Master Skylark: A Story of Shakspere's Time by John Bennett (top rated books of all time txt) 📕

“Come,” growled the blacksmith, gripping his tongs, “what wilt thou have o’ the lad?”

“What will I have o’ the lad?” said Master Carew, mimicking the blacksmith in a most comical way, with a wink at the crowd, as if he had never been angry at all, so quickly could he change his face—“What will I have o’ the lad?” and all the crowd laughed. “Why, bless thy gentle heart, good man, I want to turn his farthings into round gold crowns—if thou and thine infernal hot shoe do not make zanies of us all! Why, Master Smith, ’tis to London town I’d take him, and fill his hands with more silver shillings than there be cast-off shoes in thy whole shop.”

“La, now, hearken till him!” gaped the smith, staring in amazement.

“And here thou needs must up and spoil it all, because, forsooth, the silly child goes a trifle sick for home and whimpers for his minnie!”

“But the lad saith thou hast stealed him awa-ay from ’s ho-ome,” rumbled the smith, like a doubtful earthquake; “and we’ll ha’ no stealing o’ lads awa-ay from ho-ome in County Herts!”

“Nay, that we won’t!” cried one. “Hurrah, John Smith—fair play, fair play!” and there came an ugly, threatening murmur from the crowd.

“What! Fair play?” cried Master Carew, turning so sharply about, with his hand upon his poniard, that each made as if it were not he but his neighbor had growled. “Why, sirs, what if I took any one of ye out of your poverty and common clothes down into London town, horseback like a king, and had ye sing before the Queen, and play for earls, and talk with the highest dames in all the land; and fed ye well, and spoke ye fair, and lodged ye soft, and clad ye fine, and wrought the whole town on to cheer ye, and to fill your purses full of gold? What, sir,” said he, turning to the gaping farrier—“what if I promised thee to turn thine every word to a silver sixpence, and thy smutty grins to golden angels—what wouldst thou? Knock me in the head with thy dirty sledge, and bawl foul play?”

“Nay, that I’d not,” roared the burly smith, with a stupid, ox-like grin, scratching his tousled head; “I’d say, ‘Go it, bully, and a plague on him that said thee nay!’”

“And yet when I would fill this silly fellow’s jerkin full of good gold Harry shovel-boards for the simple drawing of his breath, ye bawl ‘Foul play!’”

“What, here! come out, lad,” roared the smith, with a great horse-laugh, swinging Nick forward and thwacking him jovially between the shoulders with his brawny hand; “come out, and go along o’ the master here,—’tis for thy good,—and ho-ome wull keep, I trow, till thou dost come again.”

But Nick hung back, and clung to the blacksmith’s grimy arm, crying in despair: “I will na—oh, I will na!”

“Tut, tut!” cried Master Carew. “Come, Nicholas; I mean thee well, I’ll speak thee fair, and I’ll treat thee true”—and he smiled so frankly that even Nick’s doubts almost wavered. “Come, I’ll swear it on my hilt,” said he.

The smith’s brow clouded. “Nay,” said he; “we’ll no swearing by hilts or by holies here; the bailiff will na have it, sir.”

“Good! then upon mine honour as an Englishman!” cried Carew. “What, how, bullies? Upon mine honour as an Englishman!—how is it? Here we be, all Englishmen together!” and he clapped his hand to Will Hostler’s shoulder, whereat Will stood up very straight and looked around, as if all at once he were somebody instead of somewhat less than nobody at all of any consequence. “What!—ye are all for fair play?—and I am for fair play, and good Master Smith, with his beautiful shoe, here, is for fair play! Why, sirs, my bullies, we are all for fair play; and what more can a man ask than good, downright English fair play? Nothing, say I. Fair play first, last, and all the time!” and he waved his hand. “Hurrah for downright English fair play!”

“Hurrah, hurrah!” bellowed the crowd, swept along like bubbles in a flood. “Fair play, says we—English fair play—hurrah!” And those inside waved their hands, and those that were outside tossed up their caps, in sheer delight of good fair play.

“Hurrah, my bullies! That’s the cry!” said Carew, in his hail-fellow-well-met, royal way. “Why, we’re the very best of fellows, and the very fastest friends! Come, all to the old Three Lions inn, and douse a can of brown March brew at my expense. To the Queen, to good fair play, and to all the fine fellows in Albans town!”

And what did the crowd do but raise a shout, like a parcel of school-boys loosed for a holiday, and troop off to the Three Lions inn at Master Carew’s heels, Will Hostler and the brawny smith bringing up the rear with Nick between them, hand to collar, half forgotten by the rest, and his heart too low for further grief.

And while the crowd were still roaring over their tankards and cheering good fair play, Master Gaston Carew up with his prisoner into the saddle, and, mounting himself, with the bandy-legged man grinning opposite, shook the dust of old St. Albans from his horse’s heels.

“Now, Nicholas Attwood,” said he, grimly, as they galloped away, “hark ’e well to what I have to say, and do not let it slip thy mind. I am willed to take thee to London town—dost mark me?—and to London town thou shalt go, warm or cold. By the whistle of the Lord High Admiral, I mean just what I say! So thou mayst take thy choice.”

He gripped Nick’s shoulder as they rode, and glared into his eyes as if to sear them with his own. Nick heard his poniard grating in its sheath, and shut his eyes so that he might not see the master-player’s horrid stare; for the opening and shutting, opening and shutting, of the blue lids made him shudder.

“And what’s more,” said Carew, sternly, “I shall call thee Master Skylark from this time forth—dost hear? And when I bid thee go, thou’lt go; and when I bid thee come, thou’lt come; and when I say, ‘Here, follow me!’ thou’lt follow like a dog to heel!” He drew up his lip until his white teeth showed, and Nick, hearing them gritting together, shrank back dismayed.

“There!” laughed Carew, scornfully. “He that knows better how to tame a vixen or to cozen a pack of gulls, now let him speak!” and said no more until they passed by Chipping Barnet. Then, “Nick,” said he, in a quiet, kindly tone, as if they had been friends for years, “this is the place where Warwick fell”; and pointed down the field. “There in the corner of that croft they piled the noble dead like corn upon a threshing-floor. Since then,” said he, with quiet irony, “men have stopped making English kings as the Dutch make dolls, of a stick and a poll thereon.”

Pleased with hearing his own voice, he would have gone on with many another thing; but seeing that Nick listened not at all to what he said, he ceased, and rode on silently or chatting with the others.

The country through Middlesex was in most part flat, and heavy forests overhung the road from time to time. There the players slipped their poniards, and rode with rapier in hand; for many a dark deed and cruel robbery had been done along this stretch of Watling street. And as they passed, more than one dark-visaged rogue with branded hand and a price upon his head peered at them from the copses by the way.

In places where the woods crept very near they pressed closer together and rode rapidly; and the horse-boy and the grooms lit up the matches of their pistolets, and laid their harquebuses ready in rest, and blew the creeping sparkle snapping red at every turn; not so much really fearing an attack upon so stout a party of reckless, dashing blades, as being overawed by the great, mysterious silence of the forest, the semi-twilight all about, and the cold, strange-smelling wind that fanned their faces.

The wild spattering of hoofs in water-pools that lay unsucked by the sun in shadowy stretches, the grim silence of the riders, and the wary eying of each covert as they passed, sent a thrill of excitement into Nick’s heart too keen for any boy to resist.

Then, too, it was no everyday tale to be stolen away from home. It was a wild, strange thing with a strange, wild sound to it, not altogether terrible or unpleasant to a brave boy’s ears in that wonder-filled age, when all the world was turned adventurer, and England led the fore; when Francis Drake and the “Golden Hind,” John Hawkins and the “Victory,” Frobisher and his cockleshells, were gossip for every English fireside; when the whole world rang with English steel, and the wide sea foamed with English keels, and the air was full of the blaze of the living and the ghosts of the mighty dead. And down in Nick’s plucky young English heart there came a spark like that which burns in the soul of a mariner when for the first time an unknown ocean rolls before his eyes.

So he rode on bravely, filled with a sense of daring and the thrill of perils more remote than Master Carew’s altogether too adjacent poniard, as well as with a sturdy determination to escape at the first opportunity, in spite of all the master-player’s threats.

Up Highgate Hill they rattled in a bracing northeast wind, the rugged country bowling back against the tumbled sky. Far to south a rusty haze had gloomed against the sun like a midday fog, mile after mile; and suddenly, as they topped the range and cleared the last low hill, they saw a city in the south spreading away until it seemed to Nick to girdle half the world and to veil the sky in a reek of murky sea-coal smoke.

“There!” said Carew, reining in the gray, as Nick looked up and felt his heart almost stand still; “since Parma burned old Antwerp, and the Low Countries are dead, there lies the market-heart of all the big round world!”

“London!” cried Nick, and, catching his breath with a quick gasp, sat speechless, staring.

Carew smiled. “Ay, Nick,” said he, cheerily; “’tis London town. Pluck up thine heart, lad, and be no more cast down; there lies a New World ready to thine hand. Thou canst win it if thou wilt. Come, let it be thine