"Thou liest. I ha' nothing but my skin,
And my clothes; my sword here, and myself."
—The Sea Voyage.
Captain Ravenshaw headed his horse for the Canterbury road, and, having soon left the town behind him, began to feel a pleasant content in the sunlight and soft air. The fresh green of spring, the flowers of May, the glad twitter of birds, met his senses on every side. Never since his boyhood had the sight and smell of hawthorn been more sweet. He conceived he had, for once, earned the right to enjoy so fair a day. He was tired and bruised, but he looked forward to rest upon his arrival. Peace, comparative solitude, country ease, seemed so inviting that he had not a regret for the town he left behind.
"SUDDENLY THE NARROW WAY BEFORE HIM BECAME
BLOCKED WITH HUMAN CREATURES."
His road, at the first, was that which Chaucer's pilgrims had traversed blithely toward Canterbury. He had a few villages to ride through, clustered about gray churches, and drowsy in the spring sunshine; a few towered and turreted castles, a few gabled farmhouses, to pass in sight of. But for the most part his way was by greenwood and field and common, up and down the gentle inclines, and across the pleasant levels, of the wavy Kentish country. Often it was a narrow aisle through forest, with great trunks for pillars, and leafy boughs for pointed arches, and here and there a yellow splash where the green leaves left an opening for sunlight. And then it trailed over open heath dotted with solitary trees or little clumps, and along fields enclosed by green hedgerows. It was a good road for that time, wide enough for two riders to pass each other without giving cause for quarrel; ditchlike, uneven, rutted, here so stony that a horse would stumble, there so soft that a horse would sink deep at each step.
Ravenshaw had already turned out of the Canterbury road to the left, and was passing from a heath into a thick copse, when suddenly the narrow way before him became blocked with human creatures, or what seemed rather the remnants of human creatures, that limped out from among the trees at the sides.
He drew in his horse quickly to avoid riding over any one, while the newcomers thronged about him with outstretched palms and whining cries:
"Save your good worship, one little drop of money!" "A small piece of silver, for the love of God!" "Pity for a poor maimed soldier!" "A few pence to buy bread, kind gentleman!" "Charity for the lame and blind!"
"Peace, peace, peace!" cried the captain. "What be these the greenwood vomits up? Hath the forest made a dinner of men, and cast up the pieces it could not stomach?"