It pleased me to recall the humours of the town at that time. Except for the rows of booths, one would have thought it Stourbridge Fair at Cambridge, which once I saw. The weather was fine and clear, the cold east winds gone. There was so much money flying about that everybody was buying as well as selling; in spite of all that was brought into the town by the visitors, nothing was left when they went away, because all had been spent. We thought that the harvest would last forever. We looked to a season like that of Bath, which goes on all the year round. If our people took more money in one day than they had before taken in a whole month, they thought that it would go on day after day, and they spent it all without restraint. Nay, the wives and daughters of those who had kept humble shops and been content with fat bacon and hot milk for breakfast, and more bacon for dinner; who had been clad in homespun, now drank tea with bread and butter for breakfast like the Lady Anastasia herself; dined off ducks and goslings; drank fine ale and even Canary and Lisbon; and ventured to attend the assembly where they stood up to the country dance in silk like any gentlewoman.
I have mentioned the company of players; they acted three times a week. We who work for our living are apt to despise these mummers and their calling; to pretend every day to be some one else is not, we think, an occupation worthy of a man, while the painting, the disguise, the representation, either in dumb show or in words, of all the passions in turn, must surely leave the actor no real passions of his own. Yet I heard, while this company was with us, cases of such generosity and Christian charity one towards the other when the money ceased to come in, that I am constrained to allow them at least the great Christian virtue of love for one another.
Besides the players, there were the singers and the musicians of the spa; and there were jugglers, mountebanks, tumblers, tight-rope dancers, ballad-singers, fortune-tellers, conjurers, pedlars and hawkers of all kinds. The town of Lynn, formerly so quiet and retired, with no other disturbance than that caused by a brawl among drunken sailors, became suddenly transformed into the abode of all the devils disengaged at the moment. There were sharpers busy at the races and the cocking; men who laid bets, and if they lost, ran away, but loudly demanded their money when they won; there was gambling; there was drinking; there was fighting; the servants were as corrupt as their masters; there were fresh scandals continually; a reputation lost every day; there were duels fought over drunken quarrels, about women, about bets and wagers; the clerks of the counting-houses were filled with the new spirit of gambling; there were lotteries and raffles in which everybody took tickets, even if they got the money for them dishonestly. In a word, the pursuits of pleasure proved a mad race, down a broad and flowery path, on each side of which were drinking booths, and music, and dancing, while at the end there opened wide…. You shall speedily learn what this was.
CHAPTER XII
THE CAPTAIN'S AMBITION
"Jack," said the captain, "I am now resolved that Molly shall make her appearance at the assembly, and that as the heiress that she is. Not lowly and humbly. She shall take her place at once among the fine ladies."
"But she is not a gentlewoman, captain," I objected.
"She shall be finer than any gentlewoman of the whole company—just as she is better to look at without any finery."
"Will the company," I asked, "welcome her among them?"
"The women, Jack, will flout and slight her—I have watched them. They flout and slight each other. That breaks no bones. She shall go."