Often a barn or a byre sufficed for their night’s lodging, but they seldom lacked food. Even in the most rural places Gervase’s skill upon the flute, blended occasionally with the fresh and charming voice of Anne, hardly ever failed to bring a few pence which served to buy them a meal.
It was a good life and yet a very hard one. They dared not venture into the larger places where pence might have been more plentiful. Thus for the most part the fare was coarse and scanty, and often were their bones a mass of aches from the unkindness of their couches. They were tanned like gypsies, fine-drawn as greyhounds; and all too soon their clothes began to display holes and tatters in spite of the care with which they tended them.
Small wonder was it that as the days passed this severe life of the road began to pall. Greatly as they exulted in their freedom, they began to long intensely for gentler fare. Besides, they were inclined to view their perils more lightly. Nerved by hardship, very hungry and also grown a little desperate after a long succession of most uncomfortable days and nights, they found themselves on a glorious morning in the streets of the famous town of Oxford. And here a thing befell that was to change the current of their lives.
It was hardly more than eight o’clock by the time they came into the Cornmarket, where stood the Crown Tavern, which was the principal inn in the city. The season was June, and young as was the day the sun was already hot in a sky that was without a cloud.
A man dressed neatly in a doublet of black velvet, and with a short cock’s feather in his hat, sat on a bench in the sun by the tavern door. On his knees was a mass of papers which he was studying intently. The expression upon his face was a little dubious at times, and more than a little pensive at others. Now and again as he read he indulged in a trick of brushing back his rather long hair with the palm of his hand, and to this he had free recourse when he came to a passage in the close-written folio that particularly engaged his attention.
As the strains of Gervase’s flute, mingled with the notes of Anne’s rather plaintive treble, caught the man’s ear he paused suddenly in his task. With an eager, inquiring eye that was singularly searching he looked up; and as it fell upon the pair of vagabonds who were coming slowly across the Cornmarket toward where he sat, there was something in their aspect which seemed to arouse his curiosity. At any rate he laid his papers down on the bench, and regarded the musician and the singer with an air of great candor and interest.
It may have been that the performance on the flute struck him as possessing a merit beyond the common, or it may have been that the sweetly plaintive voice touched a chord in his heart, or again it may have been that some subtle quality in the aspect of these ragged robins spoke to him. For at least his scrutiny was grave, direct, very regardful. It was as if he saw, beyond the tawny skins, the unkempt locks, the tattered clothes, an underlying strangeness as of something far other than was as yet revealed.
So oddly was this man taken by the appearance of these wanderers that when they halted, rather timidly as it seemed, some twenty paces from where he sat, he was fain to beckon to them to come nearer. Yes, here were youth and grace indeed, and beneath their tan was an unmistakable beauty. Very slowly and very gravely the man on the tavern bench looked them up and down from top to toe.
“Playing for a breakfast, young sir?” he said in a tone of amused friendliness, when at last this scrutiny was at an end.
“Yes, sir, we be,” said Gervase.