In truth, reader, you know not what a pleasure there is--when the mind is clear from care or sorrow, the heart well attuned, the object a good one, and the tale interesting--you know not what a pleasure there is, to sit down and tell a long story to those who are worthy of hearing one.
And now, having made a somewhat wide excursion, and finding it difficult to get back again to the tale by any easy and gradual process, I will even in this place, close the first chapter, which, by your leave, shall serve for a Preface and Introduction both.
CHAPTER II.
It was in the spring of the year, somewhere about the period which good
old Chaucer describes in the beginning of his Canterbury Tales,
"Whanne that April with his shoures sote, The droughte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swiche licour,
Of whiche vertue engendred is the flow'r:"
it was also towards the decline of the day, and the greater part of the travellers who visited the inn for an hour, on their way homeward from the neighbouring towns, had betaken themselves to the road, in order to get under the shelter of their own roof ere the night fell, when, at one of the tables in the low-pitched parlour--the beams of which must have caused any wayfarer of six feet high to bend his head--might still be seen a man in the garb of a countryman, sitting with a great, black leathern jug before him, and one or two horns round about, besides the one out of which he himself was drinking.
A slice of a brown loaf toasted at the embers, and which he dipped from time to time in his cup, was the only solid food that he seemed inclined to take; and, to say sooth, it probably might not have been very convenient for him to call for any very costly viands--at least, if one might judge by his dress, which, though good, and not very old, was of the poorest and the homeliest kind--plain hodden-grey cloth, of a coarse fabric, with leathern leggings and wooden-soled shoes.
The garb of the countryman, however, was not the only thing worthy of remark in his appearance. His form had that peculiarity which is not usually considered a perfection, and is termed a hump; not that there was exactly, upon either shoulder, one of those large knobs which is sometimes so designated, but there was a general roundness above his bladebones--a sort of domineering effort of his neck to keep down his head--which gave him a clear title to the appellation of hunchback.
In other respects he was not an unseemly man--his legs were stout and well turned, his arms brawny and long, his chest singularly wide for a deformed person, and his grey eyes large, bright and sparkling. His nose was somewhat long and pointed, and was not only a prominent feature, but a very distinguished one in his countenance. It was one of those noses which have a great deal of expression in them. There was a good deal of fun and sly merriment about the corners of his mouth and under his eyelids, but his nose was decidedly the point of the epigram, standing out a sort of sharp apex to a shrewd, merry ferret-like face; and, as high mountains generally catch the sunshine either in the rise or the decline of the day, and glow with the rosy hue of morning before the rest of the country round obtains the rays, so had the light of the vine settled in purple brightness on the highest feature of his face, gradually melting away into a healthy red over the rest of his countenance.
He wore his beard close shaven, as if he had been a priest; but his eyebrows, which were very prominent, and his hair, which hung in three or four detached locks over his sun-burnt brow and upon his aspiring neck, though they had once been as black as a raven's wing, were now very nearly white.
With this face and form sat the peasant at the table, sopping his bread in the contents of his jug, and from time to time looking down into the bottom of the pot with one eye, as if to ascertain how much was left. He stirred not from his seat, nor even turned his head away from the window, though a very pretty girl of some eighteen years of age looked in at him from time to time, and his was a face which announced that the owner thereof had at one time of his life had sweet things to say to all the black eyes he met with.
At length, however, the sound of a trotting horse was heard, and the peasant exclaimed, eagerly--"Here, Kate! Kate!--you merry compound of the woman and the serpent, take away the jack; they're coming now. Away with it, good girl! I mustn't be found drinking wine of Bourdeaux. Give me a tankard of ale, girl. How does the room smell?"
"Like a friar's cell," said the girl, taking up the black jack with a laugh. "Grape juice, well fermented, and a brown toast beside."
"Get thee gone, slut!" cried the peasant, "what dost thou know of friars' cells? Too much, I misdoubt me. Bring the ale, I say--and spill a drop on the floor, to give a new flavour to the room."
"I'll bring thee a sprig of rue, Hardy," said the girl; "it will give out odour enough. Put it in thy posset when thou gett'st home; it will sweeten thy blood, and whiten thy nose."
"Away with thee," cried the man she called Hardy, "or I'll kiss thee before company."
The girl darted away as her companion rose from his seat with an appearance of putting, at least, one part of his threat in execution, and returned a minute after, bearing in her hand the ale he had demanded.
"Spill some--spill some!" cried the peasant. But as she seemed to think such a proceeding, in respect to good liquor, a sin and a shame, the peasant was obliged to bring it about himself in a way which the manners of those days rendered not uncommon.
The girl set down the tankard on the table, and, with her pretty brown fingers still wet with a portion of the ale which had gone over, bestowed a buffet on the side of the peasant's head which made his ear tingle for a moment, and then carefully wiped her mouth with the corner of her apron, as if to remove every vestige of his salute.
As nearly as possible at the same moment that she was thus clearing her lips, the feet of the horse which had been heard coming, stopped at the door of the inn; and loud applications for attendance called the girl away from her coquettish sparring with Hardy, who, resuming his seat, put the tankard of ale to his lips, and did not seem to find it unpalatable, notwithstanding the Bourdeaux by which it had been preceded. At the same time, however, a considerable change took place in his appearance. His neck became more bent, his shoulders were thrown more forward; he untied the points at the back of his doublet, so that it appeared somewhat too loose for his figure; he drew the hair, too, more over his forehead, suffered his cheeks to fall in, and by these and other slight operations he contrived to make himself look fully fifteen years older than he had done the minute before.
While this was going on, there had been all that little bustle and noise at the door of the inn which usually accompanied the reception of a guest in those days, when landlords thought they could not testify sufficient honour and respect to an arriving customer without mingling their gratulations with scoldings of the horse-boys and tapsters, and manifold loud-tongued directions to chamberlains and maids.
At length the good host, with his stout, round person clothed in close-fitting garments, which displayed every weal of fat under his skin, led in a portly well-looking man, of about thirty, or five-and-thirty years of age, bearing the cognizance of some noble house embroidered on his shoulder. He was evidently, to judge by his dress and appearance, one of the favourite servants of some great man, and a stout, frank, hearty, English yeoman he seemed to be; a little consequential withal, and having a decidedly high opinion of his own powers, mental and corporeal, but good-humoured and gay, and as ready to take as