AT THE FALCON INN
And then there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerald.
So says that wonder-ballad of the sea.
But over London came a gale that made the chimneys rock; and after it
came ice and snow, sharp, stinging sleet, and thumping hail, with
sickening winds from the gray west, sour yellow fogs, and plunging rain,
till all the world was weary of the winter and the cold.
But winter could not last forever. March crept onward, and the streets
of London came up out of the slush again with a glad surprise of
cobblestones. The sickly mist no longer hung along the river; and
sometimes upon a breezy afternoon it was pleasant and fair, the sun
shone warmly on one’s back, and the rusty sky grew bluer overhead. The
trees in Paris Garden put out buds; the lilac-tips began to swell; there
was a stirring in the roadside grass, and now and then a questing bird
went by upon the wind, piping a little silver thread of song. Nick’s
heart grew hungry for the woods of Arden and the gathering rush of the
waking water-brooks among the old dead leaves. The rain beat in at his
window, but he did not care for that, and kept it open day and night;
for when he wakened in the dark he loved to feel the fingers of the wind
across his face.
Sometimes the moonlight through the ragged clouds came in upon the
floor, and in the hurry of the wind he almost fancied he could hear the
Avon, bank-full, rushing under the old mill-bridge.
Then one day there came a shower with a warm south wind, sweet and
healthful and serene; and through the shower, out of the breaking
clouds, a sun-gleam like a path of gold straight down to the heart of
London town; and on the south wind, down that path of gold, came April.
That night the wind in the chimney fluted a glad, new tune; and when
Nick looked out at his casement the free stars danced before him in the
sky. And when he felt that fluting wind blow warm and cool together on
his cheek, the chimneys mocked him, and the town was hideous.
* * * * *
It fell upon an April night, when the moon was at its full, that Master
Carew had come to the Falcon Inn, on the Southwark side of the river,
and had brought Nick with him for the air. Master Heywood was along, and
it was very pleasant there.
The night breeze smelled of green fields, and the inn was thronged with
company. The windows were bright, and the air was full of voices. Tables
had been brought out into the garden and set beneath the arbor toward
the riverside. The vines of the arbor were shooting forth their first
pink-velvet leaves, and in the moonlight their shadows fell like
lacework across the linen cloths, blurred by the glow of the lanterns
hung upon the posts.
The folds in the linen marked the table-tops with squares like a
checker-board, and Nick stood watching from the tap-room door, as if it
were a game. Not that he cared for any game; but that watching dulled
the teeth of the hunger in his heart to be out of the town and back
among the hills of Warwickshire, now that the spring was there.
“What, there!—a pot of sack!” cried one gay fellow with a
silver-bordered cloak. “A pot of sack?” cried out another with a feather
like a rose-bush in his cap; “two pots ye mean, my buck!” “Ods-fish my
skin!” bawled out a third—“ods-fish my skin! Two pots of beggarly sack
on a Saturday night and a moon like this? Three pots, say I—and make it
malmsey, at my cost! What, there, knave! the table full of pots—I’ll
pay the score.”
At that they all began to laugh and to slap one another on the back, and
to pound with their fists upon the board until the pewter tankards
hopped; and when the tapster’s knave came back they were singing at the
top of their lungs, for the spring had gotten into their wits, and they
were beside themselves with merriment.
Master Tom Heywood had a little table to himself off in a corner, and
was writing busily upon a new play. “A sheet a day,” said he, “doth do
a wonder in a year”; so he was always at it.
Gaston Carew sat beyond, dicing with a silky rogue who had the coldest,
hardest face that Nick had ever seen. His eyes were black and beady as a
rat’s, and were circled about by a myriad of little crowfoot lines; and
his hooked nose lay across his thin blue lips like a finger across a
slit in a dried pie. His long, slim hands were white as any woman’s; and
his fingers slipped among the laces at his cuffs like a weasel in a
tangle-patch.
They had been playing for an hour, and the game had gone beyond all
reason. The other players had put aside the dice to watch the two, and
the nook in which their table stood was ringed with curious faces. A
lantern had been hung above, but Carew had had it taken down, as its
bottom made a shadow on the board. Carew’s face was red and white by
turns; but the face of the other had no more color than candle-wax.
At the end of the arbor some one was strumming upon a gittern. It was
strung in a different key from that in which the men were singing, and
the jangle made Nick feel all puckered up inside. By and by the playing
ceased, and the singers came to the end of their song. In the brief hush
the sharp rattle of the dice sounded like the patter of cold hail
against the shutter in the lull of a winter storm.
Then there came a great shouting outside, and, looking through the
arbor, Nick saw two couriers on galloway nags come galloping over the
bowling-green to the arbor-side, calling for ale. They drank it in
their saddles, while their panting horses sniffed at the fresh young
grass. Then they galloped on. Through the vines, as he looked after
them, Nick could see the towers of London glittering strangely in the
moonlight. It was nearly high tide, and up from the river came the sound
of women’s voices and laughter, with the pulse-like throb of oars and
the hoarse calling of the watermen.
In the great room of the inn behind him the gallants were taking their
snuff in little silver ladles, and talking of princesses they had met,
and of whose coach they had ridden home in last from tennis at my
lord’s. Some were eating, some were drinking, and some were puffing at
long clay pipes, while others, by twos, locked arm in arm, went
swaggering up and down the room, with a huge talking of foreign lands
which they had never so much as seen.
“A murrain on the luck!” cried Carew, suddenly. “Can I throw nothing but
threes and fours?”
A muffled stir ran round. Nick turned from the glare of the open door,
and looked out into the moonlight. It seemed quite dark at first. The
master-player’s face was bitter white, and his fingers were tapping a
queer staccato upon the table-top.
“A plague on the bedlam dice!” said he. “I think they are bewitched.”
“Huff, ruff, and snuff!” the other replied. “Don’t get the
mubble-fubbles, Carew: there’s nought the matter with the dice.”
A man came down from the tap-room door. Nick stepped aside to let him
pass. He was a player, by his air.
He wore a riding-cloak of Holland cloth, neither so good nor so bad as a
riding-cloak might be, but under it a handsome jerkin overlaid with
lace, and belted with a buff girdle in which was a light Spanish rapier.
His boots were russet cordovan, mid-thigh tall, and the rowels of his
clinking spurs were silver stars. He was large of frame, and his curly
hair was short and brown; so was his pointed beard. His eyes were
singularly bright and fearless, and bluff self-satisfaction marked his
stride; but his under lip was petulant, and he flicked his boot with his
riding-whip as he shouldered his way along.
“Ye cannot miss the place, sir,” called the tapster after him. “’Tis
just beyond Ned Alleyn’s, by the ditch. Ye’ll never mistake the ditch,
sir—Billingsgate is roses to it.”
“Oh, I’ll find it fast enough,” the stranger answered; “but he should
have sent to meet me, knowing I might come at any hour. ’Tis a felon
place for thieves; and I’ve not heart to skewer even a goose on such a
night as this.”
At the sudden breaking of voices upon the silence, Carew looked up, with
a quarrel ripe for picking in his eye. But seeing who spoke, such a
smile came rippling from the corners of his mouth across his dark,
unhappy face that it was as if a lamp of welcome had been lighted there.
“What, Ben!” he cried; “thou here? Why, bless thine heart, old gossip,
’tis good to see an honest face amid this pack of rogues.”
There was a surly muttering in the crowd. Carew threw his head back
haughtily and set his knuckles to his hip. “A pack of rogues, I say,” he
repeated sharply; “and a fig for the whole pack!” There was a certain
wildness in his eyes. No one stirred or made reply.
“Good! Gaston,” laughed the stranger, with a shrug; “picking thy company
still, I see, for quantity, and not for quality. No, thank ’e; none of
the tap for me. My Lord Hunsdon was made chamberlain in his father’s
stead to-day, and I’m off hot-foot with the news to Will’s.”
He gathered his cloak about him, and was gone.
“Ye’ve lost,” said the man who was dicing with Carew.
Nick stepped down from the tap-room door. His ears were tingling with
the sound: “I’m off hot-foot with the news to Will’s.”
“Hot-foot with the news to Will’s”?
To “Will’s”? “Will” who?
The man was a player, by his air.
Nick hurriedly looked around. Carew’s wild eyes were frozen upon the
dice. The bandy-legged man was drinking at a table near the door. The
crimson ribbon in his ear looked like a patch of blood.
He saw Nick looking at him, and made a horrible face. He would have
sworn likewise, but there was half a quart of ale in his can; so he
turned it up and drank instead. It was a long, long drink, and half his
face was buried in the pot.
When he put it down the boy was gone.