“But, oh, Master Carew,” pleaded Nick, with a sob in his throat, “my mother’s heart will surely break if I do na come home!”
Carew started, and his mouth twitched queerly. “Enough, I say—enough!” he cried. “I will not hear; I’ll have no more. I tell thee hold thy tongue—be dumb! I’ll not have ears—thou shalt not speak! Dost hear?” He dashed the towel to the ground. “I bid thee hold thy tongue.”
Nick hid his face between his hands, and leaned against the rough stone wall, a naked, shivering, wretched little chap indeed. “Oh, mother, mother, mother!” he sobbed pitifully.
A singular expression came over the master-player’s face. “I will not hear—I tell thee I will not hear!” he choked, and, turning suddenly away, he fell upon the sleepy hostler, who was drawing water at the well, and rated him outrageously, to that astounded worthy’s great amazement.
Nick crept into his clothes, and stole away to the kitchen door. There was a red-faced woman there who bade him not to cry—’t would soon be breakfast-time. Nick thought he could not eat at all; but when the savory smell crept out and filled the chilly air, his poor little empty stomach would not be denied, and he ate heartily. Master Heywood sat beside him and gave him the choicest bits from his own trencher; and Carew himself, seeing that he ate, looked strangely pleased, and ordered him a tiny mutton-pie, well spiced. Nick pushed it back indignantly; but Heywood took the pie and cut it open, saying quietly: “Come, lad, the good God made the sheep that is in this pie, not Gaston Carew. Eat it—come, ’twill do thee good!” and saw him finish the last crumb.
From Towcester south through Northamptonshire is a pretty country of rolling hills and undulating hollows, ribboned with pebbly rivers, and dotted with fair parks and tofts of ash and elm and oak. Straggling villages now and then were threaded on the road like beads upon a string, and here and there the air was damp and misty from the grassy fens along some winding stream.
It was against nature that a healthy, growing lad should be so much cast down as not to see and be interested in the strange, new, passing world of things about him; and little by little Nick roused from his wretchedness and began to look about him. And a wonder grew within his brain: why had they stolen him?—where were they taking him?—what would they do with him there?—or would they soon let him go again?
Every yellow cloud of dust arising far ahead along the road wrought up his hopes to a Bluebeard pitch, as regularly to fall. First came a cast-off soldier from the war in the Netherlands, rakishly forlorn, his breastplate full of rusty dents, his wild hair worn by his steel cap, swaggering along on a sorry hack with an old belt full of pistolets, and his long sword thumping Rosinante’s ribs. Then a peddling chapman, with a dust-white pack and a cunning Hebrew look, limped by, sulkily doffing his greasy hat. Two sturdy Midland journeymen, in search of southern handicraft, trudged down with tool-bags over their shoulders and stout oak staves in hand. Of wretched beggars and tattered rogues there was an endless string. But of any help no sign.
Here and there, like a moving dot, a ploughman turned a belated furrow; or a sweating ditcher leaned upon his reluctant spade and longed for night; or a shepherd, quite as silly as his sheep, gawked up the morning hills. But not a sign of help for Nick.
Once, passing through a little town, he raised a sudden cry of “Help! Help—they be stealing me away!” But at that the master-player and the bandy-legged man waved their hands and set up such a shout that his shrill outcry was not even heard. And the simple country bumpkins, standing in a grinning row like so many Old Aunt Sallys at a fair, pulled off their caps and bowed, thinking it some company of great lords, and fetched a clownish cheer as the players galloped by.