The East Anglian peasant torn from his primitive home amongst the wheatfields of Norfolk, transplanted into the vitiated atmosphere of the great city, there to learn the abject lessons which the service of a capricious woman and the bribes of her courtiers do so readily teach to a grasping nature, now fell a ready slave to the insidious suggestions of these perjurers. Pye at first had listened with half an ear. His thoughts were still centred on vengeance and on his own aches and pains, and the denunciations against Papists which was the chief subject of discussion between Oates and his audience seemed to him of puerile significance.
But the eye of the other, of him with the florid complexion, was constantly fixed on Daniel Pye. Gradually he drew the latter into conversation. A vague question here, a suggestion there, and the whole history of that day's bitter wrongs was soon poured into overwilling ears: the accusation of theft, the whipping post, the pillory.
Pye felt no shame in retailing these humiliating woes to a stranger. Ever since he had been kicked out of the house by that insolent subordinate he had longed to tell the tale to some one. Truly he would have gone raving mad with compressed rage if he had had to go silently to bed. The stranger was a sympathetic listener:
"Strike me! but 'tis a damnable tale," he said, "misdeeds that cry loudly for revenge. Cannot you, friend, be even with a woman who hath treated you so ill?"
"How can I?" growled Pye, moodily. "A woman! She is rich, too, and hath many friends—"
"Well-favoured, too, mayhap," suggested the other.
"Ay, she's counted pretty—"
"And her friends are mostly gentlemen, I imagine."
"Mostly," replied Daniel impatiently, for he liked not this digression from the all-absorbing topic of his own woes.
Tongue said nothing more for the present, but anon he called for mulled ale, and made Pye draw nearer to the table and partake largely of his lavishness.