to be led.
The party had two lanterns and a torch, all which had been lighted in the boat. Cutting Tom assigned one lantern to Holyday, the other to the slim fellow with the projecting head, the torch to himself. The poet, with a deep sigh, and craning his neck to peer into the mysterious blackness beyond the little area of feeble light, started forward; Millicent clung to his elbow; Cutting Tom placed himself at her other side, and the four men followed close.
The walkers proceeded slowly, Master Holyday having often to stop to ascertain his way. At first the turf under them was springy, then it became softer, and sometimes one’s foot would sink into a tiny pool; then the ground became higher, and presently they entered a wood. This seemed interminable; not only was poor Master Holyday compelled to pause every minute to identify his whereabouts but also the protruding roots, fallen boughs, and frequent underbrush made every step a matter of care.
As they moved their torch and lanterns, so the light and shadow constantly moved about them; trunks and boughs, bush and brake, would suddenly appear and as quickly vanish as the yellow rays swung here and there. The breeze rustled unceasingly among the leaves, and the air was pleasant with forest odours. Millicent’s fancy peopled the shades with sleeping giants, goblins, witches, dragons, and all the creatures of the old tales of fairies and knights errant. She thought a similar terror must have come upon the others; her companion hesitated so when he strove to pierce the shadows with wide-open eyes; and Cutting Tom kept so close to her; while one of the men had stepped up to the other side of Holyday and tightly grasped his arm.
“’Tis a weary journey, mistress,” complained the poet.
“Nay, I find it pleasant sport,” said she, feeling that one of the two must show a light heart. Holyday’s manner all evening had been so at variance with his readiness to fight a dangerous man some hours earlier, that she made no attempt to understand the alteration; she merely attended to the need of keeping up his spirits, though her own heart faltered. But she could not help adding: “Is there much more of this wood to go through?”
“More than I wish there were,” replied Holyday.
They went some distance farther in silence. Then the slim fellow with a lantern suddenly gave two coughs. Instantly Cutting Tom gripped Millicent’s arm, stood still, and said to Holyday:
“A plague on your eyes, sir! you are leading us the wrong way.”
Holyday, stopping perforce with all the rest, replied, in amazement: “’Tis the right way; I have come by this path to fish in the Thames a hundred times.”
“Poh! fish me no fish, sir!” cried Cutting Tom, while the slim lantern-bearer strode around to the front. “Am I to be led astray, and this
maid here, for your designs? You have dragged us too long through this cursed wood — and that’s the hell of it!”
“’Tis the right way, I tell you,” said Holyday; “and how can you say otherwise, when you know not whither we are bound?”
“But I do know whither we are bound — and that’s the hell of it!”
“I begin to think you are an impudent fellow,” quoth Holyday, momentarily reckless through loss of patience; “and that’s the hell of it, in your Bedlam gibberish!”
“Death!” bellowed Cutting Tom; “‘hell of it’ belongs to me; no man in England dare steal my speech!”
He handed his torch to one of the men, ran at the scholar, dealt him a blow between the eyes, seized his lantern, and dragged Millicent away, motioning the slim knave to lead on. The knave took a direction leftward from their former one.
“What mean you?” cried the maid, trying to release herself. “I’ll not leave Master Holyday.”
One of the men caught her by the free arm, and she was borne away by him and Cutting Tom. Glancing back, she saw that the two remaining men, one of whom had quickly stuck the torch in the ground, were grappling with Holyday, who was struggling between them.
“In God’s name, what would you do?” Millicent cried, as her captors hastened on at the heels of the new guide.
The men vouchsafed no answer. After a little while, at a word from Cutting Tom, they stopped and waited. Tom gave a whistle, which was answered from the direction whence they had last come, — evidently by one of the men who had remained with Holyday. Being at intervals repeated, and answered at lessening distances, the whistle proved to be for the purpose of guiding these two men. Soon they appeared with the torch, but without Holyday.
“Oh, heaven! what have you done with him?” cried Millicent, turning cold.