“By all the saints, fair girl!” I exclaimed impetuously, as she led me toward that place, “thy father’s workshop is on fire! See the gray smoke curling from the lintel of the doorway, and the broken panes—and yonder I catch a glint of flame! Here, let me burst the door!” and I sprang forward.
But the lady put her hand upon my arm, saying with a somewhat rueful smile, “No, not so bad as that—there is fire there, but it is servant not master. Come in and you shall see.” She took me down six damp stone steps, then lifted the latch of a massy, weather-beaten, oaken doorway, and led me within.
It was a vast, dim, vaulted cellar. The rough black roof of rugged masonry was hung by vistas of such mighty tapestries of grimy cobwebs as never mortal saw before. On the near side the row of little windows, dusty and neglected, let in thin streams of light that only made the general darkness the more visible. All the other wall was rough and bare; beset with great spikes and nails wherefrom depended a thousand forms of ironware, and ancient useless metal things, the broken, rusty implements of peace and war. The floor seemed, as I took in every detail of this subterranean chamber, to be bare earth, stamped hard and glossy with constant treading, while here and there in hollows black water stood in pools, and gray ashes from a furnace-fire margined those miry places. It was a gloomy hall, without a doubt, and as my eyes wandered round the shadows they presently discovered the presiding genius.
In the hollow of the great final arch was a cobwebbed, smoke-grimed blacksmith’s forge and bellows. The little heap of fuel on it was glowing white, and the curling smoke ascended part up the rugged chimney and part into the chamber. On one side of this forge stood a heavy anvil, and by it, as we entered, a man was toiling on a molten bar of iron, plying his blows so slow and heavy it was melancholy to watch them. That man, it did not need another glance to tell me, was my host! If he had looked gaunt and wild by night, the yellow flicker of the furnace and the pale mockery of daylight which stole through his poor panes did not improve him now. The bright fire of enthusiasm still burned in his keen old eyes, I saw, but they were red and heavy with long sleeplessness; his ragged, open shirt displayed his lean and hairy chest, stained and smudged with the hue of toil; his arms were bare to the elbow, and his knotted old fingers clutched like the talons of a bird upon the handle of the hammer that he wielded. Grim old fellow! He was near double with weariness and labor; the breath came quick and hectic as he toiled; the painful sweat cut white furrows down his pallid, ash-stained face; and his wild, gray elfin locks were dank and heavy with the foul fumes of that black hole of his. Yet he stopped not to look to left or to right, but still kept at it, unmindful of aught else—hammer, hammer, hammer! and sigh, sigh, sigh!—with a fine inspired smile of misty, heroic pleasure about his mouth, and the light of prophecy and quenchless courage in his eyes!
It was very strange to watch him, and there was something about the unbroken rhythm of his blows, and the inflexible determination hanging about him, that held me spellbound, waiting I knew not for what, but half thinking to witness that red iron whereinto his soul was being welded spring into something wild and strange and fair—half thinking to witness these sooty walls fall back into the wide arcades of shadowy realm, and that old magician blossom out of his vile rags into some splendid flower of humankind. It was foolish, but it was an unlearned age, and I only a rough soldier. That fair maid by my side, more familiar with these strange sights and sounds, roused me from my expectant watching in a minute.
She had come in after me, had paused as I did, and now with pretty filial pity in her face, and outspread hands, she ran to that old man and laid a tender finger upon his yellow arm, and stayed its measured labor. At this he looked up for the first time since we entered, as dazed and sleepy as one newly waked, and, seeing that he scarce knew her, Elizabeth shook her head at him, and took his grizzled cheeks between her rosy palms, and kissed him first on one side and then on the other, kissed him sweet and tenderly upon his pallid unwashed cheeks, and then, with kind imperiousness, loosed his cramped fingers from the hammer-shaft and threw it away, and led him by gentle force back from his forge and anvil. “Oh, father!” she said, bustling round him and fastening up his shirt and pulling down his sleeves, and looking in his face with real solicitude, “indeed I do think you are the worst father that ever any maid did have,” and here was another kiss. “Oh! how long have you worked down here? Two nights and days on end. Fie, for shame! And how much have you eaten? What? Nothing, nothing all that time? Did ever child have such a parent? Oh! would to Heaven you had less wisdom and more wit—why, if you go on like this, you will be thinner than any of these spiders overhead in springtime—and weary—nay, do not tell me you are not—and, oh! so dirty, alack that I should let a stranger see thee like this!” and, taking her own white kerchief from her apron, that damsel wiped her father’s face in love and gentleness, and stroked his gritty beard and smoothed, as well as she was able, his ancient locks, then took him by the hand and pointed to me, standing a little way off in the gloom.
At first the old man gazed at the amber-suited gallant shining in the blackness of his workshop, stolidly, without a trace of recognition, but, when in a minute or two by an effort he drew his wits together, he took me for one of those gay fellows, who, no doubt, had haunted his courtyards and spent his money in brighter times, and taxed me with it. But I laughed at that and shook my head, whereon he mused—“What! are thou, then, young John Eldrid of Beaulieu, come to pay those twenty crowns your father borrowed twelve years since?”
No! I was not John Eldrid, and there were no crowns in my wallet. Then I must be Lord Fossedene’s reeve come to complain again of broken fences and cattle straying, or, perhaps, a bailiff for the Queen’s dues, and, if that were so, it was little I would get from him.
Thereon his daughter burst out laughing and stroking the old man’s hand. “Oh, father,” she said gently, “you were not always thus forgetful. This excellent gentleman I found trespassing among my flowers, and did arrest him; he is your guest, and declares you brought him here two nights since, lodging him in our empty front, where he has subsisted all this time on melancholy and stolen meals. Surely, father, you recall him now?”
The old man was puzzled, but slowly a ray of recollection pierced through the thick mists of forgetfulness. Indeed, he did remember, he muttered, something of the kind, but it was a sturdy, shrewd-looking yeoman, tall, and bronzed under his wide cap, a rustic fellow in country cloth that he had brought along, and not this yellow gentleman. So then I explained how he had resuited me, and jogged his memory gently, lifting it down the trail of our brief acquaintance as a good huntsman lifts a hound over a cold scent, until at last, when he had given him a cup of red wine from his cupboard in the niche, his eyes brightened up, the vacuity faded from his face, and, laughing in turn, he knew me; then, holding out two withered hands in very courteous wise, old Andrew Faulkener welcomed me, and in civil, courtly speech, that seemed strange enough in that grim hole, and from that grizzly, bent, unwashed old fellow, made apology for the neglect and seeming slight which he feared I must have suffered.