The Last of the Barons — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (reading an ebook .TXT) 📖

advanced from childhood. But there was no expression of youth in their hard, sinister features: coarse paint supplied the place of bloom; the very youngest had a wrinkle on her brow; their forms wanted the round and supple grace of early years. Living principally in the open air, trained from infancy to feats of activity, their muscles were sharp and prominent, their aspects had something of masculine audacity and rudeness; health itself seemed in them more loathsome than disease. Upon those faces of bronze, vice had set its ineffable, unmistaken seal. To those eyes never had sprung the tears of compassion or woman’s gentle sorrow; on those brows never had flushed the glow of modest shame: their very voices half belied their sex,—harsh and deep and hoarse, their laughter loud and dissonant. Some amongst them were not destitute of a certain beauty, but it was a beauty of feature with a common hideousness of expression,—an expression at once cunning, bold, callous, licentious. Womanless through the worst vices of woman, passionless through the premature waste of passion, they stood between the sexes like foul and monstrous anomalies, made up and fashioned from the rank depravities of both. These creatures seemed to have newly arrived from some long wayfaring; their shoes and the hems of their robes were covered with dust and mire; their faces were heated, and the veins in their bare, sinewy, sunburned arms were swollen by fatigue. Each had beside her on the floor a timbrel, each wore at her girdle a long knife in its sheath: well that the sheaths hid the blades, for not one—not even that which yon cold-eyed child of fifteen wore—but had on its steel the dark stain of human blood!

The presence of soldiers fresh from the scene of action had naturally brought into the hostelry several of the idle gossips of the suburb, and these stood round the table, drinking into their large ears the boasting narratives of the soldiers. At a small table, apart from the revellers, but evidently listening with attention to all the news of the hour, sat a friar, gravely discussing a mighty tankard of huffcap, and ever and anon, as he lifted his head for the purpose of drinking, glancing a wanton eye at one of the tymbesteres.

“But an’ you had seen,” said a trooper, who was the mouthpiece of his comrades—“an’ you had seen the raptrils run when King Edward himself led the charge! Marry, it was like a cat in a rabbit burrow! Easy to see, I trow, that Earl Warwick was not amongst them! His men, at least, fight like devils!”

“But there was one tall fellow,” said a soldier, setting down his tankard, “who made a good fight and dour, and, but for me and my comrades, would have cut his way to the king.”

“Ay, ay, true; we saved his highness, and ought to have been knighted,—but there’s no gratitude nowadays!”

“And who was this doughty warrior?” asked one of the bystanders, who secretly favoured the rebellion.

“Why, it was said that he was Robin of Redesdale,—he who fought my Lord Montagu off York.”

“Our Robin!” exclaimed several voices. “Ay, he was ever a brave fellow—poor Robin!”

“‘Your Robin,’ and ‘poor Robin,’ varlets!” cried the principal trooper. “Have a care! What do ye mean by your Robin?”

“Marry, sir soldier,” quoth a butcher, scratching his head, and in a humble voice, “craving your pardon and the king’s, this Master Robin sojourned a short time in this hamlet, and was a kind neighbour, and mighty glib of the tongue. Don’t ye mind, neighbours,” he added rapidly, eager to change the conversation, “how he made us leave off when we were just about burning Adam Warner, the old nigromancer, in his den yonder? Who else could have done that? But an’ we had known Robin had been a rebel to sweet King Edward, we’d have roasted him along with the wizard!”

One of the timbrel-girls, the leader of the choir, her arm round a soldier’s neck, looked up at the last speech, and her eye followed the gesture of the butcher, as he pointed through the open lattice to the sombre, ruinous abode of Adam Warner.

“Was that the house ye would have burned?” she asked abruptly.

“Yes; but Robin told us the king would hang those who took on them the king’s blessed privilege of burning nigromancers; and, sure enough, old Adam Warner was advanced to be wizard-in-chief to the king’s own highness a week or two afterwards.”

The friar had made a slight movement at the name of Warner; he now pushed his stool nearer to the principal group, and drew his hood completely over his countenance.

“Yea!” exclaimed the mechanic, whose son had been the innocent cause of the memorable siege to poor Adam’s dilapidated fortress, related in the first book of this narrative”—yea; and what did he when there? Did he not devise a horrible engine for the destruction of the poor,—an engine that was to do all the work in England by the devil’s help?—so that if a gentleman wanted a coat of mail, or a cloth tunic; if his dame needed a Norwich worsted; if a yeoman lacked a plough or a wagon, or his good wife a pot or a kettle; they were to go, not to the armourer, and the draper, and the tailor, and the weaver, and the wheelwright, and the blacksmith,—but, hey presto! Master Warner set his imps a-churning, and turned ye out mail and tunic, worsted and wagon, kettle and pot, spick and span new, from his brewage of vapour and sea-coal. Oh, have I not heard enough of the sorcerer from my brother, who works in the Chepe for Master Stokton, the mercer!—and Master Stokton was one of the worshipful deputies to whom the old nigromancer had the front to boast his devices.”

“It is true,” said the friar, suddenly.

“Yes, reverend father, it is true,” said the mechanic, doffing his cap, and inclining his swarthy face to this unexpected witness of his veracity. A murmur of wrath and hatred was heard amongst the bystanders. The soldiers indifferently turned to their female companions. There was a brief silence; and, involuntarily, the gossips stretched over the table to catch sight of the house of so demoniac an oppressor of the poor.

“See,” said the baker, “the smoke still curls from the rooftop! I heard he had come back. Old Madge, his handmaid, has bought cimnel-cakes of me the last week or so; nothing less than the finest wheat serves him now, I trow. However, right’s right, and—”

“Come back!” cried the fierce mechanic; “the owl hath kept close in his roost! An’ it were not for the king’s favour, I would soon see how the wizard liked to have fire and water brought to bear against himself!”

“Sit down, sweetheart,” whispered one of the young tymbesteres to the last speaker—

“Come, kiss me, my darling, Warm kisses I trade for.”

“Avaunt!” quoth the mechanic, gruffly, and shaking off the seductive arm of the tymbestere—“avaunt! I have neither liefe nor halfpence for thee and thine. Out on thee!—a child of thy years! a rope’s end to thy back were a friend’s best kindness!”

The girl’s eyes sparkled, she instinctively put her hand to her knife; then turning to a soldier by her side, she said, “Hear you that, and sit still?”

“Thunder and wounds!” growled the soldier thus appealed to, “more respect