“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 daughter,—a pretty lass, but too high for my kisses. And as for the father, I want not the man’s life,—that is, not very specially,—but his model, his mechanical. He may go free, if that can be compassed; if not, why, the model at all risks. Serve me in this.”
“And thou wilt teach me the last tricks of the cards, and thy great art of making phantoms glide by on the wall?”
“Bring the model intact, and I will teach thee more, Graul,—the dead man’s candle, and the charm of the newt; and I’ll give thee, to boot, the Gaul of the parricide that thou hast prayed me so oft for. Hum! thou hast a girl in thy troop who hath a blinking eye that well pleases me; but go now, and obey me. Work before play, and grace before pudding!”
The tymbestere nodded, snapped her fingers in the air, and humming no holy ditty, returned to the house through the doorway.
This short conference betrays to the reader the relations, mutually advantageous, which subsisted between the conjuror and the tymbesteres. Their troop (the mothers, perchance, of the generation we treat of) had been familiar to the friar in his old capacity of mountebank, or tregetour, and in his clerical and courtly elevation, he did not disdain an ancient connection that served him well with the populace; for these grim children of vice seemed present in every place, where pastime was gay, or strife was rampant,—in peace, at the merry-makings and the hostelries; in war, following the camp, and seen, at night, prowling through the battlefields to dispatch the wounded and to rifle the slain: in merrymaking, hostelry, or in camp, they could thus still spread the fame of Friar Bungey, and uphold his repute both for terrible lore and for hearty love of the commons.
Nor was this all; both tymbesteres and conjuror were fortune-tellers by profession. They could interchange the anecdotes each picked up in their different lines. The tymbestere could thus learn the secrets of gentle and courtier, the conjuror those of the artisan and mechanic.
Unconscious of the formidable dispositions of their neighbours, Sibyll and Warner were inhaling the sweet air of the early spring in their little garden. His disgrace had affected the philosopher less than might be supposed. True, that the loss of the king’s favour was the deferring indefinitely—perhaps for life—any practical application of his adored theory; and yet, somehow or other, the theory itself consoled him. At the worst, he should find some disciple, some ingenious student, more fortunate than himself, to whom he could bequeath the secret, and who, when Adam was in his grave, would teach the world to revere his name. Meanwhile, his time was his own; he was lord of a home, though ruined and desolate; he was free, with his free thoughts; and therefore, as he paced the narrow garden, his step was lighter, his mind less absent than when parched with feverish fear and hope for the immediate practical success of a principle which was to be tried before the hazardous tribunal of prejudice and ignorance.
“My child,” said the sage, “I feel, for the first time for years, the distinction of the seasons. I feel that we are walking in the pleasant spring. Young days come back to me like dreams; and I could almost think thy mother were once more by my side!”