Part 28 (1/2)

”What is the matter?” said a traveller disdainfully. ”Does the good cheese scare ye? Then put it hither, in the name of all the saints!”

”Cheese!” cried Gerard, ”I see none. These nauseous reptiles have made away with every bit of it.”

”Well,” replied another, ”It is not gone far. By eating of the mites we eat the cheese to boot.”

”Nay, not so,” said Gerard. ”These reptiles are made like us, and digest their food and turn it to foul flesh even as we do ours to sweet: as well might you think to chew gra.s.s by eating of gra.s.s-fed beeves, as to eat cheese by swallowing these uncleanly insects.”

Gerard raised his voice in uttering this, and the company received the paradox in dead silence, and with a distrustful air, like any other stranger, during which the Burgundian, who understood German but imperfectly, made Gerard Gallicise the discussion. He patted his interpreter on the back. ”C'est bien, mon gars: plus fin que toi n'est pas bete,” and administered his formula of encouragement; and Gerard edged away from him; for next to ugly sights and ill odours the poor wretch disliked profaneness.

Meantime, though shaken in argument, the raw reptiles were duly eaten and relished by the company, and served to provoke thirst, a princ.i.p.al aim of all the solids in that part of Germany. So now the company drank ”garausses” all around, and their tongues were unloosed, and oh the Babel! But above the fierce clamour rose at intervals like some hero's war cry in battle, the trumpet-like voice of the Burgundian soldier shouting l.u.s.tily ”Courage, camarades, le diable est mort!”

Entered grisly Ganymede holding in his hand a wooden dish with circles and semicircles marked on it in chalk. He put it down on the table and stood silent, sad, and sombre, as Charon by Styx waiting for his boat-load of souls. Then pouches and purses were rummaged, and each threw a coin into the dish. Gerard timidly observed that he had drunk next to no beer, and inquired how much less he was to pay than the others.

”What mean you?” said Ganymede roughly. ”Whose fault is it you have not drunken? Are all to suffer because one chooses to be a milksop? You will pay no more than the rest and no less.”

Gerard was abashed.

”Courage, pet.i.t, le diable est mort,” hiccoughed the soldier, and flung Ganymede a coin.

”You are as bad as he is,” said the old man peevishly, ”you are paying too much;” and the tyrannical old Aristides returned him some coin out of the trencher with a most reproachful countenance. And now the man, whom Gerard had confuted an hour and a half ago, awoke from a brown study, in which he had been ever since, and came to him and said, ”_Yes_: but the honey is none the worse for pa.s.sing through the bees'

bellies.”

Gerard stared. The answer had been so long on the road he hadn't an idea what it was an answer to. Seeing him dumbfoundered, the other concluded him confuted, and withdrew calmed.

The bedrooms were upstairs dungeons with not a sc.r.a.p of furniture except the bed, and a male servant settled inexorably who should sleep with whom. Neither money nor prayers would get a man a bed to himself here: custom forbade it sternly. You might as well have asked to monopolize a see-saw. They a.s.signed to Gerard a man with a great black beard. He was an honest fellow enough; but not perfect; he would _not_ go to bed, and _would_ sit on the edge of it telling the wretched Gerard by force, and at length, the events of the day, and alternately laughing and crying at the same circ.u.mstances, which were not in the smallest degree pathetic or humorous, but only dead trivial. At last Gerard put his fingers in his ears, and lying down in his clothes for the sheets were too dirty for him to undress, contrived to sleep. But in an hour or two he awoke cold, and found that his drunken companion had got all the feather bed; so mighty is instinct. They lay between two beds; the lower one hard and made of straw, the upper soft and filled with feathers light as down.

Gerard pulled at it, but the experienced drunkard held it fast mechanically. Gerard tried to twitch it away by surprise; but instinct was too many for him. On this he got out of bed, and, kneeling down on his bed-fellow's unguarded side easily whipped the prize away and rolled with it under the bed, and there lay on one edge of it, and curled the rest round his shoulders. Before he slept he often heard something grumbling and growling above him, which was some little satisfaction.

Thus Instinct was outwitted, and victorious Reason lay chuckling on feathers, and not quite choked with dust.

At peep of day Gerard rose, flung the feather bed upon his snoring companion, and went in search of milk and air.

A cheerful voice hailed him in French: ”What ho! you are up with the sun, comrade.”

”He rises betimes that lies in a dog's lair,” answered Gerard, crossly.

”Courage, l'ami! le diable est mort,” was the instant reply. The soldier then told him his name was Denys, and he was pa.s.sing from Flus.h.i.+ng in Zealand to the duke's French dominions; a change the more agreeable to him, as he should revisit his native place, and a host of pretty girls who had wept at his departure, and should hear French spoken again. ”And who are you, and whither bound?”

”My name is Gerard, and I am going to Rome,” said the more reserved Hollander, and in a way that invited no further confidences.

”All the better; we will go together as far as Burgundy.”

”That is not my road.”

”All roads take to Rome.”

”Ay, but the shortest road thither is my way.”

”Well, then, it is I who must go out of my way a step for the sake of good company, for thy face likes me, and thou speakest French, or nearly.”