"A FRIEND IN NEED."
Lawrence Lee had meanwhile reached the town. Hardly, however, was he
well into the High Street before he was forced to rein up, impeded at
every step by the dense throng, crowding as far ahead as eye could
reach. Epping Fair was a small thing by comparison with this motley
medley of bawling wagoners, shrill-tongued farmers' wives haggling
over their butter and eggs, screaming children, chattering
apprentices banging about the shutters of their booths, barking
sheep-dogs, chasing their terrified charges back into the ranks,
braying donkies, clattering of pack-horses stumbling beneath their
burdens over the cobble-stones, and all to the tune of the several
church bells and clocks clanging out six. The unaccustomed senses of
Lawrence Lee lost their balance for a moment, and he closed his eyes
to assist their recovery, but opened them again in a twinkling at the
sound of a voice demanding in not too honeyed accents where he was
"shoving to?"
"It's you that's shoving," retorted Lee, looking down wrathfully at
the speaker, whose uplifted elbow was raised insultingly near Stars
and Garters' nose; and lifting his whip, but letting it fall again as
he perceived what for the first moment he imagined to be an old man.
A second glance, however, showed him that the shambling gait,
pasty-coloured cheeks, puckered features, and lacklustre eyes helped
to the composition of an individual of somewhere about his own number
of years.
[Sidenote: Tit for tat.]
"I'll teach you and your jade to trample down gentlemen in the
street," growled on this young old personage.
"Come, come!" laughed Lee good-humouredly, "I didn't mean to do
anything of the sort. You're not hurt, are you?"
"No thanks to you if I'm not," sourly returned the other.
"Oh, come now. Did you get out of bed left leg foremost?" again
laughed Lee.
"Right or left," ingenuously yawned the other, whom a game of basset
had detained from between the blankets far into the small hours; "if
they've been in bed at all, it's as much as they have."
Lawrence Lee's case was in degree a similar one; and his own weary
sensations made him feel some sort of indulgence for this
individual's sulky humour. "Oh, that accounts for it," he said to
himself.
"Accounts for what?" fired back the other, catching the _sotto voce_
comment.
"For your being so polite--and--and--"
"Well," fumed the other, "people who have any manners never stop
gawking in the middle of their remarks. It an't good breeding."
"Isn't it now? Well, for your looking so fresh and spruce then, I
took you for a scarecrow."
"And I take you for a clodpole," glared back his new acquaintance
with an affected laugh, "to whom 'twill be a real charity to give
twopence a week to learn manners."
[Sidenote: Crooked answers.]
"That begins at home; keep it for your own necessities, my friend.
You see I know how to be generous. But if you're really so amiably
disposed towards me--"
"Go about your business."
"That I shall be able to do, when I have gone miles enough to find
some one with a tongue in his head, civil enough to direct me to the
king's palace."
The other opened his dull eyes in a preternaturally wide-awake
manner, and bestowed a scrutinizing stare on Lawrence. "What may you
want there?"
"Folks with an ounce of manners never meet question with question.
It isn't good breeding--not in the part I come from."
"And where--"
"Where do I come from? That's a question whose answer will improve
by keeping. So out of the way, friend, if you can't direct me."
"Can't!" hysterically giggled the other. "Ho! Come, I like that Ho,
ho! Ha, ha! That's rich. Don't you know who I am, friend?"
"Haven't a notion," said Lawrence, looking away from him up and down
the street, and anxiously surveying its snug but unpalatial-looking
houses.
"How do you conceive, I wonder, how I come by these, my good fellow?"
he went on, pointing downwards.
"Padded a bit, aren't they?" said Lawrence, driven to utter the
passing comparison he had already unconsciously instituted in his own
mind, between the remarkable symmetry and plumpness of the pair of
silken-clad calves, and the meagre upper proportions of their
proprietor.
[Sidenote: A grand personage.]
"Psha! Bah! These, I mean;" and then Lawrence perceiving that not
the legs, but the pair of fine blue cloth breeches covering them,
were the indicated objects, said, honestly enough, he doubted not,
nay, he was sure they were, by many a long mile, the very finest
small-clothes he had ever seen, and must have cost a pretty penny.
"Out of His Majesty's own purse," replied the other, waxing
sweet-tempered as any cat rubbed under the chin, and elevating his
insignificant nose, as he buttoned on the coat he had carried
inside-out over his arm, and which Lawrence now perceived to be of
the same cerulean hue and glittering embroideries as the nether
garments. "Now," he went on, falling well back on to the heels of
his resetted shoes, and strutting forward a few paces. "Now do you
know who I am?"
"I haven't the ghost of a notion, I tell you," said Lawrence,
watching the exhibition with absent impatient eyes, into which,
however, a gleam of hopeful intelligence began to dawn; "but think I
know what you are. One of the king's lackey fellows."
[Sidenote: The lackey.]
"Sirrah!"
"For sure!" and Lawrence slapped his knee, and his face grew full of
animation. "How came I not to recognize the cut of you sooner, when
I've seen any number of you hanging as thick as thieves scores of
times--about the King's Arms, swilling down its cider--"
"To which King's Arms do you refer, my good fellow?" lisped the
lackey. "There's hundreds of 'em scattered over the country."
"Opposite Master Rumbold's."
"Never heard of the fellow," said the lackey, airily stroking his
little chin. "Hang me now if I have. Shouldn't be able to tell him
from Adam, renounce me now if I should. Rumbold? Rumbold?"
"Of the Rye House."
"Never so much as heard of the place," said the lackey, and slowly
shaking his head with the action and beatifically vacuous smile of a
Chinese image.
"That shows how little you know the king, then, for he knows it well
enough," contemptuously returned Lawrence, "as well as he does one of
his palaces. 'Twas a palace too itself, once upon a time; and 'tis
big enough for the squinniest eyes to see."
[Illustration: LAWRENCE ENCOUNTERS MR. FLIPPET]
"Cock-a-doodle-doo!" screeched the other. "Hear the clodhopper--all
his geese are swans. I apprehend you'll be for telling me next that
your Rye House is as fine an edifice as this;" and he languidly
extended his hand in the direction of the house beneath whose walls
they stood.
"This!" echoed Lawrence, laughing merrily. "This dog-hole of a place
hold a candle to our old Rye House! Come," and briskly twitching
Stars and Garters by the rein, he was about to push on, "how much
farther to the king's palace?"
[Sidenote: Mr. Alworth.]
"Under this archway and across the yard," said a voice immediately
behind him.
Lawrence's face fell blankly. If he had not quite anticipated walls
of gold and columns of ivory, he had conceived of something statelier
than this mean, patched-up-looking house. "I thank you, sir," he
contrived, however, to say at last, turning to the speaker and
lifting his cap deferentially, as he perceived him to be an elderly
man, somewhat tall and still fairly robust, in an iron-gray periwig,
and with a genial glance in his keen gray eyes, overshadowed by brows
still thick and dark. The Mr. Alworth, in fact, whose acquaintance
we have already made upon the heath.
"And if," continued Lawrence, "you will add to your obligation by
telling me how I may come to speak with the king--"
"Ho!" chuckled the lackey; "renounce me if ever I heard the like of
that!"
"I am no courtier," answered Mr. Alworth, suppressing the lackey's
outbreak by a look; "but I am acquainted with many that are," he went
on with a flicker of a smile; "and I often hear them say that His
Majesty is not difficult of access, provided you have, of course,
some letter of commendation."
"Not the ghost of one," said Lee with another blank stare.
"Ha! ha!" grinned the lackey in vast enjoyment of Lawrence's
discomfiture. "A pretty fellow! What do you say to that, Mr.
Alworth?"
"Silence, Mr. Flippet," said Alworth sternly. "You should have
provided yourself, my friend," he went on, turning again to Lee.
"You have doubtless influential neighbours--"
"Oh, yes!" said Lawrence, scratching his curls.
"Standing well at court?" continued Mr. Alworth.
"Well, I don't know so much about that. H'm, h'm--the fact is,"
stammered on Lawrence, "I--you see, I came off in--in just a bit of a
hurry."
"And the more haste the less speed. You will know that, when those
brown locks of yours have got a silver streak or two among them.
Well, I don't know what's to be done," he added cogitatively.
[Sidenote: How to see the King.]
"Go back where he came from, like a bad penny," interjected the
hugely delighted Flippet, but in a key too low to catch the ear of
Alworth, of whom he stood in wholesome awe. That personage having,
as he believed, and not without good cause, power to mar or to
advance his fortunes by reason of his intimate acquaintance with many
whose time was passed about the presence of the king. And Mr.
Flippet was fond of his place, in spite of his complaints concerning
its arduous and fatiguing duties. These consisted in the daily
washing and combing of a couple of little dogs, respectively named
Azor and Médor, two prime favourites among the posse of snubby-nosed,
silky-coated, fringy-pawed, lilliputian spaniels which his majesty
loved to have about him. As to the daily airing necessary for their
health, the king himself was their nurse; and the toilets of the
little creatures completed, Mr. Flippet was lord of his time, of
which the portion not devoted to slumber, eating and drinking, and
the basset-table, he spent in dawdling about.
"I fear there is nothing for it," said Mr. Alworth after a brief
speculative silence, "but for you to return home, and obtain such a
letter of introduction. 'Tis a case, I doubt, where, as the old
saying has it, 'the longest way round is the shortest way there.':
"Go back!" cried Lee in dismay. "Thirty miles if 'tis a yard. Sir!
sir! and 'tis a matter of life and death!"
"That's what they all say when they want to be fleecing the king or
you; an't it, Master Alworth?" sneered the lackey.
[Sidenote: Flippet's duties.]
The remark was, however, lost on Alworth, who was absorbed in the
study of Lawrence's countenance; but turning his eyes on Flippet at
last, he said: "Mr. Flippet, you are a person of considerable
influence with the gentlemen of the bed-chamber--according to your
own account."
[Sidenote: Brought to book.]
"Oh, Mr. Alworth!" blushingly rejoined Flippet, "you're too kind to
say so; renounce me if you're not."
"Denounce you, you mean sir!" sternly said Alworth. "And that, let
me tell you, is what I had more than half a mind for, when I heard
those two wretched little dogs yelping in the stable yonder to the
tune of a switch, as I passed some two hours since."
"Oh, Mr. Alworth!" yelped Flippet in his turn, and falling on his
knees, regardless of the puddles; "you'll never tell of me, Mr.
Alworth. 'Twould be a hanging matter for me, if it came to his
majesty's ears. Oh! Mr. Alworth, the lazy, pampered little beasts
put me out of patience, and I--I--"
"If all the pampered animals were treated by their deservings, some
would come worse off than Azor and Médor. Get up, you foolish
fellow. You cowardly pretence of a man, chastising two poor helpless
little dogs. Don't let me hear of it again."
"You shall not, Mr. Alworth," whined Flippet, inwardly resolved that
next time he had occasion to "correct" his charges, it should be with
closed windows and stuffed keyholes. "You shall not! Oh! don't tell
of me this once," he went on in an agony of entreaty, "and I'll--I'll
stand on my head to do you a service."
"You'll serve me better," smiled Alworth, "by keeping it where it is,
and giving your brains a chance of devising some means of bringing
this young man before the king, without an instant's delay."
"I--I--" gasped Flippet. "Oh! yes, to be sure; only, you see--"
"Yes or no," said Alworth inflexibly.
"Anything to oblige you--" began the unfortunate lackey.
[Sidenote: A friend not at court.]
"Very good," nodded Alworth. "'Tis but a small enough favour. But
for my own part, I have never so much as seen his majesty face to
face; and should have to be beholden to some of my friends for
introduction to him myself, though we are near enough neighbours, and
have had some business together. But my name, sir," he went on,
turning again to Lee, "is but plain Richard Alworth. To be heard of
across the way yonder, over against the parish church, at the sign of
the 'Silver Leopard.'"
"And my name," said Lawrence, "is Lee--Lawrence Lee."
"Of the Nether Hall Farm, by Hoddesdon?" cried Alworth, a sudden
light dispelling all the little clouds of mystification in the keen
eyes transfixing Lawrence.
"The same," nodded Lee, as he dismounted from his horse; "at your
service."
"The son of my good old friend and comrade!" and now tears glistened
up into the eyes. "The loyalest heart that ever beat," he went on,
seizing the hand of Lawrence. "We fought side by side on Worcester
Field; and he was struck down. Heaven does so often take the best
early back to itself. Well, well, he died worthily--as a man may be
proud to die--for King and Country. You look your father's son," he
went on, scanning the young man keenly; "every inch of you. But I
must not detain you now; and Mr. Flippet here is, I can see, dying to
acquit himself of his little obligation. So fare you well, Master
Lee, till you favour me with your company at supper to-night. Nay,
come, come; but I'll take no denial. Don't forget the 'Silver
Leopard.' Anybody will direct you. I'm well known. Your servant,
my lord," he went on, acknowledging the salutation of a gaily-dressed
gallant, who thereupon linked his arm familiarly into that of
Alworth, and led him away engaged in earnest conversation.
[Sidenote: The power of the purse.]
"Ay, there they go," muttered Flippet; "hand-in-glove, of course,
like he is with 'em all. That's what it is to have your pockets well
lined," continued Flippet, thrusting his hands into his own
highly-decorated, but, thanks to the past night's little amusements,
absolutely empty ones.
"A wealthy man?" said Lawrence.
"That's not the word for it," enviously replied Flippet. "No
courtier? No. I'll warrant Richard Alworth, the goldsmith, wouldn't
change his mouse-coloured broadcloth for all their fine feathers.
But he's a good sort I don't say anything against him. Leastways he
would be a good sort if he wasn't such a confounded, pig-headed,
obstinate old--"
[Sidenote: Stopped in time.]
"Come, Mr. Flippet, when you're ready," interrupted Lee.