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

to the sex, knave; if I don’t break thy fool’s costard with my sword-hilt, it is only because Red Grisell can take care of herself against twenty such lozels as thou. These honest girls have been to the wars with us; King Edward grudges no man his jolly fere. Speak up for thyself, Grisell! How many tall fellows didst thou put out of their pain after the battle of Losecote?”

“Only five, Hal,” replied the cold-eyed girl, and showing her glittering teeth with the grin of a young tigress; “but one was a captain. I shall do better next time; it was my first battle, thou knowest!”

The more timid of the bystanders exchanged a glance of horror, and drew back. The mechanic resumed sullenly,—“I seek no quarrel with lass or lover. I am a plain, blunt man, with a wife and children, who are dear to me; and if I have a grudge to the nigromancer, it is because he glamoured my poor boy Tim. See!”—and he caught up a blue-eyed, handsome boy, who had been clinging to his side, and baring the child’s arm, showed it to the spectators; there was a large scar on the limb, and it was shrunk and withered.

“It was my own fault,” said the little fellow, deprecatingly. The affectionate father silenced the sufferer with a cuff on the cheek, and resumed: “Ye note, neighbours, the day when the foul wizard took this little one in his arms: well, three weeks afterwards—that very day three weeks—as he was standing like a lamb by the fire, the good wife’s caldron seethed over, without reason or rhyme, and scalded his arm till it rivelled up like a leaf in November; and if that is not glamour, why have we laws against witchcraft?”

“True, true!” groaned the chorus.

The boy, who had borne his father’s blow without a murmur, now again attempted remonstrance. “The hot water went over the gray cat, too, but Master Warner never bewitched her, daddy.”

“He takes his part!—You hear the daff laddy? He takes the old nigromancer’s part,—a sure sign of the witchcraft; but I’ll leather it out of thee, I will!” and the mechanic again raised his weighty arm. The child did not this time await the blow; he dodged under the butcher’s apron, gained the door, and disappeared. “And he teaches our own children to fly in our faces!” said the father, in a kind of whimper. The neighbours sighed in commiseration.

“Oh,” he exclaimed in a fiercer tone, grinding his teeth, and shaking his clenched fist towards Adam Warner’s melancholy house, “I say again, if the king did not protect the vile sorcerer, I would free the land from his devilries ere his black master could come to his help.”

“The king cares not a straw for Master Warner or his inventions, my son,” said a rough, loud voice. All turned, and saw the friar standing in the midst of the circle. “Know ye not, my children, that the king sent the wretch neck and crop out of the palace for having bewitched the Earl of Warwick and his grace the Lord Clarence, so that they turned unnaturally against their own kinsman, his highness? But ‘Manus malorum suos bonos breaket,’—that is to say, the fists of wicked men only whack their own bones. Ye have all heard tell of Friar Bungey, my children?”

“Ay, ay!” answered two or three in a breath,—“a wizard, it’s true, and a mighty one; but he never did harm to the poor; though they do say he made a quaint image of the earl, and—”

“Tut, tut!” interrupted the friar, “all Bungey did was to try to disenchant the Lord Warwick, whom yon miscreant had spellbound. Poor Bungey! he is a friend to the people: and when he found that Master Adam was making a device for their ruin, he spared no toil, I assure ye, to frustrate the iniquity. Oh, how he fasted and watched! Oh, how many a time he fought, tooth and nail, with the devil in person, to get at the infernal invention! for if he had that invention once in his hands, he could turn it to good account, I can promise ye: and give ye rain for the green blade and sun for the ripe sheaf. But the fiend got the better at first; and King Edward, bewitched himself for the moment, would have hanged Friar Bungey for crossing old Adam, if he had not called three times, in a loud voice, ‘Presto pepranxenon!’ changed himself into a bird, and flown out of the window. As soon as Master Adam Warner found the field clear to himself, he employed his daughter to bewitch the Lord Hastings; he set brother against brother, and made the king and Lord George fall to loggerheads; he stirred up the rebellion; and where he would have stopped the foul fiend only knows, if your friend Friar Bungey, who, though a wizard as you say, is only so for your benefit (and a holy priest into the bargain), had not, by aid of a good spirit, whom he conjured up in the island of Tartary, disenchanted the king, and made him see in a dream what the villanous Warner was devising against his crown and his people,—whereon his highness sent Master Warner and his daughter back to their roost, and, helped by Friar Bungey, beat his enemies out of the kingdom. So, if ye have a mind to save your children from mischief and malice, ye may set to work with good heart, always provided that ye touch not old Adam’s iron invention. Woe betide ye, if ye think to destroy that! Bring it safe to Friar Bungey, whom ye will find returned to the palace, and journeyman’s wages will be a penny a day higher for the next ten years to come!” With these words the friar threw down his reckoning, and moved majestically to the door.

“An’ I might trust you!” said Tim’s father, laying hold of the friar’s serge.

“Ye may, ye may!” cried the leader of the tymbesteres, starting up from the lap of her soldier, “for it is Friar Bungey himself!”

A movement of astonishment and terror was universal. “Friar Bungey himself!” repeated the burly impostor. “Right, lassie, right; and he now goes to the palace of the Tower, to mutter good spells in King Edward’s ear,—spells to defeat the malignant ones, and to lower the price of beer. Wax wobiscum!”

With that salutation, more benevolent than accurate, the friar vanished from the room; the chief of the tymbesteres leaped lightly on the table, put one foot on the soldier’s shoulder, and sprang through the open lattice. She found the friar in the act of mounting a sturdy mule, which had been tied to a post by the door.

“Fie, Graul Skellet! Fie, Graul!” said the conjurer “Respect for my serge. We must not be noted together out of door in the daylight. There’s a groat for thee. Vade, execrabilis,—that is, good-day to thee, pretty rogue!”

“A word, friar, a word. Wouldst thou have the old man burned, drowned, or torn piecemeal? He hath a daughter too, who once sought to mar our trade with her gittern; a daughter, then in a kirtle that I would not have nimmed from a hedge, but whom I last saw in sarcenet and lawn, with a great lord for her fere.” The tymbestere’s eyes shone with malignant envy, as she added, “Graul Skellet loves not to see those who have worn worsted and say walk in sarcenet and lawn. Graul Skellet loves not wenches who have lords for their feres, and yet who shrink from Graul and her sisters as the sound from the leper.”

“Fegs,” answered the friar, impatiently, “I know naught against the