Forest Days: A Romance of Old Times
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