Part 30 (1/2)
”What breeding can you expect from women that wear no hose?” inquired Gerard; ”and some of them no shoon? They seem to me reserved, and modest, as becomes their s.e.x; and sober, whereas the men are little better than beer-barrels. Would you have them brazen as well as hoseless?”
”A little affability adorns even beauty,” sighed Denys.
”Then let them alone, sith they are not to your taste,” retorted Gerard.
”What, is there no sweet face in Bergundy that would pale to see you so wrapped up in strange women?”
”Half a dozen that would cry their eyes out.”
”Well then!”
”But it is a long way to Burgundy.”
”Ay, to the foot, but not to the heart. I am there, sleeping and waking, and almost every minute of the day.”
”In Burgundy? Why I thought you had never--”
”In Burgundy?” cried Gerard contemptuously. ”No, in sweet Sevenbergen.
Ah! well-a-day! well-a-day!”
Many such dialogues as this pa.s.sed between the pair on the long and weary road, and neither could change the other.
One day about noon they reached a town of some pretensions and Gerard was glad, for he wanted to buy a pair of shoes: his own were quite worn out. They soon found a shop that displayed a goodly array and made up to it, and would have entered it; but the shopkeeper sat on the door-step taking a nap, and was so fat as to block up the narrow doorway: the very light could hardly struggle past his ”too, too solid flesh,” much less a carnal customer.
My fair readers, accustomed, when they go shopping, to be met half way with nods, and becks and wreathed smiles, and waived into a seat, while almost at the same instant an eager shopman flings himself half across the counter in a semicircle to learn their commands, can best appreciate this mediaeval Teuton, who kept a shop as a dog keeps a kennel: and sat at the exclusion of custom, snoring like a pig.
Denys and Gerard stood and contemplated this curiosity; emblem, permit me to remark, of the lets and hindrances to commerce that characterized his epoch.
”Jump over him!”
”The door is too low.”
”March through him!”
”The man is too thick.”
”What is the coil?” inquired a mumbling voice from the interior: apprentice with his mouth full.
”We want to get into your shop.”
”What for, in Heaven's name??!!!”
”Shoon; lazy bones!”
The ire of the apprentice began to rise at such an explanation. ”And could ye find no hour out of all the twelve to come pestering us for shoon, but the one little, little hour my master takes his nap, and I sit down to my dinner, when all the rest of the world is full long ago?”
Denys heard, but could not follow the sense. ”Waste no more time talking their German gibberish,” said he; ”take out thy knife and tickle his fat ribs.”
”That will I not,” said Gerard.