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The houses opposite were superior to any I had yet seen in Ciudad Rodrigo and had iron balconies before their first-floor windows, broad and deep and overhanging the house-doors. On one of these doors Leicester was hammering with his side-arm, the Portuguese standing by on the step below.
The windows of the great inn were open; people were thronging on to the balcony to see what the matter was; citizens came to their house-doors. At that moment, Mr. Jermyn appeared. The captain of the guard was asking questions in Dutch. The guardsmen were peering at my face in the lantern light. Mr. Jermyn questioned me quickly as to what had happened. He interpreted my tale to the guard.
So they went by frith and fell, by wood and fair ways, till in two days' time they were come by undern within sight of the Castle of the Outer March, and entered into the street of the thorpe aforesaid; and they saw that there were no folk therein and at the house-doors save old carles and carlines scarce wayworthy, and little children who might not go afoot.
It was soon gone again to return no more that day; and the bands of music and the straggling Punch's shows going after it, left it a prey to the most dismal of organs, and white mice; with now and then a porcupine, to vary the entertainments; until the butlers whose families were dining out, began to stand at the house-doors in the twilight, and the lamp-lighter made his nightly failure in attempting to brighten up the street with gas.
Sleep came upon me as it came on many other outcasts, against whom house-doors were locked, and house-dogs barked, that night and I dreamed of lying on my old school-bed, talking to the boys in my room; and found myself sitting upright, with Steerforth's name upon my lips, looking wildly at the stars that were glistening and glimmering above me.
By this time the stars were shining clear in the cold, frosty sky, and candles or train-oil lamps were burning in most of the houses; for all these things took place long before gas had been heard of in those quarters. A few faces were pressed close to the window-panes as the cart passed; and some rather untidy women came to the house-doors to look.
Iskandar then asked "Why do you dig your graves before your house-doors?"; and the King answered, "That they may be the prospective of our eye-glances; so we may look on them and ever renew talk and thought of death, neither forget the world to come; and on this wise the love of the world be banished from our hearts and we be not thereby distracted from the service of our Lord, the Almighty."
And oh! what dismay what terror did that monster spread in the thoroughfares through which he passed; how wildly, how madly flew the men and women from his path; how piteously screamed the children at the house-doors in the poor neighborhoods!
But when vague rumours got abroad, that in this Protestant association a secret power was mustering against the government for undefined and mighty purposes; when the air was filled with whispers of a confederacy among the Popish powers to degrade and enslave England, establish an inquisition in London, and turn the pens of Smithfield market into stakes and cauldrons; when terrors and alarms which no man understood were perpetually broached, both in and out of Parliament, by one enthusiast who did not understand himself, and bygone bugbears which had lain quietly in their graves for centuries, were raised again to haunt the ignorant and credulous; when all this was done, as it were, in the dark, and secret invitations to join the Great Protestant Association in defence of religion, life, and liberty, were dropped in the public ways, thrust under the house-doors, tossed in at windows, and pressed into the hands of those who trod the streets by night; when they glared from every wall, and shone on every post and pillar, so that stocks and stones appeared infected with the common fear, urging all men to join together blindfold in resistance of they knew not what, they knew not why; then the mania spread indeed, and the body, still increasing every day, grew forty thousand strong.
"Come, accompany us to the market-place!" A few months later he was sent to Petersburg under arrest, accused principally of having behaved too leniently and too much in the German interest for a Russian general. The morning was cold and rainy, the wind howled down the empty streets, rattling the windows, and slamming the open house-doors.
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