The Armourer's Prentices

“That is,” called out the wife, “if thou wilt make a fair scholar of little Will.  ’Tis a mighty good offer.  There are not many who would let their child be taught by a mere stripling like thee!”

“Nay,” said Ambrose, who could not bring himself to thank her, “I go with Stephen, mistress; I would mend my scholarship ere I teach.”

“As you please,” said Mistress Maud, shrugging her shoulders, “only never say that a fair offer was not made to you.”

“And,” said Stephen, “so please you, brother John, hand us over our portions, and the jewels as bequeathed to us, and we will be gone.”

“Portions, quotha?” returned John.  “Boy, they be not due to you till you be come to years of discretion.”

The brothers looked at one another, and Stephen said, “Nay, now, brother, I know not how that may be, but I do know that you cannot drive us from our father’s house without maintenance, and detain what belongs to us.”

And Ambrose muttered something about “my Lord of Beaulieu.”

“Look you, now,” said John, “did I ever speak of driving you from home without maintenance?  Hath not Ambrose had his choice of staying here, and Stephen of waiting till some office be found for him?  As for putting forty crowns into the hands of striplings like you, it were mere throwing it to the robbers.”

“That being so,” said Ambrose turning to Stephen, “we will to Beaulieu, and see what counsel my lord will give us.”

“Yea, do, like the vipers ye are, and embroil us with my Lord of Beaulieu,” cried Maud from the fire.

“See,” said John, in his more caressing fashion, “it is not well to carry family tales to strangers, and—and—”

He was disconcerted by a laugh from the old nurse, “Ho!  John Birkenholt, thou wast ever a lad of smooth tongue, but an thou, or madam here, think that thy brothers can be put forth from thy father’s door without their due before the good man be cold in his grave, and the Forest not ring with it, thou art mightily out in thy reckoning!”

“Peace, thou old hag; what matter is’t of thine?” began Mistress Maud, but again came the harsh laugh.  “Matter of mine!  Why, whose matter should it be but mine, that have nursed all three of the lads, ay, and their father before them, besides four more that lie in the graveyard at Beaulieu?  Rest their sweet souls!  And I tell thee, Master John, an thou do not righteously by these thy brothers, thou mayst back to thy parchments at Southampton, for not a man or beast in the Forest will give thee good day.”

They all felt the old woman’s authority.  She was able and spirited in her homely way, and more mistress of the house than Mrs. Birkenholt herself; and such were the terms of domestic service, that there was no peril of losing her place.  Even Maud knew that to turn her out was an impossibility, and that she must be accepted like the loneliness, damp, and other evils of Forest life.  John had been under her dominion, and proceeded to persuade her.  “Good now, Nurse Joan, what have I denied these rash striplings that my father would have granted them?  Wouldst thou have them carry all their portion in their hands, to be cozened of it at the first ale-house, or robbed on the next heath?”

“I would have thee do a brother’s honest part, John Birkenholt.  A loving part I say not.  Thou wert always like a very popple for hardness, and smoothness, ay, and slipperiness.  Heigh ho!  But what is right by the lads, thou shalt do.”

John cowered under her eye as he had done at six years old, and faltered, “I only seek to do them right, nurse.”

Nurse Joan uttered an emphatic grunt, but Mistress Maud broke in, “They are not to hang about here in idleness, eating my poor child’s substance, and teaching him ill manners.”

“We would not stay here if you paid us for it,” returned Stephen.

“And whither would you go?” asked John.

“To Winchester first, to seek counsel with our uncle Birkenholt.  Then to London, where uncle Randall will help us to our fortunes.”

“Gipsy Hal!  He is more like to help you to a halter,” sneered John, sotto voce, and Joan herself observed, “Their uncle at Winchester will show them better than to run after that there go-by-chance.”

However, as no one wished to keep the youths, and they were equally determined to go, an accommodation was come to at last.  John was induced to give them three crowns apiece and to yield them up the five small trinkets specified, though not without some murmurs from his wife.  It was no doubt safer to leave the rest of the money in his hands than to carry it with them, and he undertook that it should be forthcoming, if needed for any fit purpose, such as the purchase of an office, an apprentice’s fee, or an outfit as a squire.  It was a vague promise that cost him nothing just then, and thus could be readily made, and John’s great desire was to get them away so that he could aver that they had gone by their own free will, without any hardship, for he had seen enough at his father’s obsequies to show him that the love and sympathy of all the scanty dwellers in the Forest was with them.

Nurse Joan had fought their battles, but with the sore heart of one who was parting with her darlings never to see them again.  She bade them doff their suits of mourning that she might make up their fardels, as they would travel in their Lincoln-green suits.  To take these she repaired to the little rough shed-like chamber where the two brothers lay for the last time on their pallet bed, awake, and watching for her, with Spring at their feet.  The poor old woman stood over them, as over the motherless nurslings whom she had tended, and she should probably never see more, but she was a woman of shrewd sense, and perceived that “with the new madam in the hall” it was better that they should be gone before worse ensued.

She advised leaving their valuables sealed up in the hands of my Lord Abbot, but they were averse to this—for they said their uncle Randall, who had not seen them since they were little children, would not know them without some pledge.

She shook her head.  “The less you deal with Hal Randall the better,” she said.  “Come now, lads, be advised and go no farther than Winchester, where Master Ambrose may get all the book-learning he is ever craving for, and you, Master Steevie, may prentice yourself to some good trade.”

“Prentice!” cried Stephen, scornfully.

“Ay, ay.  As good blood as thine has been prenticed,” returned Joan.  “Better so than be a cut-throat sword-and-buckler fellow, ever slaying some one else or getting thyself slain—a terror to all peaceful folk.  But thine uncle will see to that—a steady-minded lad always was he—was Master Dick.”

Consoling herself with this hope, the old woman rolled up their new suits with some linen into two neat knapsacks; sighing over the thought that unaccustomed fingers would deal with the shirts she had spun, bleached, and sewn.  But she had confidence in “Master Dick,” and concluded that to send his nephews to him at Winchester gave a far better chance of their being cared for, than letting them be flouted into ill-doing by their grudging brother and his wife.

CHAPTER II

THE GRANGE OF SILKSTEDE

“All Itchen’s valley lay,
St. Catherine’s breezy side and the woodlands far away,
The huge Cathedral sleeping in venerable gloom,
The modest College tower, and the bedesmen’s Norman home.”

    Lord Selborne.
Very early in the morning, even according to the habits of the time, were Stephen and Ambrose Birkenholt astir.  They were full of ardour to enter on the new and unknown world beyond the Forest, and much as they loved it, any change that kept them still to their altered life would have been distasteful.

Nurse Joan, asking no questions, folded up their fardels on their backs, and packed the wallets for their day’s journey with ample provision.  She charged them to be good lads, to say their Pater, Credo, and Ave daily, and never omit Mass on a Sunday.  They kissed her like their mother and promised heartily—and Stephen took his crossbow.  They had had some hope of setting forth so early as to avoid all other human farewells, except that Ambrose wished to begin by going to Beaulieu to take leave of the Father who had been his kind master, and get his blessing and counsel.  But Beaulieu was three miles out of their way, and Stephen had not the same desire, being less attached to his schoolmaster and more afraid of hindrances being thrown in their way.

Moreover, contrary to their expectation, their elder brother came forth, and declared his intention of setting them forth on their way, bestowing a great amount of good advice, to the same purport as that of nurse Joan, namely, that they should let their uncle Richard Birkenholt find them some employment at Winchester, where they, or at least Ambrose, might even obtain admission into the famous college of St. Mary.

In fact, this excellent elder brother persuaded himself that it would be doing them an absolute wrong to keep such promising youths hidden in the Forest.

The purpose of his going thus far with them made itself evident.  It was to see them past the turning to Beaulieu.  No doubt he wished to tell the story in his own way, and that they should not present themselves there as orphans expelled from their father’s house.  It would sound much better that he had sent them to ask counsel of their uncle at Winchester, the fit person to take charge of them.  And as he represented that to go to Beaulieu would lengthen their day’s journey so much that they might hardly reach Winchester that night, while all Stephen’s wishes were to go forward, Ambrose could only send his greetings.  There was another debate over Spring, who had followed his master as usual.  John uttered an exclamation of vexation at perceiving it, and bade Stephen drive the dog back.  “Or give me the leash to drag him.  He will never follow me.”

“He goes with us,” said Stephen.

“He!  Thou’lt never have the folly!  The old hound is half blind and past use.  No man will take thee in with him after thee.”

“Then they shall not take me in,” said Stephen.  “I’ll not leave him to be hanged by thee.”

“Who spoke of hanging him!”

“Thy wife will soon, if she hath not already.”

“Thou wilt be for hanging him thyself ere thou have made a day’s journey with him on the king’s highway, which is not like these forest paths, I would have thee to know.  Why, he limps already.”

“Then I’ll carry him,” said Stephen, doggedly.

“What hast thou to say to that device, Ambrose?” asked John, appealing to the elder and wiser.

But Ambrose only answered “I’ll help,” and as John had no particular desire to retain the superannuated hound, and preferred on the whole to be spared sentencing him, no more was said on the subject as they went along, until all John’s stock of good counsel had been lavished on his brothers’ impatient ears.  He bade them farewell, and turned back to the lodge, and they struck away along the woodland pathway which they had been told led to Winchester, though they had never been thither, nor seen any town save Southampton and Romsey at long intervals.  On they went, sometimes through beech and oak woods of noble, almost primeval, trees, but more often across tracts of holly underwood, illuminated here and there with the snowy garlands of the wild cherry, and beneath with wide spaces covered with young green bracken, whose soft irregular masses on the undulating ground had somewhat the effect of the waves of the sea.  These alternated with stretches of yellow gorse and brown heather, sheets of cotton-grass, and pools of white crowfoot, and all the vegetation of a mountain side, only that the mountain was not there.

The brothers looked with eyes untaught to care for beauty, but with a certain love of the home scenes, tempered by youth’s impatience for something new.  The nightingales sang, the thrushes flew out before them, the wild duck and moorhen glanced on the pools.  Here and there they came on the furrows left by the snout of the wild swine, and in the open tracts rose the graceful heads of the deer, but of inhabitants or travellers they scarce saw any, save when they halted at the little hamlet of Minestead, where a small alehouse was kept by one Will Purkiss, who claimed descent from the charcoal-burner who had carried William Rufus’s corpse to burial at Winchester—the one fact in history known to all New Foresters, though perhaps Ambrose and John were the only persons beyond the walls of Beaulieu who did not suppose the affair to have taken place in the last generation.

A draught of ale and a short rest were welcome as the heat of the day came on, making the old dog plod wearily on with his tongue out, so that Stephen began to consider whether he should indeed have to be his bearer—a serious matter, for the creature at full length measured nearly as much as he did.  They met hardly any one, and they and Spring were alike too well known and trained, for difficulties to arise as to leading a dog through the Forest.  Should they ever come to the term of the Forest?  It was not easy to tell when they were really beyond it, for the ground was much of the same kind.  Only the smooth, treeless hills, where they had always been told Winchester lay, seemed more defined; and they saw no more deer, but here and there were inclosures where wheat and barley were growing, and black timbered farm-houses began to show themselves at intervals.  Herd boys, as rough and unkempt as their charges, could be seen looking after little tawny cows, black-faced sheep, or spotted pigs, with curs which barked fiercely at poor weary Spring, even as their masters were more disposed to throw stones than to answer questions.

By and by, on the further side of a green valley, could be seen buildings with an encircling wall of flint and mortar faced with ruddy brick, the dark red-tiled roofs rising among walnut-trees, and an orchard in full bloom spreading into a long green field.