“Take my word for’t,” says he, “and demand your own terms.”
The musician hesitated a moment longer, then succumbed. After all, he was committing himself to no more than an interview. “Lead on,” he said, and, the rascal going before, he followed, with the beast, in his tracks.
They were here in a wide place of gabled houses, all having stalls below, with a common pent-roof over, and signs of trades innumerable hung, like flags, from its eaves. Out of this spacious thoroughfare they turned sharply into an alley, sunless like a ravine from the overtopping of its tenements, but full of life and bustle. This was Birchin Lane, much inhabited of dealers in second-hand frippery and upholstery, yet with spaces of quiet between, where in the shadows lurked here and there a doorway enclosing some business less officious in its character. And before one of these doors the stranger stopped. A modest sign hung over it, showing the inscription, “Salvator, Physician,” with a tiny pestle and mortar depicted in the top outer corner, and its base was sunk a single step below the street level.
“Wait you here,” said the fellow, “the whiles I go before to acquaint my master.”
He rapped on the door with the iron knocker, shaped like a sphinx, that hung there, and in a little it was opened to him by a strong, hard-faced woman, who inquired his business. That fact again should have warned our harpist; but the man was a dreamer and simpleton. He noted only that his escort was admitted, and thereafter was content to await his reappearance with patience.
Salvator sat alone in an upper room when the rogue was shown in to him. The physician was of a piece with his chamber, moth-blown and fusty. He wore a long black robe with a fur tippet, and a fur cap was on his head, from which his locks hung down, the colour of dry ginger. He looked spoiled and stained, from much handling of medicaments, and his jaw seemed to goggle with his eyes. The room, beyond a table, an astral globe, a bookcase stuffed with treatises, and a chair or two, possessed little furniture, and no sign whatever of the usual mummified paraphernalia of a dealer in the healing arts. He turned, from his occupation of filling a test-tube from a glass phial, to face, somewhat impatiently, the visitor.
“Well, friend, and what is thy need?”
The rogue fumbled his doffed hat.
“None of my own, master, but my brother’s. A waits in the street below, unwitting of my purpose.”
“What need? What purpose? State, state, and be done with it.”