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The White Company

by Arthur Conan Doyle · English · Gutenberg #903 · 832,097 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The White Company

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle


        
Release date: May 1, 1997 [eBook #903]
                Most recently updated: June 28, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/903

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller, Carlo Traverso, Tonya Allen, Samuel S. Johnson,
        and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHITE COMPANY ***







THE WHITE COMPANY

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle



   CONTENTS.


   I.       How the Black Sheep came forth from the Fold
   II.      How Alleyne Edricson came out into the World
   III.     How Hordle John cozened the Fuller of Lymington
   IV.      How the Bailiff of Southampton Slew the Two Masterless Men
   IV.      How a Strange Company Gathered at the “Pied Merlin”
    VI.      How Samkin Aylward Wagered his Feather-bed
   VII.     How the Three Comrades Journeyed through the Woodlands
   VIII.    The Three Friends
   IX.      How Strange Things Befell in Minstead Wood
   X.       How Hordle John Found a Man whom he Might Follow
   XI.      How a Young Shepherd had a Perilous Flock
   XII.     How Alleyne Learned More than he could Teach
   XIII.    How the White Company set forth to the Wars
   XIV.     How Sir Nigel sought for a Wayside Venture
   XV.      How the Yellow Cog sailed forth from Lepe
   XVI.     How the Yellow Cog fought the Two Rover Galleys
   XVII.    How the Yellow Cog crossed the Bar of Gironde
   XVIII.   How Sir Nigel Loring put a Patch upon his Eye
   XIX.     How there was Stir at the Abbey of St. Andrew's
   XX.      How Alleyne Won his Place in an Honorable Guild
   XXI.     How Agostino Pisano Risked his Head
   XXII.    How the Bowmen held Wassail at the “Rose de Guienne”
    XXIII.   How England held the Lists at Bordeaux
   XXIV.    How a Champion came forth from the East
   XXV.     How Sir Nigel wrote to Twynham Castle
   XXVI.    How the Three Comrades Gained a Mighty Treasure
   XXVII.   How Roger Club-foot was Passed into Paradise
   XXVIII.  How the Comrades came over the Marches of France
   XXIX.    How the Blessed Hour of Sight Came to the Lady Tiphaine
   XXX.     How the Brushwood Men came to the Chateau of Villefranche
   XXXI.    How Five Men held the Keep of Villefranche
   XXXII.   How the Company took Counsel Round the Fallen Tree
   XXXIII.  How the Army made the Passage of Roncesvalles
   XXXIV.   How the Company Made Sport in the Vale of Pampeluna
   XXXV.    How Sir Nigel Hawked at an Eagle
   XXXVI.   How Sir Nigel Took the Patch from his Eye
   XXXVII.  How the White Company came to be Disbanded
   XXXVIII.  Of the Home-coming to Hampshire




CHAPTER I. HOW THE BLACK SHEEP CAME FORTH FROM THE FOLD.


The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest
might be heard its musical clangor and swell. Peat-cutters on Blackdown
and fishers upon the Exe heard the distant throbbing rising and falling
upon the sultry summer air. It was a common sound in those parts--as
common as the chatter of the jays and the booming of the bittern. Yet
the fishers and the peasants raised their heads and looked questions at
each other, for the angelus had already gone and vespers was still far
off. Why should the great bell of Beaulieu toll when the shadows were
neither short nor long?

All round the Abbey the monks were trooping in. Under the long
green-paved avenues of gnarled oaks and of lichened beeches the
white-robed brothers gathered to the sound. From the vine-yard and
the vine-press, from the bouvary or ox-farm, from the marl-pits and
salterns, even from the distant iron-works of Sowley and the outlying
grange of St. Leonard's, they had all turned their steps homewards. It
had been no sudden call. A swift messenger had the night before sped
round to the outlying dependencies of the Abbey, and had left the
summons for every monk to be back in the cloisters by the third hour
after noontide. So urgent a message had not been issued within the
memory of old lay-brother Athanasius, who had cleaned the Abbey knocker
since the year after the Battle of Bannockburn.

A stranger who knew nothing either of the Abbey or of its immense
resources might have gathered from the appearance of the brothers some
conception of the varied duties which they were called upon to perform,
and of the busy, wide-spread life which centred in the old monastery.
As they swept gravely in by twos and by threes, with bended heads and
muttering lips there were few who did not bear upon them some signs of
their daily toil. Here were two with wrists and sleeves all spotted
with the ruddy grape juice. There again was a bearded brother with
a broad-headed axe and a bundle of faggots upon his shoulders, while
beside him walked another with the shears under his arm and the white
wool still clinging to his whiter gown. A long, straggling troop bore
spades and mattocks while the two rearmost of all staggered along under
a huge basket o' fresh-caught carp, for the morrow was Friday, and there
were fifty platters to be filled and as many sturdy trenchermen behind
them. Of all the throng there was scarce one who was not labor-stained
and weary, for Abbot Berghersh was a hard man to himself and to others.

Meanwhile, in the broad and lofty chamber set apart for occasions of
import, the Abbot himself was pacing impatiently backwards and forwards,
with his long white nervous hands clasped in front of him. His thin,
thought-worn features and sunken, haggard cheeks bespoke one who had
indeed beaten down that inner foe whom every man must face, but had none
the less suffered sorely in the contest. In crushing his passions he had
well-nigh crushed himself. Yet, frail as was his person there gleamed
out ever and anon from under his drooping brows a flash of fierce
energy, which recalled to men's minds that he came of a fighting stock,
and that even now his twin-brother, Sir Bartholomew Berghersh, was one
of the most famous of those stern warriors who had planted the Cross of
St. George before the gates of Paris. With lips compressed and clouded
brow, he strode up and down the oaken floor, the very genius and
impersonation of asceticism, while the great bell still thundered and
clanged above his head. At last the uproar died away in three last,
measured throbs, and ere their echo had ceased the Abbot struck a small
gong which summoned a lay-brother to his presence.

“Have the brethren come?” he asked, in the Anglo-French dialect used in
religious houses.

“They are here,” the other answered, with his eyes cast down and his
hands crossed upon his chest.

“All?”

“Two and thirty of the seniors and fifteen of the novices, most holy
father. Brother Mark of the Spicarium is sore smitten with a fever and
could not come. He said that--”

“It boots not what he said. Fever or no, he should have come at my call.
His spirit must be chastened, as must that of many more in this Abbey.
You yourself, brother Francis, have twice raised your voice, so it hath
come to my ears, when the reader in the refectory hath been dealing with
the lives of God's most blessed saints. What hast thou to say?”

The lay-brother stood meek and silent, with his arms still crossed in
front of him.

“One thousand Aves and as many Credos, said standing with arms
outstretched before the shrine of the Virgin, may help thee to remember
that the Creator hath given us two ears and but one mouth, as a token
that there is twice the work for the one as for the other. Where is the
master of the novices?”

“He is without, most holy father.”

“Send him hither.”

The sandalled feet clattered over the wooden floor, and the iron-bound
door creaked upon its hinges. In a few moments it opened again to admit
a short square monk with a heavy, composed face and an authoritative
manner.

“You have sent for me, holy father?”

“Yes, brother Jerome, I wish that this matter be disposed of with as
little scandal as may be, and yet it is needful that the example should
be a public one.” The Abbot spoke in Latin now, as a language which was
more fitted by its age and solemnity to convey the thoughts of two high
dignitaries of the order.

“It would, perchance, be best that the novices be not admitted,”
 suggested the master. “This mention of a woman may turn their minds from
their pious meditations to worldly and evil thoughts.”

“Woman! woman!” groaned the Abbot. “Well has the holy Chrysostom termed
them _radix malorum_. From Eve downwards, what good hath come from any
of them? Who brings the plaint?”

“It is brother Ambrose.”

“A holy and devout young man.”

“A light and a pattern to every novice.”

“Let the matter be brought to an issue then according to our old-time
monastic habit. Bid the chancellor and the sub-chancellor lead in the
brothers according to age, together with brother John, the accused, and
brother Ambrose, the accuser.”

“And the novices?”

“Let them bide in the north alley of the cloisters. Stay! Bid the
sub-chancellor send out to them Thomas the lector to read unto them
from the 'Gesta beati Benedicti.' It may save them from foolish and
pernicious babbling.”

The Abbot was left to himself once more, and bent his thin gray face
over his illuminated breviary. So he remained while the senior monks
filed slowly and sedately into the chamber seating themselves upon the
long oaken benches which lined the wall on either side. At the further
end, in two high chairs as large as that of the Abbot, though hardly as
elaborately carved, sat the master of the novices and the chancellor,
the latter a broad and portly priest, with dark mirthful eyes and a
thick outgrowth of crisp black hair all round his tonsured head. Between
them stood a lean, white-faced brother who appeared to be ill at ease,
shifting his feet from side to side and tapping his chin nervously with
the long parchment roll which he held in his hand. The Abbot, from his
point of vantage, looked down on the two long lines of faces, placid and
sun-browned for the most part, with the large bovine eyes and unlined
features which told of their easy, unchanging existence. Then he turned
his eager fiery gaze upon the pale-faced monk who faced him.

“This plaint is thine, as I learn, brother Ambrose,” said he. “May the
holy Benedict, patron of our house, be present this day and aid us in
our findings! How many counts are there?”

“Three, most holy father,” the brother answered in a low and quavering
voice.

“Have you set them forth according to rule?”

“They are here set down, most holy father, upon a cantle of sheep-skin.”

“Let the sheep-skin be handed to the chancellor. Bring in brother John,
and let him hear the plaints which have been urged against him.”

At this order a lay-brother swung open the door, and two other
lay-brothers entered leading between them a young novice of the order.
He was a man of huge stature, dark-eyed and red-headed, with a peculiar
half-humorous, half-defiant expression upon his bold, well-marked
features. His cowl was thrown back upon his shoulders, and his gown,
unfastened at the top, disclosed a round, sinewy neck, ruddy and corded
like the bark of the fir. Thick, muscular arms, covered with a reddish
down, protruded from the wide sleeves of his habit, while his white
shirt, looped up upon one side, gave a glimpse of a huge knotty leg,
scarred and torn with the scratches of brambles. With a bow to the
Abbot, which had in it perhaps more pleasantry than reverence, the
novice strode across to the carved prie-dieu which had been set apart
for him, and stood silent and erect with his hand upon the gold bell
which was used in the private orisons of the Abbot's own household. His
dark eyes glanced rapidly over the assembly, and finally settled with a
grim and menacing twinkle upon the face of his accuser.

The chancellor rose, and having slowly unrolled the parchment-scroll,
proceeded to read it out in a thick and pompous voice, while a subdued
rustle and movement among the brothers bespoke the interest with which
they followed the proceedings.

“Charges brought upon the second Thursday after the Feast of the
Assumption, in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and sixty-six,
against brother John, formerly known as Hordle John, or John of Hordle,
but now a novice in the holy monastic order of the Cistercians. Read
upon the same day at the Abbey of Beaulieu in the presence of the most
reverend Abbot Berghersh and of the assembled order.

“The charges against the said brother John are the following, namely, to
wit:

“First, that on the above-mentioned Feast of the Assumption, small beer
having been served to the novices in the proportion of one quart to
each four, the said brother John did drain the pot at one draught to
the detriment of brother Paul, brother Porphyry and brother Ambrose,
who could scarce eat their none-meat of salted stock-fish on account of
their exceeding dryness.”

At this solemn indictment the novice raised his hand and twitched his
lip, while even the placid senior brothers glanced across at each other
and coughed to cover their amusement. The Abbot alone sat gray and
immutable, with a drawn face and a brooding eye.

“Item, that having been told by the master of the novices that he should
restrict his food for two days to a single three-pound loaf of bran and
beans, for the greater honoring and glorifying of St. Monica, mother of
the holy Augustine, he was heard by brother Ambrose and others to say
that he wished twenty thousand devils would fly away with the said
Monica, mother of the holy Augustine, or any other saint who came
between a man and his meat. Item, that upon brother Ambrose reproving
him for this blasphemous wish, he did hold the said brother face
downwards over the piscatorium or fish-pond for a space during which
the said brother was able to repeat a pater and four aves for the better
fortifying of his soul against impending death.”

There was a buzz and murmur among the white-frocked brethren at this
grave charge; but the Abbot held up his long quivering hand. “What
then?” said he.

“Item, that between nones and vespers on the feast of James the Less the
said brother John was observed upon the Brockenhurst road, near the spot
which is known as Hatchett's Pond in converse with a person of the other
sex, being a maiden of the name of Mary Sowley, the daughter of the
King's verderer. Item, that after sundry japes and jokes the said
brother John did lift up the said Mary Sowley and did take, carry, and
convey her across a stream, to the infinite relish of the devil and the
exceeding detriment of his own soul, which scandalous and wilful falling
away was witnessed by three members of our order.”

A dead silence throughout the room, with a rolling of heads and
upturning of eyes, bespoke the pious horror of the community.

The Abbot drew his gray brows low over his fiercely questioning eyes.

“Who can vouch for this thing?” he asked.

“That can I,” answered the accuser. “So too can brother Porphyry, who
was with me, and brother Mark of the Spicarium, who hath been so much
stirred and inwardly troubled by the sight that he now lies in a fever
through it.”

“And the woman?” asked the Abbot. “Did she not break into lamentation
and woe that a brother should so demean himself?”

“Nay, she smiled sweetly upon him and thanked him. I can vouch it and so
can brother Porphyry.”

“Canst thou?” cried the Abbot, in a high, tempestuous tone. “Canst thou
so? Hast forgotten that the five-and-thirtieth rule of the order is that
in the presence of a woman the face should be ever averted and the eyes
cast down? Hast forgot it, I say? If your eyes were upon your sandals,
how came ye to see this smile of which ye prate? A week in your cells,
false brethren, a week of rye-bread and lentils, with double lauds and
double matins, may help ye to remembrance of the laws under which ye
live.”

At this sudden outflame of wrath the two witnesses sank their faces on
to their chests, and sat as men crushed. The Abbot turned his angry eyes
away from them and bent them upon the accused, who met his searching
gaze with a firm and composed face.

“What hast thou to say, brother John, upon these weighty things which
are urged against you?”

“Little enough, good father, little enough,” said the novice, speaking
English with a broad West Saxon drawl. The brothers, who were English
to a man, pricked up their ears at the sound of the homely and yet
unfamiliar speech; but the Abbot flushed red with anger, and struck his
hand upon the oaken arm of his chair.

“What talk is this?” he cried. “Is this a tongue to be used within the
walls of an old and well-famed monastery? But grace and learning have
ever gone hand in hand, and when one is lost it is needless to look for
the other.”

“I know not about that,” said brother John. “I know only that the words
come kindly to my mouth, for it was the speech of my fathers before me.
Under your favor, I shall either use it now or hold my peace.”

The Abbot patted his foot and nodded his head, as one who passes a point
but does not forget it.

“For the matter of the ale,” continued brother John, “I had come in hot
from the fields and had scarce got the taste of the thing before
mine eye lit upon the bottom of the pot. It may be, too, that I spoke
somewhat shortly concerning the bran and the beans, the same being poor
provender and unfitted for a man of my inches. It is true also that I
did lay my hands upon this jack-fool of a brother Ambrose, though, as
you can see, I did him little scathe. As regards the maid, too, it is
true that I did heft her over the stream, she having on her hosen and
shoon, whilst I had but my wooden sandals, which could take no hurt from
the water. I should have thought shame upon my manhood, as well as my
monkhood, if I had held back my hand from her.” He glanced around as
he spoke with the half-amused look which he had worn during the whole
proceedings.

“There is no need to go further,” said the Abbot. “He has confessed to
all. It only remains for me to portion out the punishment which is due
to his evil conduct.”

He rose, and the two long lines of brothers followed his example,
looking sideways with scared faces at the angry prelate.

“John of Hordle,” he thundered, “you have shown yourself during the two
months of your novitiate to be a recreant monk, and one who is unworthy
to wear the white garb which is the outer symbol of the spotless spirit.
That dress shall therefore be stripped from thee, and thou shalt be cast
into the outer world without benefit of clerkship, and without lot or
part in the graces and blessings of those who dwell under the care of
the Blessed Benedict. Thou shalt come back neither to Beaulieu nor to
any of the granges of Beaulieu, and thy name shall be struck off the
scrolls of the order.”

The sentence appeared a terrible one to the older monks, who had become
so used to the safe and regular life of the Abbey that they would have
been as helpless as children in the outer world. From their pious
oasis they looked dreamily out at the desert of life, a place full of
stormings and strivings--comfortless, restless, and overshadowed by
evil. The young novice, however, appeared to have other thoughts, for
his eyes sparkled and his smile broadened. It needed but that to add
fresh fuel to the fiery mood of the prelate.

“So much for thy spiritual punishment,” he cried. “But it is to thy
grosser feelings that we must turn in such natures as thine, and as
thou art no longer under the shield of holy church there is the less
difficulty. Ho there! lay-brothers--Francis, Naomi, Joseph--seize him
and bind his arms! Drag him forth, and let the foresters and the porters
scourge him from the precincts!”

As these three brothers advanced towards him to carry out the Abbot's
direction, the smile faded from the novice's face, and he glanced right
and left with his fierce brown eyes, like a bull at a baiting. Then,
with a sudden deep-chested shout, he tore up the heavy oaken prie-dieu
and poised it to strike, taking two steps backward the while, that none
might take him at a vantage.

“By the black rood of Waltham!” he roared, “if any knave among you lays
a finger-end upon the edge of my gown, I will crush his skull like a
filbert!” With his thick knotted arms, his thundering voice, and his
bristle of red hair, there was something so repellent in the man that
the three brothers flew back at the very glare of him; and the two rows
of white monks strained away from him like poplars in a tempest. The
Abbot only sprang forward with shining eyes; but the chancellor and the
master hung upon either arm and wrested him back out of danger's way.

“He is possessed of a devil!” they shouted. “Run, brother Ambrose,
brother Joachim! Call Hugh of the Mill, and Woodman Wat, and Raoul with
his arbalest and bolts. Tell them that we are in fear of our lives! Run,
run! for the love of the Virgin!”

But the novice was a strategist as well as a man of action. Springing
forward, he hurled his unwieldy weapon at brother Ambrose, and, as desk
and monk clattered on to the floor together, he sprang through the open
door and down the winding stair. Sleepy old brother Athanasius, at
the porter's cell, had a fleeting vision of twinkling feet and flying
skirts; but before he had time to rub his eyes the recreant had passed
the lodge, and was speeding as fast as his sandals could patter along
the Lyndhurst Road.



CHAPTER II. HOW ALLEYNE EDRICSON CAME OUT INTO THE WORLD.


Never had the peaceful atmosphere of the old Cistercian house been so
rudely ruffled. Never had there been insurrection so sudden, so short,
and so successful. Yet the Abbot Berghersh was a man of too firm a grain
to allow one bold outbreak to imperil the settled order of his great
household. In a few hot and bitter words, he compared their false
brother's exit to the expulsion of our first parents from the garden,
and more than hinted that unless a reformation occurred some others of
the community might find themselves in the same evil and perilous case.
Having thus pointed the moral and reduced his flock to a fitting state
of docility, he dismissed them once more to their labors and withdrew
himself to his own private chamber, there to seek spiritual aid in the
discharge of the duties of his high office.

The Abbot was still on his knees, when a gentle tapping at the door of
his cell broke in upon his orisons.

Rising in no very good humor at the interruption, he gave the word to
enter; but his look of impatience softened down into a pleasant and
paternal smile as his eyes fell upon his visitor.

He was a thin-faced, yellow-haired youth, rather above the middle size,
comely and well shapen, with straight, lithe figure and eager, boyish
features. His clear, pensive gray eyes, and quick, delicate expression,
spoke of a nature which had unfolded far from the boisterous joys and
sorrows of the world. Yet there was a set of the mouth and a prominence
of the chin which relieved him of any trace of effeminacy. Impulsive
he might be, enthusiastic, sensitive, with something sympathetic and
adaptive in his disposition; but an observer of nature's tokens would
have confidently pledged himself that there was native firmness and
strength underlying his gentle, monk-bred ways.

The youth was not clad in monastic garb, but in lay attire, though his
jerkin, cloak and hose were all of a sombre hue, as befitted one who
dwelt in sacred precincts. A broad leather strap hanging from his
shoulder supported a scrip or satchel such as travellers were wont to
carry. In one hand he grasped a thick staff pointed and shod with metal,
while in the other he held his coif or bonnet, which bore in its front a
broad pewter medal stamped with the image of Our Lady of Rocamadour.

“Art ready, then, fair son?” said the Abbot. “This is indeed a day of
comings and of goings. It is strange that in one twelve hours the Abbey
should have cast off its foulest weed and should now lose what we are
fain to look upon as our choicest blossom.”

“You speak too kindly, father,” the youth answered. “If I had my will I
should never go forth, but should end my days here in Beaulieu. It hath
been my home as far back as my mind can carry me, and it is a sore thing
for me to have to leave it.”

“Life brings many a cross,” said the Abbot gently. “Who is without them?
Your going forth is a grief to us as well as to yourself. But there
is no help. I had given my foreword and sacred promise to your father,
Edric the Franklin, that at the age of twenty you should be sent out
into the world to see for yourself how you liked the savor of it. Seat
thee upon the settle, Alleyne, for you may need rest ere long.”

The youth sat down as directed, but reluctantly and with diffidence.
The Abbot stood by the narrow window, and his long black shadow fell
slantwise across the rush-strewn floor.

“Twenty years ago,” he said, “your father, the Franklin of Minstead,
died, leaving to the Abbey three hides of rich land in the hundred of
Malwood, and leaving to us also his infant son on condition that we
should rear him until he came to man's estate. This he did partly
because your mother was dead, and partly because your elder brother,
now Socman of Minstead, had already given sign of that fierce and rude
nature which would make him no fit companion for you. It was his desire
and request, however, that you should not remain in the cloisters, but
should at a ripe age return into the world.”

“But, father,” interrupted the young man, “it is surely true that I am
already advanced several degrees in clerkship?”

“Yes, fair son, but not so far as to bar you from the garb you now wear
or the life which you must now lead. You have been porter?”

“Yes, father.”

“Exorcist?”

“Yes, father.”

“Reader?”

“Yes, father.”

“Acolyte?”

“Yes, father.”

“But have sworn no vow of constancy or chastity?”

“No, father.”

“Then you are free to follow a worldly life. But let me hear, ere you
start, what gifts you take away with you from Beaulieu? Some I already
know. There is the playing of the citole and the rebeck. Our choir will
be dumb without you. You carve too?”

The youth's pale face flushed with the pride of the skilled workman.
“Yes, holy father,” he answered. “Thanks to good brother Bartholomew, I
carve in wood and in ivory, and can do something also in silver and
in bronze. From brother Francis I have learned to paint on vellum, on
glass, and on metal, with a knowledge of those pigments and essences
which can preserve the color against damp or a biting air. Brother
Luke hath given me some skill in damask work, and in the enamelling of
shrines, tabernacles, diptychs and triptychs. For the rest, I know a
little of the making of covers, the cutting of precious stones, and the
fashioning of instruments.”

“A goodly list, truly,” cried the superior with a smile. “What clerk of
Cambrig or of Oxenford could say as much? But of thy reading--hast not
so much to show there, I fear?”

“No, father, it hath been slight enough. Yet, thanks to our good
chancellor, I am not wholly unlettered. I have read Ockham, Bradwardine,
and other of the schoolmen, together with the learned Duns Scotus and
the book of the holy Aquinas.”

“But of the things of this world, what have you gathered from your
reading? From this high window you may catch a glimpse over the wooden
point and the smoke of Bucklershard of the mouth of the Exe, and the
shining sea. Now, I pray you, Alleyne, if a man were to take a ship and
spread sail across yonder waters, where might he hope to arrive?”

The youth pondered, and drew a plan amongst the rushes with the point
of his staff. “Holy father,” said he, “he would come upon those parts
of France which are held by the King's Majesty. But if he trended to the
south he might reach Spain and the Barbary States. To his north would be
Flanders and the country of the Eastlanders and of the Muscovites.”

“True. And how if, after reaching the King's possessions, he still
journeyed on to the eastward?”

“He would then come upon that part of France which is still in dispute,
and he might hope to reach the famous city of Avignon, where dwells our
blessed father, the prop of Christendom.”

“And then?”

“Then he would pass through the land of the Almains and the great Roman
Empire, and so to the country of the Huns and of the Lithuanian pagans,
beyond which lies the great city of Constantine and the kingdom of the
unclean followers of Mahmoud.”

“And beyond that, fair son?”

“Beyond that is Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and the great river which
hath its source in the Garden of Eden.”

“And then?”

“Nay, good father, I cannot tell. Methinks the end of the world is not
far from there.”

“Then we can still find something to teach thee, Alleyne,” said the
Abbot complaisantly. “Know that many strange nations lie betwixt there
and the end of the world. There is the country of the Amazons, and the
country of the dwarfs, and the country of the fair but evil women who
slay with beholding, like the basilisk. Beyond that again is the kingdom
of Prester John and of the great Cham. These things I know for very
sooth, for I had them from that pious Christian and valiant knight, Sir
John de Mandeville, who stopped twice at Beaulieu on his way to and from
Southampton, and discoursed to us concerning what he had seen from the
reader's desk in the refectory, until there was many a good brother who
got neither bit nor sup, so stricken were they by his strange tales.”

“I would fain know, father,” asked the young man, “what there may be at
the end of the world?”

“There are some things,” replied the Abbot gravely, “into which it was
never intended that we should inquire. But you have a long road before
you. Whither will you first turn?”

“To my brother's at Minstead. If he be indeed an ungodly and violent
man, there is the more need that I should seek him out and see whether I
cannot turn him to better ways.”

The Abbot shook his head. “The Socman of Minstead hath earned an evil
name over the country side,” he said. “If you must go to him, see at
least that he doth not turn you from the narrow path upon which you have
learned to tread. But you are in God's keeping, and Godward should you
ever look in danger and in trouble. Above all, shun the snares of women,
for they are ever set for the foolish feet of the young. Kneel down, my
child, and take an old man's blessing.”

Alleyne Edricson bent his head while the Abbot poured out his heartfelt
supplication that Heaven would watch over this young soul, now going
forth into the darkness and danger of the world. It was no mere form for
either of them. To them the outside life of mankind did indeed seem to
be one of violence and of sin, beset with physical and still more with
spiritual danger. Heaven, too, was very near to them in those days.
God's direct agency was to be seen in the thunder and the rainbow,
the whirlwind and the lightning. To the believer, clouds of angels and
confessors, and martyrs, armies of the sainted and the saved, were
ever stooping over their struggling brethren upon earth, raising,
encouraging, and supporting them. It was then with a lighter heart and
a stouter courage that the young man turned from the Abbot's room, while
the latter, following him to the stair-head, finally commended him to
the protection of the holy Julian, patron of travellers.

Underneath, in the porch of the Abbey, the monks had gathered to give
him a last God-speed. Many had brought some parting token by which he
should remember them. There was brother Bartholomew with a crucifix of
rare carved ivory, and brother Luke with a white-backed psalter
adorned with golden bees, and brother Francis with the “Slaying of the
Innocents” most daintily set forth upon vellum. All these were
duly packed away deep in the traveller's scrip, and above them old
pippin-faced brother Athanasius had placed a parcel of simnel bread and
rammel cheese, with a small flask of the famous blue-sealed Abbey wine.
So, amid hand-shakings and laughings and blessings, Alleyne Edricson
turned his back upon Beaulieu.

At the turn of the road he stopped and gazed back. There was the
wide-spread building which he knew so well, the Abbot's house, the long
church, the cloisters with their line of arches, all bathed and mellowed
in the evening sun. There too was the broad sweep of the river Exe, the
old stone well, the canopied niche of the Virgin, and in the centre of
all the cluster of white-robed figures who waved their hands to him. A
sudden mist swam up before the young man's eyes, and he turned away upon
his journey with a heavy heart and a choking throat.



CHAPTER III. HOW HORDLE JOHN COZENED THE FULLER OF LYMINGTON.


It is not, however, in the nature of things that a lad of twenty, with
young life glowing in his veins and all the wide world before him,
should spend his first hours of freedom in mourning for what he had
left. Long ere Alleyne was out of sound of the Beaulieu bells he was
striding sturdily along, swinging his staff and whistling as merrily as
the birds in the thicket. It was an evening to raise a man's heart. The
sun shining slantwise through the trees threw delicate traceries across
the road, with bars of golden light between. Away in the distance
before and behind, the green boughs, now turning in places to a coppery
redness, shot their broad arches across the track. The still summer air
was heavy with the resinous smell of the great forest. Here and there a
tawny brook prattled out from among the underwood and lost itself again
in the ferns and brambles upon the further side. Save the dull piping of
insects and the sough of the leaves, there was silence everywhere--the
sweet restful silence of nature.

And yet there was no want of life--the whole wide wood was full of it.
Now it was a lithe, furtive stoat which shot across the path upon some
fell errand of its own; then it was a wild cat which squatted upon the
outlying branch of an oak and peeped at the traveller with a yellow and
dubious eye. Once it was a wild sow which scuttled out of the bracken,
with two young sounders at her heels, and once a lordly red staggard
walked daintily out from among the tree trunks, and looked around
him with the fearless gaze of one who lived under the King's own high
protection. Alleyne gave his staff a merry flourish, however, and the
red deer bethought him that the King was far off, so streaked away from
whence he came.

The youth had now journeyed considerably beyond the furthest domains of
the Abbey. He was the more surprised therefore when, on coming round a
turn in the path, he perceived a man clad in the familiar garb of the
order, and seated in a clump of heather by the roadside. Alleyne had
known every brother well, but this was a face which was new to him--a
face which was very red and puffed, working this way and that, as
though the man were sore perplexed in his mind. Once he shook both hands
furiously in the air, and twice he sprang from his seat and hurried down
the road. When he rose, however, Alleyne observed that his robe was much
too long and loose for him in every direction, trailing upon the ground
and bagging about his ankles, so that even with trussed-up skirts he
could make little progress. He ran once, but the long gown clogged him
so that he slowed down into a shambling walk, and finally plumped into
the heather once more.

“Young friend,” said he, when Alleyne was abreast of him, “I fear from
thy garb that thou canst know little of the Abbey of Beaulieu.”

“Then you are in error, friend,” the clerk answered, “for I have spent
all my days within its walls.”

“Hast so indeed?” cried he. “Then perhaps canst tell me the name of
a great loathly lump of a brother wi' freckled face an' a hand like a
spade. His eyes were black an' his hair was red an' his voice like
the parish bull. I trow that there cannot be two alike in the same
cloisters.”

“That surely can be no other than brother John,” said Alleyne. “I trust
he has done you no wrong, that you should be so hot against him.”

“Wrong, quotha?” cried the other, jumping out of the heather. “Wrong!
why he hath stolen every plack of clothing off my back, if that be a
wrong, and hath left me here in this sorry frock of white falding, so
that I have shame to go back to my wife, lest she think that I have
donned her old kirtle. Harrow and alas that ever I should have met him!”

“But how came this?” asked the young clerk, who could scarce keep from
laughter at the sight of the hot little man so swathed in the great
white cloak.

“It came in this way,” he said, sitting down once more: “I was passing
this way, hoping to reach Lymington ere nightfall when I came on this
red-headed knave seated even where we are sitting now. I uncovered and
louted as I passed thinking that he might be a holy man at his orisons,
but he called to me and asked me if I had heard speak of the new
indulgence in favor of the Cistercians. 'Not I,' I answered. 'Then the
worse for thy soul!' said he; and with that he broke into a long tale
how that on account of the virtues of the Abbot Berghersh it had been
decreed by the Pope that whoever should wear the habit of a monk of
Beaulieu for as long as he might say the seven psalms of David should be
assured of the kingdom of Heaven. When I heard this I prayed him on
my knees that he would give me the use of his gown, which after many
contentions he at last agreed to do, on my paying him three marks
towards the regilding of the image of Laurence the martyr. Having
stripped his robe, I had no choice but to let him have the wearing of my
good leathern jerkin and hose, for, as he said, it was chilling to
the blood and unseemly to the eye to stand frockless whilst I made my
orisons. He had scarce got them on, and it was a sore labor, seeing that
my inches will scarce match my girth--he had scarce got them on, I say,
and I not yet at the end of the second psalm, when he bade me do honor
to my new dress, and with that set off down the road as fast as feet
would carry him. For myself, I could no more run than if I had been sown
in a sack; so here I sit, and here I am like to sit, before I set eyes
upon my clothes again.”

“Nay, friend, take it not so sadly,” said Alleyne, clapping the
disconsolate one upon the shoulder. “Canst change thy robe for a jerkin
once more at the Abbey, unless perchance you have a friend near at
hand.”

“That have I,” he answered, “and close; but I care not to go nigh him in
this plight, for his wife hath a gibing tongue, and will spread the
tale until I could not show my face in any market from Fordingbridge
to Southampton. But if you, fair sir, out of your kind charity would be
pleased to go a matter of two bow-shots out of your way, you would do me
such a service as I could scarce repay.”

“With all my heart,” said Alleyne readily.

“Then take this pathway on the left, I pray thee, and then the
deer-track which passes on the right. You will then see under a great
beech-tree the hut of a charcoal-burner. Give him my name, good sir,
the name of Peter the fuller, of Lymington, and ask him for a change of
raiment, that I may pursue my journey without delay. There are reasons
why he would be loth to refuse me.”

Alleyne started off along the path indicated, and soon found the log-hut
where the burner dwelt. He was away faggot-cutting in the forest, but
his wife, a ruddy bustling dame, found the needful garments and tied
them into a bundle. While she busied herself in finding and folding
them, Alleyne Edricson stood by the open door looking in at her with
much interest and some distrust, for he had never been so nigh to a
woman before. She had round red arms, a dress of some sober woollen
stuff, and a brass brooch the size of a cheese-cake stuck in the front
of it.

“Peter the fuller!” she kept repeating. “Marry come up! if I were Peter
the fuller's wife I would teach him better than to give his clothes to
the first knave who asks for them. But he was always a poor, fond, silly
creature, was Peter, though we are beholden to him for helping to bury
our second son Wat, who was a 'prentice to him at Lymington in the year
of the Black Death. But who are you, young sir?”

“I am a clerk on my road from Beaulieu to Minstead.”

“Aye, indeed! Hast been brought up at the Abbey then. I could read it
from thy reddened cheek and downcast eye. Hast learned from the monks, I
trow, to fear a woman as thou wouldst a lazar-house. Out upon them! that
they should dishonor their own mothers by such teaching. A pretty world
it would be with all the women out of it.”

“Heaven forfend that such a thing should come to pass!” said Alleyne.

“Amen and amen! But thou art a pretty lad, and the prettier for thy
modest ways. It is easy to see from thy cheek that thou hast not spent
thy days in the rain and the heat and the wind, as my poor Wat hath been
forced to do.”

“I have indeed seen little of life, good dame.”

“Wilt find nothing in it to pay for the loss of thy own freshness. Here
are the clothes, and Peter can leave them when next he comes this way.
Holy Virgin! see the dust upon thy doublet! It were easy to see that
there is no woman to tend to thee. So!--that is better. Now buss me,
boy.”

Alleyne stooped and kissed her, for the kiss was the common salutation
of the age, and, as Erasmus long afterwards remarked, more used in
England than in any other country. Yet it sent the blood to his temples
again, and he wondered, as he turned away, what the Abbot Berghersh
would have answered to so frank an invitation. He was still tingling
from this new experience when he came out upon the high-road and saw a
sight which drove all other thoughts from his mind.

Some way down from where he had left him the unfortunate Peter was
stamping and raving tenfold worse than before. Now, however, instead of
the great white cloak, he had no clothes on at all, save a short woollen
shirt and a pair of leather shoes. Far down the road a long-legged
figure was running, with a bundle under one arm and the other hand to
his side, like a man who laughs until he is sore.

“See him!” yelled Peter. “Look to him! You shall be my witness. He shall
see Winchester jail for this. See where he goes with my cloak under his
arm!”

“Who then?” cried Alleyne.

“Who but that cursed brother John. He hath not left me clothes enough to
make a gallybagger. The double thief hath cozened me out of my gown.”

“Stay though, my friend, it was his gown,” objected Alleyne.

“It boots not. He hath them all--gown, jerkin, hosen and all. Gramercy
to him that he left me the shirt and the shoon. I doubt not that he will
be back for them anon.”

“But how came this?” asked Alleyne, open-eyed with astonishment.

“Are those the clothes? For dear charity's sake give them to me. Not the
Pope himself shall have these from me, though he sent the whole college
of cardinals to ask it. How came it? Why, you had scarce gone ere this
loathly John came running back again, and, when I oped mouth to reproach
him, he asked me whether it was indeed likely that a man of prayer would
leave his own godly raiment in order to take a layman's jerkin. He
had, he said, but gone for a while that I might be the freer for my
devotions. On this I plucked off the gown, and he with much show of
haste did begin to undo his points; but when I threw his frock down
he clipped it up and ran off all untrussed, leaving me in this sorry
plight. He laughed so the while, like a great croaking frog, that I
might have caught him had my breath not been as short as his legs were
long.”

The young man listened to this tale of wrong with all the seriousness
that he could maintain; but at the sight of the pursy red-faced man and
the dignity with which he bore him, the laughter came so thick upon him
that he had to lean up against a tree-trunk. The fuller looked sadly and
gravely at him; but finding that he still laughed, he bowed with much
mock politeness and stalked onwards in his borrowed clothes. Alleyne
watched him until he was small in the distance, and then, wiping the
tears from his eyes, he set off briskly once more upon his journey.



CHAPTER IV. HOW THE BAILIFF OF SOUTHAMPTON SLEW THE TWO MASTERLESS MEN.


The road along which he travelled was scarce as populous as most other
roads in the kingdom, and far less so than those which lie between the
larger towns. Yet from time to time Alleyne met other wayfarers, and
more than once was overtaken by strings of pack mules and horsemen
journeying in the same direction as himself. Once a begging friar came
limping along in a brown habit, imploring in a most dolorous voice to
give him a single groat to buy bread wherewith to save himself from
impending death. Alleyne passed him swiftly by, for he had learned from
the monks to have no love for the wandering friars, and, besides, there
was a great half-gnawed mutton bone sticking out of his pouch to prove
him a liar. Swiftly as he went, however, he could not escape the curse
of the four blessed evangelists which the mendicant howled behind him.
So dreadful are his execrations that the frightened lad thrust his
fingers into his ear-holes, and ran until the fellow was but a brown
smirch upon the yellow road.

Further on, at the edge of the woodland, he came upon a chapman and his
wife, who sat upon a fallen tree. He had put his pack down as a table,
and the two of them were devouring a great pasty, and washing it down
with some drink from a stone jar. The chapman broke a rough jest as he
passed, and the woman called shrilly to Alleyne to come and join them,
on which the man, turning suddenly from mirth to wrath, began to belabor
her with his cudgel. Alleyne hastened on, lest he make more mischief,
and his heart was heavy as lead within him. Look where he would, he
seemed to see nothing but injustice and violence and the hardness of man
to man.

But even as he brooded sadly over it and pined for the sweet peace of
the Abbey, he came on an open space dotted with holly bushes, where was
the strangest sight that he had yet chanced upon. Near to the pathway
lay a long clump of greenery, and from behind this there stuck straight
up into the air four human legs clad in parti-colored hosen, yellow and
black. Strangest of all was when a brisk tune struck suddenly up and
the four legs began to kick and twitter in time to the music. Walking on
tiptoe round the bushes, he stood in amazement to see two men bounding
about on their heads, while they played, the one a viol and the other
a pipe, as merrily and as truly as though they were seated in a choir.
Alleyne crossed himself as he gazed at this unnatural sight, and
could scarce hold his ground with a steady face, when the two dancers,
catching sight of him, came bouncing in his direction. A spear's length
from him, they each threw a somersault into the air, and came down upon
their feet with smirking faces and their hands over their hearts.

“A guerdon--a guerdon, my knight of the staring eyes!” cried one.

“A gift, my prince!” shouted the other. “Any trifle will serve--a purse
of gold, or even a jewelled goblet.”

Alleyne thought of what he had read of demoniac possession--the
jumpings, the twitchings, the wild talk. It was in his mind to repeat
over the exorcism proper to such attacks; but the two burst out
a-laughing at his scared face, and turning on to their heads once more,
clapped their heels in derision.

“Hast never seen tumblers before?” asked the elder, a black-browed,
swarthy man, as brown and supple as a hazel twig. “Why shrink from us,
then, as though we were the spawn of the Evil One?”

“Why shrink, my honey-bird? Why so afeard, my sweet cinnamon?” exclaimed
the other, a loose-jointed lanky youth with a dancing, roguish eye.

“Truly, sirs, it is a new sight to me,” the clerk answered. “When I saw
your four legs above the bush I could scarce credit my own eyes. Why is
it that you do this thing?”

“A dry question to answer,” cried the younger, coming back on to
his feet. “A most husky question, my fair bird! But how? A flask, a
flask!--by all that is wonderful!” He shot out his hand as he spoke, and
plucking Alleyne's bottle out of his scrip, he deftly knocked the neck
off, and poured the half of it down his throat. The rest he handed to
his comrade, who drank the wine, and then, to the clerk's increasing
amazement, made a show of swallowing the bottle, with such skill
that Alleyne seemed to see it vanish down his throat. A moment later,
however, he flung it over his head, and caught it bottom downwards upon
the calf of his left leg.

“We thank you for the wine, kind sir,” said he, “and for the ready
courtesy wherewith you offered it. Touching your question, we may tell
you that we are strollers and jugglers, who, having performed with much
applause at Winchester fair, are now on our way to the great Michaelmas
market at Ringwood. As our art is a very fine and delicate one, however,
we cannot let a day go by without exercising ourselves in it, to which
end we choose some quiet and sheltered spot where we may break our
journey. Here you find us; and we cannot wonder that you, who are new to
tumbling, should be astounded, since many great barons, earls, marshals
and knights, who have wandered as far as the Holy Land, are of one
mind in saying that they have never seen a more noble or gracious
performance. If you will be pleased to sit upon that stump, we will now
continue our exercise.”

Alleyne sat down willingly as directed with two great bundles on
either side of him which contained the strollers' dresses--doublets of
flame-colored silk and girdles of leather, spangled with brass and tin.
The jugglers were on their heads once more, bounding about with rigid
necks, playing the while in perfect time and tune. It chanced that out
of one of the bundles there stuck the end of what the clerk saw to be
a cittern, so drawing it forth, he tuned it up and twanged a harmony to
the merry lilt which the dancers played. On that they dropped their own
instruments, and putting their hands to the ground they hopped about
faster and faster, ever shouting to him to play more briskly, until at
last for very weariness all three had to stop.

“Well played, sweet poppet!” cried the younger. “Hast a rare touch on
the strings.”

“How knew you the tune?” asked the other.

“I knew it not. I did but follow the notes I heard.”

Both opened their eyes at this, and stared at Alleyne with as much
amazement as he had shown at them.

“You have a fine trick of ear then,” said one. “We have long wished to
meet such a man. Wilt join us and jog on to Ringwood? Thy duties shall
be light, and thou shalt have two-pence a day and meat for supper every
night.”

“With as much beer as you can put away,” said the other, “and a flask of
Gascon wine on Sabbaths.”

“Nay, it may not be. I have other work to do. I have tarried with you
over long,” quoth Alleyne, and resolutely set forth upon his journey
once more. They ran behind him some little way, offering him first
fourpence and then sixpence a day, but he only smiled and shook his
head, until at last they fell away from him. Looking back, he saw that
the smaller had mounted on the younger's shoulders, and that they stood
so, some ten feet high, waving their adieus to him. He waved back to
them, and then hastened on, the lighter of heart for having fallen in
with these strange men of pleasure.

Alleyne had gone no great distance for all the many small passages that
had befallen him. Yet to him, used as he was to a life of such quiet
that the failure of a brewing or the altering of an anthem had seemed
to be of the deepest import, the quick changing play of the lights and
shadows of life was strangely startling and interesting. A gulf seemed
to divide this brisk uncertain existence from the old steady round of
work and of prayer which he had left behind him. The few hours that had
passed since he saw the Abbey tower stretched out in his memory until
they outgrew whole months of the stagnant life of the cloister. As he
walked and munched the soft bread from his scrip, it seemed strange to
him to feel that it was still warm from the ovens of Beaulieu.

When he passed Penerley, where were three cottages and a barn, he
reached the edge of the tree country, and found the great barren heath
of Blackdown stretching in front of him, all pink with heather and
bronzed with the fading ferns. On the left the woods were still thick,
but the road edged away from them and wound over the open. The sun lay
low in the west upon a purple cloud, whence it threw a mild, chastening
light over the wild moorland and glittered on the fringe of forest
turning the withered leaves into flakes of dead gold, the brighter for
the black depths behind them. To the seeing eye decay is as fair as
growth, and death as life. The thought stole into Alleyne's heart as he
looked upon the autumnal country side and marvelled at its beauty. He
had little time to dwell upon it however, for there were still six good
miles between him and the nearest inn. He sat down by the roadside
to partake of his bread and cheese, and then with a lighter scrip he
hastened upon his way.

There appeared to be more wayfarers on the down than in the forest.
First he passed two Dominicans in their long black dresses, who swept by
him with downcast looks and pattering lips, without so much as a glance
at him. Then there came a gray friar, or minorite, with a good paunch
upon him, walking slowly and looking about him with the air of a man who
was at peace with himself and with all men. He stopped Alleyne to ask
him whether it was not true that there was a hostel somewhere in those
parts which was especially famous for the stewing of eels. The clerk
having made answer that he had heard the eels of Sowley well spoken of,
the friar sucked in his lips and hurried forward. Close at his heels
came three laborers walking abreast, with spade and mattock over their
shoulders. They sang some rude chorus right tunefully as they walked,
but their English was so coarse and rough that to the ears of a
cloister-bred man it sounded like a foreign and barbarous tongue. One
of them carried a young bittern which they had caught upon the moor, and
they offered it to Alleyne for a silver groat. Very glad he was to get
safely past them, for, with their bristling red beards and their fierce
blue eyes, they were uneasy men to bargain with upon a lonely moor.

Yet it is not always the burliest and the wildest who are the most to
be dreaded. The workers looked hungrily at him, and then jogged onwards
upon their way in slow, lumbering Saxon style. A worse man to deal with
was a wooden-legged cripple who came hobbling down the path, so weak and
so old to all appearance that a child need not stand in fear of him.
Yet when Alleyne had passed him, of a sudden, out of pure devilment, he
screamed out a curse at him, and sent a jagged flint stone hurtling past
his ear. So horrid was the causeless rage of the crooked creature, that
the clerk came over a cold thrill, and took to his heels until he was
out of shot from stone or word. It seemed to him that in this country
of England there was no protection for a man save that which lay in the
strength of his own arm and the speed of his own foot. In the cloisters
he had heard vague talk of the law--the mighty law which was higher than
prelate or baron, yet no sign could he see of it. What was the benefit
of a law written fair upon parchment, he wondered, if there were no
officers to enforce it. As it fell out, however, he had that very
evening, ere the sun had set, a chance of seeing how stern was the grip
of the English law when it did happen to seize the offender.

A mile or so out upon the moor the road takes a very sudden dip into a
hollow, with a peat-colored stream running swiftly down the centre
of it. To the right of this stood, and stands to this day, an ancient
barrow, or burying mound, covered deeply in a bristle of heather and
bracken. Alleyne was plodding down the slope upon one side, when he saw
an old dame coming towards him upon the other, limping with weariness
and leaning heavily upon a stick. When she reached the edge of the
stream she stood helpless, looking to right and to left for some ford.
Where the path ran down a great stone had been fixed in the centre of
the brook, but it was too far from the bank for her aged and uncertain
feet. Twice she thrust forward at it, and twice she drew back, until at
last, giving up in despair, she sat herself down by the brink and
wrung her hands wearily. There she still sat when Alleyne reached the
crossing.

“Come, mother,” quoth he, “it is not so very perilous a passage.”

“Alas! good youth,” she answered, “I have a humor in the eyes, and
though I can see that there is a stone there I can by no means be sure
as to where it lies.”

“That is easily amended,” said he cheerily, and picking her lightly up,
for she was much worn with time, he passed across with her. He could
not but observe, however, that as he placed her down her knees seemed to
fail her, and she could scarcely prop herself up with her staff.

“You are weak, mother,” said he. “Hast journeyed far, I wot.”

“From Wiltshire, friend,” said she, in a quavering voice; “three days
have I been on the road. I go to my son, who is one of the King's
regarders at Brockenhurst. He has ever said that he would care for me in
mine old age.”

“And rightly too, mother, since you cared for him in his youth. But when
have you broken fast?”

“At Lyndenhurst; but alas! my money is at an end, and I could but get a
dish of bran-porridge from the nunnery. Yet I trust that I may be able
to reach Brockenhurst to-night, where I may have all that heart can
desire; for oh! sir, but my son is a fine man, with a kindly heart of
his own, and it is as good as food to me to think that he should have a
doublet of Lincoln green to his back and be the King's own paid man.”

“It is a long road yet to Brockenhurst,” said Alleyne; “but here is such
bread and cheese as I have left, and here, too, is a penny which may
help you to supper. May God be with you!”

“May God be with you, young man!” she cried. “May He make your heart as
glad as you have made mine!” She turned away, still mumbling blessings,
and Alleyne saw her short figure and her long shadow stumbling slowly up
the slope.

He was moving away himself, when his eyes lit upon a strange sight, and
one which sent a tingling through his skin. Out of the tangled scrub on
the old overgrown barrow two human faces were looking out at him; the
sinking sun glimmered full upon them, showing up every line and feature.
The one was an oldish man with a thin beard, a crooked nose, and a broad
red smudge from a birth-mark over his temple; the other was a negro, a
thing rarely met in England at that day, and rarer still in the quiet
southland parts. Alleyne had read of such folk, but had never seen one
before, and could scarce take his eyes from the fellow's broad pouting
lip and shining teeth. Even as he gazed, however, the two came writhing
out from among the heather, and came down towards him with such a
guilty, slinking carriage, that the clerk felt that there was no good in
them, and hastened onwards upon his way.

He had not gained the crown of the slope, when he heard a sudden scuffle
behind him and a feeble voice bleating for help. Looking round, there
was the old dame down upon the roadway, with her red whimple flying on
the breeze, while the two rogues, black and white, stooped over her,
wresting away from her the penny and such other poor trifles as were
worth the taking. At the sight of her thin limbs struggling in weak
resistance, such a glow of fierce anger passed over Alleyne as set his
head in a whirl. Dropping his scrip, he bounded over the stream once
more, and made for the two villains, with his staff whirled over his
shoulder and his gray eyes blazing with fury.

The robbers, however, were not disposed to leave their victim until they
had worked their wicked will upon her. The black man, with the woman's
crimson scarf tied round his swarthy head, stood forward in the centre
of the path, with a long dull-colored knife in his hand, while the
other, waving a ragged cudgel, cursed at Alleyne and dared him to
come on. His blood was fairly aflame, however, and he needed no such
challenge. Dashing at the black man, he smote at him with such good will
that the other let his knife tinkle into the roadway, and hopped howling
to a safer distance. The second rogue, however, made of sterner stuff,
rushed in upon the clerk, and clipped him round the waist with a grip
like a bear, shouting the while to his comrade to come round and stab
him in the back. At this the negro took heart of grace, and picking up
his dagger again he came stealing with prowling step and murderous eye,
while the two swayed backwards and forwards, staggering this way and
that. In the very midst of the scuffle, however, whilst Alleyne braced
himself to feel the cold blade between his shoulders, there came a
sudden scurry of hoofs, and the black man yelled with terror and ran
for his life through the heather. The man with the birth-mark, too,
struggled to break away, and Alleyne heard his teeth chatter and felt
his limbs grow limp to his hand. At this sign of coming aid the clerk
held on the tighter, and at last was able to pin his man down and
glanced behind him to see where all the noise was coming from.

Down the slanting road there was riding a big, burly man, clad in a
tunic of purple velvet and driving a great black horse as hard as
it could gallop. He leaned well over its neck as he rode, and made a
heaving with his shoulders at every bound as though he were lifting the
steed instead of it carrying him. In the rapid glance Alleyne saw that
he had white doeskin gloves, a curling white feather in his flat velvet
cap, and a broad gold, embroidered baldric across his bosom. Behind him
rode six others, two and two, clad in sober brown jerkins, with the
long yellow staves of their bows thrusting out from behind their right
shoulders. Down the hill they thundered, over the brook and up to the
scene of the contest.

“Here is one!” said the leader, springing down from his reeking horse,
and seizing the white rogue by the edge of his jerkin. “This is one of
them. I know him by that devil's touch upon his brow. Where are your
cords, Peterkin? So! Bind him hand and foot. His last hour has come. And
you, young man, who may you be?”

“I am a clerk, sir, travelling from Beaulieu.”

“A clerk!” cried the other. “Art from Oxenford or from Cambridge? Hast
thou a letter from the chancellor of thy college giving thee a permit
to beg? Let me see thy letter.” He had a stern, square face, with bushy
side whiskers and a very questioning eye.

“I am from Beaulieu Abbey, and I have no need to beg,” said Alleyne, who
was all of a tremble now that the ruffle was over.

“The better for thee,” the other answered. “Dost know who I am?”

“No, sir, I do not.”

“I am the law!”--nodding his head solemnly. “I am the law of England
and the mouthpiece of his most gracious and royal majesty, Edward the
Third.”

Alleyne louted low to the King's representative. “Truly you came in good
time, honored sir,” said he. “A moment later and they would have slain
me.”

“But there should be another one,” cried the man in the purple coat.
“There should be a black man. A shipman with St. Anthony's fire, and a
black man who had served him as cook--those are the pair that we are in
chase of.”

“The black man fled over to that side,” said Alleyne, pointing towards
the barrow.

“He could not have gone far, sir bailiff,” cried one of the archers,
unslinging his bow. “He is in hiding somewhere, for he knew well, black
paynim as he is, that our horses' four legs could outstrip his two.”

“Then we shall have him,” said the other. “It shall never be said,
whilst I am bailiff of Southampton, that any waster, riever, draw-latch
or murtherer came scathless away from me and my posse. Leave that rogue
lying. Now stretch out in line, my merry ones, with arrow on string, and
I shall show you such sport as only the King can give. You on the left,
Howett, and Thomas of Redbridge upon the right. So! Beat high and low
among the heather, and a pot of wine to the lucky marksman.”

As it chanced, however, the searchers had not far to seek. The negro had
burrowed down into his hiding-place upon the barrow, where he might have
lain snug enough, had it not been for the red gear upon his head. As
he raised himself to look over the bracken at his enemies, the staring
color caught the eye of the bailiff, who broke into a long screeching
whoop and spurred forward sword in hand. Seeing himself discovered,
the man rushed out from his hiding-place, and bounded at the top of
his speed down the line of archers, keeping a good hundred paces to the
front of them. The two who were on either side of Alleyne bent their
bows as calmly as though they were shooting at the popinjay at the
village fair.

“Seven yards windage, Hal,” said one, whose hair was streaked with gray.

“Five,” replied the other, letting loose his string. Alleyne gave a gulp
in his throat, for the yellow streak seemed to pass through the man; but
he still ran forward.

“Seven, you jack-fool,” growled the first speaker, and his bow twanged
like a harp-string. The black man sprang high up into the air, and
shot out both his arms and his legs, coming down all a-sprawl among
the heather. “Right under the blade bone!” quoth the archer, sauntering
forward for his arrow.

“The old hound is the best when all is said,” quoth the bailiff of
Southampton, as they made back for the roadway. “That means a quart of
the best malmsey in Southampton this very night, Matthew Atwood. Art
sure that he is dead?”

“Dead as Pontius Pilate, worshipful sir.”

“It is well. Now, as to the other knave. There are trees and to spare
over yonder, but we have scarce leisure to make for them. Draw thy
sword, Thomas of Redbridge, and hew me his head from his shoulders.”

“A boon, gracious sir, a boon!” cried the condemned man.

“What then?” asked the bailiff.

“I will confess to my crime. It was indeed I and the black cook, both
from the ship 'La Rose de Gloire,' of Southampton, who did set upon the
Flanders merchant and rob him of his spicery and his mercery, for which,
as we well know, you hold a warrant against us.”

“There is little merit in this confession,” quoth the bailiff sternly.
“Thou hast done evil within my bailiwick, and must die.”

“But, sir,” urged Alleyne, who was white to the lips at these bloody
doings, “he hath not yet come to trial.”

“Young clerk,” said the bailiff, “you speak of that of which you know
nothing. It is true that he hath not come to trial, but the trial hath
come to him. He hath fled the law and is beyond its pale. Touch not that
which is no concern of thine. But what is this boon, rogue, which you
would crave?”

“I have in my shoe, most worshipful sir, a strip of wood which belonged
once to the bark wherein the blessed Paul was dashed up against the
island of Melita. I bought it for two rose nobles from a shipman who
came from the Levant. The boon I crave is that you will place it in my
hands and let me die still grasping it. In this manner, not only shall
my own eternal salvation be secured, but thine also, for I shall never
cease to intercede for thee.”

At the command of the bailiff they plucked off the fellow's shoe, and
there sure enough at the side of the instep, wrapped in a piece of fine
sendall, lay a long, dark splinter of wood. The archers doffed caps at
the sight of it, and the bailiff crossed himself devoutly as he handed
it to the robber.

“If it should chance,” he said, “that through the surpassing merits of
the blessed Paul your sin-stained soul should gain a way into paradise,
I trust that you will not forget that intercession which you have
promised. Bear in mind too, that it is Herward the bailiff for whom you
pray, and not Herward the sheriff, who is my uncle's son. Now, Thomas, I
pray you dispatch, for we have a long ride before us and sun has already
set.”

Alleyne gazed upon the scene--the portly velvet-clad official, the knot
of hard-faced archers with their hands to the bridles of their horses,
the thief with his arms trussed back and his doublet turned down upon
his shoulders. By the side of the track the old dame was standing,
fastening her red whimple once more round her head. Even as he looked
one of the archers drew his sword with a sharp whirr of steel and stept
up to the lost man. The clerk hurried away in horror; but, ere he
had gone many paces, he heard a sudden, sullen thump, with a choking,
whistling sound at the end of it. A minute later the bailiff and four
of his men rode past him on their journey back to Southampton, the other
two having been chosen as grave-diggers. As they passed Alleyne saw that
one of the men was wiping his sword-blade upon the mane of his horse.
A deadly sickness came over him at the sight, and sitting down by the
wayside he burst out weeping, with his nerves all in a jangle. It was a
terrible world thought he, and it was hard to know which were the most
to be dreaded, the knaves or the men of the law.



CHAPTER V. HOW A STRANGE COMPANY GATHERED AT THE “PIED MERLIN.”


The night had already fallen, and the moon was shining between the rifts
of ragged, drifting clouds, before Alleyne Edricson, footsore and weary
from the unwonted exercise, found himself in front of the forest inn
which stood upon the outskirts of Lyndhurst. The building was long and
low, standing back a little from the road, with two flambeaux blazing on
either side of the door as a welcome to the traveller. From one window
there thrust forth a long pole with a bunch of greenery tied to the end
of it--a sign that liquor was to be sold within. As Alleyne walked up to
it he perceived that it was rudely fashioned out of beams of wood, with
twinkling lights all over where the glow from within shone through the
chinks. The roof was poor and thatched; but in strange contrast to
it there ran all along under the eaves a line of wooden shields, most
gorgeously painted with chevron, bend, and saltire, and every heraldic
device. By the door a horse stood tethered, the ruddy glow beating
strongly upon his brown head and patient eyes, while his body stood back
in the shadow.

Alleyne stood still in the roadway for a few minutes reflecting
upon what he should do. It was, he knew, only a few miles further to
Minstead, where his brother dwelt. On the other hand, he had never seen
this brother since childhood, and the reports which had come to his ears
concerning him were seldom to his advantage. By all accounts he was a
hard and a bitter man.

It might be an evil start to come to his door so late and claim the
shelter of his roof. Better to sleep here at this inn, and then travel
on to Minstead in the morning. If his brother would take him in, well
and good.

He would bide with him for a time and do what he might to serve him.
If, on the other hand, he should have hardened his heart against him,
he could only go on his way and do the best he might by his skill as
a craftsman and a scrivener. At the end of a year he would be free
to return to the cloisters, for such had been his father's bequest. A
monkish upbringing, one year in the world after the age of twenty, and
then a free selection one way or the other--it was a strange course
which had been marked out for him. Such as it was, however, he had no
choice but to follow it, and if he were to begin by making a friend
of his brother he had best wait until morning before he knocked at his
dwelling.

The rude plank door was ajar, but as Alleyne approached it there came
from within such a gust of rough laughter and clatter of tongues that
he stood irresolute upon the threshold. Summoning courage, however, and
reflecting that it was a public dwelling, in which he had as much right
as any other man, he pushed it open and stepped into the common room.

Though it was an autumn evening and somewhat warm, a huge fire of heaped
billets of wood crackled and sparkled in a broad, open grate, some of
the smoke escaping up a rude chimney, but the greater part rolling out
into the room, so that the air was thick with it, and a man coming from
without could scarce catch his breath. On this fire a great cauldron
bubbled and simmered, giving forth a rich and promising smell. Seated
round it were a dozen or so folk, of all ages and conditions, who set
up such a shout as Alleyne entered that he stood peering at them through
the smoke, uncertain what this riotous greeting might portend.

“A rouse! A rouse!” cried one rough looking fellow in a tattered jerkin.
“One more round of mead or ale and the score to the last comer.”

“'Tis the law of the 'Pied Merlin,'” shouted another. “Ho there, Dame
Eliza! Here is fresh custom come to the house, and not a drain for the
company.”

“I will take your orders, gentles; I will assuredly take your orders,”
 the landlady answered, bustling in with her hands full of leathern
drinking-cups. “What is it that you drink, then? Beer for the lads of
the forest, mead for the gleeman, strong waters for the tinker, and wine
for the rest. It is an old custom of the house, young sir. It has been
the use at the 'Pied Merlin' this many a year back that the company
should drink to the health of the last comer. Is it your pleasure to
humor it?”

“Why, good dame,” said Alleyne, “I would not offend the customs of your
house, but it is only sooth when I say that my purse is a thin one. As
far as two pence will go, however, I shall be right glad to do my part.”

“Plainly said and bravely spoken, my suckling friar,” roared a deep
voice, and a heavy hand fell upon Alleyne's shoulder. Looking up, he saw
beside him his former cloister companion the renegade monk, Hordle John.

“By the thorn of Glastonbury! ill days are coming upon Beaulieu,” said
he. “Here they have got rid in one day of the only two men within their
walls--for I have had mine eyes upon thee, youngster, and I know that
for all thy baby-face there is the making of a man in thee. Then there
is the Abbot, too. I am no friend of his, nor he of mine; but he has
warm blood in his veins. He is the only man left among them. The others,
what are they?”

“They are holy men,” Alleyne answered gravely.

“Holy men? Holy cabbages! Holy bean-pods! What do they do but live and
suck in sustenance and grow fat? If that be holiness, I could show you
hogs in this forest who are fit to head the calendar. Think you it was
for such a life that this good arm was fixed upon my shoulder, or that
head placed upon your neck? There is work in the world, man, and it is
not by hiding behind stone walls that we shall do it.”

“Why, then, did you join the brothers?” asked Alleyne.

“A fair enough question; but it is as fairly answered. I joined them
because Margery Alspaye, of Bolder, married Crooked Thomas of Ringwood,
and left a certain John of Hordle in the cold, for that he was a
ranting, roving blade who was not to be trusted in wedlock. That was
why, being fond and hot-headed, I left the world; and that is why,
having had time to take thought, I am right glad to find myself back in
it once more. Ill betide the day that ever I took off my yeoman's jerkin
to put on the white gown!”

Whilst he was speaking the landlady came in again, bearing a broad
platter, upon which stood all the beakers and flagons charged to the
brim with the brown ale or the ruby wine. Behind her came a maid with
a high pile of wooden plates, and a great sheaf of spoons, one of which
she handed round to each of the travellers. Two of the company, who were
dressed in the weather-stained green doublet of foresters, lifted the
big pot off the fire, and a third, with a huge pewter ladle, served out
a portion of steaming collops to each guest. Alleyne bore his share and
his ale-mug away with him to a retired trestle in the corner, where he
could sup in peace and watch the strange scene, which was so different
to those silent and well-ordered meals to which he was accustomed.

The room was not unlike a stable. The low ceiling, smoke-blackened and
dingy, was pierced by several square trap-doors with rough-hewn ladders
leading up to them. The walls of bare unpainted planks were studded
here and there with great wooden pins, placed at irregular intervals
and heights, from which hung over-tunics, wallets, whips, bridles, and
saddles. Over the fireplace were suspended six or seven shields of
wood, with coats-of-arms rudely daubed upon them, which showed by their
varying degrees of smokiness and dirt that they had been placed there
at different periods. There was no furniture, save a single long
dresser covered with coarse crockery, and a number of wooden benches and
trestles, the legs of which sank deeply into the soft clay floor, while
the only light, save that of the fire, was furnished by three torches
stuck in sockets on the wall, which flickered and crackled, giving
forth a strong resinous odor. All this was novel and strange to the
cloister-bred youth; but most interesting of all was the motley circle
of guests who sat eating their collops round the blaze. They were a
humble group of wayfarers, such as might have been found that night
in any inn through the length and breadth of England; but to him they
represented that vague world against which he had been so frequently and
so earnestly warned. It did not seem to him from what he could see of it
to be such a very wicked place after all.

Three or four of the men round the fire were evidently underkeepers
and verderers from the forest, sunburned and bearded, with the quick
restless eye and lithe movements of the deer among which they lived.
Close to the corner of the chimney sat a middle-aged gleeman, clad in a
faded garb of Norwich cloth, the tunic of which was so outgrown that it
did not fasten at the neck and at the waist. His face was swollen and
coarse, and his watery protruding eyes spoke of a life which never
wandered very far from the wine-pot. A gilt harp, blotched with many
stains and with two of its strings missing, was tucked under one of his
arms, while with the other he scooped greedily at his platter. Next to
him sat two other men of about the same age, one with a trimming of fur
to his coat, which gave him a dignity which was evidently dearer to him
than his comfort, for he still drew it round him in spite of the hot
glare of the faggots. The other, clad in a dirty russet suit with a long
sweeping doublet, had a cunning, foxy face with keen, twinkling eyes and
a peaky beard. Next to him sat Hordle John, and beside him three other
rough unkempt fellows with tangled beards and matted hair--free laborers
from the adjoining farms, where small patches of freehold property
had been suffered to remain scattered about in the heart of the royal
demesne. The company was completed by a peasant in a rude dress of
undyed sheepskin, with the old-fashioned galligaskins about his legs,
and a gayly dressed young man with striped cloak jagged at the edges
and parti-colored hosen, who looked about him with high disdain upon his
face, and held a blue smelling-flask to his nose with one hand, while he
brandished a busy spoon with the other. In the corner a very fat man was
lying all a-sprawl upon a truss, snoring stertorously, and evidently in
the last stage of drunkenness.

“That is Wat the limner,” quoth the landlady, sitting down beside
Alleyne, and pointing with the ladle to the sleeping man. “That is he
who paints the signs and the tokens. Alack and alas that ever I should
have been fool enough to trust him! Now, young man, what manner of a
bird would you suppose a pied merlin to be--that being the proper sign
of my hostel?”

“Why,” said Alleyne, “a merlin is a bird of the same form as an eagle or
a falcon. I can well remember that learned brother Bartholomew, who is
deep in all the secrets of nature, pointed one out to me as we walked
together near Vinney Ridge.”

“A falcon or an eagle, quotha? And pied, that is of two several colors.
So any man would say except this barrel of lies. He came to me, look
you, saying that if I would furnish him with a gallon of ale, wherewith
to strengthen himself as he worked, and also the pigments and a board,
he would paint for me a noble pied merlin which I might hang along with
the blazonry over my door. I, poor simple fool, gave him the ale and all
that he craved, leaving him alone too, because he said that a man's mind
must be left untroubled when he had great work to do. When I came back
the gallon jar was empty, and he lay as you see him, with the board in
front of him with this sorry device.” She raised up a panel which was
leaning against the wall, and showed a rude painting of a scraggy and
angular fowl, with very long legs and a spotted body.

“Was that,” she asked, “like the bird which thou hast seen?”

Alleyne shook his head, smiling.

“No, nor any other bird that ever wagged a feather. It is most like a
plucked pullet which has died of the spotted fever. And scarlet too!
What would the gentles Sir Nicholas Boarhunte, or Sir Bernard Brocas, of
Roche Court, say if they saw such a thing--or, perhaps, even the King's
own Majesty himself, who often has ridden past this way, and who loves
his falcons as he loves his sons? It would be the downfall of my house.”

“The matter is not past mending,” said Alleyne. “I pray you, good dame,
to give me those three pigment-pots and the brush, and I shall try
whether I cannot better this painting.”

Dame Eliza looked doubtfully at him, as though fearing some other
stratagem, but, as he made no demand for ale, she finally brought the
paints, and watched him as he smeared on his background, talking the
while about the folk round the fire.

“The four forest lads must be jogging soon,” she said. “They bide at
Emery Down, a mile or more from here. Yeomen prickers they are, who tend
to the King's hunt. The gleeman is called Floyting Will. He comes from
the north country, but for many years he hath gone the round of the
forest from Southampton to Christchurch. He drinks much and pays little
but it would make your ribs crackle to hear him sing the 'Jest of Hendy
Tobias.' Mayhap he will sing it when the ale has warmed him.”

“Who are those next to him?” asked Alleyne, much interested. “He of the
fur mantle has a wise and reverent face.”

“He is a seller of pills and salves, very learned in humors, and rheums,
and fluxes, and all manner of ailments. He wears, as you perceive, the
vernicle of Sainted Luke, the first physician, upon his sleeve. May good
St. Thomas of Kent grant that it may be long before either I or mine
need his help! He is here to-night for herbergage, as are the others
except the foresters. His neighbor is a tooth-drawer. That bag at his
girdle is full of the teeth that he drew at Winchester fair. I warrant
that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work
and a trifle dim in the eye. The lusty man next him with the red head
I have not seen before. The four on this side are all workers, three
of them in the service of the bailiff of Sir Baldwin Redvers, and the
other, he with the sheepskin, is, as I hear, a villein from the midlands
who hath run from his master. His year and day are well-nigh up, when he
will be a free man.”

“And the other?” asked Alleyne in a whisper. “He is surely some very
great man, for he looks as though he scorned those who were about him.”

The landlady looked at him in a motherly way and shook her head. “You
have had no great truck with the world,” she said, “or you would have
learned that it is the small men and not the great who hold their noses
in the air. Look at those shields upon my wall and under my eaves. Each
of them is the device of some noble lord or gallant knight who hath
slept under my roof at one time or another. Yet milder men or easier to
please I have never seen: eating my bacon and drinking my wine with a
merry face, and paying my score with some courteous word or jest which
was dearer to me than my profit. Those are the true gentles. But your
chapman or your bearward will swear that there is a lime in the wine,
and water in the ale, and fling off at the last with a curse instead of
a blessing. This youth is a scholar from Cambrig, where men are wont to
be blown out by a little knowledge, and lose the use of their hands in
learning the laws of the Romans. But I must away to lay down the beds.
So may the saints keep you and prosper you in your undertaking!”

Thus left to himself, Alleyne drew his panel of wood where the light of
one of the torches would strike full upon it, and worked away with all
the pleasure of the trained craftsman, listening the while to the talk
which went on round the fire. The peasant in the sheepskins, who had
sat glum and silent all evening, had been so heated by his flagon of ale
that he was talking loudly and angrily with clenched hands and flashing
eyes.

“Sir Humphrey Tennant of Ashby may till his own fields for me,” he
cried. “The castle has thrown its shadow upon the cottage over long.
For three hundred years my folk have swinked and sweated, day in and day
out, to keep the wine on the lord's table and the harness on the lord's
back. Let him take off his plates and delve himself, if delving must be
done.”

“A proper spirit, my fair son!” said one of the free laborers. “I would
that all men were of thy way of thinking.”

“He would have sold me with his acres,” the other cried, in a
voice which was hoarse with passion. “'The man, the woman and their
litter'--so ran the words of the dotard bailiff. Never a bullock on the
farm was sold more lightly. Ha! he may wake some black night to find
the flames licking about his ears--for fire is a good friend to the
poor man, and I have seen a smoking heap of ashes where over night there
stood just such another castlewick as Ashby.”

“This is a lad of mettle!” shouted another of the laborers. “He dares to
give tongue to what all men think. Are we not all from Adam's loins, all
with flesh and blood, and with the same mouth that must needs have food
and drink? Where all this difference then between the ermine cloak and
the leathern tunic, if what they cover is the same?”

“Aye, Jenkin,” said another, “our foeman is under the stole and the
vestment as much as under the helmet and plate of proof. We have as much
to fear from the tonsure as from the hauberk. Strike at the noble and
the priest shrieks, strike at priest and the noble lays his hand upon
glaive. They are twin thieves who live upon our labor.”

“It would take a clever man to live upon thy labor, Hugh,” remarked one
of the foresters, “seeing that the half of thy time is spent in swilling
mead at the 'Pied Merlin.'”

“Better that than stealing the deer that thou art placed to guard, like
some folk I know.”

“If you dare open that swine's mouth against me,” shouted the woodman,
“I'll crop your ears for you before the hangman has the doing of it,
thou long-jawed lackbrain.”

“Nay, gentles, gentles!” cried Dame Eliza, in a singsong heedless voice,
which showed that such bickerings were nightly things among her guests.
“No brawling or brabbling, gentles! Take heed to the good name of the
house.”

“Besides, if it comes to the cropping of ears, there are other folk who
may say their say,” quoth the third laborer. “We are all freemen, and
I trow that a yeoman's cudgel is as good as a forester's knife. By
St. Anselm! it would be an evil day if we had to bend to our master's
servants as well as to our masters.”

“No man is my master save the King,” the woodman answered. “Who is
there, save a false traitor, who would refuse to serve the English
king?”

“I know not about the English king,” said the man Jenkin. “What sort of
English king is it who cannot lay his tongue to a word of English? You
mind last year when he came down to Malwood, with his inner marshal and
his outer marshal, his justiciar, his seneschal, and his four and twenty
guardsmen. One noontide I was by Franklin Swinton's gate, when up he
rides with a yeoman pricker at his heels. 'Ouvre,' he cried, 'ouvre,' or
some such word, making signs for me to open the gate; and then 'Merci,'
as though he were adrad of me. And you talk of an English king?”

“I do not marvel at it,” cried the Cambrig scholar, speaking in the high
drawling voice which was common among his class. “It is not a tongue
for men of sweet birth and delicate upbringing. It is a foul, snorting,
snarling manner of speech. For myself, I swear by the learned Polycarp
that I have most ease with Hebrew, and after that perchance with
Arabian.”

“I will not hear a word said against old King Ned,” cried Hordle John
in a voice like a bull. “What if he is fond of a bright eye and a saucy
face. I know one of his subjects who could match him at that. If
he cannot speak like an Englishman I trow that he can fight like an
Englishman, and he was hammering at the gates of Paris while ale-house
topers were grutching and grumbling at home.”

This loud speech, coming from a man of so formidable an appearance,
somewhat daunted the disloyal party, and they fell into a sullen
silence, which enabled Alleyne to hear something of the talk which was
going on in the further corner between the physician, the tooth-drawer
and the gleeman.

“A raw rat,” the man of drugs was saying, “that is what it is ever my
use to order for the plague--a raw rat with its paunch cut open.”

“Might it not be broiled, most learned sir?” asked the tooth-drawer. “A
raw rat sounds a most sorry and cheerless dish.”

“Not to be eaten,” cried the physician, in high disdain. “Why should any
man eat such a thing?”

“Why indeed?” asked the gleeman, taking a long drain at his tankard.

“It is to be placed on the sore or swelling. For the rat, mark you,
being a foul-living creature, hath a natural drawing or affinity for
all foul things, so that the noxious humors pass from the man into the
unclean beast.”

“Would that cure the black death, master?” asked Jenkin.

“Aye, truly would it, my fair son.”

“Then I am right glad that there were none who knew of it. The black
death is the best friend that ever the common folk had in England.”

“How that then?” asked Hordle John.

“Why, friend, it is easy to see that you have not worked with your hands
or you would not need to ask. When half the folk in the country were
dead it was then that the other half could pick and choose who they
would work for, and for what wage. That is why I say that the murrain
was the best friend that the borel folk ever had.”

“True, Jenkin,” said another workman; “but it is not all good that is
brought by it either. We well know that through it corn-land has been
turned into pasture, so that flocks of sheep with perchance a single
shepherd wander now where once a hundred men had work and wage.”

“There is no great harm in that,” remarked the tooth-drawer, “for the
sheep give many folk their living. There is not only the herd, but the
shearer and brander, and then the dresser, the curer, the dyer, the
fuller, the webster, the merchant, and a score of others.”

“If it come to that.” said one of the foresters, “the tough meat of them
will wear folks teeth out, and there is a trade for the man who can draw
them.”

A general laugh followed this sally at the dentist's expense, in the
midst of which the gleeman placed his battered harp upon his knee, and
began to pick out a melody upon the frayed strings.

“Elbow room for Floyting Will!” cried the woodmen. “Twang us a merry
lilt.”

“Aye, aye, the 'Lasses of Lancaster,'” one suggested.

“Or 'St. Simeon and the Devil.'”

“Or the 'Jest of Hendy Tobias.'”

To all these suggestions the jongleur made no response, but sat with his
eye fixed abstractedly upon the ceiling, as one who calls words to his
mind. Then, with a sudden sweep across the strings, he broke out into
a song so gross and so foul that ere he had finished a verse the
pure-minded lad sprang to his feet with the blood tingling in his face.

“How can you sing such things?” he cried. “You, too, an old man who
should be an example to others.”

The wayfarers all gazed in the utmost astonishment at the interruption.

“By the holy Dicon of Hampole! our silent clerk has found his tongue,”
 said one of the woodmen. “What is amiss with the song then? How has it
offended your babyship?”

“A milder and better mannered song hath never been heard within these
walls,” cried another. “What sort of talk is this for a public inn?”

“Shall it be a litany, my good clerk?” shouted a third; “or would a hymn
be good enough to serve?”

The jongleur had put down his harp in high dudgeon. “Am I to be preached
to by a child?” he cried, staring across at Alleyne with an inflamed and
angry countenance. “Is a hairless infant to raise his tongue against me,
when I have sung in every fair from Tweed to Trent, and have twice been
named aloud by the High Court of the Minstrels at Beverley? I shall sing
no more to-night.”

“Nay, but you will so,” said one of the laborers. “Hi, Dame Eliza, bring
a stoup of your best to Will to clear his throat. Go forward with thy
song, and if our girl-faced clerk does not love it he can take to the
road and go whence he came.”

“Nay, but not too fast,” broke in Hordle John. “There are two words in
this matter. It may be that my little comrade has been over quick in
reproof, he having gone early into the cloisters and seen little of the
rough ways and words of the world. Yet there is truth in what he says,
for, as you know well, the song was not of the cleanest. I shall stand
by him, therefore, and he shall neither be put out on the road, nor
shall his ears be offended indoors.”

“Indeed, your high and mighty grace,” sneered one of the yeomen, “have
you in sooth so ordained?”

“By the Virgin!” said a second, “I think that you may both chance to
find yourselves upon the road before long.”

“And so belabored as to be scarce able to crawl along it,” cried a
third.

“Nay, I shall go! I shall go!” said Alleyne hurriedly, as Hordle John
began to slowly roll up his sleeve, and bare an arm like a leg of
mutton. “I would not have you brawl about me.”

“Hush! lad,” he whispered, “I count them not a fly. They may find they
have more tow on their distaff than they know how to spin. Stand thou
clear and give me space.”

Both the foresters and the laborers had risen from their bench, and Dame
Eliza and the travelling doctor had flung themselves between the two
parties with soft words and soothing gestures, when the door of the
“Pied Merlin” was flung violently open, and the attention of the company
was drawn from their own quarrel to the new-comer who had burst so
unceremoniously upon them.



CHAPTER VI. HOW SAMKIN AYLWARD WAGERED HIS FEATHER-BED.


He was a middle-sized man, of most massive and robust build, with an
arching chest and extraordinary breadth of shoulder. His shaven face was
as brown as a hazel-nut, tanned and dried by the weather, with harsh,
well-marked features, which were not improved by a long white scar which
stretched from the corner of his left nostril to the angle of the jaw.
His eyes were bright and searching, with something of menace and of
authority in their quick glitter, and his mouth was firm-set and hard,
as befitted one who was wont to set his face against danger. A straight
sword by his side and a painted long-bow jutting over his shoulder
proclaimed his profession, while his scarred brigandine of chain-mail
and his dinted steel cap showed that he was no holiday soldier, but one
who was even now fresh from the wars. A white surcoat with the lion
of St. George in red upon the centre covered his broad breast, while a
sprig of new-plucked broom at the side of his head-gear gave a touch of
gayety and grace to his grim, war-worn equipment.

“Ha!” he cried, blinking like an owl in the sudden glare. “Good even
to you, comrades! Hola! a woman, by my soul!” and in an instant he had
clipped Dame Eliza round the waist and was kissing her violently. His
eye happening to wander upon the maid, however, he instantly abandoned
the mistress and danced off after the other, who scurried in confusion
up one of the ladders, and dropped the heavy trap-door upon her pursuer.
He then turned back and saluted the landlady once more with the utmost
relish and satisfaction.

“La petite is frightened,” said he. “Ah, c'est l'amour, l'amour! Curse
this trick of French, which will stick to my throat. I must wash it out
with some good English ale. By my hilt! camarades, there is no drop of
French blood in my body, and I am a true English bowman, Samkin Aylward
by name; and I tell you, mes amis, that it warms my very heart-roots to
set my feet on the dear old land once more. When I came off the galley
at Hythe, this very day, I down on my bones, and I kissed the good brown
earth, as I kiss thee now, ma belle, for it was eight long years since
I had seen it. The very smell of it seemed life to me. But where are my
six rascals? Hola, there! En avant!”

At the order, six men, dressed as common drudges, marched solemnly
into the room, each bearing a huge bundle upon his head. They formed in
military line, while the soldier stood in front of them with stern eyes,
checking off their several packages.

“Number one--a French feather-bed with the two counter-panes of white
sendall,” said he.

“Here, worthy sir,” answered the first of the bearers, laying a great
package down in the corner.

“Number two--seven ells of red Turkey cloth and nine ells of cloth of
gold. Put it down by the other. Good dame, I prythee give each of these
men a bottrine of wine or a jack of ale. Three--a full piece of white
Genoan velvet with twelve ells of purple silk. Thou rascal, there is
dirt on the hem! Thou hast brushed it against some wall, coquin!”

“Not I, most worthy sir,” cried the carrier, shrinking away from the
fierce eyes of the bowman.

“I say yes, dog! By the three kings! I have seen a man gasp out his last
breath for less. Had you gone through the pain and unease that I have
done to earn these things you would be at more care. I swear by my ten
finger-bones that there is not one of them that hath not cost its weight
in French blood! Four--an incense-boat, a ewer of silver, a gold buckle
and a cope worked in pearls. I found them, camarades, at the Church of
St. Denis in the harrying of Narbonne, and I took them away with me lest
they fall into the hands of the wicked. Five--a cloak of fur turned
up with minever, a gold goblet with stand and cover, and a box of
rose-colored sugar. See that you lay them together. Six--a box of
monies, three pounds of Limousine gold-work, a pair of boots, silver
tagged, and, lastly, a store of naping linen. So, the tally is complete!
Here is a groat apiece, and you may go.”

“Go whither, worthy sir?” asked one of the carriers.

“Whither? To the devil if ye will. What is it to me? Now, ma belle, to
supper. A pair of cold capons, a mortress of brawn, or what you will,
with a flask or two of the right Gascony. I have crowns in my pouch,
my sweet, and I mean to spend them. Bring in wine while the food is
dressing. Buvons my brave lads; you shall each empty a stoup with me.”

Here was an offer which the company in an English inn at that or any
other date are slow to refuse. The flagons were re-gathered and came
back with the white foam dripping over their edges. Two of the woodmen
and three of the laborers drank their portions off hurriedly and trooped
off together, for their homes were distant and the hour late. The
others, however, drew closer, leaving the place of honor to the right
of the gleeman to the free-handed new-comer. He had thrown off his steel
cap and his brigandine, and had placed them with his sword, his quiver
and his painted long-bow, on the top of his varied heap of plunder in
the corner. Now, with his thick and somewhat bowed legs stretched in
front of the blaze, his green jerkin thrown open, and a great quart
pot held in his corded fist, he looked the picture of comfort and of
good-fellowship. His hard-set face had softened, and the thick crop of
crisp brown curls which had been hidden by his helmet grew low upon his
massive neck. He might have been forty years of age, though hard toil
and harder pleasure had left their grim marks upon his features. Alleyne
had ceased painting his pied merlin, and sat, brush in hand, staring
with open eyes at a type of man so strange and so unlike any whom he had
met. Men had been good or had been bad in his catalogue, but here was a
man who was fierce one instant and gentle the next, with a curse on his
lips and a smile in his eye. What was to be made of such a man as that?

It chanced that the soldier looked up and saw the questioning glance
which the young clerk threw upon him. He raised his flagon and drank to
him, with a merry flash of his white teeth.

“A toi, mon garcon,” he cried. “Hast surely never seen a man-at-arms,
that thou shouldst stare so?”

“I never have,” said Alleyne frankly, “though I have oft heard talk of
their deeds.”

“By my hilt!” cried the other, “if you were to cross the narrow sea you
would find them as thick as bees at a tee-hole. Couldst not shoot a
bolt down any street of Bordeaux, I warrant, but you would pink archer,
squire, or knight. There are more breastplates than gaberdines to be
seen, I promise you.”

“And where got you all these pretty things?” asked Hordle John, pointing
at the heap in the corner.

“Where there is as much more waiting for any brave lad to pick it up.
Where a good man can always earn a good wage, and where he need look
upon no man as his paymaster, but just reach his hand out and help
himself. Aye, it is a goodly and a proper life. And here I drink to
mine old comrades, and the saints be with them! Arouse all together,
mes enfants, under pain of my displeasure. To Sir Claude Latour and the
White Company!”

“Sir Claude Latour and the White Company!” shouted the travellers,
draining off their goblets.

“Well quaffed, mes braves! It is for me to fill your cups again, since
you have drained them to my dear lads of the white jerkin. Hola! mon
ange, bring wine and ale. How runs the old stave?--

        We'll drink all together
        To the gray goose feather
        And the land where the gray goose flew.”

He roared out the catch in a harsh, unmusical voice, and ended with a
shout of laughter. “I trust that I am a better bowman than a minstrel,”
 said he.

“Methinks I have some remembrance of the lilt,” remarked the gleeman,
running his fingers over the strings. “Hoping that it will give thee no
offence, most holy sir”--with a vicious snap at Alleyne--“and with the
kind permit of the company, I will even venture upon it.”

Many a time in the after days Alleyne Edricson seemed to see that scene,
for all that so many which were stranger and more stirring were soon
to crowd upon him. The fat, red-faced gleeman, the listening group, the
archer with upraised finger beating in time to the music, and the huge
sprawling figure of Hordle John, all thrown into red light and black
shadow by the flickering fire in the centre--memory was to come often
lovingly back to it. At the time he was lost in admiration at the deft
way in which the jongleur disguised the loss of his two missing strings,
and the lusty, hearty fashion in which he trolled out his little ballad
of the outland bowmen, which ran in some such fashion as this:

          What of the bow?
            The bow was made in England:
        Of true wood, of yew wood,
          The wood of English bows;
            So men who are free
            Love the old yew tree
        And the land where the yew tree grows.

          What of the cord?
            The cord was made in England:
        A rough cord, a tough cord,
          A cord that bowmen love;
            So we'll drain our jacks
            To the English flax
        And the land where the hemp was wove.

          What of the shaft?
            The shaft was cut in England:
        A long shaft, a strong shaft,
          Barbed and trim and true;
            So we'll drink all together
            To the gray goose feather
        And the land where the gray goose flew.

          What of the men?
            The men were bred in England:
        The bowman--the yeoman--
          The lads of dale and fell
            Here's to you--and to you;
            To the hearts that are true
        And the land where the true hearts dwell.

“Well sung, by my hilt!” shouted the archer in high delight. “Many a
night have I heard that song, both in the old war-time and after in the
days of the White Company, when Black Simon of Norwich would lead the
stave, and four hundred of the best bowmen that ever drew string would
come roaring in upon the chorus. I have seen old John Hawkwood, the same
who has led half the Company into Italy, stand laughing in his beard as
he heard it, until his plates rattled again. But to get the full smack
of it ye must yourselves be English bowmen, and be far off upon an
outland soil.”

Whilst the song had been singing Dame Eliza and the maid had placed a
board across two trestles, and had laid upon it the knife, the spoon,
the salt, the tranchoir of bread, and finally the smoking dish which
held the savory supper. The archer settled himself to it like one who
had known what it was to find good food scarce; but his tongue still
went as merrily as his teeth.

“It passes me,” he cried, “how all you lusty fellows can bide scratching
your backs at home when there are such doings over the seas. Look at
me--what have I to do? It is but the eye to the cord, the cord to the
shaft, and the shaft to the mark. There is the whole song of it. It is
but what you do yourselves for pleasure upon a Sunday evening at the
parish village butts.”

“And the wage?” asked a laborer.

“You see what the wage brings,” he answered. “I eat of the best, and I
drink deep. I treat my friend, and I ask no friend to treat me. I clap
a silk gown on my girl's back. Never a knight's lady shall be better
betrimmed and betrinketed. How of all that, mon garcon? And how of the
heap of trifles that you can see for yourselves in yonder corner? They
are from the South French, every one, upon whom I have been making
war. By my hilt! camarades, I think that I may let my plunder speak for
itself.”

“It seems indeed to be a goodly service,” said the tooth-drawer.

“Tete bleu! yes, indeed. Then there is the chance of a ransom. Why, look
you, in the affair at Brignais some four years back, when the companies
slew James of Bourbon, and put his army to the sword, there was scarce a
man of ours who had not count, baron, or knight. Peter Karsdale, who
was but a common country lout newly brought over, with the English fleas
still hopping under his doublet, laid his great hands upon the Sieur
Amaury de Chatonville, who owns half Picardy, and had five thousand
crowns out of him, with his horse and harness. 'Tis true that a French
wench took it all off Peter as quick as the Frenchman paid it; but what
then? By the twang of string! it would be a bad thing if money was not
made to be spent; and how better than on woman--eh, ma belle?”

“It would indeed be a bad thing if we had not our brave archers to bring
wealth and kindly customs into the country,” quoth Dame Eliza, on whom
the soldier's free and open ways had made a deep impression.

“A toi, ma cherie!” said he, with his hand over his heart. “Hola! there
is la petite peeping from behind the door. A toi, aussi, ma petite! Mon
Dieu! but the lass has a good color!”

“There is one thing, fair sir,” said the Cambridge student in his
piping voice, “which I would fain that you would make more clear. As
I understand it, there was peace made at the town of Bretigny some six
years back between our most gracious monarch and the King of the French.
This being so, it seems most passing strange that you should talk so
loudly of war and of companies when there is no quarrel between the
French and us.”

“Meaning that I lie,” said the archer, laying down his knife.

“May heaven forfend!” cried the student hastily. “_Magna est veritas sed
rara_, which means in the Latin tongue that archers are all honorable
men. I come to you seeking knowledge, for it is my trade to learn.”

“I fear that you are yet a 'prentice to that trade,” quoth the soldier;
“for there is no child over the water but could answer what you ask.
Know then that though there may be peace between our own provinces and
the French, yet within the marches of France there is always war, for
the country is much divided against itself, and is furthermore harried
by bands of flayers, skinners, Brabacons, tardvenus, and the rest of
them. When every man's grip is on his neighbor's throat, and every
five-sous-piece of a baron is marching with tuck of drum to fight whom
he will, it would be a strange thing if five hundred brave English boys
could not pick up a living. Now that Sir John Hawkwood hath gone with
the East Anglian lads and the Nottingham woodmen into the service of the
Marquis of Montferrat to fight against the Lord of Milan, there are but
ten score of us left, yet I trust that I may be able to bring some back
with me to fill the ranks of the White Company. By the tooth of Peter!
it would be a bad thing if I could not muster many a Hamptonshire man
who would be ready to strike in under the red flag of St. George, and
the more so if Sir Nigel Loring, of Christchurch, should don hauberk
once more and take the lead of us.”

“Ah, you would indeed be in luck then,” quoth a woodman; “for it is said
that, setting aside the prince, and mayhap good old Sir John Chandos,
there was not in the whole army a man of such tried courage.”

“It is sooth, every word of it,” the archer answered. “I have seen him
with these two eyes in a stricken field, and never did man carry himself
better. Mon Dieu! yes, ye would not credit it to look at him, or to
hearken to his soft voice, but from the sailing from Orwell down to
the foray to Paris, and that is clear twenty years, there was not a
skirmish, onfall, sally, bushment, escalado or battle, but Sir Nigel was
in the heart of it. I go now to Christchurch with a letter to him from
Sir Claude Latour to ask him if he will take the place of Sir John
Hawkwood; and there is the more chance that he will if I bring one or
two likely men at my heels. What say you, woodman: wilt leave the bucks
to loose a shaft at a nobler mark?”

The forester shook his head. “I have wife and child at Emery Down,”
 quoth he; “I would not leave them for such a venture.”

“You, then, young sir?” asked the archer.

“Nay, I am a man of peace,” said Alleyne Edricson. “Besides, I have
other work to do.”

“Peste!” growled the soldier, striking his flagon on the board until the
dishes danced again. “What, in the name of the devil, hath come over
the folk? Why sit ye all moping by the fireside, like crows round a dead
horse, when there is man's work to be done within a few short leagues of
ye? Out upon you all, as a set of laggards and hang-backs! By my hilt I
believe that the men of England are all in France already, and that what
is left behind are in sooth the women dressed up in their paltocks and
hosen.”

“Archer,” quoth Hordle John, “you have lied more than once and more than
twice; for which, and also because I see much in you to dislike, I am
sorely tempted to lay you upon your back.”

“By my hilt! then, I have found a man at last!” shouted the bowman.
“And, 'fore God, you are a better man than I take you for if you can lay
me on my back, mon garcon. I have won the ram more times than there are
toes to my feet, and for seven long years I have found no man in the
Company who could make my jerkin dusty.”

“We have had enough bobance and boasting,” said Hordle John, rising and
throwing off his doublet. “I will show you that there are better men
left in England than ever went thieving to France.”

“Pasques Dieu!” cried the archer, loosening his jerkin, and eyeing his
foeman over with the keen glance of one who is a judge of manhood.
“I have only once before seen such a body of a man. By your leave, my
red-headed friend, I should be right sorry to exchange buffets with
you; and I will allow that there is no man in the Company who would
pull against you on a rope; so let that be a salve to your pride. On
the other hand I should judge that you have led a life of ease for some
months back, and that my muscle is harder than your own. I am ready to
wager upon myself against you if you are not afeard.”

“Afeard, thou lurden!” growled big John. “I never saw the face yet of
the man that I was afeard of. Come out, and we shall see who is the
better man.”

“But the wager?”

“I have nought to wager. Come out for the love and the lust of the
thing.”

“Nought to wager!” cried the soldier. “Why, you have that which I covet
above all things. It is that big body of thine that I am after. See,
now, mon garcon. I have a French feather-bed there, which I have been at
pains to keep these years back. I had it at the sacking of Issodun, and
the King himself hath not such a bed. If you throw me, it is thine; but,
if I throw you, then you are under a vow to take bow and bill and hie
with me to France, there to serve in the White Company as long as we be
enrolled.”

“A fair wager!” cried all the travellers, moving back their benches and
trestles, so as to give fair field for the wrestlers.

“Then you may bid farewell to your bed, soldier,” said Hordle John.

“Nay; I shall keep the bed, and I shall have you to France in spite
of your teeth, and you shall live to thank me for it. How shall it be,
then, mon enfant? Collar and elbow, or close-lock, or catch how you
can?”

“To the devil with your tricks,” said John, opening and shutting his
great red hands. “Stand forth, and let me clip thee.”

“Shalt clip me as best you can then,” quoth the archer, moving out into
the open space, and keeping a most wary eye upon his opponent. He had
thrown off his green jerkin, and his chest was covered only by a pink
silk jupon, or undershirt, cut low in the neck and sleeveless. Hordle
John was stripped from his waist upwards, and his huge body, with his
great muscles swelling out like the gnarled roots of an oak, towered
high above the soldier. The other, however, though near a foot shorter,
was a man of great strength; and there was a gloss upon his white skin
which was wanting in the heavier limbs of the renegade monk. He was
quick on his feet, too, and skilled at the game; so that it was clear,
from the poise of head and shine of eye, that he counted the chances to
be in his favor. It would have been hard that night, through the whole
length of England, to set up a finer pair in face of each other.

Big John stood waiting in the centre with a sullen, menacing eye, and
his red hair in a bristle, while the archer paced lightly and swiftly to
the right and the left with crooked knee and hands advanced. Then with a
sudden dash, so swift and fierce that the eye could scarce follow it, he
flew in upon his man and locked his leg round him. It was a grip that,
between men of equal strength, would mean a fall; but Hordle John tore
him off from him as he might a rat, and hurled him across the room, so
that his head cracked up against the wooden wall.

“Ma foi!” cried the bowman, passing his fingers through his curls, “you
were not far from the feather-bed then, mon gar. A little more and this
good hostel would have a new window.”

Nothing daunted, he approached his man once more, but this time with
more caution than before. With a quick feint he threw the other off his
guard, and then, bounding upon him, threw his legs round his waist and
his arms round his bull-neck, in the hope of bearing him to the ground
with the sudden shock. With a bellow of rage, Hordle John squeezed him
limp in his huge arms; and then, picking him up, cast him down upon the
floor with a force which might well have splintered a bone or two,
had not the archer with the most perfect coolness clung to the other's
forearms to break his fall. As it was, he dropped upon his feet and
kept his balance, though it sent a jar through his frame which set every
joint a-creaking. He bounded back from his perilous foeman; but the
other, heated by the bout, rushed madly after him, and so gave the
practised wrestler the very vantage for which he had planned. As big
John flung himself upon him, the archer ducked under the great red hands
that clutched for him, and, catching his man round the thighs, hurled
him over his shoulder--helped as much by his own mad rush as by the
trained strength of the heave. To Alleyne's eye, it was as if John had
taken unto himself wings and flown. As he hurtled through the air, with
giant limbs revolving, the lad's heart was in his mouth; for surely no
man ever yet had such a fall and came scathless out of it. In truth,
hardy as the man was, his neck had been assuredly broken had he not
pitched head first on the very midriff of the drunken artist, who was
slumbering so peacefully in the corner, all unaware of these stirring
doings. The luckless limner, thus suddenly brought out from his dreams,
sat up with a piercing yell, while Hordle John bounded back into the
circle almost as rapidly as he had left it.

“One more fall, by all the saints!” he cried, throwing out his arms.

“Not I,” quoth the archer, pulling on his clothes, “I have come well out
of the business. I would sooner wrestle with the great bear of Navarre.”

“It was a trick,” cried John.

“Aye was it. By my ten finger-bones! it is a trick that will add a
proper man to the ranks of the Company.”

“Oh, for that,” said the other, “I count it not a fly; for I had
promised myself a good hour ago that I should go with thee, since the
life seems to be a goodly and proper one. Yet I would fain have had the
feather-bed.”

“I doubt it not, mon ami,” quoth the archer, going back to his tankard.
“Here is to thee, lad, and may we be good comrades to each other! But,
hola! what is it that ails our friend of the wrathful face?”

The unfortunate limner had been sitting up rubbing himself ruefully
and staring about with a vacant gaze, which showed that he knew neither
where he was nor what had occurred to him. Suddenly, however, a flash
of intelligence had come over his sodden features, and he rose and
staggered for the door. “'Ware the ale!” he said in a hoarse whisper,
shaking a warning finger at the company. “Oh, holy Virgin, 'ware the
ale!” and slapping his hands to his injury, he flitted off into the
darkness, amid a shout of laughter, in which the vanquished joined as
merrily as the victor. The remaining forester and the two laborers
were also ready for the road, and the rest of the company turned to the
blankets which Dame Eliza and the maid had laid out for them upon the
floor. Alleyne, weary with the unwonted excitements of the day, was soon
in a deep slumber broken only by fleeting visions of twittering legs,
cursing beggars, black robbers, and the many strange folk whom he had
met at the “Pied Merlin.”



CHAPTER VII. HOW THE THREE COMRADES JOURNEYED THROUGH THE WOODLANDS.


At early dawn the country inn was all alive, for it was rare indeed
that an hour of daylight would be wasted at a time when lighting was so
scarce and dear. Indeed, early as it was when Dame Eliza began to stir,
it seemed that others could be earlier still, for the door was ajar,
and the learned student of Cambridge had taken himself off, with a
mind which was too intent upon the high things of antiquity to stoop
to consider the four-pence which he owed for bed and board. It was the
shrill out-cry of the landlady when she found her loss, and the clucking
of the hens, which had streamed in through the open door, that first
broke in upon the slumbers of the tired wayfarers.

Once afoot, it was not long before the company began to disperse. A
sleek mule with red trappings was brought round from some neighboring
shed for the physician, and he ambled away with much dignity upon his
road to Southampton. The tooth-drawer and the gleeman called for a cup
of small ale apiece, and started off together for Ringwood fair, the old
jongleur looking very yellow in the eye and swollen in the face after
his overnight potations. The archer, however, who had drunk more than
any man in the room, was as merry as a grig, and having kissed the
matron and chased the maid up the ladder once more, he went out to the
brook, and came back with the water dripping from his face and hair.

“Hola! my man of peace,” he cried to Alleyne, “whither are you bent this
morning?”

“To Minstead,” quoth he. “My brother Simon Edricson is socman there, and
I go to bide with him for a while. I prythee, let me have my score, good
dame.”

“Score, indeed!” cried she, standing with upraised hands in front of the
panel on which Alleyne had worked the night before. “Say, rather what
it is that I owe to thee, good youth. Aye, this is indeed a pied merlin,
and with a leveret under its claws, as I am a living woman. By the rood
of Waltham! but thy touch is deft and dainty.”

“And see the red eye of it!” cried the maid.

“Aye, and the open beak.”

“And the ruffled wing,” added Hordle John.

“By my hilt!” cried the archer, “it is the very bird itself.”

The young clerk flushed with pleasure at this chorus of praise, rude and
indiscriminate indeed, and yet so much heartier and less grudging than
any which he had ever heard from the critical brother Jerome, or the
short-spoken Abbot. There was, it would seem, great kindness as well as
great wickedness in this world, of which he had heard so little that was
good. His hostess would hear nothing of his paying either for bed or
for board, while the archer and Hordle John placed a hand upon either
shoulder and led him off to the board, where some smoking fish, a dish
of spinach, and a jug of milk were laid out for their breakfast.

“I should not be surprised to learn, mon camarade,” said the soldier, as
he heaped a slice of fish upon Alleyne's tranchoir of bread, “that you
could read written things, since you are so ready with your brushes and
pigments.”

“It would be shame to the good brothers of Beaulieu if I could not,” he
answered, “seeing that I have been their clerk this ten years back.”

The bowman looked at him with great respect. “Think of that!” said he.
“And you with not a hair to your face, and a skin like a girl. I can
shoot three hundred and fifty paces with my little popper there, and
four hundred and twenty with the great war-bow; yet I can make nothing
of this, nor read my own name if you were to set 'Sam Aylward' up
against me. In the whole Company there was only one man who could read,
and he fell down a well at the taking of Ventadour, which proves that
the thing is not suited to a soldier, though most needful to a clerk.”

“I can make some show at it,” said big John; “though I was scarce long
enough among the monks to catch the whole trick of it.

“Here, then, is something to try upon,” quoth the archer, pulling a
square of parchment from the inside of his tunic. It was tied securely
with a broad band of purple silk, and firmly sealed at either end with a
large red seal. John pored long and earnestly over the inscription upon
the back, with his brows bent as one who bears up against great mental
strain.

“Not having read much of late,” he said, “I am loth to say too much
about what this may be. Some might say one thing and some another, just
as one bowman loves the yew, and a second will not shoot save with the
ash. To me, by the length and the look of it, I should judge this to be
a verse from one of the Psalms.”

The bowman shook his head. “It is scarce likely,” he said, “that Sir
Claude Latour should send me all the way across seas with nought more
weighty than a psalm-verse. You have clean overshot the butts this time,
mon camarade. Give it to the little one. I will wager my feather-bed
that he makes more sense of it.”

“Why, it is written in the French tongue,” said Alleyne, “and in a
right clerkly hand. This is how it runs: 'A le moult puissant et moult
honorable chevalier, Sir Nigel Loring de Christchurch, de son tres
fidele ami Sir Claude Latour, capitaine de la Compagnie blanche,
chatelain de Biscar, grand seigneur de Montchateau, vavaseur de le
renomme Gaston, Comte de Foix, tenant les droits de la haute justice, de
la milieu, et de la basse.' Which signifies in our speech: 'To the very
powerful and very honorable knight, Sir Nigel Loring of Christchurch,
from his very faithful friend Sir Claude Latour, captain of the White
Company, chatelain of Biscar, grand lord of Montchateau and vassal to
the renowned Gaston, Count of Foix, who holds the rights of the high
justice, the middle and the low.'”

“Look at that now!” cried the bowman in triumph. “That is just what he
would have said.”

“I can see now that it is even so,” said John, examining the parchment
again. “Though I scarce understand this high, middle and low.”

“By my hilt! you would understand it if you were Jacques Bonhomme. The
low justice means that you may fleece him, and the middle that you may
torture him, and the high that you may slay him. That is about the truth
of it. But this is the letter which I am to take; and since the platter
is clean it is time that we trussed up and were afoot. You come with
me, mon gros Jean; and as to you, little one, where did you say that you
journeyed?”

“To Minstead.”

“Ah, yes. I know this forest country well, though I was born myself
in the Hundred of Easebourne, in the Rape of Chichester, hard by the
village of Midhurst. Yet I have not a word to say against the Hampton
men, for there are no better comrades or truer archers in the whole
Company than some who learned to loose the string in these very parts.
We shall travel round with you to Minstead lad, seeing that it is little
out of our way.”

“I am ready,” said Alleyne, right pleased at the thought of such company
upon the road.

“So am not I. I must store my plunder at this inn, since the hostess is
an honest woman. Hola! ma cherie, I wish to leave with you my gold-work,
my velvet, my silk, my feather bed, my incense-boat, my ewer, my naping
linen, and all the rest of it. I take only the money in a linen bag,
and the box of rose colored sugar which is a gift from my captain to the
Lady Loring. Wilt guard my treasure for me?”

“It shall be put in the safest loft, good archer. Come when you may, you
shall find it ready for you.”

“Now, there is a true friend!” cried the bowman, taking her hand. “There
is a bonne amie! English land and English women, say I, and French wine
and French plunder. I shall be back anon, mon ange. I am a lonely man,
my sweeting, and I must settle some day when the wars are over and done.
Mayhap you and I----Ah, mechante, mechante! There is la petite peeping
from behind the door. Now, John, the sun is over the trees; you must be
brisker than this when the bugleman blows 'Bows and Bills.'”

“I have been waiting this time back,” said Hordle John gruffly.

“Then we must be off. Adieu, ma vie! The two livres shall settle the
score and buy some ribbons against the next kermesse. Do not forget Sam
Aylward, for his heart shall ever be thine alone--and thine, ma petite!
So, marchons, and may St. Julian grant us as good quarters elsewhere!”

The sun had risen over Ashurst and Denny woods, and was shining
brightly, though the eastern wind had a sharp flavor to it, and the
leaves were flickering thickly from the trees. In the High Street of
Lyndhurst the wayfarers had to pick their way, for the little town
was crowded with the guardsmen, grooms, and yeomen prickers who were
attached to the King's hunt. The King himself was staying at Castle
Malwood, but several of his suite had been compelled to seek such
quarters as they might find in the wooden or wattle-and-daub cottages of
the village. Here and there a small escutcheon, peeping from a
glassless window, marked the night's lodging of knight or baron. These
coats-of-arms could be read, where a scroll would be meaningless, and
the bowman, like most men of his age, was well versed in the common
symbols of heraldry.

“There is the Saracen's head of Sir Bernard Brocas,” quoth he. “I saw
him last at the ruffle at Poictiers some ten years back, when he bore
himself like a man. He is the master of the King's horse, and can sing
a right jovial stave, though in that he cannot come nigh to Sir John
Chandos, who is first at the board or in the saddle. Three martlets on a
field azure, that must be one of the Luttrells. By the crescent upon it,
it should be the second son of old Sir Hugh, who had a bolt through his
ankle at the intaking of Romorantin, he having rushed into the fray ere
his squire had time to clasp his solleret to his greave. There too is
the hackle which is the old device of the De Brays. I have served under
Sir Thomas de Bray, who was as jolly as a pie, and a lusty swordsman
until he got too fat for his harness.”

So the archer gossiped as the three wayfarers threaded their way among
the stamping horses, the busy grooms, and the knots of pages and squires
who disputed over the merits of their masters' horses and deer-hounds.
As they passed the old church, which stood upon a mound at the left-hand
side of the village street the door was flung open, and a stream of
worshippers wound down the sloping path, coming from the morning mass,
all chattering like a cloud of jays. Alleyne bent knee and doffed hat at
the sight of the open door; but ere he had finished an ave his comrades
were out of sight round the curve of the path, and he had to run to
overtake them.

“What!” he said, “not one word of prayer before God's own open house?
How can ye hope for His blessing upon the day?”

“My friend,” said Hordle John, “I have prayed so much during the last
two months, not only during the day, but at matins, lauds, and the like,
when I could scarce keep my head upon my shoulders for nodding, that I
feel that I have somewhat over-prayed myself.”

“How can a man have too much religion?” cried Alleyne earnestly. “It is
the one thing that availeth. A man is but a beast as he lives from day
to day, eating and drinking, breathing and sleeping. It is only when
he raises himself, and concerns himself with the immortal spirit within
him, that he becomes in very truth a man. Bethink ye how sad a thing
it would be that the blood of the Redeemer should be spilled to no
purpose.”

“Bless the lad, if he doth not blush like any girl, and yet preach like
the whole College of Cardinals,” cried the archer.

“In truth I blush that any one so weak and so unworthy as I should
try to teach another that which he finds it so passing hard to follow
himself.”

“Prettily said, mon garcon. Touching that same slaying of the Redeemer,
it was a bad business. A good padre in France read to us from a scroll
the whole truth of the matter. The soldiers came upon him in the garden.
In truth, these Apostles of His may have been holy men, but they were of
no great account as men-at-arms. There was one, indeed, Sir Peter, who
smote out like a true man; but, unless he is belied, he did but clip
a varlet's ear, which was no very knightly deed. By these ten
finger-bones! had I been there with Black Simon of Norwich, and but one
score picked men of the Company, we had held them in play. Could we do
no more, we had at least filled the false knight, Sir Judas, so full of
English arrows that he would curse the day that ever he came on such an
errand.”

The young clerk smiled at his companion's earnestness. “Had He wished
help,” he said, “He could have summoned legions of archangels from
heaven, so what need had He of your poor bow and arrow? Besides, bethink
you of His own words--that those who live by the sword shall perish by
the sword.”

“And how could man die better?” asked the archer. “If I had my wish, it
would be to fall so--not, mark you, in any mere skirmish of the Company,
but in a stricken field, with the great lion banner waving over us and
the red oriflamme in front, amid the shouting of my fellows and the
twanging of the strings. But let it be sword, lance, or bolt that
strikes me down: for I should think it shame to die from an iron ball
from the fire-crake or bombard or any such unsoldierly weapon, which is
only fitted to scare babes with its foolish noise and smoke.”

“I have heard much even in the quiet cloisters of these new and dreadful
engines,” quoth Alleyne. “It is said, though I can scarce bring myself
to believe it, that they will send a ball twice as far as a bowman
can shoot his shaft, and with such force as to break through armor of
proof.”

“True enough, my lad. But while the armorer is thrusting in his
devil's-dust, and dropping his ball, and lighting his flambeau, I
can very easily loose six shafts, or eight maybe, so he hath no great
vantage after all. Yet I will not deny that at the intaking of a town
it is well to have good store of bombards. I am told that at Calais they
made dints in the wall that a man might put his head into. But surely,
comrades, some one who is grievously hurt hath passed along this road
before us.”

All along the woodland track there did indeed run a scattered straggling
trail of blood-marks, sometimes in single drops, and in other places in
broad, ruddy gouts, smudged over the dead leaves or crimsoning the white
flint stones.

“It must be a stricken deer,” said John.

“Nay, I am woodman enough to see that no deer hath passed this way this
morning; and yet the blood is fresh. But hark to the sound!”

They stood listening all three with sidelong heads. Through the silence
of the great forest there came a swishing, whistling sound, mingled
with the most dolorous groans, and the voice of a man raised in a
high quavering kind of song. The comrades hurried onwards eagerly, and
topping the brow of a small rising they saw upon the other side the
source from which these strange noises arose.

A tall man, much stooped in the shoulders, was walking slowly with
bended head and clasped hands in the centre of the path. He was dressed
from head to foot in a long white linen cloth, and a high white cap
with a red cross printed upon it. His gown was turned back from his
shoulders, and the flesh there was a sight to make a man wince, for it
was all beaten to a pulp, and the blood was soaking into his gown and
trickling down upon the ground. Behind him walked a smaller man with his
hair touched with gray, who was clad in the same white garb. He intoned
a long whining rhyme in the French tongue, and at the end of every line
he raised a thick cord, all jagged with pellets of lead, and smote his
companion across the shoulders until the blood spurted again. Even as
the three wayfarers stared, however, there was a sudden change, for the
smaller man, having finished his song, loosened his own gown and handed
the scourge to the other, who took up the stave once more and lashed
his companion with all the strength of his bare and sinewy arm. So,
alternately beating and beaten, they made their dolorous way through the
beautiful woods and under the amber arches of the fading beech-trees,
where the calm strength and majesty of Nature might serve to rebuke the
foolish energies and misspent strivings of mankind.

Such a spectacle was new to Hordle John or to Alleyne Edricson; but the
archer treated it lightly, as a common matter enough.

“These are the Beating Friars, otherwise called the Flagellants,” quoth
he. “I marvel that ye should have come upon none of them before, for
across the water they are as common as gallybaggers. I have heard that
there are no English among them, but that they are from France, Italy
and Bohemia. En avant, camarades! that we may have speech with them.”

As they came up to them, Alleyne could hear the doleful dirge which the
beater was chanting, bringing down his heavy whip at the end of each
line, while the groans of the sufferer formed a sort of dismal chorus.
It was in old French, and ran somewhat in this way:

        Or avant, entre nous tous freres
        Battons nos charognes bien fort
        En remembrant la grant misere
        De Dieu et sa piteuse mort
        Qui fut pris en la gent amere
        Et vendus et trais a tort
        Et bastu sa chair, vierge et dere
        Au nom de ce battons plus fort.

Then at the end of the verse the scourge changed hands and the chanting
began anew.

“Truly, holy fathers,” said the archer in French as they came abreast of
them, “you have beaten enough for to-day. The road is all spotted like a
shambles at Martinmas. Why should ye mishandle yourselves thus?”

“C'est pour vos peches--pour vos peches,” they droned, looking at the
travellers with sad lack-lustre eyes, and then bent to their bloody
work once more without heed to the prayers and persuasions which were
addressed to them. Finding all remonstrance useless, the three comrades
hastened on their way, leaving these strange travellers to their dreary
task.

“Mort Dieu!” cried the bowman, “there is a bucketful or more of my blood
over in France, but it was all spilled in hot fight, and I should think
twice before I drew it drop by drop as these friars are doing. By my
hilt! our young one here is as white as a Picardy cheese. What is amiss
then, mon cher?”

“It is nothing,” Alleyne answered. “My life has been too quiet, I am not
used to such sights.”

“Ma foi!” the other cried, “I have never yet seen a man who was so stout
of speech and yet so weak of heart.”

“Not so, friend,” quoth big John; “it is not weakness of heart for I
know the lad well. His heart is as good as thine or mine but he hath
more in his pate than ever you will carry under that tin pot of thine,
and as a consequence he can see farther into things, so that they weigh
upon him more.”

“Surely to any man it is a sad sight,” said Alleyne, “to see these
holy men, who have done no sin themselves, suffering so for the sins of
others. Saints are they, if in this age any may merit so high a name.”

“I count them not a fly,” cried Hordle John; “for who is the better for
all their whipping and yowling? They are like other friars, I trow, when
all is done. Let them leave their backs alone, and beat the pride out of
their hearts.”

“By the three kings! there is sooth in what you say,” remarked the
archer. “Besides, methinks if I were le bon Dieu, it would bring me
little joy to see a poor devil cutting the flesh off his bones; and I
should think that he had but a small opinion of me, that he should hope
to please me by such provost-marshal work. No, by my hilt! I should look
with a more loving eye upon a jolly archer who never harmed a fallen foe
and never feared a hale one.”

“Doubtless you mean no sin,” said Alleyne. “If your words are wild, it
is not for me to judge them. Can you not see that there are other foes
in this world besides Frenchmen, and as much glory to be gained in
conquering them? Would it not be a proud day for knight or squire if he
could overthrow seven adversaries in the lists? Yet here are we in the
lists of life, and there come the seven black champions against us Sir
Pride, Sir Covetousness, Sir Lust, Sir Anger, Sir Gluttony, Sir Envy,
and Sir Sloth. Let a man lay those seven low, and he shall have the
prize of the day, from the hands of the fairest queen of beauty, even
from the Virgin-Mother herself. It is for this that these men mortify
their flesh, and to set us an example, who would pamper ourselves
overmuch. I say again that they are God's own saints, and I bow my head
to them.”

“And so you shall, mon petit,” replied the archer. “I have not heard
a man speak better since old Dom Bertrand died, who was at one time
chaplain to the White Company. He was a very valiant man, but at
the battle of Brignais he was spitted through the body by a Hainault
man-at-arms. For this we had an excommunication read against the man,
when next we saw our holy father at Avignon; but as we had not his name,
and knew nothing of him, save that he rode a dapple-gray roussin, I have
feared sometimes that the blight may have settled upon the wrong man.”

“Your Company has been, then, to bow knee before our holy father, the
Pope Urban, the prop and centre of Christendom?” asked Alleyne, much
interested. “Perchance you have yourself set eyes upon his august face?”

“Twice I saw him,” said the archer. “He was a lean little rat of a man,
with a scab on his chin. The first time we had five thousand crowns out
of him, though he made much ado about it. The second time we asked ten
thousand, but it was three days before we could come to terms, and I
am of opinion myself that we might have done better by plundering the
palace. His chamberlain and cardinals came forth, as I remember, to
ask whether we would take seven thousand crowns with his blessing and
a plenary absolution, or the ten thousand with his solemn ban by bell,
book and candle. We were all of one mind that it was best to have the
ten thousand with the curse; but in some way they prevailed upon Sir
John, so that we were blest and shriven against our will. Perchance it
is as well, for the Company were in need of it about that time.”

The pious Alleyne was deeply shocked by this reminiscence. Involuntarily
he glanced up and around to see if there were any trace of those
opportune levin-flashes and thunderbolts which, in the “Acta Sanctorum,”
 were wont so often to cut short the loose talk of the scoffer. The
autumn sun streamed down as brightly as ever, and the peaceful red path
still wound in front of them through the rustling, yellow-tinted forest,
Nature seemed to be too busy with her own concerns to heed the dignity
of an outraged pontiff. Yet he felt a sense of weight and reproach
within his breast, as though he had sinned himself in giving ear to such
words. The teachings of twenty years cried out against such license. It
was not until he had thrown himself down before one of the many wayside
crosses, and had prayed from his heart both for the archer and for
himself, that the dark cloud rolled back again from his spirit.



CHAPTER VIII. THE THREE FRIENDS.


His companions had passed on whilst he was at his orisons; but his young
blood and the fresh morning air both invited him to a scamper. His staff
in one hand and his scrip in the other, with springy step and floating
locks, he raced along the forest path, as active and as graceful as a
young deer. He had not far to go, however; for, on turning a corner,
he came on a roadside cottage with a wooden fence-work around it, where
stood big John and Aylward the bowman, staring at something within. As
he came up with them, he saw that two little lads, the one about nine
years of age and the other somewhat older, were standing on the plot
in front of the cottage, each holding out a round stick in their left
hands, with their arms stiff and straight from the shoulder, as
silent and still as two small statues. They were pretty, blue-eyed,
yellow-haired lads, well made and sturdy, with bronzed skins, which
spoke of a woodland life.

“Here are young chips from an old bow stave!” cried the soldier in great
delight. “This is the proper way to raise children. By my hilt! I could
not have trained them better had I the ordering of it myself.”

“What is it then?” asked Hordle John. “They stand very stiff, and I
trust that they have not been struck so.”

“Nay, they are training their left arms, that they may have a steady
grasp of the bow. So my own father trained me, and six days a week I
held out his walking-staff till my arm was heavy as lead. Hola, mes
enfants! how long will you hold out?”

“Until the sun is over the great lime-tree, good master,” the elder
answered.

“What would ye be, then? Woodmen? Verderers?”

“Nay, soldiers,” they cried both together.

“By the beard of my father! but ye are whelps of the true breed. Why so
keen, then, to be soldiers?”

“That we may fight the Scots,” they answered. “Daddy will send us to
fight the Scots.”

“And why the Scots, my pretty lads? We have seen French and Spanish
galleys no further away than Southampton, but I doubt that it will be
some time before the Scots find their way to these parts.”

“Our business is with the Scots,” quoth the elder; “for it was the Scots
who cut off daddy's string fingers and his thumbs.”

“Aye, lads, it was that,” said a deep voice from behind Alleyne's
shoulder. Looking round, the wayfarers saw a gaunt, big-boned man, with
sunken cheeks and a sallow face, who had come up behind them. He held
up his two hands as he spoke, and showed that the thumbs and two first
fingers had been torn away from each of them.

“Ma foi, camarade!” cried Aylward. “Who hath served thee in so shameful
a fashion?”

“It is easy to see, friend, that you were born far from the marches of
Scotland,” quoth the stranger, with a bitter smile. “North of Humber
there is no man who would not know the handiwork of Devil Douglas, the
black Lord James.”

“And how fell you into his hands?” asked John.

“I am a man of the north country, from the town of Beverley and the
wapentake of Holderness,” he answered. “There was a day when, from Trent
to Tweed, there was no better marksman than Robin Heathcot. Yet, as you
see, he hath left me, as he hath left many another poor border archer,
with no grip for bill or bow. Yet the king hath given me a living here
in the southlands, and please God these two lads of mine will pay off
a debt that hath been owing over long. What is the price of daddy's
thumbs, boys?”

“Twenty Scottish lives,” they answered together.

“And for the fingers?”

“Half a score.”

“When they can bend my war-bow, and bring down a squirrel at a hundred
paces, I send them to take service under Johnny Copeland, the Lord of
the Marches and Governor of Carlisle. By my soul! I would give the rest
of my fingers to see the Douglas within arrow-flight of them.”

“May you live to see it,” quoth the bowman. “And hark ye, mes enfants,
take an old soldier's rede and lay your bodies to the bow, drawing from
hip and thigh as much as from arm. Learn also, I pray you, to shoot with
a dropping shaft; for though a bowman may at times be called upon to
shoot straight and fast, yet it is more often that he has to do with a
town-guard behind a wall, or an arbalestier with his mantlet raised when
you cannot hope to do him scathe unless your shaft fall straight upon
him from the clouds. I have not drawn string for two weeks, but I may
be able to show ye how such shots should be made.” He loosened his
long-bow, slung his quiver round to the front, and then glanced keenly
round for a fitting mark. There was a yellow and withered stump some
way off, seen under the drooping branches of a lofty oak. The archer
measured the distance with his eye; and then, drawing three shafts, he
shot them off with such speed that the first had not reached the mark
ere the last was on the string. Each arrow passed high over the oak;
and, of the three, two stuck fair into the stump; while the third,
caught in some wandering puff of wind, was driven a foot or two to one
side.

“Good!” cried the north countryman. “Hearken to him lads! He is a master
bowman. Your dad says amen to every word he says.”

“By my hilt!” said Aylward, “if I am to preach on bowmanship, the whole
long day would scarce give me time for my sermon. We have marksmen in
the Company who will notch with a shaft every crevice and joint of a
man-at-arm's harness, from the clasp of his bassinet to the hinge of his
greave. But, with your favor, friend, I must gather my arrows again, for
while a shaft costs a penny a poor man can scarce leave them sticking
in wayside stumps. We must, then, on our road again, and I hope from my
heart that you may train these two young goshawks here until they are
ready for a cast even at such a quarry as you speak of.”

Leaving the thumbless archer and his brood, the wayfarers struck through
the scattered huts of Emery Down, and out on to the broad rolling heath
covered deep in ferns and in heather, where droves of the half-wild
black forest pigs were rooting about amongst the hillocks. The woods
about this point fall away to the left and the right, while the road
curves upwards and the wind sweeps keenly over the swelling uplands. The
broad strips of bracken glowed red and yellow against the black peaty
soil, and a queenly doe who grazed among them turned her white front
and her great questioning eyes towards the wayfarers. Alleyne gazed
in admiration at the supple beauty of the creature; but the archer's
fingers played with his quiver, and his eyes glistened with the fell
instinct which urges a man to slaughter.

“Tete Dieu!” he growled, “were this France, or even Guienne, we should
have a fresh haunch for our none-meat. Law or no law, I have a mind to
loose a bolt at her.”

“I would break your stave across my knee first,” cried John, laying his
great hand upon the bow. “What! man, I am forest-born, and I know what
comes of it. In our own township of Hordle two have lost their eyes and
one his skin for this very thing. On my troth, I felt no great love when
I first saw you, but since then I have conceived over much regard for
you to wish to see the verderer's flayer at work upon you.”

“It is my trade to risk my skin,” growled the archer; but none the less
he thrust his quiver over his hip again and turned his face for the
west.

As they advanced, the path still tended upwards, running from heath into
copses of holly and yew, and so back into heath again. It was joyful to
hear the merry whistle of blackbirds as they darted from one clump
of greenery to the other. Now and again a peaty amber colored stream
rippled across their way, with ferny over-grown banks, where the blue
kingfisher flitted busily from side to side, or the gray and pensive
heron, swollen with trout and dignity, stood ankle-deep among the
sedges. Chattering jays and loud wood-pigeons flapped thickly overhead,
while ever and anon the measured tapping of Nature's carpenter, the
great green woodpecker, sounded from each wayside grove. On either side,
as the path mounted, the long sweep of country broadened and expanded,
sloping down on the one side through yellow forest and brown moor to
the distant smoke of Lymington and the blue misty channel which lay
alongside the sky-line, while to the north the woods rolled away, grove
topping grove, to where in the furthest distance the white spire of
Salisbury stood out hard and clear against the cloudless sky. To Alleyne
whose days had been spent in the low-lying coastland, the eager upland
air and the wide free country-side gave a sense of life and of the joy
of living which made his young blood tingle in his veins. Even the
heavy John was not unmoved by the beauty of their road, while the bowman
whistled lustily or sang snatches of French love songs in a voice which
might have scared the most stout-hearted maiden that ever hearkened to
serenade.

“I have a liking for that north countryman,” he remarked presently. “He
hath good power of hatred. Couldst see by his cheek and eye that he is
as bitter as verjuice. I warm to a man who hath some gall in his liver.”

“Ah me!” sighed Alleyne. “Would it not be better if he had some love in
his heart?”

“I would not say nay to that. By my hilt! I shall never be said to be
traitor to the little king. Let a man love the sex. Pasques Dieu! they
are made to be loved, les petites, from whimple down to shoe-string! I
am right glad, mon garcon, to see that the good monks have trained thee
so wisely and so well.”

“Nay, I meant not worldly love, but rather that his heart should soften
towards those who have wronged him.”

The archer shook his head. “A man should love those of his own breed,”
 said he. “But it is not nature that an English-born man should love
a Scot or a Frenchman. Ma foi! you have not seen a drove of Nithsdale
raiders on their Galloway nags, or you would not speak of loving them. I
would as soon take Beelzebub himself to my arms. I fear, mon gar., that
they have taught thee but badly at Beaulieu, for surely a bishop knows
more of what is right and what is ill than an abbot can do, and I myself
with these very eyes saw the Bishop of Lincoln hew into a Scottish
hobeler with a battle-axe, which was a passing strange way of showing
him that he loved him.”

Alleyne scarce saw his way to argue in the face of so decided an opinion
on the part of a high dignitary of the Church. “You have borne arms
against the Scots, then?” he asked.

“Why, man, I first loosed string in battle when I was but a lad, younger
by two years than you, at Neville's Cross, under the Lord Mowbray.
Later, I served under the Warden of Berwick, that very John Copeland of
whom our friend spake, the same who held the King of Scots to ransom. Ma
foi! it is rough soldiering, and a good school for one who would learn
to be hardy and war-wise.”

“I have heard that the Scots are good men of war,” said Hordle John.

“For axemen and for spearmen I have not seen their match,” the archer
answered. “They can travel, too, with bag of meal and gridiron slung
to their sword-belt, so that it is ill to follow them. There are scant
crops and few beeves in the borderland, where a man must reap his grain
with sickle in one fist and brown bill in the other. On the other hand,
they are the sorriest archers that I have ever seen, and cannot so much
as aim with the arbalest, to say nought of the long-bow. Again, they are
mostly poor folk, even the nobles among them, so that there are few who
can buy as good a brigandine of chain-mail as that which I am wearing,
and it is ill for them to stand up against our own knights, who carry
the price of five Scotch farms upon their chest and shoulders. Man for
man, with equal weapons, they are as worthy and valiant men as could be
found in the whole of Christendom.”

“And the French?” asked Alleyne, to whom the archer's light gossip had
all the relish that the words of the man of action have for the recluse.

“The French are also very worthy men. We have had great good fortune in
France, and it hath led to much bobance and camp-fire talk, but I have
ever noticed that those who know the most have the least to say about
it. I have seen Frenchmen fight both in open field, in the intaking and
the defending of towns or castlewicks, in escalados, camisades, night
forays, bushments, sallies, outfalls, and knightly spear-runnings. Their
knights and squires, lad, are every whit as good as ours, and I could
pick out a score of those who ride behind Du Guesclin who would hold the
lists with sharpened lances against the best men in the army of England.
On the other hand, their common folk are so crushed down with gabelle,
and poll-tax, and every manner of cursed tallage, that the spirit has
passed right out of them. It is a fool's plan to teach a man to be a
cur in peace, and think that he will be a lion in war. Fleece them like
sheep and sheep they will remain. If the nobles had not conquered
the poor folk it is like enough that we should not have conquered the
nobles.”

“But they must be sorry folk to bow down to the rich in such a fashion,”
 said big John. “I am but a poor commoner of England myself, and yet I
know something of charters, liberties, franchises, usages, privileges,
customs, and the like. If these be broken, then all men know that it is
time to buy arrow-heads.”

“Aye, but the men of the law are strong in France as well as the men
of war. By my hilt! I hold that a man has more to fear there from the
ink-pot of the one than from the iron of the other. There is ever some
cursed sheepskin in their strong boxes to prove that the rich man should
be richer and the poor man poorer. It would scarce pass in England, but
they are quiet folk over the water.”

“And what other nations have you seen in your travels, good sir?” asked
Alleyne Edricson. His young mind hungered for plain facts of life, after
the long course of speculation and of mysticism on which he had been
trained.

“I have seen the low countryman in arms, and I have nought to say
against him. Heavy and slow is he by nature, and is not to be brought
into battle for the sake of a lady's eyelash or the twang of a
minstrel's string, like the hotter blood of the south. But ma foi! lay
hand on his wool-bales, or trifle with his velvet of Bruges, and out
buzzes every stout burgher, like bees from the tee-hole, ready to lay on
as though it were his one business in life. By our lady! they have shown
the French at Courtrai and elsewhere that they are as deft in wielding
steel as in welding it.”

“And the men of Spain?”

“They too are very hardy soldiers, the more so as for many hundred years
they have had to fight hard against the cursed followers of the black
Mahound, who have pressed upon them from the south, and still, as I
understand, hold the fairer half of the country. I had a turn with them
upon the sea when they came over to Winchelsea and the good queen with
her ladies sat upon the cliffs looking down at us, as if it had been
joust or tourney. By my hilt! it was a sight that was worth the seeing,
for all that was best in England was out on the water that day. We went
forth in little ships and came back in great galleys--for of fifty tall
ships of Spain, over two score flew the Cross of St. George ere the sun
had set. But now, youngster, I have answered you freely, and I trow it
is time that you answered me. Let things be plat and plain between us. I
am a man who shoots straight at his mark. You saw the things I had
with me at yonder hostel: name which you will, save only the box of
rose-colored sugar which I take to the Lady Loring, and you shall have
it if you will but come with me to France.”

“Nay,” said Alleyne, “I would gladly come with ye to France or where
else ye will, just to list to your talk, and because ye are the only two
friends that I have in the whole wide world outside of the cloisters;
but, indeed, it may not be, for my duty is towards my brother, seeing
that father and mother are dead, and he my elder. Besides, when ye talk
of taking me to France, ye do not conceive how useless I should be to
you, seeing that neither by training nor by nature am I fitted for the
wars, and there seems to be nought but strife in those parts.”

“That comes from my fool's talk,” cried the archer; “for being a man of
no learning myself, my tongue turns to blades and targets, even as
my hand does. Know then that for every parchment in England there are
twenty in France. For every statue, cut gem, shrine, carven screen,
or what else might please the eye of a learned clerk, there are a good
hundred to our one. At the spoiling of Carcasonne I have seen chambers
stored with writing, though not one man in our Company could read them.
Again, in Arles and Nimes, and other towns that I could name, there are
the great arches and fortalices still standing which were built of old
by giant men who came from the south. Can I not see by your brightened
eye how you would love to look upon these things? Come then with me,
and, by these ten finger-bones! there is not one of them which you shall
not see.”

“I should indeed love to look upon them,” Alleyne answered; “but I have
come from Beaulieu for a purpose, and I must be true to my service, even
as thou art true to thine.”

“Bethink you again, mon ami,” quoth Aylward, “that you might do much
good yonder, since there are three hundred men in the Company, and none
who has ever a word of grace for them, and yet the Virgin knows that
there was never a set of men who were in more need of it. Sickerly the
one duty may balance the other. Your brother hath done without you this
many a year, and, as I gather, he hath never walked as far as Beaulieu
to see you during all that time, so he cannot be in any great need of
you.”

“Besides,” said John, “the Socman of Minstead is a by-word through the
forest, from Bramshaw Hill to Holmesley Walk. He is a drunken, brawling,
perilous churl, as you may find to your cost.”

“The more reason that I should strive to mend him,” quoth Alleyne.
“There is no need to urge me, friends, for my own wishes would draw
me to France, and it would be a joy to me if I could go with you. But
indeed and indeed it cannot be, so here I take my leave of you, for
yonder square tower amongst the trees upon the right must surely be the
church of Minstead, and I may reach it by this path through the woods.”

“Well, God be with thee, lad!” cried the archer, pressing Alleyne to his
heart. “I am quick to love, and quick to hate and 'fore God I am loth to
part.”

“Would it not be well,” said John, “that we should wait here, and see
what manner of greeting you have from your brother. You may prove to be
as welcome as the king's purveyor to the village dame.”

“Nay, nay,” he answered; “ye must not bide for me, for where I go I
stay.”

“Yet it may be as well that you should know whither we go,” said the
archer. “We shall now journey south through the woods until we come out
upon the Christchurch road, and so onwards, hoping to-night to reach the
castle of Sir William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, of which Sir Nigel
Loring is constable. There we shall bide, and it is like enough that for
a month or more you may find us there, ere we are ready for our viage
back to France.”

It was hard indeed for Alleyne to break away from these two new but
hearty friends, and so strong was the combat between his conscience
and his inclinations that he dared not look round, lest his resolution
should slip away from him. It was not until he was deep among the tree
trunks that he cast a glance backwards, when he found that he could
still see them through the branches on the road above him. The archer
was standing with folded arms, his bow jutting from over his shoulder,
and the sun gleaming brightly upon his head-piece and the links of
his chain-mail. Beside him stood his giant recruit, still clad in the
home-spun and ill-fitting garments of the fuller of Lymington, with arms
and legs shooting out of his scanty garb. Even as Alleyne watched them
they turned upon their heels and plodded off together upon their way.



CHAPTER IX. HOW STRANGE THINGS BEFELL IN MINSTEAD WOOD.


The path which the young clerk had now to follow lay through a
magnificent forest of the very heaviest timber, where the giant bowls
of oak and of beech formed long aisles in every direction, shooting
up their huge branches to build the majestic arches of Nature's own
cathedral. Beneath lay a broad carpet of the softest and greenest moss,
flecked over with fallen leaves, but yielding pleasantly to the foot of
the traveller. The track which guided him was one so seldom used that in
places it lost itself entirely among the grass, to reappear as a reddish
rut between the distant tree trunks. It was very still here in the heart
of the woodlands. The gentle rustle of the branches and the distant
cooing of pigeons were the only sounds which broke in upon the silence,
save that once Alleyne heard afar off a merry call upon a hunting bugle
and the shrill yapping of the hounds.

It was not without some emotion that he looked upon the scene around
him, for, in spite of his secluded life, he knew enough of the ancient
greatness of his own family to be aware that the time had been when they
had held undisputed and paramount sway over all that tract of country.
His father could trace his pure Saxon lineage back to that Godfrey Malf
who had held the manors of Bisterne and of Minstead at the time when the
Norman first set mailed foot upon English soil. The afforestation of the
district, however, and its conversion into a royal demesne had
clipped off a large section of his estate, while other parts had been
confiscated as a punishment for his supposed complicity in an abortive
Saxon rising. The fate of the ancestor had been typical of that of his
descendants. During three hundred years their domains had gradually
contracted, sometimes through royal or feudal encroachment, and
sometimes through such gifts to the Church as that with which Alleyne's
father had opened the doors of Beaulieu Abbey to his younger son. The
importance of the family had thus dwindled, but they still retained the
old Saxon manor-house, with a couple of farms and a grove large enough
to afford pannage to a hundred pigs--“sylva de centum porcis,” as the
old family parchments describe it. Above all, the owner of the soil
could still hold his head high as the veritable Socman of Minstead--that
is, as holding the land in free socage, with no feudal superior, and
answerable to no man lower than the king. Knowing this, Alleyne felt
some little glow of worldly pride as he looked for the first time
upon the land with which so many generations of his ancestors had been
associated. He pushed on the quicker, twirling his staff merrily, and
looking out at every turn of the path for some sign of the old Saxon
residence. He was suddenly arrested, however, by the appearance of a
wild-looking fellow armed with a club, who sprang out from behind a tree
and barred his passage. He was a rough, powerful peasant, with cap and
tunic of untanned sheepskin, leather breeches, and galligaskins round
legs and feet.

“Stand!” he shouted, raising his heavy cudgel to enforce the order. “Who
are you who walk so freely through the wood? Whither would you go, and
what is your errand?”

“Why should I answer your questions, my friend?” said Alleyne, standing
on his guard.

“Because your tongue may save your pate. But where have I looked upon
your face before?”

“No longer ago than last night at the 'Pied Merlin,'” the clerk
answered, recognizing the escaped serf who had been so outspoken as to
his wrongs.

“By the Virgin! yes. You were the little clerk who sat so mum in the
corner, and then cried fy on the gleeman. What hast in the scrip?”

“Naught of any price.”

“How can I tell that, clerk? Let me see.”

“Not I.”

“Fool! I could pull you limb from limb like a pullet. What would you
have? Hast forgot that we are alone far from all men? How can your
clerkship help you? Wouldst lose scrip and life too?”

“I will part with neither without fight.”

“A fight, quotha? A fight betwixt spurred cock and new hatched chicken!
Thy fighting days may soon be over.”

“Hadst asked me in the name of charity I would have given freely,” cried
Alleyne. “As it stands, not one farthing shall you have with my free
will, and when I see my brother, the Socman of Minstead, he will raise
hue and cry from vill to vill, from hundred to hundred, until you are
taken as a common robber and a scourge to the country.”

The outlaw sank his club. “The Socman's brother!” he gasped. “Now,
by the keys of Peter! I had rather that hand withered and tongue was
palsied ere I had struck or miscalled you. If you are the Socman's
brother you are one of the right side, I warrant, for all your clerkly
dress.”

“His brother I am,” said Alleyne. “But if I were not, is that reason why
you should molest me on the king's ground?”

“I give not the pip of an apple for king or for noble,” cried the serf
passionately. “Ill have I had from them, and ill I shall repay them. I
am a good friend to my friends, and, by the Virgin! an evil foeman to my
foes.”

“And therefore the worst of foemen to thyself,” said Alleyne. “But I
pray you, since you seem to know him, to point out to me the shortest
path to my brother's house.”

The serf was about to reply, when the clear ringing call of a bugle
burst from the wood close behind them, and Alleyne caught sight for
an instant of the dun side and white breast of a lordly stag glancing
swiftly betwixt the distant tree trunks. A minute later came the shaggy
deer-hounds, a dozen or fourteen of them, running on a hot scent, with
nose to earth and tail in air. As they streamed past the silent forest
around broke suddenly into loud life, with galloping of hoofs, crackling
of brushwood, and the short, sharp cries of the hunters. Close behind
the pack rode a fourrier and a yeoman-pricker, whooping on the laggards
and encouraging the leaders, in the shrill half-French jargon which was
the language of venery and woodcraft. Alleyne was still gazing
after them, listening to the loud “Hyke-a-Bayard! Hyke-a-Pomers!
Hyke-a-Lebryt!” with which they called upon their favorite hounds, when
a group of horsemen crashed out through the underwood at the very spot
where the serf and he were standing.

The one who led was a man between fifty and sixty years of age, war-worn
and weather-beaten, with a broad, thoughtful forehead and eyes which
shone brightly from under his fierce and overhung brows. His beard,
streaked thickly with gray, bristled forward from his chin, and spoke
of a passionate nature, while the long, finely cut face and firm mouth
marked the leader of men. His figure was erect and soldierly, and he
rode his horse with the careless grace of a man whose life had been
spent in the saddle. In common garb, his masterful face and flashing
eye would have marked him as one who was born to rule; but now, with his
silken tunic powdered with golden fleurs-de-lis, his velvet mantle lined
with the royal minever, and the lions of England stamped in silver upon
his harness, none could fail to recognize the noble Edward, most warlike
and powerful of all the long line of fighting monarchs who had ruled
the Anglo-Norman race. Alleyne doffed hat and bowed head at the sight
of him, but the serf folded his hands and leaned them upon his cudgel,
looking with little love at the knot of nobles and knights-in-waiting
who rode behind the king.

“Ha!” cried Edward, reining up for an instant his powerful black steed.
“Le cerf est passe? Non? Ici, Brocas; tu parles Anglais.”

“The deer, clowns?” said a hard-visaged, swarthy-faced man, who rode at
the king's elbow. “If ye have headed it back it is as much as your ears
are worth.”

“It passed by the blighted beech there,” said Alleyne, pointing, “and
the hounds were hard at its heels.”

“It is well,” cried Edward, still speaking in French: for, though he
could understand English, he had never learned to express himself in so
barbarous and unpolished a tongue. “By my faith, sirs,” he continued,
half turning in his saddle to address his escort, “unless my woodcraft
is sadly at fault, it is a stag of six tines and the finest that we have
roused this journey. A golden St. Hubert to the man who is the first to
sound the mort.” He shook his bridle as he spoke, and thundered away,
his knights lying low upon their horses and galloping as hard as whip
and spur would drive them, in the hope of winning the king's prize. Away
they drove down the long green glade--bay horses, black and gray, riders
clad in every shade of velvet, fur, or silk, with glint of brazen horn
and flash of knife and spear. One only lingered, the black-browed Baron
Brocas, who, making a gambade which brought him within arm-sweep of
the serf, slashed him across the face with his riding-whip. “Doff, dog,
doff,” he hissed, “when a monarch deigns to lower his eyes to such as
you!”--then spurred through the underwood and was gone, with a gleam of
steel shoes and flutter of dead leaves.

The villein took the cruel blow without wince or cry, as one to whom
stripes are a birthright and an inheritance. His eyes flashed, however,
and he shook his bony hand with a fierce wild gesture after the
retreating figure.

“Black hound of Gascony,” he muttered, “evil the day that you and those
like you set foot in free England! I know thy kennel of Rochecourt. The
night will come when I may do to thee and thine what you and your class
have wrought upon mine and me. May God smite me if I fail to smite thee,
thou French robber, with thy wife and thy child and all that is under
thy castle roof!”

“Forbear!” cried Alleyne. “Mix not God's name with these unhallowed
threats! And yet it was a coward's blow, and one to stir the blood and
loose the tongue of the most peaceful. Let me find some soothing simples
and lay them on the weal to draw the sting.”

“Nay, there is but one thing that can draw the sting, and that the
future may bring to me. But, clerk, if you would see your brother you
must on, for there is a meeting to-day, and his merry men will await him
ere the shadows turn from west to east. I pray you not to hold him back,
for it would be an evil thing if all the stout lads were there and the
leader a-missing. I would come with you, but sooth to say I am stationed
here and may not move. The path over yonder, betwixt the oak and the
thorn, should bring you out into his nether field.”

Alleyne lost no time in following the directions of the wild, masterless
man, whom he left among the trees where he had found him. His heart was
the heavier for the encounter, not only because all bitterness and wrath
were abhorrent to his gentle nature, but also because it disturbed him
to hear his brother spoken of as though he were a chief of outlaws or
the leader of a party against the state. Indeed, of all the things which
he had seen yet in the world to surprise him there was none more
strange than the hate which class appeared to bear to class. The talk
of laborer, woodman and villein in the inn had all pointed to the
wide-spread mutiny, and now his brother's name was spoken as though he
were the very centre of the universal discontent. In good truth, the
commons throughout the length and breadth of the land were heart-weary
of this fine game of chivalry which had been played so long at their
expense. So long as knight and baron were a strength and a guard to the
kingdom they might be endured, but now, when all men knew that the great
battles in France had been won by English yeomen and Welsh stabbers,
warlike fame, the only fame to which his class had ever aspired,
appeared to have deserted the plate-clad horsemen. The sports of the
lists had done much in days gone by to impress the minds of the people,
but the plumed and unwieldy champion was no longer an object either of
fear or of reverence to men whose fathers and brothers had shot into the
press at Crecy or Poitiers, and seen the proudest chivalry in the world
unable to make head against the weapons of disciplined peasants. Power
had changed hands. The protector had become the protected, and the whole
fabric of the feudal system was tottering to a fall. Hence the fierce
mutterings of the lower classes and the constant discontent, breaking
out into local tumult and outrage, and culminating some years later in
the great rising of Tyler. What Alleyne saw and wondered at in Hampshire
would have appealed equally to the traveller in any other English county
from the Channel to the marches of Scotland.

He was following the track, his misgivings increasing with every step
which took him nearer to that home which he had never seen, when of a
sudden the trees began to thin and the sward to spread out onto a broad,
green lawn, where five cows lay in the sunshine and droves of black
swine wandered unchecked. A brown forest stream swirled down the centre
of this clearing, with a rude bridge flung across it, and on the other
side was a second field sloping up to a long, low-lying wooden house,
with thatched roof and open squares for windows. Alleyne gazed across
at it with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes--for this, he knew, must
be the home of his fathers. A wreath of blue smoke floated up through a
hole in the thatch, and was the only sign of life in the place, save a
great black hound which lay sleeping chained to the door-post. In the
yellow shimmer of the autumn sunshine it lay as peacefully and as still
as he had oft pictured it to himself in his dreams.

He was roused, however, from his pleasant reverie by the sound of
voices, and two people emerged from the forest some little way to his
right and moved across the field in the direction of the bridge. The one
was a man with yellow flowing beard and very long hair of the same tint
drooping over his shoulders; his dress of good Norwich cloth and his
assured bearing marked him as a man of position, while the sombre hue
of his clothes and the absence of all ornament contrasted with the flash
and glitter which had marked the king's retinue. By his side walked
a woman, tall and slight and dark, with lithe, graceful figure and
clear-cut, composed features. Her jet-black hair was gathered back under
a light pink coif, her head poised proudly upon her neck, and her step
long and springy, like that of some wild, tireless woodland creature.
She held her left hand in front of her, covered with a red velvet glove,
and on the wrist a little brown falcon, very fluffy and bedraggled,
which she smoothed and fondled as she walked. As she came out into the
sunshine, Alleyne noticed that her light gown, slashed with pink, was
all stained with earth and with moss upon one side from shoulder to hem.
He stood in the shadow of an oak staring at her with parted lips, for
this woman seemed to him to be the most beautiful and graceful creature
that mind could conceive of. Such had he imagined the angels, and such
he had tried to paint them in the Beaulieu missals; but here there was
something human, were it only in the battered hawk and discolored dress,
which sent a tingle and thrill through his nerves such as no dream of
radiant and stainless spirit had ever yet been able to conjure up. Good,
quiet, uncomplaining mother Nature, long slighted and miscalled, still
bides her time and draws to her bosom the most errant of her children.

The two walked swiftly across the meadow to the narrow bridge, he in
front and she a pace or two behind. There they paused, and stood for
a few minutes face to face talking earnestly. Alleyne had read and
had heard of love and of lovers. Such were these, doubtless--this
golden-bearded man and the fair damsel with the cold, proud face. Why
else should they wander together in the woods, or be so lost in talk by
rustic streams? And yet as he watched, uncertain whether to advance from
the cover or to choose some other path to the house, he soon came
to doubt the truth of this first conjecture. The man stood, tall and
square, blocking the entrance to the bridge, and throwing out his hands
as he spoke in a wild eager fashion, while the deep tones of his stormy
voice rose at times into accents of menace and of anger. She stood
fearlessly in front of him, still stroking her bird; but twice she threw
a swift questioning glance over her shoulder, as one who is in search
of aid. So moved was the young clerk by these mute appeals, that he came
forth from the trees and crossed the meadow, uncertain what to do, and
yet loth to hold back from one who might need his aid. So intent were
they upon each other that neither took note of his approach; until, when
he was close upon them, the man threw his arm roughly round the damsel's
waist and drew her towards him, she straining her lithe, supple figure
away and striking fiercely at him, while the hooded hawk screamed with
ruffled wings and pecked blindly in its mistress's defence. Bird and
maid, however, had but little chance against their assailant who,
laughing loudly, caught her wrist in one hand while he drew her towards
him with the other.

“The best rose has ever the longest thorns,” said he. “Quiet, little
one, or you may do yourself a hurt. Must pay Saxon toll on Saxon land,
my proud Maude, for all your airs and graces.”

“You boor!” she hissed. “You base underbred clod! Is this your care and
your hospitality? I would rather wed a branded serf from my father's
fields. Leave go, I say----Ah! good youth, Heaven has sent you. Make him
loose me! By the honor of your mother, I pray you to stand by me and to
make this knave loose me.”

“Stand by you I will, and that blithely,” said Alleyne. “Surely, sir,
you should take shame to hold the damsel against her will.”

The man turned a face upon him which was lion-like in its strength and
in its wrath. With his tangle of golden hair, his fierce blue eyes, and
his large, well-marked features, he was the most comely man whom Alleyne
had ever seen, and yet there was something so sinister and so fell in
his expression that child or beast might well have shrunk from him. His
brows were drawn, his cheek flushed, and there was a mad sparkle in his
eyes which spoke of a wild, untamable nature.

“Young fool!” he cried, holding the woman still to his side, though
every line of her shrinking figure spoke her abhorrence. “Do you keep
your spoon in your own broth. I rede you to go on your way, lest worse
befall you. This little wench has come with me and with me she shall
bide.”

“Liar!” cried the woman; and, stooping her head, she suddenly bit
fiercely into the broad brown hand which held her. He whipped it back
with an oath, while she tore herself free and slipped behind Alleyne,
cowering up against him like the trembling leveret who sees the falcon
poising for the swoop above him.

“Stand off my land!” the man said fiercely, heedless of the blood which
trickled freely from his fingers. “What have you to do here? By your
dress you should be one of those cursed clerks who overrun the land like
vile rats, poking and prying into other men's concerns, too caitiff to
fight and too lazy to work. By the rood! if I had my will upon ye, I
should nail you upon the abbey doors, as they hang vermin before their
holes. Art neither man nor woman, young shaveling. Get thee back to thy
fellows ere I lay hands upon you: for your foot is on my land, and I may
slay you as a common draw-latch.”

“Is this your land, then?” gasped Alleyne.

“Would you dispute it, dog? Would you wish by trick or quibble to juggle
me out of these last acres? Know, base-born knave, that you have dared
this day to stand in the path of one whose race have been the advisers
of kings and the leaders of hosts, ere ever this vile crew of Norman
robbers came into the land, or such half-blood hounds as you were let
loose to preach that the thief should have his booty and the honest man
should sin if he strove to win back his own.”

“You are the Socman of Minstead?”

“That am I; and the son of Edric the Socman, of the pure blood of
Godfrey the thane, by the only daughter of the house of Aluric, whose
forefathers held the white-horse banner at the fatal fight where our
shield was broken and our sword shivered. I tell you, clerk, that my
folk held this land from Bramshaw Wood to the Ringwood road; and, by the
soul of my father! it will be a strange thing if I am to be bearded upon
the little that is left of it. Begone, I say, and meddle not with my
affair.”

“If you leave me now,” whispered the woman, “then shame forever upon
your manhood.”

“Surely, sir,” said Alleyne, speaking in as persuasive and soothing a
way as he could, “if your birth is gentle, there is the more reason that
your manners should be gentle too. I am well persuaded that you did but
jest with this lady, and that you will now permit her to leave your land
either alone or with me as a guide, if she should need one, through the
wood. As to birth, it does not become me to boast, and there is sooth in
what you say as to the unworthiness of clerks, but it is none the less
true that I am as well born as you.”

“Dog!” cried the furious Socman, “there is no man in the south who can
say as much.”

“Yet can I,” said Alleyne smiling; “for indeed I also am the son of
Edric the Socman, of the pure blood of Godfrey the thane, by the only
daughter of Aluric of Brockenhurst. Surely, dear brother,” he continued,
holding out his hand, “you have a warmer greeting than this for me.
There are but two boughs left upon this old, old Saxon trunk.”

His elder brother dashed his hand aside with an oath, while an
expression of malignant hatred passed over his passion-drawn features.
“You are the young cub of Beaulieu, then,” said he. “I might have known
it by the sleek face and the slavish manner too monk-ridden and craven
in spirit to answer back a rough word. Thy father, shaveling, with all
his faults, had a man's heart; and there were few who could look him in
the eyes on the day of his anger. But you! Look there, rat, on yonder
field where the cows graze, and on that other beyond, and on the orchard
hard by the church. Do you know that all these were squeezed out of
your dying father by greedy priests, to pay for your upbringing in the
cloisters? I, the Socman, am shorn of my lands that you may snivel Latin
and eat bread for which you never did hand's turn. You rob me first, and
now you would come preaching and whining, in search mayhap of another
field or two for your priestly friends. Knave! my dogs shall be set upon
you; but, meanwhile, stand out of my path, and stop me at your peril!”
 As he spoke he rushed forward, and, throwing the lad to one side, caught
the woman's wrist. Alleyne, however, as active as a young deer-hound,
sprang to her aid and seized her by the other arm, raising his iron-shod
staff as he did so.

“You may say what you will to me,” he said between his clenched
teeth--“it may be no better than I deserve; but, brother or no, I swear
by my hopes of salvation that I will break your arm if you do not leave
hold of the maid.”

There was a ring in his voice and a flash in his eyes which promised
that the blow would follow quick at the heels of the word. For a moment
the blood of the long line of hot-headed thanes was too strong for the
soft whisperings of the doctrine of meekness and mercy. He was conscious
of a fierce wild thrill through his nerves and a throb of mad gladness
at his heart, as his real human self burst for an instant the bonds
of custom and of teaching which had held it so long. The socman sprang
back, looking to left and to right for some stick or stone which might
serve him for weapon; but finding none, he turned and ran at the top of
his speed for the house, blowing the while upon a shrill whistle.

“Come!” gasped the woman. “Fly, friend, ere he come back.”

“Nay, let him come!” cried Alleyne. “I shall not budge a foot for him or
his dogs.”

“Come, come!” she cried, tugging at his arm. “I know the man: he will
kill you. Come, for the Virgin's sake, or for my sake, for I cannot go
and leave you here.”

“Come, then,” said he; and they ran together to the cover of the woods.
As they gained the edge of the brushwood, Alleyne, looking back, saw his
brother come running out of the house again, with the sun gleaming upon
his hair and his beard. He held something which flashed in his right
hand, and he stooped at the threshold to unloose the black hound.

“This way!” the woman whispered, in a low eager voice. “Through the
bushes to that forked ash. Do not heed me; I can run as fast as you, I
trow. Now into the stream--right in, over ankles, to throw the dog off,
though I think it is but a common cur, like its master.” As she spoke,
she sprang herself into the shallow stream and ran swiftly up the
centre of it, with the brown water bubbling over her feet and her
hand out-stretched toward the clinging branches of bramble or sapling.
Alleyne followed close at her heels, with his mind in a whirl at this
black welcome and sudden shifting of all his plans and hopes. Yet, grave
as were his thoughts, they would still turn to wonder as he looked at
the twinkling feet of his guide and saw her lithe figure bend this way
and that, dipping under boughs, springing over stones, with a lightness
and ease which made it no small task for him to keep up with her. At
last, when he was almost out of breath, she suddenly threw herself down
upon a mossy bank, between two holly-bushes, and looked ruefully at her
own dripping feet and bedraggled skirt.

“Holy Mary!” said she, “what shall I do? Mother will keep me to my
chamber for a month, and make me work at the tapestry of the nine bold
knights. She promised as much last week, when I fell into Wilverley bog,
and yet she knows that I cannot abide needle-work.”

Alleyne, still standing in the stream, glanced down at the graceful
pink-and-white figure, the curve of raven-black hair, and the proud,
sensitive face which looked up frankly and confidingly at his own.

“We had best on,” he said. “He may yet overtake us.”

“Not so. We are well off his land now, nor can he tell in this great
wood which way we have taken. But you--you had him at your mercy. Why
did you not kill him?”

“Kill him! My brother!”

“And why not?”--with a quick gleam of her white teeth. “He would have
killed you. I know him, and I read it in his eyes. Had I had your staff
I would have tried--aye, and done it, too.” She shook her clenched white
hand as she spoke, and her lips tightened ominously.

“I am already sad in heart for what I have done,” said he, sitting down
on the bank, and sinking his face into his hands. “God help me!--all
that is worst in me seemed to come uppermost. Another instant, and I
had smitten him: the son of my own mother, the man whom I have longed to
take to my heart. Alas! that I should still be so weak.”

“Weak!” she exclaimed, raising her black eyebrows. “I do not think that
even my father himself, who is a hard judge of manhood, would call you
that. But it is, as you may think, sir, a very pleasant thing for me to
hear that you are grieved at what you have done, and I can but rede
that we should go back together, and you should make your peace with the
Socman by handing back your prisoner. It is a sad thing that so small a
thing as a woman should come between two who are of one blood.”

Simple Alleyne opened his eyes at this little spurt of feminine
bitterness. “Nay, lady,” said he, “that were worst of all. What man
would be so caitiff and thrall as to fail you at your need? I have
turned my brother against me, and now, alas! I appear to have given you
offence also with my clumsy tongue. But, indeed, lady, I am torn both
ways, and can scarce grasp in my mind what it is that has befallen.”

“Nor can I marvel at that,” said she, with a little tinkling laugh. “You
came in as the knight does in the jongleur's romances, between dragon
and damsel, with small time for the asking of questions. Come,” she went
on, springing to her feet, and smoothing down her rumpled frock, “let us
walk through the shaw together, and we may come upon Bertrand with the
horses. If poor Troubadour had not cast a shoe, we should not have had
this trouble. Nay, I must have your arm: for, though I speak lightly,
now that all is happily over I am as frightened as my brave Roland. See
how his chest heaves, and his dear feathers all awry--the little knight
who would not have his lady mishandled.” So she prattled on to her hawk,
while Alleyne walked by her side, stealing a glance from time to time at
this queenly and wayward woman. In silence they wandered together over
the velvet turf and on through the broad Minstead woods, where the
old lichen-draped beeches threw their circles of black shadow upon the
sunlit sward.

“You have no wish, then, to hear my story?” said she, at last.

“If it pleases you to tell it me,” he answered.

“Oh!” she cried tossing her head, “if it is of so little interest to
you, we had best let it bide.”

“Nay,” said he eagerly, “I would fain hear it.”

“You have a right to know it, if you have lost a brother's favor through
it. And yet----Ah well, you are, as I understand, a clerk, so I
must think of you as one step further in orders, and make you my
father-confessor. Know then that this man has been a suitor for my hand,
less as I think for my own sweet sake than because he hath ambition and
had it on his mind that he might improve his fortunes by dipping into
my father's strong box--though the Virgin knows that he would have found
little enough therein. My father, however, is a proud man, a gallant
knight and tried soldier of the oldest blood, to whom this man's
churlish birth and low descent----Oh, lackaday! I had forgot that he was
of the same strain as yourself.”

“Nay, trouble not for that,” said Alleyne, “we are all from good mother
Eve.”

“Streams may spring from one source, and yet some be clear and some be
foul,” quoth she quickly. “But, to be brief over the matter, my father
would have none of his wooing, nor in sooth would I. On that he swore
a vow against us, and as he is known to be a perilous man, with many
outlaws and others at his back, my father forbade that I should hawk or
hunt in any part of the wood to the north of the Christchurch road. As
it chanced, however, this morning my little Roland here was loosed at a
strong-winged heron, and page Bertrand and I rode on, with no thoughts
but for the sport, until we found ourselves in Minstead woods. Small
harm then, but that my horse Troubadour trod with a tender foot upon a
sharp stick, rearing and throwing me to the ground. See to my gown, the
third that I have befouled within the week. Woe worth me when Agatha the
tire-woman sets eyes upon it!”

“And what then, lady?” asked Alleyne.

“Why, then away ran Troubadour, for belike I spurred him in falling,
and Bertrand rode after him as hard as hoofs could bear him. When I rose
there was the Socman himself by my side, with the news that I was on
his land, but with so many courteous words besides, and such gallant
bearing, that he prevailed upon me to come to his house for shelter,
there to wait until the page return. By the grace of the Virgin and the
help of my patron St. Magdalen, I stopped short ere I reached his
door, though, as you saw, he strove to hale me up to it. And
then--ah-h-h-h!”--she shivered and chattered like one in an ague-fit.

“What is it?” cried Alleyne, looking about in alarm.

“Nothing, friend, nothing! I was but thinking how I bit into his hand.
Sooner would I bite living toad or poisoned snake. Oh, I shall loathe my
lips forever! But you--how brave you were, and how quick! How meek for
yourself, and how bold for a stranger! If I were a man, I should wish to
do what you have done.”

“It was a small thing,” he answered, with a tingle of pleasure at these
sweet words of praise. “But you--what will you do?”

“There is a great oak near here, and I think that Bertrand will bring
the horses there, for it is an old hunting-tryst of ours. Then hey for
home, and no more hawking to-day! A twelve-mile gallop will dry feet and
skirt.”

“But your father?”

“Not one word shall I tell him. You do not know him; but I can tell you
he is not a man to disobey as I have disobeyed him. He would avenge me,
it is true, but it is not to him that I shall look for vengeance. Some
day, perchance, in joust or in tourney, knight may wish to wear my
colors, and then I shall tell him that if he does indeed crave my favor
there is wrong unredressed, and the wronger the Socman of Minstead. So
my knight shall find a venture such as bold knights love, and my debt
shall be paid, and my father none the wiser, and one rogue the less in
the world. Say, is not that a brave plan?”

“Nay, lady, it is a thought which is unworthy of you. How can such as
you speak of violence and of vengeance. Are none to be gentle and kind,
none to be piteous and forgiving? Alas! it is a hard, cruel world, and I
would that I had never left my abbey cell. To hear such words from your
lips is as though I heard an angel of grace preaching the devil's own
creed.”

She started from him as a young colt who first feels the bit. “Gramercy
for your rede, young sir!” she said, with a little curtsey. “As I
understand your words, you are grieved that you ever met me, and look
upon me as a preaching devil. Why, my father is a bitter man when he is
wroth, but hath never called me such a name as that. It may be his right
and duty, but certes it is none of thine. So it would be best, since you
think so lowly of me, that you should take this path to the left while
I keep on upon this one; for it is clear that I can be no fit companion
for you.” So saying, with downcast lids and a dignity which was somewhat
marred by her bedraggled skirt, she swept off down the muddy track,
leaving Alleyne standing staring ruefully after her. He waited in vain
for some backward glance or sign of relenting, but she walked on with
a rigid neck until her dress was only a white flutter among the leaves.
Then, with a sunken head and a heavy heart, he plodded wearily down the
other path, wroth with himself for the rude and uncouth tongue which had
given offence where so little was intended.

He had gone some way, lost in doubt and in self-reproach, his mind all
tremulous with a thousand new-found thoughts and fears and wonderments,
when of a sudden there was a light rustle of the leaves behind him, and,
glancing round, there was this graceful, swift-footed creature, treading
in his very shadow, with her proud head bowed, even as his was--the
picture of humility and repentance.

“I shall not vex you, nor even speak,” she said; “but I would fain keep
with you while we are in the wood.”

“Nay, you cannot vex me,” he answered, all warm again at the very sight
of her. “It was my rough words which vexed you; but I have been thrown
among men all my life, and indeed, with all the will, I scarce know how
to temper my speech to a lady's ear.”

“Then unsay it,” cried she quickly; “say that I was right to wish to
have vengeance on the Socman.”

“Nay, I cannot do that,” he answered gravely.

“Then who is ungentle and unkind now?” she cried in triumph. “How stern
and cold you are for one so young! Art surely no mere clerk, but bishop
or cardinal at the least. Shouldst have crozier for staff and mitre
for cap. Well, well, for your sake I will forgive the Socman and take
vengeance on none but on my own wilful self who must needs run into
danger's path. So will that please you, sir?”

“There spoke your true self,” said he; “and you will find more pleasure
in such forgiveness than in any vengeance.”

She shook her head, as if by no means assured of it, and then with a
sudden little cry, which had more of surprise than of joy in it, “Here
is Bertrand with the horses!”

Down the glade there came a little green-clad page with laughing eyes,
and long curls floating behind him. He sat perched on a high bay horse,
and held on to the bridle of a spirited black palfrey, the hides of both
glistening from a long run.

“I have sought you everywhere, dear Lady Maude,” said he in a
piping voice, springing down from his horse and holding the stirrup.
“Troubadour galloped as far as Holmhill ere I could catch him. I trust
that you have had no hurt or scath?” He shot a questioning glance at
Alleyne as he spoke.

“No, Bertrand,” said she, “thanks to this courteous stranger. And now,
sir,” she continued, springing into her saddle, “it is not fit that I
leave you without a word more. Clerk or no, you have acted this day as
becomes a true knight. King Arthur and all his table could not have done
more. It may be that, as some small return, my father or his kin may
have power to advance your interest. He is not rich, but he is honored
and hath great friends. Tell me what is your purpose, and see if he may
not aid it.”

“Alas! lady, I have now no purpose. I have but two friends in the world,
and they have gone to Christchurch, where it is likely I shall join
them.”

“And where is Christchurch?”

“At the castle which is held by the brave knight, Sir Nigel Loring,
constable to the Earl of Salisbury.”

To his surprise she burst out a-laughing, and, spurring her palfrey,
dashed off down the glade, with her page riding behind her. Not one word
did she say, but as she vanished amid the trees she half turned in her
saddle and waved a last greeting. Long time he stood, half hoping that
she might again come back to him; but the thud of the hoofs had died
away, and there was no sou

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