The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📕

“Tu dis?”

“I say-oh, what stout hearts some men have!”

“N'est-ce pas, p'tit? So after that sort—thing—this sort thing is heaven. Soft—warm—good company, comradancow—cou'age—diable—m-ornk!”

And the glib tongue was still for some hours.

In the morning Gerard was wakened by a liquid hitting his eye, and it was Denys employing the cow's udder as a squirt.

“Oh, fie!” cried Gerard, “to waste the good milk;” and he took a horn out of his wallet. “Fill this! but indeed I see not what right we have to meddle with her milk at all.”

“Make your mind easy! Last night la camarade was not nice; but what then, true friendship dispenses with ceremony. To-day we make as free with her.”

“Why, what did she do, poor thing?”

“Ate my pillow.”

“Ha! ha!”

“On waking I had to hunt for my head, and found it down in the stable gutter. She ate our pillow from us, we drink our pillow from her. A votre sante, madame; et sans rancune;” and the dog drank her milk to her own health.

“The ancient was right though,” said Gerard. “Never have I risen so refreshed since I left my native land. Henceforth let us shun great towns, and still lie in a convent or a cow-house; for I'd liever sleep on fresh straw, than on linen well washed six months agone; and the breath of kine it is sweeter than that of Christians, let alone the garlic, which men and women folk affect, but cowen abhor from, and so do I, St. Bavon be my witness!”

The soldier eyed him from head to foot: “Now but for that little tuft on your chin I should take you for a girl; and by the finger-nails of St. Luke, no ill-favoured one neither.”

These three towns proved types and repeated themselves with slight variations for many a weary league; but even when he could get neither a convent nor a cow-house, Gerard learned in time to steel himself to the inevitable, and to emulate his comrade, whom he looked on as almost superhuman for hardihood of body and spirit.

There was, however, a balance to all this veneration.

Denys, like his predecessor Achilles, had his weak part, his very weak part, thought Gerard.

His foible was “woman.”

Whatever he was saying or doing, he stopped short at sight of a farthingale, and his whole soul became occupied with that garment and its inmate till they had disappeared; and sometimes for a good while after.

He often put Gerard to the blush by talking his amazing German to such females as he caught standing or sitting indoors or out, at which they stared; and when he met a peasant girl on the road, he took off his cap to her and saluted her as if she was a queen; the invariable effect of which was, that she suddenly drew herself up quite stiff like a soldier on parade, and wore a forbidding countenance.

“They drive me to despair,” said Denys. “Is that a just return to a civil bonnetade? They are large, they are fair, but stupid as swans.”

“What breeding can you expect from women that wear no hose?” inquired Gerard; “and some of them no shoon? They seem to me reserved and modest, as becomes their sex, and sober, whereas the men are little better than beer-barrels. Would you have them brazen as well as hoseless?”

“A little affability adorns even beauty,” sighed Denys.

“Then let these alone, sith they are not to your taste,” retorted Gerard. “What, is there no sweet face in Burgundy that would pale to see you so wrapped up in strange women?”

“Half-a-dozen that would cry their eyes out.”

“Well then!”

“But it is a long way to Burgundy.”

“Ay, to the foot, but not to the heart. I am there, sleeping and waking, and almost every minute of the day.”

“In Burgundy? Why, I thought you had never—”

“In Burgundy?” cried Gerard contemptuously. “No, in sweet Sevenbergen. Ah! well-a-day! well-a-day!”

Many such dialogues as this passed between the pair on the long and weary road, and neither could change the other.

One day about noon they reached a town of some pretensions, and Gerard was glad, for he wanted to buy a pair of shoes; his own were quite worn out. They soon found a shop that displayed a goodly array, and made up to it, and would have entered it, but the shopkeeper sat on the doorstep taking a nap, and was so fat as to block up the narrow doorway; the very light could hardly struggle past his “too, too solid flesh,” much less a carnal customer.

My fair readers, accustomed, when they go shopping, to be met half way with nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles, and waved into a seat, while almost at the same instant an eager shopman flings himself half across the counter in a semi-circle to learn their commands, can best appreciate this mediaeval Teuton, who kept a shop as a dog keeps a kennel, and sat at the exclusion of custom snoring like a pig.

Denys and Gerard stood and contemplated this curiosity; emblem, permit me to remark, of the lets and hindrances to commerce that characterized his epoch.

“Jump over him!”

“The door is too low.”

“March through him!”

“The man is too thick.”

“What is the coil?” inquired a mumbling voice from the interior; apprentice with his mouth full.

“We want to get into your shop?”

“What for, in Heaven's name??!!!”

“Shoon, lazy bones!”

The ire of the apprentice began to rise at such an explanation. “And could ye find no hour out of all the twelve to come pestering us for shoon, but the one little, little hour my master takes his nap, and I sit down to my dinner, when all the rest of the world is full long ago?”

Denys heard, but could not follow the sense. “Waste no more time talking their German gibberish,” said he; “take out thy knife and tickle his fat ribs.”

“That I will not,” said Gerard.

“Then here goes; I'll prong him with this.”

Gerard seized the mad fellow's arm in dismay, for he had been long enough in the country to guess that the whole town would take part in any brawl with the native against a stranger. But Denys twisted away from him, and the cross-bow