How! Old thief thy wits are lame;
To clip such it is no shame;
I rede you in the devil's name,
Ye come not here to make men game.
—SWINBURNE.
Daniel Pye, having arrived at that corner stone in Holborn Row which afforded him a full view of the house whence he had just been ignominiously dismissed, turned and shook a menacing fist in its direction. His body ached, he was smarting in every limb, and he had a grievance which clamoured loudly for revenge.
In Paris he had endured, whilst executing his duty, the buffetings and blows of a crowd of rowdy apprentices; this he had done not from any deep-rooted attachment to a capricious and exacting mistress, nor from any very exalted notions of abstract duty, but chiefly for the sake of the commendations and the rewards which the due fulfilment to Mistress Peyton's commands would naturally bring in its train.
The fact that, in order to allay the futile anxieties of a pretty woman, good Daniel Pye subsequently went in for a somewhat highly-coloured tale of his adventures was, after all, a venial sin, and surely the minor transgression which he had committed in delivering the letter, half an hour later than he should have done, did not call for such malignant and cruel treatment as his ungrateful mistress had thought fit to impose upon him. Under a paltry accusation of theft, which the lady herself must have known was totally unfounded, she had handed him over to the magistrate for punishment. Convicted of the charge on the most flimsy evidence, he had been made to stand in the pillory two hours, and been publicly flogged like some recalcitrant 'prentice, or immoral wench.
Nay, worse! For Mistress Peyton herself, accompanied by Sir John Ayloffe, had gone down to Bridewell to see her serving-man whipped, under the pretence that she wished to see justice properly tempered with mercy, since she only desired merited chastisement for him and not wanton cruelty.
And yet when he, Daniel Pye, was howling at the whipping post like one possessed, the while a crowd of young jackanapes—among whom were some of Pye's fellow servants—stood hooting and jeering, Sir John Ayloffe at Mistress Peyton's special command had ordered that an additional ten strokes with the lash be dealt him with no lenient hand. And when Daniel anon stood in the pillory, bruised, sore, every limb in his body aching with the heavy blows, Sir John had caused baskets full of rotten eggs and scraps of tainted fish and meat and decayed vegetable to be distributed among the spectators so that the ribald youngsters might throw this evil-smelling refuse at the unfortunate man whose sole crime had been a tiny lie spoken in order to reassure an ungrateful mistress.
Finally Pye was dismissed from Mistress Peyton's service, despite his abject entreaties. He was kicked out of the street door by a young lacquey whom he himself had oft flogged for impertinence and who now had already assumed the comfortable shoes of office which Daniel had worn for so long.
To the last the mistress had persisted in her unfounded and cruel accusations. To the last she coldly asserted that Daniel had robbed her of seventy thousand pounds.
Seventy thousand pounds! By Heaven! Daniel was not aware that such a vast sum existed in the world, nor if he had stolen it—which of course he had not—would he have known what to do with all that money!
No wonder, therefore, that the man felt mentally as well as bodily sore—nay, that he swore to be revenged on the cruel lady who had so wantonly wronged him. What form his revenge would take he could not at first determine, but these were days when it was not over-difficult for a man to make his petty spite be very uncomfortably felt, provided he had nothing more to lose and possessed neither conscience nor fear of ulterior punishment.
Now Daniel Pye, we know, had no overwhelming regard for truth; as to punishment, by the Lord, he had had all the punishment that any menial could possibly receive. He could sink no lower in the hierarchy of respectable domesticity; he had nothing more to lose, nothing more to gain. A serving-man who had been publicly flogged for theft was an outcast as far as gentlemen's houses were concerned. All the service that a branded thief might obtain in future would be in mean taverns or places of doubtful reputation where the master could not afford to be over-particular in the choice of his henchmen.
Pye had indeed shaken a menacing fist at the house in Holborn Row. Though he had not thought out the exact form which his revenge might take, he knew by instinct in what quarter to seek for guidance in this desire.
His steps led him almost mechanically in the direction of Whitefriars. When he himself was still a respectable lacquey; he would have scorned to set foot in this unhallowed spot where cheats, liars and other reprobates rubbed shoulders with the wastrels of aristocratic descent who had sought sanctuary here against their creditors.
In a corner of the narrow street, and in what had once been the refectory of white-robed monks, there now stood a tavern of evil fame—one or two low-raftered rooms, wherein light and air penetrated in such minute particles that these had not the power to drive away the heavy fumes of alcohol, of rank tobacco, of vice and of licentiousness which filled every corner of this dark and squalid spot.
Here the informer, the perjurer, the cheat, held his court unmolested, here the debtor was free from pursuit, and the highway robber safe from the arm of the law.
Whitefriars was sanctuary! Oh, the mockery of the word! For it was the brawlers and the bullies, the termagants and hags that inhabited these once holy and consecrated precincts, who enforced this self-ordained law of sanctuary. Neither townguard nor soldiery would dare to enter the unhallowed neighbourhood save in great numerical strength, and even then the flails of the lawless fraternity, the bludgeons of the men and stew-pans and spits of the women oft gained a victory over the musketeers.
To this spot now Daniel Pye unhesitatingly turned his footsteps. The servant kicked out of house for theft, the henchman who had been flogged and had stood in the pillory, naturally drifted towards those who like himself were at war with law and order, who had quarrelled with justice or were nursing a grievance.
It was then late in the afternoon. Outside the beautiful May sun was trying to smile on the grimy city, on all that man had put up in order to pollute God's pure earth: the evil-smelling, narrow streets, the pavements oozing with slimy, slippery mud, the rickety, tumble-down houses covered with dirt and stains. All this the sun had kissed and touched gently with warmth and promise of spring, but into that corner of Whitefriars where Daniel Pye now stood, it had not attempted to penetrate.
Overhead the protruding gables right and left of the street almost met, obscuring all save a very narrow strip of sky. Underfoot the slimy mud, fed by innumerable overflowing gutters, hardly gave a foothold to the passerby.
But the door of the brothel stood invitingly open. Daniel Pye walked in unchallenged; scarce a head was turned or a glance raised to appraise the newcomer. He looked sulky and unkempt, his clothes were soiled and tattered after the painful halt in the pillory. In fact he looked what he was—a rebel against society like unto themselves.
Men sat in groups conversing in whispers and drinking deeply out of pewter mugs. One of these groups, more compact than the others, occupied the centre of the room. In the midst of it a man with thin, long, yellow hair straggling round a high forehead, his thin shanks encased in undarned worsted stockings, his stooping shoulders covered by a surcoat of sad-coloured grogram, seemed to hold a kind of court.
Daniel slouched toward that group; the man in the sad-coloured coat raised a pair of pale, watery eyes to him, and no doubt recognising by that subtle instinct peculiar to the great army of blackguards, that here was a kindred spirit, he made way for the stranger so that the latter might sit on the bench beside him.
After a very little while Pye found himself quite at home in that low-raftered room, wherein the air surfeited with evil-smelling fumes was less foul than the sentiments, the lies, the blasphemies that were freely emitted here.
The group of whom Mistress Peyton's ex-henchman had now become a unit, and over which presided the lanky-haired, pale-eyed youth, consisted of men who had neither the enthusiasm of their own villainy nor the courage of their own crimes; they were the spies that worked in the dark, the informers who struck unseen. False oaths, perjured information, lying accusations were their special trade. It did not take Daniel Pye very long to learn its secrets.
The man with the yellow hair was called Oates. He had once been a priest, now he was a renegade, a sacrilegious liar, and maker of false oaths. Close to him sat another man, outwardly very different to look at, for he was stout and florid, and his eyes were bleary, but the perversion of the soul within was equal in these two men. Oates and Tongue! What a world of infamy do their very names evoke! They were the leaders of this band of false informers who lived and throve by this infamous trade. Oates soon made a fortune by those very schemes which he propounded to his henchmen on this memorable day when Daniel Pye drifted into their midst.
The East Anglian peasant torn from his primitive home amongst the wheatfields of Norfolk, transplanted into the vitiated atmosphere of the great city, there to learn the abject lessons which the service of a capricious woman and the bribes of her courtiers do so readily teach to a grasping nature, now fell a ready slave to the insidious suggestions of these perjurers. Pye at first had listened with half an ear. His thoughts were still centred on vengeance and on his own aches and pains, and the denunciations against Papists which was the chief subject of discussion between Oates and his audience seemed to him of puerile significance.
But the eye of the other, of him with the florid complexion, was constantly fixed on Daniel Pye. Gradually he drew the latter into conversation. A vague question here, a suggestion there, and the whole history of that day's bitter wrongs was soon poured into overwilling ears: the accusation of theft, the whipping post, the pillory.
Pye felt no shame in retailing these humiliating woes to a stranger. Ever since he had been kicked out of the house by that insolent subordinate he had longed to tell the tale to some one. Truly he would have gone raving mad with compressed rage if he had had to go silently to bed. The stranger was a sympathetic listener:
"Strike me! but 'tis a damnable tale," he said, "misdeeds that cry loudly for revenge. Cannot you, friend, be even with a woman who hath treated you so ill?"
"How can I?" growled Pye, moodily. "A woman! She is rich, too, and hath many friends—"
"Well-favoured, too, mayhap," suggested the other.
"Ay, she's counted pretty—"
"And her friends are mostly gentlemen, I imagine."
"Mostly," replied Daniel impatiently, for he liked not this digression from the all-absorbing topic of his own woes.
Tongue said nothing more for the present, but anon he called for mulled ale, and made Pye draw nearer to the table and partake largely of his lavishness.
The ale had been strengthened with raw alcohol, and made heady with steaming and the admixture of spices. It had special properties—as all blackguards in search of victims or confederates well knew—of loosening tongues and addling feeble minds.
Daniel Pye had had no desire to be reticent. He was already over-ready to talk. But the spirituous ale which soon got into his head killed that instinctive native suspicion in him, which in more sober moments would have caused him to look askance at the easy familiarity of his newly-found friend.
Pye was quite unaware of the fact that Tongue was really questioning him very closely, and that he himself gave ready answer to every question. Within half an hour, he had told the other all that there was to know about Mistress Peyton and her household, but still Master Tongue was disappointing in his offers of advice. Daniel was under the impression that the man with the florid face would help him to be revenged on his spiteful mistress, and yet time went on and Daniel had told his story over and over again in every detail and yet nothing had been suggested that sounded satisfactory.
He wanted to dwell on his troubles, those final ten lashes specially ordered, the rotten eggs thrown at him one by one by that damnable little scullion whom he himself had so often thrashed. Yet Master Tongue would no longer dwell on these interesting facts, but always dragged the conversation back to Mistress Peyton's household, or to the gentlemen who formed her court.
"Surely, friend," he said somewhat impatiently at last, "you must have known some of these gentlemen quite intimately. If as you say your mistress was a noted beauty, she must have had many admirers, some more favoured than others—some of these must have been Papists. The Duke of Norfolk now—did he come to see your lady?"
"No," replied Daniel Pye, sulkily. "But just as that rascally scullion hit me in the eye—"
"Never mind about that now," interrupted the other. "Try and tell me the names of those gentlemen who most often visited this Mistress Julia Peyton."
"There was Sir John Ayloffe—"
"He is no Papist—who else?"
"Sir Anthony Wykeham—"
"Oh!" said Tongue eagerly. "Did he come often?"
"No. Only once. But as I was telling you, there was a youngster in that crowd—"
But the other again broke in impatiently:
"You only saw Sir Anthony Wykeham once? When was that?"
"He came with my lord of Stowmaries."
"My lord Stowmaries? You know my lord Stowmaries? Did he come often?"
"Every day nearly. Mistress Peyton is like to marry him, now that he's rid of his first wife."
To Daniel Pye's utter astonishment, this simple fact—which he himself considered of very minor interest in comparison with the story of his own troubles—seemed to delight his newly-found friend.
Master Tongue jumped up with every sign of eager excitement.
"You knew my lord Stowmaries?" he reiterated insistently. "You knew him well?"
Then as Pye, somewhat bewildered, assented, he ejaculated:
"By G—d! the best man we could ever have hit upon, under the circumstances."
He now slipped his hand confidentially under Pye's arm, forcing him to rise, then he dragged him away from the group, and into a distant corner of the room.
"Friend," he whispered eagerly, "let me tell you that you are in luck to-day. You want your revenge; you shall have it, and much more yet to boot, and your spiteful mistress will yet have cause to rue the day when she turned you out of doors. Listen to me, man! Are you desirous of securing a good competence as well as of being even with her who had you whipped and pilloried?"
"Ay!" replied Daniel Pye with a fervour which was too deep for a longer flow of words.
"Then do you go out of here now and find means to kill time in some other tavern close by. But at ten of the clock this night return here. You will find me and my friend Oates, and one or two more of these gentlemen who have a vast scheme in hand for our own good fortune, wherein we will ask you to participate. Nay, ask me no more now!" added the man with the bleary eyes. "It were too long to explain, and there are several pairs of ears present in this room at this moment who are not meant to hear all that I say. But I tell you, friend, that if you be willing, my friend Oates will help you to your revenge, and in addition there will be at least £30 in your pocket, and the chance of earning more. Well, what say you?"
"That I'll come," said Daniel Pye simply.