CHAPTER V.
In Auvergne, but in a different part of it from that where we left our party of pilgrims, rode onward a personage who seemed to think, with Jacques, that motley is the only wear. Not that he was precisely habited in the piebald garments of the professed fool; but yet his dress was as many coloured as the jacket of my ancient friend harlequin; and so totally differed from the vestments of that age, that it seemed as if he had taken a jump of two or three centuries, and stolen some gay habit from the court of Charles the Seventh. He wore long tight silk breeches, of a bright flame-colour; a sky-blue cassock of cloth girt round his waist by a yellow girdle, below which it did not extend above three inches, forming a sort of frill about his middle; while, at the same time, this sort of surcoat being without sleeves, his arms appeared from beneath covered with a jacket of green silk, cut close to his shape, and buttoned tight at the wrists. On his head he wore a black cap, not unlike the famous Phrygian bonnet; and he was mounted on a strong grey mare, then considered a ridiculous and disgraceful equipage.
This strange personage's figure no way corresponded with his absurd dress; for, had one desired a model of active strength, it could nowhere have been found better than in his straight and muscular limbs. His face, however, was more in accordance with the extravagance of his habiliments; for, certainly, never did a more curious physiognomy come from the cunning and various hand of Nature. His nose was long, and was seemingly boneless; for, ever and anon, whether from some natural convulsive motion, or from a voluntary and laudable desire to improve upon the singular hideousness of his countenance, this long, sausage-like contrivance in the midst of his face would wriggle from side to side, with a very portentous and uneasy movement. His eyes were large and grey, and did not in the least discredit the nose in whose company they were placed, though they had in themselves a manifest tendency to separate, never having any fixed and determined direction, but wandering about apparently independent of each other,--sometimes far asunder,--sometimes, like Pyramus and Thisbe, wooing each other across the wall of his nose with a most portentous squint. Besides this obliquity, they were endowed with a cold, leadenness of stare, which would have rendered the whole face as meaningless as a mask, had not, every now and then, a still, keen, sharp glance stolen out of them for a moment, like the sudden kindling up of a fire where all seems cold and dead. His mouth was guarded with large thick lips, which extended far and wide through a black and bushy beard; and, when he yawned, which was more than once the case, as he rode through the fertile valleys of Limagne, a great chasm seemed to open in his countenance, exposing, to the very back, two ranges of very white, broad teeth, with their accompanying gums.
For some way, the traveller rode on in quiet, seeming to exercise himself in giving additional ugliness to his features, by screwing them into every sort of form, till he became aware that he was watched by a party of men, whose appearance had nothing in it very consolatory to the journeyer of those days.
The road through the valley was narrow; the hills, rising rapidly on each side, were steep and rugged; and the party which we have mentioned was stationed at some two or three hundred yards before him, consisting of about ten or twelve archers, who, lurking behind a mass of stones and bushes, seemed prepared to impose a toll upon the highway through the valley.
The traveller, however, pursued his journey, though he very well comprehended their aim and object, nor did he exhibit any sign of fear or alarm beyond the repeated wriggling of his nose, till such time as he beheld one of the foremost of the group begin to fit an arrow to his bowstring, and take a clear step beyond the bushes. Then, suddenly reversing his position on the horse, which was proceeding at an easy canter, he placed his head on the saddle, and his feet in the air; and in this position advanced quietly on his way, not at all unlike one of those smart and active gentlemen who may be seen nightly in the spring-time circumambulating the area of Astley's Amphitheatre.
The feat which he performed, however simple and legitimate at present, was quite sufficiently extraordinary in those days, to gain him the reputation of a close intimacy with Satan, even if it did not make him pass for Satan himself.
The thunderstruck archer dropped his arrow, exclaiming, "'Tis the devil!" to which conclusion most of his companions readily assented. Nevertheless, one less ceremonious than the rest started forward and bent his own bow for the shot. "If he be the devil," cried he, "the more reason to give him an arrow in his liver: what matters it to us whether he be devil or saint, so he have a purse?" As he spoke, he drew his bow to the full extent of his arm, and raised the arrow to his eye. But at the very moment the missile twanged away from the string, the strange horseman we have described let himself fall suddenly across his mare, much after the fashion of a sack of wheat, and the arrow whistled idly over him. Then, swinging himself up again into his natural position, he turned his frightful countenance to the routiers, and burst into a loud horse-laugh that had something in its ringing coppery tone truly unearthly.
"Fools!" cried he, riding close up to the astonished plunderers. "Do you think to hurt me? Why, I am your patron saint, the Devil. Do not you know your lord and master? But, poor fools, I will give you a morsel. Lay ye a strong band between Vic le Comte and the lake Pavin, and watch there till ye see a fine band of pilgrims coming down. Skin them! skin them, if ye be true thieves. Leave them not a besant to bless themselves!"
Here one of the thieves, moved partly by a qualm of conscience, partly by bodily fear at holding a conversation with a person he most devoutly believed to be the Prince of Darkness, signed himself with the cross,--an action, not at all unusual amongst the plunderers of that age, who, so far from casting off the bonds of religion at the same time that they threw off all the other ties of civil society, were often but the more superstitious and credulous from the very circumstances of their unlawful trade. However, no sooner did the horseman see the sign, than he affected to start. "Ha!" cried he. "You drive me away; but we shall meet again, good friends--we shall meet again, and trust me, I will give you a warm reception. Haw, haw, haw, haw!" and, contorting his face into a most horrible grin, he poured forth one of his fiendlike laughs, and galloped off at full speed.
"Jesu Maria!" cried one of the routiers, "it is the fiend certainly--I will give him an arrow, for heaven's benison!" But whether it was that the bowman's hand trembled, or that the horseman was too far distant, certain it is, he rode on in safety, and did not even know that he had been again shot at.
"I will give the half of the first booty I make to our lady of Mount Ferrand," cried one of the robbers, thinking to appease Heaven and guard against Satan, by sharing the proceeds of his next breach of the decalogue with the priest of his favourite saint.
"And I will lay out six sous of Paris on a general absolution!" cried another, whose faith was great in the potency of papal authority.
But, leaving these gentry to arrange their affairs with Heaven as they thought fit, we must follow for a time the person they mistook for their spiritual enemy, and must also endeavour to develope what was passing in his mind, which really did in some degree find utterance; he being one of those people whose lips--those ever unfaithful guardians of the treasures of the heart--are peculiarly apt to murmur forth unconsciously, that on which the mind is busy. His thoughts burst from him in broken murmured sentences, somewhat to the following effect:--"What matters it to me who is killed!--Say the villains kill the men-at-arms.--Haw, haw! haw, haw! 'Twill be rare sport!--And then we will strip them, and I shall have gold, gold, gold! But the men-at-arms will kill the villains. I care not! I will help to kill them:--then I shall get gold too.--Haw, haw, haw! The villains plundered some rich merchants yesterday, and I will plunder them to-morrow. Oh, rare! Then, that Thibalt of Auvergne may be killed in the melée, with his cold look and his sneer.--Oh! how I shall like to see that lip, that called me De Coucy's fool juggler,--how I shall like to see it grinning with death! I will have one of his white fore-teeth for a mouth-piece to my reed flute, and one of his arm bones polished, to whip tops withal.--Haw, haw, haw! De Coucy's fool juggler!--Haw, haw! haw, haw! Ay, and my good Lord de Coucy!--the beggarly miscreant. He struck me, when I had got hold of a lord's daughter at the storming of Constantinople, and forbade me to show her violence.--Haw, haw! I paid him for meddling with my plunder, by stealing his; and, because I dared not carry it about, buried it in a field at Naples:--but I owe him the blow yet. It shall be paid!--Haw, haw, haw! Shall I tell him now the truth of what he sent me to Burgundy for? No, no, no! for then he'll sit at home at ease, and be a fine lord; and I shall be thrust into the kitchen, and called for, to amuse the noble knights and dames.--Haw, haw! No, no! he shall wander yet awhile; but I must make up my tale." And the profundity of thought into which he now fell, put a stop to his solitary loquacity; though ever and anon, as the various fragments of roguery, and villany, and folly, which formed the strange chaos of his mind, seemed, as it were, to knock against each other in the course of his cogitations, he would leer about, with a glance in which shrewdness certainly predominated over idiotcy, or would loll his tongue forth from his mouth, and, shutting one of his eyes, would make the other take the whole circuit of the earth and sky around him, as if he were mocking the universe itself; and then, at last, burst out into a long, shrill, ringing laugh, by the tone of which it was difficult to tell whether it proceeded from pain or from mirth.