A CHANCE TO SERVE THE CHURCH.
Now will I show myself
To have more of the serpent then the dove;
That is more knave than fool.
—The Jew of Malta, ii, 3.
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
—King Richard III, i, 3.
Under the newly-cast sign of an iron dolphin suspended before the ale-house of that name, the two horsemen, who had ridden abreast from Finbury Fields, dismounted for hasty refreshment. While Tabbard was securing the horses near the end of the long stone trough, at the front of the building, his waiting companion was idly surveying the suroundings.
Directly across the unpaved highway, he could see the bulky steeple of the parish church of Saint Botolph lifting itself into the misty air, and just beyond the brick walls of the structure, the miserable churchyard of Petty France. The few straggling headstones of the graves of a multitude of buried foreigners could be faintly discerned under scrubby trees inclosed with a fence of crumbling masonry. Its southern edge was bordered by the town ditch, once broad enough for the defense of the city, but now showing only a narrow black mouth under the shadow of the old Roman wall. The latter was near enough to be visible, and, coming out of the fog from east and west, terminated in stone bulwarks against which the ancient gates of Bishopsgate were hung. These were swung back, revealing a black expanse below which ran the unseen road into the metropolis.
The scene was desolate in the extreme, but the spirits of the silent observer had reached too high a pitch of exaltation to be affected by any aspect of Nature. The news brought him by the present henchman of the Duke of Sussex and past servant of the Golden Hind, had lifted his mind above the plane where even thoughts of approaching financial distress or fears of the plague could arise, much less any sober-colored clouds be created by what passed before the eye.
The bearer of the message, menial though he was, had rendered too valuable a service to be treated in any other manner than as a good fellow of equal rank with himself. Hence, he had thrown off the superiority he generally assumed amid the common rabble, and after listening affably to the remarks of Tabbard, had held him for a meal at the Dolphin.
“How long will those gates be open?” asked Tabbard, looking in the direction of the wall.
“Until ten o’clock, and even after that hour you can pass through if you pound upon their fronts loudly enough to wake the keeper, who sleeps within the little black house close to the wall on the southern side. But in pounding, mind thee, Tabbard,” continued the speaker, with a smile, “see to it that you do not mar the stone features of the full length figure of King Richard the Second, which with broken scepter in his hand, stands out from the northern front of one of the rotting gates.”
“He must have his face now against the wall, for they are swung outward,” remarked Tabbard.