Master Skylark Part 26

As he slipped the knot the throat of the bag sagged down, and a gold piece jangled on the floor. Carew started as if all his nerves had leaped within him at the unexpected sound, and closed the panel like a flash. Then, setting his foot upon the fallen coin, he stopped its spinning, and with one hand on his poniard, peering right and left, blew the candle out.

A little while he stood and listened in the dark; a little while his feet went to and fro in the darkness. The wind cried in the chimney. Now and then the cas.e.m.e.nts s.h.i.+vered. The timbers in the wall creaked with the cold, and the boards in the stairway cracked. Then the old he rat came back to his rind, and his mate came out of the crack in the wall, working her whiskers hungrily and snuffing the smell of the candle-drip; for there was no sound, and the coast of rat-land was clear.

CHAPTER x.x.x

AT THE FALCON INN

And then there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold; And ice mast-high came floating by, As green as emerald.

So says that wonder-ballad of the sea.

But over London came a gale that made the chimneys rock; and after it came ice and snow, sharp, stinging sleet, and thumping hail, with sickening winds from the gray west, sour yellow fogs, and plunging rain, till all the world was weary of the winter and the cold.

But winter could not last forever. March crept onward, and the streets of London came up out of the slush again with a glad surprise of cobblestones. The sickly mist no longer hung along the river; and sometimes upon a breezy afternoon it was pleasant and fair, the sun shone warmly on one's back, and the rusty sky grew bluer overhead. The trees in Paris Garden put out buds; the lilac-tips began to swell; there was a stirring in the roadside gra.s.s, and now and then a questing bird went by upon the wind, piping a little silver thread of song. Nick's heart grew hungry for the woods of Arden and the gathering rush of the waking water-brooks among the old dead leaves. The rain beat in at his window, but he did not care for that, and kept it open day and night; for when he wakened in the dark he loved to feel the fingers of the wind across his face.

Sometimes the moonlight through the ragged clouds came in upon the floor, and in the hurry of the wind he almost fancied he could hear the Avon, bank-full, rus.h.i.+ng under the old mill-bridge.

Then one day there came a shower with a warm south wind, sweet and healthful and serene; and through the shower, out of the breaking clouds, a sun-gleam like a path of gold straight down to the heart of London town; and on the south wind, down that path of gold, came April.

That night the wind in the chimney fluted a glad, new tune; and when Nick looked out at his cas.e.m.e.nt the free stars danced before him in the sky. And when he felt that fluting wind blow warm and cool together on his cheek, the chimneys mocked him, and the town was hideous.

It fell upon an April night, when the moon was at its full, that Master Carew had come to the Falcon Inn, on the Southwark side of the river, and had brought Nick with him for the air. Master Heywood was along, and it was very pleasant there.

The night breeze smelled of green fields, and the inn was thronged with company. The windows were bright, and the air was full of voices. Tables had been brought out into the garden and set beneath the arbor toward the riverside. The vines of the arbor were shooting forth their first pink-velvet leaves, and in the moonlight their shadows fell like lacework across the linen cloths, blurred by the glow of the lanterns hung upon the posts.

The folds in the linen marked the table-tops with squares like a checker-board, and Nick stood watching from the tap-room door, as if it were a game. Not that he cared for any game; but that watching dulled the teeth of the hunger in his heart to be out of the town and back among the hills of Warwicks.h.i.+re, now that the spring was there.

"What, there!--a pot of sack!" cried one gay fellow with a silver-bordered cloak. "A pot of sack?" cried out another with a feather like a rose-bush in his cap; "two pots ye mean, my buck!" "Ods-fish my skin!" bawled out a third--"ods-fish my skin! Two pots of beggarly sack on a Sat.u.r.day night and a moon like this? Three pots, say I--and make it malmsey, at my cost! What, there, knave! the table full of pots--I'll pay the score."

At that they all began to laugh and to slap one another on the back, and to pound with their fists upon the board until the pewter tankards hopped; and when the tapster's knave came back they were singing at the top of their lungs, for the spring had gotten into their wits, and they were beside themselves with merriment.

Master Tom Heywood had a little table to himself off in a corner, and was writing busily upon a new play. "A sheet a day," said he, "doth do a wonder in a year"; so he was always at it.

Gaston Carew sat beyond, dicing with a silky rogue who had the coldest, hardest face that Nick had ever seen. His eyes were black and beady as a rat's, and were circled about by a myriad of little crowfoot lines; and his hooked nose lay across his thin blue lips like a finger across a slit in a dried pie. His long, slim hands were white as any woman's; and his fingers slipped among the laces at his cuffs like a weasel in a tangle-patch.

They had been playing for an hour, and the game had gone beyond all reason. The other players had put aside the dice to watch the two, and the nook in which their table stood was ringed with curious faces. A lantern had been hung above, but Carew had had it taken down, as its bottom made a shadow on the board. Carew's face was red and white by turns; but the face of the other had no more color than candle-wax.

At the end of the arbor some one was strumming upon a gittern. It was strung in a different key from that in which the men were singing, and the jangle made Nick feel all puckered up inside. By and by the playing ceased, and the singers came to the end of their song. In the brief hush the sharp rattle of the dice sounded like the patter of cold hail against the shutter in the lull of a winter storm.

Then there came a great shouting outside, and, looking through the arbor, Nick saw two couriers on galloway nags come galloping over the bowling-green to the arbor-side, calling for ale. They drank it in their saddles, while their panting horses sniffed at the fresh young gra.s.s. Then they galloped on. Through the vines, as he looked after them, Nick could see the towers of London glittering strangely in the moonlight. It was nearly high tide, and up from the river came the sound of women's voices and laughter, with the pulse-like throb of oars and the hoa.r.s.e calling of the watermen.

In the great room of the inn behind him the gallants were taking their snuff in little silver ladles, and talking of princesses they had met, and of whose coach they had ridden home in last from tennis at my lord's. Some were eating, some were drinking, and some were puffing at long clay pipes, while others, by twos, locked arm in arm, went swaggering up and down the room, with a huge talking of foreign lands which they had never so much as seen.

"A murrain on the luck!" cried Carew, suddenly. "Can I throw nothing but threes and fours?"

A m.u.f.fled stir ran round. Nick turned from the glare of the open door, and looked out into the moonlight. It seemed quite dark at first. The master-player's face was bitter white, and his fingers were tapping a queer staccato upon the table-top.

"A plague on the bedlam dice!" said he. "I think they are bewitched."

"Huff, ruff, and snuff!" the other replied. "Don't get the mubble-fubbles, Carew: there's nought the matter with the dice."

A man came down from the tap-room door. Nick stepped aside to let him pa.s.s. He was a player, by his air.

He wore a riding-cloak of Holland cloth, neither so good nor so bad as a riding-cloak might be, but under it a handsome jerkin overlaid with lace, and belted with a buff girdle in which was a light Spanish rapier.

His boots were russet cordovan, mid-thigh tall, and the rowels of his clinking spurs were silver stars. He was large of frame, and his curly hair was short and brown; so was his pointed beard. His eyes were singularly bright and fearless, and bluff self-satisfaction marked his stride; but his under lip was petulant, and he flicked his boot with his riding-whip as he shouldered his way along.

"Ye cannot miss the place, sir," called the tapster after him. "'Tis just beyond Ned Alleyn's, by the ditch. Ye'll never mistake the ditch, sir--Billingsgate is roses to it."

"Oh, I'll find it fast enough," the stranger answered; "but he should have sent to meet me, knowing I might come at any hour. 'Tis a felon place for thieves; and I've not heart to skewer even a goose on such a night as this."

At the sudden breaking of voices upon the silence, Carew looked up, with a quarrel ripe for picking in his eye. But seeing who spoke, such a smile came rippling from the corners of his mouth across his dark, unhappy face that it was as if a lamp of welcome had been lighted there.

"What, Ben!" he cried; "thou here? Why, bless thine heart, old gossip, 'tis good to see an honest face amid this pack of rogues."

There was a surly muttering in the crowd. Carew threw his head back haughtily and set his knuckles to his hip. "A pack of rogues, I say," he repeated sharply; "and a fig for the whole pack!" There was a certain wildness in his eyes. No one stirred or made reply.

"Good! Gaston," laughed the stranger, with a shrug; "picking thy company still, I see, for quant.i.ty, and not for quality. No, thank 'e; none of the tap for me. My Lord Hunsdon was made chamberlain in his father's stead to-day, and I'm off hot-foot with the news to Will's."

He gathered his cloak about him, and was gone.

"Ye've lost," said the man who was dicing with Carew.

Nick stepped down from the tap-room door. His ears were tingling with the sound: "I'm off hot-foot with the news to Will's."

"Hot-foot with the news to Will's"?

To "Will's"? "Will" who?

The man was a player, by his air.

Nick hurriedly looked around. Carew's wild eyes were frozen upon the dice. The bandy-legged man was drinking at a table near the door. The crimson ribbon in his ear looked like a patch of blood.

He saw Nick looking at him, and made a horrible face. He would have sworn likewise, but there was half a quart of ale in his can; so he turned it up and drank instead. It was a long, long drink, and half his face was buried in the pot.

When he put it down the boy was gone.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE