The Greatest Novels of Charles Reade. Charles Reade Reade

to Sevenbergen.

      They reached the promised land, and Denys, who was in high spirits, doffed his bonnet to all the females; who curtsied and smiled in return; fired his consigne at most of the men; at which some stared, some grinned, some both; and finally landed his friend at one of the long-promised Burgundian inns.

      “It is a little one,” said he, “but I know it of old for a good one; Les Trois Poissons.' But what is this writ up? I mind not this;” and he pointed to an inscription that ran across the whole building in a single line of huge letters. “Oh, I see. 'Ici on loge a pied et a cheval,'” said Denys, going minutely through the inscription, and looking bumptious when he had effected it.

      Gerard did look, and the sentence in question ran thus:

      “ON NE LOGE CEANS A CREDIT; CE BONHOMME EST MORT, LES MAUVAIS PAIEURS L'ONT TUE.”

      CHAPTER XXXIII

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      They met the landlord in the passage.

      “Welcome, messieurs,” said he, taking off his cap, with a low bow.

      “Come, we are not in Germany,” said Gerard.

      In the public room they found the mistress, a buxom woman of forty. She curtsied to them, and smiled right cordially “Give yourself the trouble of sitting ye down, fair sir,” said she to Gerard, and dusted two chairs with her apron, not that they needed it.

      “Thank you, dame,” said Gerard. “Well,” thought he, “this is a polite nation: the trouble of sitting down? That will I with singular patience; and presently the labour of eating, also the toil of digestion, and finally, by Hercules his aid, the strain of going to bed, and the struggle of sinking fast asleep.

      “Why, Denys, what are you doing? ordering supper for only two?”

      “Why not?”

      “What, can we sup without waiting for forty more? Burgundy forever!”

      “Aha! Courage, camarade. Le dia—”

      “C'est convenu.”

      The salic law seemed not to have penetrated to French inns. In this one at least wimple and kirtle reigned supreme; doublets and hose were few in number, and feeble in act. The landlord himself wandered objectless, eternally taking off his cap to folk for want of thought; and the women, as they passed him in turn, thrust him quietly aside without looking at him, as we remove a live twig in bustling through a wood.

      A maid brought in supper, and the mistress followed her, empty handed.

      “Fall to, my masters,” said she cheerily; “y'have but one enemy here; and he lies under your knife.” (I shrewdly suspect this of formula.)

      They fell to. The mistress drew her chair a little toward the table; and provided company as well as meat; gossiped genially with them like old acquaintances: but this form gone through, the busy dame was soon off and sent in her daughter, a beautiful young woman of about twenty, who took the vacant seat. She was not quite so broad and genial as the elder, but gentle and cheerful, and showed a womanly tenderness for Gerard on learning the distance the poor boy had come, and had to go. She stayed nearly half-an-hour, and when she left them Gerard said, “This an inn? Why, it is like home.”

      “Qui fit Francois il fit courtois,” said Denys, bursting with gratified pride.

      “Courteous? nay, Christian; to welcome us like home guests and old friends, us vagrants, here to-day and gone to-morrow. But indeed who better merits pity and kindness than the worn traveller far from his folk? Hola! here's another.”

      The new-comer was the chambermaid, a woman of about twenty-five, with a cocked nose, a large laughing mouth, and a sparkling black eye, and a bare arm very stout but not very shapely.

      The moment she came in, one of the travellers passed a somewhat free jest on her; the next the whole company were roaring at his expense, so swiftly had her practised tongue done his business. Even as, in a passage of arms between a novice and a master of fence, foils clash—novice pinked. On this another, and then another, must break a lance with her; but Marion stuck her great arms upon her haunches, and held the whole room in play. This country girl possessed in perfection that rude and ready humour which looks mean and vulgar on paper, but carries all before it spoken: not wit's rapier; its bludgeon. Nature had done much for her in this way, and daily practice in an inn the rest.

      Yet shall she not be photographed by me, but feebly indicated: for it was just four hundred years ago, the raillery was coarse, she returned every stroke in kind, and though a virtuous woman, said things without winking, which no decent man of our day would say even among men.

      Gerard sat gaping with astonishment. This was to him almost a new variety of “that interesting species,” homo. He whispered “Denys, Now I see why you Frenchmen say 'a woman's tongue is her sword:'” just then she levelled another assailant; and the chivalrous Denys, to console and support “the weaker vessel,” the iron kettle among the clay pots, administered his consigne, “Courage, ma mie, le—-” etc.

      She turned on him directly. “How can he be dead as long as there is an archer left alive?” (General laughter at her ally's expense.)

      “It is 'washing day,' my masters,” said she, with sudden gravity.

      “Apres? We travellers cannot strip and go bare while you wash our clothes,” objected a peevish old fellow by the fireside, who had kept mumchance during the raillery, but crept out into the sunshine of commonplaces.

      “I aimed not your way, ancient man,” replied Marion superciliously. “But since you ask me” (here she scanned him slowly from head to foot), “I trow you might take a turn in the tub, clothes and all, and no harm done” (laughter). “But what I spoke for, I thought this young sire might like his beard starched.”

      Poor Gerard's turn had come; his chin crop was thin and silky.

      The loudest of all the laughers this time was the traitor Denys, whose beard was of a good length, and singularly stiff and bristly; so that Shakespeare, though he never saw him, hit him in the bull's eye.

      “Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard.”

      —As You Like It.

      Gerard bore the Amazonian satire mighty calmly. He had little personal vanity. “Nay, 'chambriere,'” said he, with a smile, “mine is all unworthy your pains; take you this fair growth in hand!” and he pointed to Denys's vegetable.

      “Oh, time for that, when I starch the besoms.”

      Whilst they were all shouting over this palpable hit, the mistress returned, and in no more time than it took her to cross the threshold, did our Amazon turn to a seeming Madonna meek and mild.

      Mistresses are wonderful subjugators. Their like I think breathes not on the globe. Housemaids, decide! It was a waste of histrionic ability though; for the landlady had heard, and did not at heart disapprove, the peals of laughter.

      “Ah, Marion, lass,” said she good-humouredly, “if you laid me an egg every time you cackle, 'L'es Trois Poissons' would never lack an omelet.”

      “Now, dame,” said Gerard, “what is to pay?”

      “What for?”

      “Our supper.”

      “Where is the hurry? cannot you be content to pay when you go? lose the guest, find the money, is the rule of 'The Three Fish.'”

      “But, dame, outside 'The Three Fish' it is thus written—'Ici-on ne loge—”

      “Bah! Let that flea stick on the wall! Look hither,” and she pointed to the smoky ceiling, which was covered with hieroglyphics. These were accounts, vulgo scores; intelligible to this dame and her daughter, who wrote them at need by simply mounting a low stool,