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He soon learned the poverty of the mansion and the sacrifice of the gittern; and his generosity and compassion were busily engaged in devising some means to requite the hospitality he had received, without wounding the pride of his host, when the arrival of his mails, together with the visits of the tailor and mercer, sent to him by Alwyn, diverted his thoughts into a new channel.
The blood mounted to his brow, and halting abruptly, he said, in a dry and altered voice: "My good damsel, you are now, I think, out of danger; it would ill beseem you, so young and so comely, to go farther with one not old enough to be your protector; so, in God's name, depart quickly, and remember me when you buy your new gittern, poor child!"
As he resumed his journey, he might have been taken for a gipsy minstrel, for suspended round his neck was a small cracked gittern, retaining only two strings. This, as if in mockery of his assumed misfortune, he had rested on the hump, while the riband, which was of bright scarlet, encircled, like a necklace, his swarthy neck, that was partially uncovered.
"Oh, Madge, I forgot! we can still sell the gittern for something. Get on your wimple, Madge quick, while I go for it." "Why, Mistress Sibyll, that's your only pleasure when you sit all alone, the long summer days."
"I know not, fair sir," said the girl, slowly recovering her self; "but my father is poor, and I had heard that on these holiday occasions one who had some slight skill on the gittern might win a few groats from the courtesy of the bystanders.
Whereupon the panel slipped away within the wainscot, leaving a little closet in the hollow of the wall, in which a few strange things were stowed: an empty flask, an inlaid rosewood box, a little slipper, and a dusty gittern with its strings all snapped and a faded ribbon tied about its neck.
Blood of my life!" stammered the landlord, "is his name Adam after all?" "My name is Adam Warner," said the old man, with dignity, "no wizard a humble scholar, and a poor gentleman, who has injured no one. Wherefore, women if women ye are would ye injure mine and me?" "Faugh, wizard!" returned Graul, folding her arms. "Didst thou not send thy spawn, yonder, to spoil our mart with her gittern?
"Ugh!" grunted forth the bluff landlord, turning away. "When I play, it shall be against a Christian Englishman, and none of your foreign jigmaries." "Play, play, nevertheless," said the young landlady, handing Robin at the same time a measure of fine ale; then stooping as if to untie the knot that fastened the gittern, she whispered in his ear.
"Nay, lad; a gittern." Nick and Cicely looked up, for his manner was very odd. "Why, sir, I do na know. I could try. I ha' heard one played, and it is passing sweet."
Then all at once he stopped as if some one had clapped a hand upon his mouth, and sat and stared into the fire. But in the morning at breakfast there was a gittern at Nick's place a rare old yellow gittern, with silver scrolls about the tail-piece, ivory pegs, and a head that ended in an angel's face.
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