Idonia: A Romance of Old London

We fell in with Mr. Jordan, whom I had almost feared had given over his enterprise, some mile or so distant, at a smith's in a little village we passed through, where he was having his armour eased about the middle, and a basket hilt put upon his sword.

"Who is this fellow?" asked Sir Matthew testily, when I hailed and accosted him.

"It is my old preceptor, sir," said I, "who is coming with us, if he have your leave."

"Hast heard of any robbers by the way, Doctor?" inquired the knight at that, and I saw he was marvellous glad of this increase in his auxiliaries.

"I hear of nought else," replied the scholar sturdily, while the other turned very pale. But continuing, the scholar said: "Seeing that in a treatise I wrote awhile since and caused to be printed, there is a notable paragraph hath been bodily seized upon by a beggarly student of Leyden, and impudently exhibited to the world as his own. Heard you ever such? Robbers quotha? How of my labour, and inquiry into the nature of the lost digamma–"

"Hold!" cried Sir Matthew. "I see we talk athwart. This lost thing or person of yours (for I understand no whit of what it may be) is nothing to the purpose. I spoke of robbers on the highway, villains and cutpurses."

"Of them I reck little," said Mr. Jordan coolly, "seeing I have no purse to be cut."

"They are dangerous nevertheless," said the other loftily.

"For which reason you go sufficiently attended," muttered the scholar, with a cursory eye backward upon the knight's warlike following; and with that we all fell, although for different causes, into an uniform silence. At length, being come to the top of a hill up which we had ascended painfully for near the half of an hour, and especially the waggons found it hard to overcome, we stood out upon an open and circular piece of ground, bordered about by noble great beech trees, but itself clear save for the sweet grass that covered it; and the turf being dry and the air refreshing after our late labour, we were glad to dismount there and rest awhile.

Sir Matthew ordered one of his men to fetch cooked meat and two bottles of wine from the cart, and showed himself very generous in inviting us to join him at this repast.

"I have always gone provided in these matters," he told us as we sat together thus, "since I went upon my first voyage to the Baltic, being but a boy then, although accounted a strong one." (I know not wherefore; for he must ever have been little, and his back not above two hands' breadth.) "Howbeit," he continued, "we had the ill luck to be cast away upon the Hebrides, the weather being very tempestuous and our ship not seaworthy; so that about the fourth day it broke in pieces utterly. I held to a piece of the keel," he said, looking anxiously from one to the other as his memory or invention helped him to these particulars, "upon which, too, clung our purser, whom I did my best to comfort in this our common and marvellous peril. How we got to shore I never understood, but we did, although half dead, and the purser raving."

"Since which time," said Mr. Jordan, pausing in the conveyance to his mouth of a great piece of a fowl's wing, "you have, as you say, gone provided against the repetition of such accidents, even upon the dry land."

"And wisely, sir, as I think," added Sir Matthew.

"Was there then no food to be had in Scotland?" asked Mr. Jordan simply.

"Not where we landed, in the Hebrides," replied the knight tartly. "As to the rest of that country I know nothing, save that 'tis a poor starved foggy place, and the people savage, half naked and inclining to Presbytery, which is a form of religion I abhor, and to any that professeth the same I am ready to prove it wholly erroneous and false."

The knight's tale seeming likely to digress into theology, we ended our dinner hastily without more words; albeit from time to time later, it was evident that Sir Matthew's thoughts were still upon shipping and the sea; so that scarce an accident we met with but he found in it occasion for casting us naked on the Hebrides, or drowning us in the Baltic.

We had halted, I say, upon a considerable eminence, and the ground falling away in our front very steeply, the view thence was of an unparalleled breadth and variety. For stretched at our very feet, as it seemed, lay a fair and fertile champaign diversified here and there with woodland and open heath. Beyond the vale rose the wild and untracked downs all dark and clouded; and to the left hand (as we stood) the bar of the Quantock Hills. Surely a man must travel far who would behold a land more pleasant than this sweet vale of Taunton; nay, were he to do so, as indeed the exiled Israelites found pleasanter waters in Babylon than they had left in Jewry, yet must he needs (as they did) weep at the remembrance of it; for there is no beauty ascendeth to the height of that a man's own country hath—I mean at least if it be the West Country, as mine is.

We continued our progress, going through two or three hamlets where the old folk and children stood about the doors to watch us pass, for we were a notable spectacle, and Sir Matthew Juke a stern figure in the van; travelling thus without any great fatigue, for we kept at a foot's pace on account of the waggon, and of Mr. Jordan also, who had no horse. I frequently besought him to ride my own mare, but he would not until we were within sight of the great belfry tower of St. Mary's Church in Taunton, when he consented, being indeed pretty faint by that, and thanked me handsomely out of Æsop.

In Taunton we dined, and there too I hired a beast for the scholar because (to speak the truth) I could not bear to be parted any longer from my holsters with the new pistols in. No adventure befell us worthy recording, or rather nothing of such magnitude as Sir Matthew's shipwreck which I have above set down, until we reached Glastonbury, where we were to lie that night.

On the morrow we departed early, observing still the same order, save that we rode more closely before the baggage upon a persistent report in the inn of a horrid robbery with murder on the Frome road: which town lay in our way to Devizes. Even the Baltic dried up at this, and we kept a pretty close look-out as we crossed the flat marsh lands thereabout; and once Juke shot off his piece suddenly upon some alarm, but with so trembling and ill an aim that Mr. Jordan's high crowned hat (that he still wore) was riddled through the brim, and a verse of Ovid's which was in his mouth, cut off smartly at the cæsura. Matter of ridicule though this were, I had been alert to note some other circumstance of more gravity (as I conceived) though I spoke not of it then; the cause of my anxiety being indeed too near for open conference thereupon. For I had, by accident, observed certain becks and glances to pass between two of the fellows of our guard; the one of whom, a pikeman (by name Warren), trudged beside the cart wherein were laid up the knight's goods, and his fellow in the plot (to call it as I feared it) was the elder of the two horsemen that wore the knight's livery and were particularly engaged in his defence. After two or three such furtive signals run up, as it were, and answered betwixt these twain, I could be in no further doubt of their purpose, but studied what to do, should they fall upon us suddenly. That their main design was to seize upon the contents of the waggon that was by all supposed valuable, I made sure; but what I could not yet guess was the degree of complicity or indifference in which the rest of our company stood towards the projected assault. I conceived them to be chiefly cowards, however, and resolved therefore, if I might, to enlist their aid upon the first advantage: for cowards ever succeed to the party that rises dominant, and protest their loyalty loudest when 'tis most to be questioned.

Because I was a boy, I suppose, but at all events very impudently, my conspirators took small pains to hide their deliberations from my eyes, having first assured themselves that neither Juke nor the scholar had any cognizance of their doings. And this disdain of me it was that brought matters to a head; for I could no longer brook it, but, wheeling my horse about, I faced them both, and drawing a pistol from my holster shouted: "Halt, sirs! here be traitors amongst us."

I never saw men so immediately fall into confusion as did all of them, but chiefly the rearward, that, every man of them, fled hither and thither with little squealing pitiful cries; some running beneath the waggon or behind it; others leaping off the causeway amidst the fenny ooze and peat-bogs that it wends through in these parts, where they were fain to shelter themselves in the grasses and filthy holes that everywhere there abound. I caught a sight of Sir Matthew, on the instant, exceedingly white, and his sword half drawn; but he then losing a stirrup (as he told me afterwards he did) was borne from the conflict unwillingly a great way down the road ere he could recover himself. Only the younger serving man, whose name was Jenning, and Mr. Jordan, retained their courages, and both came at once to my assistance, which in truth was not too soon. For the footman (that is the villain with the pike) ran in under my guard and dealt me a keen thrust into the thigh which sore troubled although it did not unhorse me. I returned upon him with my pistol, discharging it close to his body, and hurt him in the shoulder, as I knew, because he dropped his pike and clapped his hand there, grinning at me the while like a dog.

Just then I heard the click of a snaphance, and perceived that the caliver that Jenning carried had hung fire; and following upon this, a great laughter from the elder man, whose name was Day, a hard-favoured fellow, having a wicked pursed mouth and little dull green eyes.

"Shouldst 'a looked to thy priming, Master Jenning," he called out mockingly; by which I saw that he had tampered with the poor man's piece while we lay at the inn in Glastonbury; and this much said, he raised his own piece and fired directly at him, who fell at once all huddled upon his horse's neck, stark dead. Before I could draw forth my second pistol, Mr. Jordan had rid forward very boldly, though armed but with his antique broadsword, and laid about him with good swinging blows, the one of which happening upon his opponent's mare, it cut into her cheek with a great gash, at the same time bursting the rein and headstall, to the end she was quite unmanageable, and despite of Day's furious restraint (who, to do him credit, would have continued the contest, two to one), charged away at a great pace, carrying him with her along the road until they were fairly out of sight.

When I had satisfied myself that the villain would certainly not return, I drew my sword and looked about for his companion, the pikeman, whom I had wounded; but whether he had crept into the concealment of the high bog grass, as the most part of the guard had done, or else had gone backward down the road, I could not get any certainty; and Sir Matthew who now rode up said he had not gone that way, else he would assuredly have met and slain him, which, seeing that the man was disabled, is likely; and so I gave over the search.

It cost us some pains to rally our forces, but in the end we did, Mr. Jordan persuading them very cogently with his great sword wherever he found them: he having groped for the digamma in stranger places, he said, and worn away the better part of his life in the prosecution of things more hard to come by than this, our bog-shotten escort.

We reverently bestowed the body of poor Jenning upon the stuff in the waggon, and with heavy hearts (though not without some thrill of victory in mine) set onward again towards Frome and Devizes, which last place the knight was now in a fever to attain to before sundown.

"I think I have not been in such jeopardy," he said, "since I suffered shipwreck off the barren coast of the Hebrides, as I related to you yesterday."

"The dangers would be about upon an equality," quoth Mr. Jordan.

Nothing occurred to renew our fears nor to cause us to assume a posture of defence for the remainder of our passage; the only accident any way memorable being that through some mischance we got into the town of Devizes at the wrong end of it, and were diligently proceeding quite contrary to our purposed direction before we discovered our error. I set this down because I have so done since also (in spite of clear information received), and have therefore cause to regard Devizes as something extraordinary in the approaches thereto, although Sir Matthew, to whom I spoke of it, said that such divergences were common enough at sea, where a man might set his course for the Baltic and fetch up off the Hebrides, or indeed the devil knew where.