LITMIR.BIZ

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the best cure for his disorder. If you get sober in bed it gives you a headache; but you leap up from the hard ground like a lark in spring; eh, Ulric?"

      "He speaks sooth, young man," said Ulric, warmly.

      "What, is the gentleman drunk?"

      The servants burst into a hoarse laugh at the simplicity of Gerard's question. But suddenly Ulric stopped, and eyeing him all over, said very gravely, "Who are you, and where born, that know not the count is ever drunk at this hour?" and Gerard found himself a suspected character.

      "I am a stranger," said he, "but a true man, and one that loves knowledge: therefore ask I questions, and not for love of prying."

      "If you be a true man," said Ulric, shrewdly, "then give us trinkgeld for the knowledge we have given you."

      Gerard looked blank. But putting a good face on it, said, "Trinkgeld you shall have, such as my lean purse can spare, an if you will tell me why ye have ta'en his cloak from the man, and laid it on the beast."

      Under the inspiring influence of coming trinkgeld two solutions were instantly offered Gerard at once: the one was, that, should the count come to himself (which, being a seasoned toper, he was apt to do all in a minute), and find his horse standing sweating in the cold, while a cloak lay idle at hand, he would fall to cursing, and peradventure to laying on; the other, more pretentious, was, that a horse is a poor milksop, which drinking nothing but water, has to be cockered up and warmed outside; but a master, being a creature ever filled with good beer, has a store of inward heat that warms him to the skin, and renders a cloak a mere shred of idle vanity.

      Each of the speakers fell in love with his theory, and to tell the truth, both had taken a hair or two of the dog that had bitten their master to the brain: so their voices presently rose so high that the green sot began to growl instead of snoring; in their heat they did not notice this.

      Ere long the argument took a turn that sooner or later was pretty sure to enliven a discussion in that age. Hans, holding the bridle with his right hand, gave Ulric a sound cuff with his left; Ulric returned it with interest, his right hand being free, and at it they went ding dong over the horse's mane, pommelling one another, and jagging the poor beast, till he ran backward and trode with iron heel upon a promontory of the green lord; he, like the toad stung by Ithuriel's spear, started up howling, with one hand clapped to the smart and the other tugging at his hilt. The servants, amazed with terror, let the horse go; he galloped off whinnying, the men in pursuit of him crying out with fear, and the green noble after them volleying curses, his naked sword in his hand and his body rebounding from hedge to hedge in his headlong but zigzag career down the narrow lane.

      "In which hurtling" Gerard turned his back on them all, and went calmly south, glad to have saved the four tin farthings he had got ready for trinkgeld, but far too heavy hearted even to smile at their drunken extravagance.

      The sun was nearly setting, and Gerard, who had now for some time been hoping in vain to find an inn by the way, was very ill at ease. To make matters worse, black clouds gathered over the sky.

      Gerard quickened his pace almost to a run.

      It was in vain: down came the rain in torrents, drenched the bewildered traveller, and seemed to extinguish the very sun; for his rays already fading could not cope with this new assailant. Gerard trudged on, dark, and wet and in an unknown region. "Fool! to leave Margaret," said he.

      Presently the darkness thickened.

      He was entering a great wood. Huge branches shot across the narrow road, and the benighted stranger groped his way in what seemed an interminable and inky cave with a rugged floor, on which he stumbled and stumbled as he went.

      On, and on, and on, with shivering limbs, and empty stomach, and fainting heart, till the wolves rose from their lairs and bayed all round the wood.

      His hair bristled; but he grasped his cudgel, and prepared to sell his life dear.

      There was no wind; and his excited ear heard light feet patter at times over the newly fallen leaves, and low branches rustled with creatures gliding swiftly past them.

      Presently in the sea of ink there was a great fiery star close to the ground. He hailed it as he would his patron saint. "CANDLE! a CANDLE!" he shouted, and tried to run; but the dark and rugged way soon stopped that. The light was more distant than he had thought; but at last in the very heart of the forest he found a house with lighted candles and loud voices inside it. He looked up to see if there was a sign-board. There was none. "Not an inn, after all," said he, sadly. "No matter; what Christian would turn a dog out into the wood to-night?" and with this he made for the door that led to the voices. He opened it slowly, and put his head in timidly. He drew it out abruptly, as if slapped in the face, and recoiled into the rain and darkness.

      He had peeped into a large but low room, the middle of which was filled by a huge round stove or clay oven that reached to the ceiling; round this wet clothes were drying, some on lines, and some more compendiously on rustics: these latter habiliments, impregnated with the wet of the day, but the dirt of a life, and lined with what another foot traveller in these parts calls "rammish clowns," evolved rank vapours and compound odours inexpressible, in steaming clouds.

      In one corner was a travelling family, a large one: thence flowed into the common stock the peculiar sickly smell of neglected brats. Garlic filled up the interstices of the air. And all this with closed window, and intense heat of the central furnace, and the breath of at least forty persons.

      They had just supped.

      Now Gerard, like most artists, had sensitive organs, and the potent effluvia struck dismay into him. But the rain lashed him outside, and the light and the fire tempted him in.

      He could not force his way all at once through the palpable perfumes; but he returned to the light again and again like the singed moth. At last he discovered that the various smells did not entirely mix, no fiend being there to stir them round. Odour of family predominated in two corners, stewed rustic reigned supreme in the centre, and garlic in the noisy group by the window. He found too, by hasty analysis, that of these the garlic described the smallest aërial orbit, and the scent of reeking rustic darted farthest; a flavour, as if ancient goats or the fathers of all foxes, had been drawn through a river, and were here dried by Nebuchadnezzar.

      So Gerard crept into a corner close to the door. But though the solidity of the main fetors isolated them somewhat, the heat and reeking vapours circulated and made the walls drip: and the home-nurtured novice found something like a cold snake wind about his legs, and his head turn to a great lump of lead; and next he felt like choking, sweetly slumbering, and dying, all in one.

      He was within an ace of swooning, but recovered to a deep sense of disgust and discouragement, and settled to go back to Holland at peep of day: this resolution formed, he plucked up a little heart, and, being faint with hunger, asked one of the men of garlic whether this was not an inn after all?

      "Whence come you who know not 'The Star of the Forest?'" was the reply.

      "I am a stranger; and in my country inns have aye a sign."

      "Droll country yours! What need of a sign to a public-house, a place that every soul knows?"

      Gerard was too tired and faint for the labour of argument: so he turned the conversation, and asked where he could find the landlord.

      At this fresh display of ignorance the native's contempt rose too high for words; he pointed to a middle-aged woman seated on the other side of the oven, and, turning to his mates, let them know what an outlandish animal was in the room. Thereat the loud voices stopped one by one, as the information penetrated the mass, and each eye turned as on a pivot, following Gerard, and his every movement, silently and zoologically.

      The landlady sat on a chair an inch or two higher than the rest, between two bundles. From the first, a huge heap of feathers and wings, she was taking the downy plumes, and pulling the others from the quills, and so filling bundle two; littering the floor ankle deep, and contributing to the general stock a stuffy little malaria, which might have played a distinguished

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