LONDON TOWN
“Come,” growled the blacksmith, gripping his tongs, “what wilt thou have
o’ the lad?”
“What will I have o’ the lad?” said Master Carew, mimicking the
blacksmith in a most comical way, with a wink at the crowd, as if he had
never been angry at all, so quickly could he change his face—“What will
I have o’ the lad?” and all the crowd laughed. “Why, bless thy gentle
heart, good man, I want to turn his farthings into round gold crowns—if
thou and thine infernal hot shoe do not make zanies of us all! Why,
Master Smith, ’tis to London town I’d take him, and fill his hands with
more silver shillings than there be cast-off shoes in thy whole shop.”
“La, now, hearken till him!” gaped the smith, staring in amazement.
“And here thou needs must up and spoil it all, because, forsooth, the
silly child goes a trifle sick for home and whimpers for his minnie!”
“But the lad saith thou hast stealed him awa-ay from ’s ho-ome,”
rumbled the smith, like a doubtful earthquake; “and we’ll ha’ no
stealing o’ lads awa-ay from ho-ome in County Herts!”
“Nay, that we won’t!” cried one. “Hurrah, John Smith—fair play, fair
play!” and there came an ugly, threatening murmur from the crowd.
“What! Fair play?” cried Master Carew, turning so sharply about, with
his hand upon his poniard, that each made as if it were not he but his
neighbor had growled. “Why, sirs, what if I took any one of ye out of
your poverty and common clothes down into London town, horseback like a
king, and had ye sing before the Queen, and play for earls, and talk
with the highest dames in all the land; and fed ye well, and spoke ye
fair, and lodged ye soft, and clad ye fine, and wrought the whole town
on to cheer ye, and to fill your purses full of gold? What, sir,” said
he, turning to the gaping farrier—“what if I promised thee to turn
thine every word to a silver sixpence, and thy smutty grins to golden
angels—what wouldst thou? Knock me in the head with thy dirty sledge,
and bawl foul play?”
“Nay, that I’d not,” roared the burly smith, with a stupid, ox-like
grin, scratching his tousled head; “I’d say, ‘Go it, bully, and a plague
on him that said thee nay!’”
“And yet when I would fill this silly fellow’s jerkin full of good gold
Harry shovel-boards for the simple drawing of his breath, ye bawl
‘Foul play!’”
“What, here! come out, lad,” roared the smith, with a great horse-laugh,
swinging Nick forward and thwacking him jovially between the shoulders
with his brawny hand; “come out, and go along o’ the master here,—’tis
for thy good,—and ho-ome wull keep, I trow, till thou dost come again.”
But Nick hung back, and clung to the blacksmith’s grimy arm, crying in
despair: “I will na—oh, I will na!”
“Tut, tut!” cried Master Carew. “Come, Nicholas; I mean thee well, I’ll
speak thee fair, and I’ll treat thee true”—and he smiled so frankly
that even Nick’s doubts almost wavered. “Come, I’ll swear it on my
hilt,” said he.
The smith’s brow clouded. “Nay,” said he; “we’ll no swearing by hilts or
by holies here; the bailiff will na have it, sir.”
“Good! then upon mine honour as an Englishman!” cried Carew. “What, how,
bullies? Upon mine honour as an Englishman!—how is it? Here we be, all
Englishmen together!” and he clapped his hand to Will Hostler’s
shoulder, whereat Will stood up very straight and looked around, as if
all at once he were somebody instead of somewhat less than nobody at all
of any consequence. “What!—ye are all for fair play?—and I am for fair
play, and good Master Smith, with his beautiful shoe, here, is for fair
play! Why, sirs, my bullies, we are all for fair play; and what more can
a man ask than good, downright English fair play? Nothing, say I. Fair
play first, last, and all the time!” and he waved his hand. “Hurrah for
downright English fair play!”
“Hurrah, hurrah!” bellowed the crowd, swept along like bubbles in a
flood. “Fair play, says we—English fair play—hurrah!” And those inside
waved their hands, and those that were outside tossed up their caps, in
sheer delight of good fair play.
“Hurrah, my bullies! That’s the cry!” said Carew, in his
hail-fellow-well-met, royal way. “Why, we’re the very best of fellows,
and the very fastest friends! Come, all to the old Three Lions inn, and
douse a can of brown March brew at my expense. To the Queen, to good
fair play, and to all the fine fellows in Albans town!”
And what did the crowd do but raise a shout, like a parcel of
school-boys loosed for a holiday, and troop off to the Three Lions inn
at Master Carew’s heels, Will Hostler and the brawny smith bringing up
the rear with Nick between them, hand to collar, half forgotten by the
rest, and his heart too low for further grief.
And while the crowd were still roaring over their tankards and cheering
good fair play, Master Gaston Carew up with his prisoner into the
saddle, and, mounting himself, with the bandy-legged man grinning
opposite, shook the dust of old St. Albans from his horse’s heels.
“Now, Nicholas Attwood,” said he, grimly, as they galloped away, “hark
’e well to what I have to say, and do not let it slip thy mind. I am
willed to take thee to London town—dost mark me?—and to London town
thou shalt go, warm or cold. By the whistle of the Lord High Admiral, I
mean just what I say! So thou mayst take thy choice.”
He gripped Nick’s shoulder as they rode, and glared into his eyes as if
to sear them with his own. Nick heard his poniard grating in its sheath,
and shut his eyes so that he might not see the master-player’s horrid
stare; for the opening and shutting, opening and shutting, of the blue
lids made him shudder.
“And what’s more,” said Carew, sternly, “I shall call thee Master
Skylark from this time forth—dost hear? And when I bid thee go, thou’lt
go; and when I bid thee come, thou’lt come; and when I say, ‘Here,
follow me!’ thou’lt follow like a dog to heel!” He drew up his lip until
his white teeth showed, and Nick, hearing them gritting together, shrank
back dismayed.
“There!” laughed Carew, scornfully. “He that knows better how to tame a
vixen or to cozen a pack of gulls, now let him speak!” and said no more
until they passed by Chipping Barnet. Then, “Nick,” said he, in a quiet,
kindly tone, as if they had been friends for years, “this is the place
where Warwick fell”; and pointed down the field. “There in the corner of
that croft they piled the noble dead like corn upon a threshing-floor.
Since then,” said he, with quiet irony, “men have stopped making English
kings as the Dutch make dolls, of a stick and a poll thereon.”
Pleased with hearing his own voice, he would have gone on with many
another thing; but seeing that Nick listened not at all to what he said,
he ceased, and rode on silently or chatting with the others.
The country through Middlesex was in most part flat, and heavy forests
overhung the road from time to time. There the players slipped their
poniards, and rode with rapier in hand; for many a dark deed and cruel
robbery had been done along this stretch of Watling street. And as they
passed, more than one dark-visaged rogue with branded hand and a price
upon his head peered at them from the copses by the way.
In places where the woods crept very near they pressed closer together
and rode rapidly; and the horse-boy and the grooms lit up the matches of
their pistolets, and laid their harquebuses ready in rest, and blew the
creeping sparkle snapping red at every turn; not so much really fearing
an attack upon so stout a party of reckless, dashing blades, as being
overawed by the great, mysterious silence of the forest, the
semi-twilight all about, and the cold, strange-smelling wind that fanned
their faces.
The wild spattering of hoofs in water-pools that lay unsucked by the sun
in shadowy stretches, the grim silence of the riders, and the wary eying
of each covert as they passed, sent a thrill of excitement into Nick’s
heart too keen for any boy to resist.
Then, too, it was no everyday tale to be stolen away from home. It was a
wild, strange thing with a strange, wild sound to it, not altogether
terrible or unpleasant to a brave boy’s ears in that wonder-filled age,
when all the world was turned adventurer, and England led the fore; when
Francis Drake and the “Golden Hind,” John Hawkins and the “Victory,”
Frobisher and his cockleshells, were gossip for every English fireside;
when the whole world rang with English steel, and the wide sea foamed
with English keels, and the air was full of the blaze of the living and
the ghosts of the mighty dead. And down in Nick’s plucky young English
heart there came a spark like that which burns in the soul of a mariner
when for the first time an unknown ocean rolls before his eyes.
So he rode on bravely, filled with a sense of daring and the thrill of
perils more remote than Master Carew’s altogether too adjacent poniard,
as well as with a sturdy determination to escape at the first
opportunity, in spite of all the master-player’s threats.
Up Highgate Hill they rattled in a bracing northeast wind, the rugged
country bowling back against the tumbled sky. Far to south a rusty haze
had gloomed against the sun like a midday fog, mile after mile; and
suddenly, as they topped the range and cleared the last low hill, they
saw a city in the south spreading away until it seemed to Nick to girdle
half the world and to veil the sky in a reek of murky sea-coal smoke.
“There!” said Carew, reining in the gray, as Nick looked up and felt his
heart almost stand still; “since Parma burned old Antwerp, and the Low
Countries are dead, there lies the market-heart of all the big
round world!”
“London!” cried Nick, and, catching his breath with a quick gasp, sat
speechless, staring.
Carew smiled. “Ay, Nick,” said he, cheerily; “’tis London town. Pluck
up thine heart, lad, and be no more cast down; there lies a New World
ready to thine hand. Thou canst win it if thou wilt. Come, let it be
thine Indies, thou Francis Drake, and I thy galleon to carry home the
spoils! And cheer up. It grieves my heart to see thee sad. Be merry
for my sake.”
“For thy sake?” gasped Nick, staring blankly in his face. “Why, what
hast thou done for me?” A sudden sob surprised him, and he clenched his
fists—it was too cruel irony. “Why, sir, if thou wouldst only leave
me go!”
“Tut, tut!” cried Carew, angrily. “Still harping on that same old
string? Why, from thy waking face I thought thou hadst dropped it long
ago. Let thee go? Not for all the wealth in Lombard street! Dost think
me a goose-witted gull?—and dost ask what I have done for thee? Thou
simpleton! I have made thee rise above the limits of thy wildest
dream—have shod thy feet with gold—have filled thy lap with
glory—have crowned thine head with fame! And yet, ‘What have I done for
thee?’ Fie! Thou art a stubborn-hearted little fool. But, marry come up!
I’ll mend thy mind. I’ll bend thy will to suit my way, or break it in
the bending!”
Clapping his hand upon his poniard, he turned his back, and did not
speak to Nick again.
And so they came down the Kentish Town road through a meadow-land
threaded with flowing streams, the wild hill thickets of Hampstead Heath
to right, the huddling villages of Islington, Hoxton, and Clerkenwell to
left. And as they passed through Kentish Town, past Primrose Hill into
Hampstead way, solitary farm-houses and lowly cottages gave way to
burgher dwellings in orderly array, with manor-houses here and there,
and in the distance palaces and towers reared their heads above the
crowding chimney-pots.
Then the players dressed themselves in fair array, and flung their
banners out, and came through Smithfield to Aldersgate, mocking the grim
old gibbet there with railing gaiety; and through the gate rode into
London town, with a long, loud cheer that brought the people crowding to
their doors, and set the shutters creaking everywhere.
Nick was bewildered by the countless shifting gables and the throngs of
people flowing onward like a stream, and stunned by the roar that seemed
to boil out of the very ground. The horses’ hoofs clashed on the
unevenly paved street with a noise like a thousand smithies. The houses
hung above him till they almost hid the sky, and seemed to be reeling
and ready to fall upon his head when he looked up; so that he urged the
little roan with his uneasy heels, and wished himself out of this
monstrous ruck where the walls were so close together that there was not
elbow-room to live, and the air seemed only heat, thick and stifling,
full of dust and smells.
Shop after shop, and booth on booth, until Nick wondered where the
gardens were; and such a maze of lanes, byways, courts, blind alleys,
and passages that his simple country footpath head went all into a
tangle, and he could scarcely have told Tottenham Court road from the
river Thames.
All that he remembered afterward was that, turning from High Holborn
into the Farringdon road, he saw a great church, under Ludgate Hill,
with spire burned and fallen, and its massive tower, black with age and
smoke, staring on the town. But he was too confused to know whither they
went or what he saw in passing; for of such a forest of houses he had
never even dreamed, with people swarming everywhere like ants upon a
hill, and among them all not one kind face he knew. Through the spirit
of adventure that had roused him for a time welled up a great
heart-sickness for his mother and his home.
Out of a bewildered daze he came at last to realize this much: that the
master-player’s house was very tall and very dark, standing in a dismal,
dirty street, and that it had a gloomy hallway full of shadows that
crept and wavered along the wall in the dim light of the late afternoon.
Then the master-player pushed him up a narrow staircase and along a
black corridor to a door at the end of the passage, through which he
thrust him into a darkness like night, and slammed the door behind him.
Nick heard the bolts shoot heavily, and Master Carew call through the
heavy panels: “Now, Jackanapes, sit down and chew the cud of solitude
awhile. It may cool thy silly pate for thee, since nothing else will
serve. When thou hast found thy common sense, perchance thou’lt find thy
freedom, not before.” Then his step went down the corridor, down the
stair, through the long hall—a door banged with a hollow sound that
echoed through the house, and all was still.
At first, in the utter darkness, Nick could not see at all, and did not
move for fear of falling down some awful hole; but as his eyes grew
used to the gloom he saw that he was in a little room. The only window
was boarded up, but a dim light crept in through narrow cracks and made
faint bars across the air. Little motes floated up and down these thin
blue bars, wavering in the uncertain light and then lost in the
darkness. Upon the floor was a pallet of straw, covered with a coarse
sheet, and having a rough coverlet of sheepskin. A round log was the
only pillow.
Something moved. Nick, startled, peered into the shadows: it was a strip
of ragged tapestry which fluttered on the wall. As he watched it
flapping fitfully there came a hollow rattle in the wainscot, and an
uncanny sound like the moaning of wind in the chimney.
“Let me out!” he cried, beating upon the door. “Let me out, I say!” A
stealthy footstep seemed to go away outside. “Mother, mother!” he cried
shrilly, now quite unstrung by fright, and beat frantically upon the
door until his hands ached; but no one answered. The window was beyond
his reach. Throwing himself upon the hard pallet, he hid his eyes in the
coverlet, and cried as if his heart would break.