_It falls me here to write of Chastity.
The fayrest vertue, far above the rest_....
A sudden rush of feet on the stairs, a rusty swing-open of the thin
door, and a man thrust himself into the room, a man without a jerkin,
panting, sobbing, on the verge of collapse.
“Wessel,” words choked him, “stick me away somewhere, love of Our
Lady!”
Caxter rose, carefully closing his book, and bolted the door in some
concern.
“I’m pursued,” cried out Soft Shoes. “I vow there’s two short-witted
blades trying to make me into mincemeat and near succeeding. They saw
me hop the back wall!”
“It would need,” said Wessel, looking at him curiously, “several
battalions armed with blunderbusses, and two or three Armadas, to keep
you reasonably secure from the revenges of the world.”
Soft Shoes smiled with satisfaction. His sobbing gasps were giving way
to quick, precise breathing; his hunted air had faded to a faintly
perturbed irony.
“I feel little surprise,” continued Wessel.
“They were two such dreary apes.”
“Making a total of three.”
“Only two unless you stick me away. Man, man, come alive, they’ll be
on the stairs in a spark’s age.”
Wessel took a dismantled pike-staff from the corner, and raising it to
the high ceiling, dislodged a rough trap-door opening into a garret
above.
“There’s no ladder.”
He moved a bench under the trap, upon which Soft Shoes mounted,
crouched, hesitated, crouched again, and then leaped amazingly upward.
He caught at the edge of the aperture and swung back and forth, for a
moment, shifting his hold; finally doubled up and disappeared into the
darkness above. There was a scurry, a migration of rats, as the
trap-door was replaced;... silence.
Wessel returned to his reading-table, opened to the Legend of
Britomartis or of Chastity--and waited. Almost a minute later there
was a scramble on the stairs and an intolerable hammering at the door.
Wessel sighed and, picking up his candle, rose.
“Who’s there?”
“Open the door!”
“Who’s there?”
An aching blow frightened the frail wood, splintered it around the
edge. Wessel opened it a scarce three inches, and held the candle
high. His was to play the timorous, the super-respectable citizen,
disgracefully disturbed.
“One small hour of the night for rest. Is that too much to ask from
every brawler and--”
“Quiet, gossip! Have you seen a perspiring fellow?”
The shadows of two gallants fell in immense wavering outlines over the
narrow stairs; by the light Wessel scrutinized them closely.
Gentlemen, they were, hastily but richly dressed--one of them wounded
severely in the hand, both radiating a sort of furious horror. Waving
aside Wessel’s ready miscomprehension, they pushed by him into the
room and with their swords went through the business of poking
carefully into all suspected dark spots in the room, further extending
their search to Wessel’s bedchamber.
“Is he hid here?” demanded the wounded man fiercely.
“Is who here?”
“Any man but you.”
“Only two others that I know of.”
For a second Wessel feared that he had been too damned funny, for the
gallants made as though to prick him through.
“I heard a man on the stairs,” he said hastily, “full five minutes
ago, it was. He most certainly failed to come up.”
He went on to explain his absorption in “The Faerie Queene” but, for
the moment at least, his visitors, like the great saints, were
anaesthetic to culture.
“What’s been done?” inquired Wessel.
“Violence!” said the man with the wounded hand. Wessel noticed that
his eyes were quite wild. “My own sister. Oh, Christ in heaven, give
us this man!”
Wessel winced.
“Who is the man?”
“God’s word! We know not even that. What’s that trap up there?” he
added suddenly.
“It’s nailed down. It’s not been used for years.” He thought of the
pole in the corner and quailed in his belly, but the utter despair of
the two men dulled their astuteness.
“It would take a ladder for any one not a tumbler,” said the wounded
man listlessly.
His companion broke into hysterical laughter.
“A tumbler. Oh, a tumbler. Oh--”
Wessel stared at them in wonder.
“That appeals to my most tragic humor,” cried the man, “that no
one--oh, no one--could get up there but a tumbler.”
The gallant with the wounded hand snapped his good fingers
impatiently.
“We must go next door--and then on--”
Helplessly they went as two walking under a dark and storm-swept sky.
Wessel closed and bolted the door and stood a moment by it, frowning
in pity.
A low-breathed “Ha!” made him look up. Soft Shoes had already raised
the trap and was looking down into the room, his rather elfish face
squeezed into a grimace, half of distaste, half of sardonic amusement.
“They take off their heads with their helmets,” he remarked in a
whisper, “but as for you and me, Wessel, we are two cunning men.”
“Now you be cursed,” cried Wessel vehemently. “I knew you for a dog,
but when I hear even the half of a tale like this, I know you for such
a dirty cur that I am minded to club your skull.”
Soft Shoes stared at him, blinking.
“At all events,” he replied finally, “I find dignity impossible in
this position.”
With this he let his body through the trap, hung for an instant, and
dropped the seven feet to the floor.
“There was a rat considered my ear with the air of a gourmet,” he
continued, dusting his hands on his breeches. “I told him in the rat’s
peculiar idiom that I was deadly poison, so he took himself off.”
“Let’s hear of this night’s lechery!” insisted Wessel angrily.
Soft Shoes touched his thumb to his nose and wiggled the fingers
derisively at Wessel.
“Street gamin!” muttered Wessel.
“Have you any paper?” demanded Soft Shoes irrelevantly, and then
rudely added, “or can you write?”
“Why should I give you paper?”
“You wanted to hear of the night’s entertainment. So you shall, an you
give me pen, ink, a sheaf of paper, and a room to myself.”
Wessel hesitated.
“Get out!” he said finally.
“As you will. Yet you have missed a most intriguing story.”
Wessel wavered--he was soft as taffy, that man--gave in. Soft Shoes
went into the adjoining room with the begrudged writing materials and
precisely closed the door. Wessel grunted and returned to “The Faerie
Queene”; so silence came once more upon the house.