“He will be here in a minute or two, if you are above looking to your own beasts.”
“We should be poor farmers if we were,” said the elder. “Come, John, my son, the stable is over this side, I see. What hour is your supper?”
“Curfew,” said the Boniface, “and you will find good company: a priest, a lawyer, a leech, a youth who looks like a page, and my worthy self, who have filled that chair for twenty years, to carve for you.”
“Could not be better, the very idea appetizes me; come, John, in with the horses.”
Soon father and son joined the motley company in the great common room of the inn, with its huge settles, its capacious hearth, and blazing fire; the priest sat in a corner of the room conning his book of hours: the leech (or doctor, as folk now call him,) talked to a rheumatic countryman who shook with his ailments: the lawyer discussed some recent statutes with a client who travelled with him to the approaching assize at Exeter: and the page—
Well, he was a good-looking stalwart fellow, who bore his burden of twenty years or so jauntily,—good-looking, but not prepossessing; he had that particularly sharp and bright appearance a hair of reddish hue often gives, and which was once esteemed an ornament, and sign of high blood,[50] although silly people like to poke jokes at the wearer now-a-days. Moreover, there was a sly expression about his face which provoked mistrust; whether deservedly or not, the reader must judge by his deeds.
This page, then, when the farmer and son entered the room, started, then looked again, and an expression of surprise, not unmingled with satisfaction, crossed his flexible features.
Gradually the talk lost its technical character, and became general; once or twice it approached politics, but the great danger which then attended political or religious discussions, wherein one incautious word, as it had often done in fact, might cost a man his life, made men very shy of expressing their opinions. The bluff hearty way in which Englishmen of the Plantagenet period (in which time we include the houses of York and Lancaster) expressed their honest opinions, was gradually losing itself in a reserved and distrustful manner, which did not improve the national character, once so frank and open.
And moreover, the political system, inaugurated by Cromwell, had filled the country, as we have seen, with spies; so that men were chary of expressing their opinions before strangers. Still they discussed, with bated breath, the king’s failing health: the question whether the Conservative party, under the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner, with its Catholic sympathies, or the Reforming party, with the Archbishop at its head, would win the royal sympathy and hold the reins of power. It was not then a question which held a majority in parliament, but which party pleased the king.