I at once sat down to rub the general green tint of age from one, noticing it was more verdant than any of its comrades had been, and rubbed with increasing consternation and alarm, moment after moment, until I had reduced it at last to an ancient British copper token, a base, abominable thing, not good enough to pitch to a starving beggar!
Another and another was snatched up and chafed, and, as I toiled on by my little flickering earthen lamp in my bachelor cell, every one of those traitor coins in an hour had shed its coating of time and turned out, under my disgusted fingers, common plebeian metal. There they lay before me at length, a contemptible five pence, wherewith to carry on a week’s carousing. Five pence! Why, it was not enough to toss to a noisy beggar outside the circus—hardly enough for a drink of detestable British wine, let alone a draught of the good Italian vintages that I had lately come to look upon as my prerogative! Horrible! and as I gazed at them stolidly, that melancholy evening, the airy castle of my pleasure crumbled from base to battlement.
As the result of long cogitation—knowing the measure of my friends too well to think of borrowing of them—I finally decided to make a retreat, and leave my acquaintance my still unblemished reputation in pawn for the various little items owing by me. Taking a look round, to assure myself every one in the house was asleep, I argued that to-night, though a pauper, I was still of good account, whereas with daylight I should be a discredited beggar; so that it was, in fact, a meritorious action to leave my host an old pair of sandals in lieu of a month’s expenses, and drop through the little window into the garden, on the way to the open world once more. Necessity is ever a sophist.
It is needless to say the gray dawn was not particularly cheerful as I sprang into the city fosse and struck out for the woods beyond. The fortune which makes a man one day a gentleman of means and the next a mendicant is more pleasant to hear of when it has befallen one’s friends than to feel at first hand. It was only the fear of the detestable city jail, and the abominable provender there, added to the ridicule of my friends, perhaps, that sent me, scripless, thus afield. Gray as the prospect ahead might be, behind it was black: so I plodded on, with my spear for a staff and Melancholy for a companion.
The leafy shades reached in an hour or so invited rest, and in their seclusion an idle spell was spent watching, through the green frame of branches, the fair, careless city below wake to new luxurious life; watching the blue smoke rise from the temple courtyards, and the pigeons circling up into the sky, and the glitter of the sun on the legionaries’ arms as they wheeled and formed and re-formed in the open ground beyond the Prefect’s house. Oh, yes! I knew it all! And how pleasantly the water spluttered in the marble baths after those dusty exercises; and how heavy the lightest armor was after such nights as I and those jolly ones down there were accustomed to spend! As I, breakfastless, leaned upon the top of my staff, I recalled the good red wine from my host’s coolest cellars, and the hot bread from slaves’ ovens in the street, and how pleasant it was to lie in silk and sandals, and drink and laugh in the shade, and stare after the comely British maids, and lay out in those idle sunny hours the fabrics of fun and mirth.
On again, and by midday a valley opened before me, and at the head, a mile or so from the river, was a very stately white villa. Thither, out of curiosity, my steps were turned, and I descended upon that lordly abode by coppices, ferny brakes, and pastures, until one brambly field alone separated us. An ordinary being, whom the Fates had not set themselves to bandy forever in their immortal hands, would have gone round this enclosure, and so taken the uneventful pathway, but not so I; I must needs cross the brambles, and thus bring down fresh ventures on my head. In the midst of the enclosure was an oak, and under the oak five or six white cows, with a massive bull of the fierce old British breed. This animal resented my trespass, and, shaking his head angrily as I advanced, he came after me at a trot when half way across. Now, a good soldier knows when to run, no less than when to stand, and so my best foot was put forth in the direction of the house, and I presently slipped through a hole in the fence directly into the trim gay garden of the villa itself.
So hasty was my entry that I nearly ran into a stately procession approaching down one of the well-kept terraces intersecting the grounds: a seneschal and a butler, a gorgeously arrayed mercenary or two, men and damsels in waiting, all this lordly array attending a litter borne by two negro slaves, whereon, with a languidness like that of convalescence, belied, however, by the bloom of excellent health and the tokens of robust grace in the every limb, reclined a handsome Roman lady. There was hardly time to take all this in at a glance, when the gorgeous attendants set up a shout of consternation and alarm, and, glancing over my shoulder to see the cause, there was that resentful bull bursting the hedge, a scanty twenty paces away, with vindictive purpose in his widespread nostrils and angry eyes.
Down went the seneschal’s staff of office, down went the base mercenaries’ gilded shields; the butler threw the dish of grapes he was carrying for his lady’s refreshment into the bushes; the waiting-maids dropped their fans, and, shrieking, joined the general rout. Worse than all, those base villains, the littermen, slipped their leather straps, and in the general panic dropped the litter, and left to her fate that mistress who, with her sandaled feet wrapped in silks and spangled linens, struggled in vain to rise. There was no time for fear. I turned, and as the bull came down upon us two in a snorting avalanche of white hide and sinew, I gave him the spear, driving it home with all my strength just in front of the ample shoulder, as he lowered his head. The strong seven-foot haft of ash, as thick as a man’s wrist, bent between us like a green hazel wand, and then burst into splinters right up to my grasp. The next moment I was hurled backward, crashing into the flowers and trim parterres as though it were by the fist of Jove himself I had been struck. Hardly touching the ground, I was up again, my short sword drawn, and ready as ever—though the gay world swam before me—to kill or to be killed.
I gave him the spear as he lowered his head