“I have no drier bed.”
“No, but I have. Come back with me to-night, and I will lodge you safe and sound until the morning.”
“Thanks for the proffer! Yet this is surely extreme courtesy between two wayfarers so newly met as we are?”
“And do I, Sir,” he cried, holding out his thin and shaky palms there in the pallid light, a gaunt and ragged-looking specter—a houseless, homeless, visionary vagrant—“do I, Sir, seem some broiling spend-thrift—some loose hedge-companion—some shallow-pated swashbuckler—hail-fellow-well-met with one and all? I have not said so much civility as I did just now to any one this twenty years!”
“The more thanks are due from him in whose favor you make so great and generous exception. Is it distant to your lodgment?”
“But a few miles straight ahead of us.”
“Then I will go with you, for it were churlish to slight so good an offer out of bare waywardness”; and I tightened my belt, and took the ragged, ungroomed little steed by the rusty, cord-mended bit, and with these two strange companions, set out I knew not how or where, and cared but little.
At first that quaint old man seemed more elated than could reasonably be expected at having secured me for a guest. He did not openly avow it, but I was not so young or unread in men but that I could decipher his pleasure in voice and eye, even while he talked on other subjects. How this interest came, what he could hope to get or have of me, however, was well past my comprehension. My dress and rustic garb spoke me his inferior in place and station, while, certes! my rags and tatters made me seem poor even after my humble kind. He was a gentleman, though the sorriest-looking one who ever put a leg across a saddle. And I? I was afoot, a gloomy, purseless, unweaponed loiterer in the shadows. What could he need of me that lent such luster to his eyes, and caused him to chuckle so hoarsely far down in his lean and withered throat? The morrow no doubt would show, and in the meantime, being still morose and sad, smarting to have unwittingly played the fool so much, and full of grief and sorrow, I responded but dully to his learned talk. Feeling this, and being only slenderly attached to mundane things at best, his mind wandered from me after a mile or two—his eyes grew fixed and expressionless, his hands dropped, supine upon the pommel, his chin sank down upon the limp, worn, yellow ruffles on his chest, and senseless, disconnected murmurs ran from his lips, like water dripping from a leaky cask.
I let him babble as he liked, and trudged along in silence, leaving the road to that sagacious beast, who, with drooped head and stolid purpose, went pacing on without a look either to right or left. And you will guess my thoughts were melancholy. Yesterday I was an honored soldier, the confidant of a proud, victorious king, the comrade of a shining band of princely brethren, as good a knight as any that breathed among a host of heroes, the clear-honored leading star—the bright example to a horde of stalwart veterans—with all the fair wide fields of renown and reputation lying inviting before me!—all the pleasant lethe of struggle and ambition open to my search, and I had strong, true friends abroad, and loving ones at home—and now! and now! Oh! I beat my hand upon my bosom, and spent impotent curses on the starlight sky, to think how all was changed—to think how those splendid princely shadows were gone—how all those sweet, rough spearmen who had ridden with me, fetlock deep, through the crimson mire of Crecy had passed out into the void, leaving me here desolate, poor, accursed—this empty hand that trained the spear that had shot princes and paladins to earth under the full gaze of crownèd Christendom, turned to a low horse-boy’s duty, my golden mail changed to a hedgeman’s muddy smock, on foot, degraded, friendless, and forlorn!
But it was no good grieving. My melancholy served somehow to pass the way, and when, presently, I shook it off again with one fierce, final sigh, and peered about, we were slowly winding down a dark road between high banks into a deeply wooded glen lying straight ahead. I had noticed now and then, as we came along, a twinkling light or two standing off from the white roadway, amid the deep black shadows of the evening, and each time had slowed my gloomy stride, thinking this were the place we aimed for. Now it was a shepherd’s lonely cot, high-perched amid the open furze and ling, with a faint red beam of warmth and light coming from the glowing hearth within. “Ah! here we be!” I thought. “So Learning is lodged with fleecy Simplicity, and cons his Ovid amid the things the sweet Latin loved, or reads bucolic Horace beneath a herdsman’s oak!”