CHAPTER X
I took lodgings that evening with some rough soldiers who kept guard over the town gate, and slept as soundly by their watch-fire as though my country clothes were purple, and a stony bench in an angle of the walls were a princely couch. But when the morning came I determined to better my condition.
With this object in view one of the smallest of my rings was selected, and, with this conveniently hidden, I went down into the town to search for a jeweler’s. A strange town indeed it struck me as being. Narrow and many were the streets, and paved with stones; timber and plaster jutting out overhead so as to lessen the fair, free sky to a narrow strip, and greatly to compress my country spirit. At every lattice window, so amply provided with glass as I had never known before, they were hanging out linen at that early hour to air; and the ’prentice lads came yawning and stretching to their masters’ shutter booths, and every now and then down the quaint streets of that curious city which had sprung—peopled with a new race—from the earth during the long night of my sleep, there rumbled a country tumbril loaded with rustic things, whereat the women came out to chaffer and buy of the smocked cartsmen who spoke the glib English so novel to my ear and laughed and gossiped with them. The early ware I noticed in his cart was still damp and sparkling with the morning dew, so close upon the dawn had he come in, and there in the town where the deep street shadows still lay undisturbed, now and then a Jew, still ashamed, it seemed, to meet any of those sleepy Christian eyes, would steal by to an early bargain, wrapped to his chin in his gabardine—I knew that garment a thousand years ago—and fearfully slinking, in that intolerant time, from house to house and shadow to shadow.
Now and then as I sauntered along in a city of novelties, a couple of revelers in extraordinary various clothes, their toes longer than their sleeves, their velvet caps quaintly peaked, and slashed doublets showing gay vests below, came reeling and singing up the back ways, making the half-waked dogs dozing in the gutters snarl and snap at them, and disturbing the morning meal of the crows rooting in the litter-heaps.
As the sun came up, and the fresh, white light of that fair Plantagenet morning crept down the faces of the eastward walls, the city woke to its daily business. A page came tripping over the cobbles with a message in his belt, the good wives were astir in the houses, and the ’prentices fell to work manfully on booth and bars as merchant and mendicant, early gallant and basketed maid, began the day in earnest.
All these things I saw from under the broad rim of my rustic hat—my ragged, sorrel-green cloak thrown over my shoulder and across my face, and, so disguised, silent, observant—now recognizing something of that yesterday that was so long ago, and anon sad and dubious, I went on until I found what I sought for, and came into a smooth, broad street, where the jewelers had their stalls. I chose one of those who seemed in a fair way of business, and entered.
“Are you the master here?” I asked of a gray-bearded merchant who was searching for the spectacles he had put away overnight.
“My neighbors say so,” he answered gruffly.
“Then I would trade with you.”
Whereon—having found and adjusted his great hornglasses—he eyed me superciliously from head to foot; then said, in a tone of derision: