They let him go, and waited for him.
Jack scrambled hastily over a heap of seething fragments, what had once formed the right wing of his father’s dwelling, and found himself in a patch of ground sloping down towards the stagnant moat.
It was a wilderness of charred weeds. Nothing remained to tell that the spot had once been a dainty garden.
Yes. One thing. A hardy Kentish rose-bush still asserted its life above a mass of filth, bricks, and potsherds. It bore one flower.
Jack tore this fiercely from its stem, and concealed it in his bosom, as if he had been stealing a diamond. He hastened to rejoin his companions with the most unconcerned look he could assume.
“What’s afoot now?” growled Bardolph, sotto voce. The worthy henchman was merely anxious to catch the new order of the day, if any.
“Hold your tongue!” said his master angrily, and looking very much ashamed of himself, “Don’t speak to me!”
Lady Alice Falstaff had been dead four years. The long loved son who should have closed her bonny blue eyes, was away at the time;—never mind where, or what doing. The last flower of her pretty garden withered and dried up beneath Jack’s doublet. He never noticed its final disappearance: you see his time was so much occupied.
This was the way in which Master John Falstaff came into his property, the residue of which he disposed of some few weeks later for the price of three new suits and a couple of horses, but which he never ceased to speak of as a princely inheritance, of which the troubles in 1381 had deprived him. Of course he found great advantage in this; for such is the inestimable value of rank and possessions, that the mere recollection of them—nay, the bare assertion of imaginary claims to them—will often procure for a gentleman credit and esteem.
The manner of Sir John Falstaff’s attaining to the honour of knighthood, is a sequel to the same adventure.