Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/44

20 found the log-hut where the burner dwelt. He was away faggot-cutting in the forest; but his wife, a ruddy, bustling dame, found the needful garments and tied them into a bundle. While she busied herself in finding and folding them Alleyne Edricson stood by the open door looking in at her with much interest and some distrust, for he had never been so nigh to a woman before. She had round red arms, a dress of some sober woollen stuff, and a brass brooch the size of a cheese-cake stuck in the front of it.

'Peter the Fuller!' she kept repeating. 'Marry come up! if I were Peter the Fuller's wife, I would teach him better than to give his clothes to the first knave who asks for them. But he was always a poor, fond, silly creature, was Peter, though we are beholden to him for helping to bury our second son, Wat, who was a 'prentice to him at Lymington in the year of the Black Death. But who are you, young sir?'

'I am a clerk on my road from Beaulieu to Minstead.'

'Aye, indeed! Hast been brought up at the Abbey then. I could read it from thy reddened cheek and downcast eye. Hast learned from the monks, I trow, to fear a woman as thou wouldst a lazar-house. Out upon them, that they should dishonour their own mothers by such teaching! A pretty world it would be with all the women out of it.'

'Heaven forefend that such a thing should come to pass!' said Alleyne.

'Amen and amen! But thou art a pretty lad, and the prettier for thy modest ways. It is easy to see from thy cheek that thou hast not spent thy days in the rain and the heat and the wind, as my poor Wat hath been forced to do.'

'I have indeed seen little of life, good dame.'

'Wilt find nothing in it to pay thee for the loss of thy own freshness. Here are the clothes, and Peter can leave them when next he comes this way. Holy Virgin! see the dust upon thy doublet. It were easy to see that there is no woman to tend to thee. So!—that is better. Now buss me, boy.'

Alleyne stooped and kissed her, for the kiss was the common salutation of the age, and, as Erasmus long