“Have ye too high a stomach to lie on straw?”
“Oho!” thought I to myself, “then I am to be kept for the mare’s sake, but not admitted to the house:” and said aloud that I could put up with a straw bed.
“Because there’s the stable loft at your service. As ye hear” (and in fact the singing still went on, only now I heard a man’s voice joining in the catch) “our house is full of company. But straw is clean bedding, and the mare I’ll help to put in stall.”
“Agreed,” I said, “on one condition—that you send out a maid to me with a cup of mulled sack: for this cold eats me alive.”
To this he consented: and stepping back into a side room with the other fellow, returned in a minute alone, and carrying a lantern which, in spite of the moon, was needed to guide a stranger across that ruinous yard. The flare, as we pick’d our way along, fell for a moment on an open cart shed and, within, on the gilt panels of a coach that I recogniz’d. In the stable, that stood at the far end of the court, I was surprised to find half a dozen horses standing, ready saddled, and munching their fill of oats. They were ungroom’d, and one or two in a lather of sweat that on such a night was hard to account for. But I asked no questions, and my companion vouchsafed no talk, though twice I caught him regarding me curiously as I unbridled the mare in the only vacant stall. Not a word pass’d as he took the lantern off the peg again, and led the way up a ramshackle ladder to the loft above. He was a fat, lumbering fellow, and made the old timbers creak. At the top he set down the light, and pointed to a heap of straw in the corner.
“Yon’s your bed,” he growled; and before I could answer, was picking his way down the ladder again.
I look’d about, and shiver’d. The eaves of my bedchamber were scarce on speaking terms with the walls, and through a score of crannies at least the wind poured and whistled, so that after shifting my truss of straw a dozen times I found myself still the centre of a whirl of draught. The candle-flame, too, was puffed this way and that inside the horn sheath. I was losing patience when I heard footsteps below; the ladder creak’d, and the red hair and broad shoulders of a chambermaid rose into view. She carried a steaming mug in her hand, and mutter’d all the while in no very choice talk.
The wench had a kind face, though; and a pair of eyes that did her more credit than her tongue.
“And what’s to be my reward for this, I want to know?” she panted out, resting her left palm on her hip.
“Why, a groat or two,” said I, “when it comes to the reckoning.”
“Lud!” she cried, “what a dull young man!”
“Dull?”
“Aye—to make me ask for a kiss in so many words:” and with the back of her left hand she wiped her mouth for it frankly, while she held out the mug in her right.
“Oh!” I said, “I beg your pardon, but my wits are frozen up, I think. There’s two, for interest: and another if you tell me whom your master entertains tonight, that I must be content with this crib.”
She took the kisses with composure and said—
“Well—to begin, there’s the gentlefolk that came this afternoon with their own carriage and heathenish French servant: a cranky old grandee and a daughter with more airs than a peacock: Sir Something-or-other Killigew—Lord bless the boy!”
For I had dropp’d the mug and spilt the hot sack all about the straw, where it trickled away with a fragrance reproachfully delicious.
“Now I beg your pardon a hundred times: but the chill is in my bones worse than the ague;” and huddling my shoulders up, I counterfeited a shivering fit with a truthfulness that surpris’d myself.
“Poor lad!”
“—And ’tis first hot and then cold all down my spine.”
“There, now!”
“—And goose flesh and flushes all over my body.”
“Dear heart—and to pass the night in this grave of a place!”
“—And by morning I shall be in a high fever: and oh! I feel I shall die of it!”
“Don’t—don’t!” The honest girl’s eyes were full of tears. “I wonder, now—” she began: and I waited, eager for her next words. “Sure, master’s at cards in the parlor, and’ll be drunk by midnight. Shalt pass the night by the kitchen fire, if only thou make no noise.”
“But your mistress—what will she say?”
“Is in heaven these two years: and out of master’s speaking distance forever. So blow out the light and follow me gently.”
Still feigning to shiver, I follow’d her down the ladder, and through the stable into the open. The wind by this time had brought up some heavy clouds, and mass’d them about the moon: but ’twas freezing hard, nevertheless. The girl took me by the hand to guide me: for, save from the one bright window in the upper floor, there was no light at all in the yard. Clearly, she was in dread of her master’s anger, for we stole across like ghosts, and once or twice she whisper’d a warning when my toe kick’d against a loose cobble. But just as I seem’d to be walking into a stone wall, she put out her hand, I heard the click of a latch, and stood in a dark, narrow passage.
The passage led to a second door that open’d on a wide, stone-pav’d kitchen, lit by a cheerful fire, whereon a kettle hissed and bubbled as the vapor lifted the cover. Close
