Stanley Weyman - Shrewsbury - A Romance

"It will not do," he said angrily. "Begone!"

I was quite taken aback: the more as several persons looked up from their books, and his immediate companion, a meagre dry-looking man in a snuff-coloured suit, fell to staring at me. "What do you mean?" I stammered.

"You know very well," the tradesman answered me roughly. "And had better be gone! And more, I tell you, if you want a hemp collar, my man, you are in the way to get one!"

"Clipped?" quoth the dry-looking man.

"New clipped and bright at the edges!" the bookseller answered. "Now go, my man, and be thankful I don't send for a constable."

At that I shrank away, two or three of the customers coming to the door to see me out, and watching which way I turned. This, I suppose-though I was then, and for a little time longer in doubt about him-was the reason why I could see nothing of my charitable friend, when I returned to the place where I had left him. I looked this way and that, but he was gone; and though, not knowing what else to do, and having still the guinea in my possession, I lingered about the mouth of the court for an hour or more, looking for him, he did not return.

At the end of that time the meagre dry man whom I had seen in the shop passed with a book under his arm; and seeing me, after a moment's hesitation stood and spoke to me. "Well, my friend?" said he, looking hard at me. "Are you waiting for the halter?"

I told him civilly, no; but that the gentleman who had given me the guinea to change had bidden me return to him there.

"And he is not here?" he said with a sneer.

"No," I said.

He stared at me, wondering at the simplicity of my answer; and then, "Well, you are either the biggest fool or the biggest knave within the bills!" he exclaimed. "Are you straight from Gotham?"

"No," I told him. "From the north." And that I wanted employment.

"You are like to get it-at the Plantations!" he answered savagely, taking snuff. I remarked that neither his hands nor his linen were of the cleanest, and that the former were stained with ink. "What are you?" he continued, presently, in the same snappish, churlish tone.

I told him a schoolmaster.

" Exempli gratiâ ," he answered quickly, and turning to the nearest stall, he indicated the title-page of a book. "Read me that, Master Schoolmaster."

I did so. He grunted; and then, "You write? Show me your hand."

I said I had no paper or ink there, but that if he would take me-

"Pooh, man, are you a fool?" he cried, impatiently. "Show me your right hand, middle finger, and I will find you scribit or non scribit . So! And you want work?"

"Yes," I said.

"Hard work and little pay?"

I said I wanted to make my living.

"Ay, and maybe the first time you come to me, you will cut my throat, and rob my desk," he answered gruffly. "Hm! That touches you home, does it? However, ask for me to-morrow, at seven in the forenoon-Mr. Timothy Brome, at the sign of the Black Boy in Fleet Street."

Now I was overjoyed, indeed. With such a prospect of employment, it seemed to me a small thing that I must pass the night in the streets; but even that I escaped. For when he was about to part from me, he asked me what money I had. None, I told him, "except the clipped guinea."

"And I suppose you expect me to give you a shilling earnest?" he answered, irascibly. "But no, no, Timothy Brome is no fool. See here," he continued, slapping his pocket and looking shrewdly at me, "that guinea is not worth a groat to you; except to hang you."

"No," I said, ruefully.

"Well, I will give you five shillings for it, as gold, mind you; as gold, and not to pass. Are you content?"

"It is not mine," I said doubtfully.

"Take it or leave it!" he said, screwing up his eyes, and so plainly pleased with the bargain he was driving that I had no inkling of the kind heart that underlay that crabbed manner. "Take it or leave it, my man."

Thus pressed, and my mind retaining no real doubt of the knavery of the man who had entrusted the guinea to me, I handed it to my new friend, and received in return a crown. And this being my last disposition of money not my own, I think it a fit season to record that from that day to this I have been enabled by God's help and man's kindness to keep the eighth commandment; and earning honestly what I have spent have been poor, but never a beggar.

In gratitude for which, and both those good men being now dead, I here conjoin the names of Mr. Timothy Brome, of Fleet Street, newsmonger and author, whose sharp tongue and morose manners cloaked a hundred benefactions; and of Charles, Duke of Shrewsbury, my honoured patron, who never gave but his smile doubled the gift which his humanity dictated.

The reader will believe that punctually on the morrow I went with joy and thankfulness to my new master, whom I found up three pairs of stairs in a room barely furnished, but heaped in every part with piles of manuscripts and dogs-eared books, and all so covered with dust that type and script were alike illegible. He wore a dingy morning-gown and had laid aside his wig; but the air of importance with which he nodded to me and a sort of dignity that clothed him as he walked to and fro on the ink-stained floor mightily impressed me, and drove me to wonder what sort of trade was carried on here. He continued, for some minutes after I entered, to declaim one fine sentence after another, rolling the long words over his tongue with a great appearance of enjoyment: a process which he only interrupted to point me to a stool and desk, and cry with averted eyes-lest he should cut the thread of his thoughts-"Write!"

On my hesitating, "Write!" he repeated, in the tone of one commanding a thousand troopers. And then he spoke thus-and as he spoke I wrote: -

"This day His Gracious Majesty, whose health appears to be completely restored, went, accompanied by the French Ambassador and a brilliant company, to take the air in the Mall. Despatches from Holland say that the Duke of Monmouth has arrived at the Hague and has been well received. Letters from the West say that the city of Bristol having a well-founded confidence in the Royal Clemency has hastened to lay its Charter at His Majesty's feet. The 30th of the month began the Sessions at the Old Bailey, and held the first and second of this; where seventeen persons received sentence of death, nine to be burned in the hand, seven to be transported, and eleven ordered to be whipped. Yesterday, or this day, a commission was sealed appointing the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys-"

In a word, my master was a writer of Newsletters, and in that capacity possessed of so excellent a style and so great a connection in the Western Counties that, as he was wont to boast, there was hardly a squire or rector from Bristol to Dawlish that did not owe what he knew of His Majesty's gout, or Mr. Dryden's last play, to his weekly epistles. The Popish Plot which had cost the lives of Lord Stafford and so many of his persuasion, no less than the Rye House Plot, which by placing the Whigs at the mercy of the Government had at once afforded those their revenge, and illustrated the ups and downs of court life, had given so sharp a stimulus to the appetite for news, that of late he had found himself unable to cope with it. In this unsettled condition, and meditating changes which should belittle Sir Roger and The London Mercury , and oust print from the field, he fell in with me; and where another man would have selected a bachelor whose cassock and scarf might commend him at Wills' or Childs', his eccentric kindness snatched me from the gutter, and set me on a tall stool, there to write all day for the delectation of country houses and mayors' parlours.

I remember that at first it seemed to me so easy a trick (this noting the news of the day in plain round hand) that I wondered they paid him to do it, more than another. But besides that I then had knowledge of one side of the business only, I mean the framing the news, but none of the manner in which it was collected at Garraway's and the Cockpit, the Sessions House, the Mall, and the Gallery at Whitehall. I presently learned that even of the share that fell to my lot I knew only as much as a dog that turns the spit knows of the roasting of meat. For when my employer, finding me docile and industrious-as I know I was, being thankful for such a haven, and crushed in spirit not only by the dangers through which I had passed, but also by my mistress's treachery-when I say, he left me one day to my devices, merely skimming through a copy and leaving me to multiply it, with, for sole guide, the list of places to which the letters were to go, as Bridgewater, Whig; Bath, Tory; Bridport, Tory; Taunton, Whig; Frome, Whig; Lyme, Whig, and so on, I came very far short of success. True, when he returned in the evening I had my packets ready and neatly prepared for the mail, which then ran to the West thrice a week and left next morning; and I had good hopes that he would send them untouched. But great was my dismay when he fell into a rage over the first he picked up, and asked me bluntly if I was quite a fool.