“Near here?” inquired Tabbard, shuddering as he looked at the gloomy buildings around him.
“Nay, mostly in the dwellings and tenements. With one death in the family, you can count that every member will follow. Ah! here is the Windmill.”
They turned from the sidewalk to mount the steps leading to the tavern. The building was a quaint structure built by the Jews at least three hundred years before. Once a synagogue, next a dwelling and then a tavern, it had, despite all these changes in its use, maintained some of the characteristics of each. Like a minister, who had become a soldier and then deserted for some safer but less honorable calling, it had retained an outward expression of sanctity in the narrow, pointed lancet-windows in its front and its six-columned portico; while, as evidence of its passage through an intermediate period, oriel windows jutted out from what might be second and third stories. The painting of a windmill, hanging between the two middle columns of the portico, published the present purposes of the place with as loud a flourish as trumpets might announce.
Into what was once the inner narthex of the synagogue, they passed. A stone floor was under foot, while a low vaulted ceiling rose overhead, its base being supported by attached columns with decorated capitals and elaborately carved corbels. Here, where devout Hebrews had once paused to arrange their gabardines, or stamp thoughts of usury for one short session from their minds before entering the body of the church, the sacrilegious Gentile had set his snares of destruction. It had become the tap-room of the tavern.
Near the foot of the rood-stair, which once led to the gallery, stood a brilliantly lighted bar, with a range of butts of Malmsey, kegs of beer and sack, deep in the recess behind it; and on the near shelves, against a bastard wall, was a glittering line of decanters, mugs and tankards.
The heavy round tables were encircled by many persons drinking under suspended lamps, and several groups of men were standing here and there on the sanded floor. A quietness, except for the low buzz of conversation and an occasional laugh, pervaded the room, thus speaking well for the sobriety of the inmates and the respectability of the tavern; still the crowd was as mixed as could be found anywhere except in the middle aisle of St. Paul’s. There, in the nave of that famous cathedral, dedicated to pious uses, in the aisles, before the ambries, and beside the font, during intervals between divine service, horsemen, usurers, cut-throats, beggars, bargainers of all kinds, doctors, lawyers and noblemen, plied their avocations, held their meetings, hatched their conspiracies and settled accounts.
Here there were no beggars, such being barred entrance; but their tatters could be seen on the portico whenever the door swung open. But men, in apparel fit for noblemen, walked in and out; others, with the hardened visages of men who dreamt continually of the gallows and shuddered at every flash of light across their paths, drank at the bar, or gathered under some of the isolated columns.
At one table was a country squire in dun-colored serge coat, with full bearded face, bending over a trencher filled with a half devoured pheasant. Before him was his city cousin, in velvet cap, with a lovelock suspended from under the green rim down across his ruffled collar. Decorated with pointed mustachios and framed in powdered periwig and high ruff, he was typical of the dandy of the period.
If the raw-boned, ungainly young man, with repellant features, who monopolized the conversation at another table, was not Ben Jonson [[note 33]], then Gyves, who pointed him out to Tabbard, had selected some one who looked enough like that genius, just rising to eminence, to be confounded with him.
“He is an actor,” said Gyves, “who lately returned from the Low Countries with the company of soldiers of which he was a volunteer, a most companionable man: can drink deeper and swear louder than any one around him.”