9. IX.
I GO TO ROSEMARY LANE, AND MEET WITH AN UGLY
ADVENTURE.
I was quite charmed with the new course which my
life had now taken, and—thinking continuously of a
young lady with great, calm eyes—grew sedulous of
my personal appearance, and thought of my tailor.
Going to try on my new uniform, I met with two
personages, the one fantastic, the other terrible; and
of these I shall now speak.
The name of the tailor was Joyce, and his shop was
not far from the Tower. The gentlemen of the Guards
had made him the fashion, by a species of caprice:
he had sent to take my measure, on receiving a message
from Harry; and the emissary, when leaving me,
requested with an air of importance that I would come
to his master's shop and try on the uniform “during
the process of its construction,” as nothing caused Mr.
Joyce such pain as to supply gentlemen with ill-fitting
garments.
I hastened therefore, a day or two after the events
just described, to visit the shop of Mr. Joyce, tailor,
in Rosemary Lane. Leaving my horse in the Guardsmen's
stables at Whitehall, I proceeded on foot; and it
was nearly evening when I at last reached Rosemary
Lane, where a tall house toppling forward was pointed
out to me as the shop of the tailor.
He was at work as I entered,—a small, important-looking
man, snipping viciously with a great pair of
shears,—and greeted me with a nonchalant air, very
unusual in a tradesman. Summoning an apprentice, he
gave him an order, and, taking no further notice of me,
strolled to the doorway. His hands were thrust beneath
his coat-skirts, he carried his nose in the air, and only
returned to the lower world, as 'twere, when his apprentice
brought the half-finished coat.
At a sign from him the apprentice approached me.
I removed my coat, and tried on the new garment.
He of the elevated nose then walked around me and
surveyed me from all sides.
“Take up in the waist,” he said to the apprentice.
“More—more—not so much—more—there.”
He then gazed at me from head to foot.
“If you would hold up your head,” he said,—
“there. The coat will fit. Be good enough to write
your name here.”
He laid a large ledger before me. I saw there the
names of Ireton and Cromwell.
“So you are court and parliament tailor indifferently?”
I remarked, laughing.
“Yes,” said Mr. Joyce, carelessly. “I make for
Guardsmen and parliament people, the court and the
Roundhead class, as the new term has it.”
“And your own politics?”
“Roundhead,” said Mr. Joyce, coolly.
He then drew his hands from beneath his coat-skirts,
informed me that my uniform would be sent me in three
days, turned his back on me, and began snipping away
again with his great shears.
Such was my first sight of this personage, who was
to become historic. I went out of his shop, half
angry and half amused. But night began to fall, I was
far from Whitehall, and the narrow and winding street
—a sort of ditch between the tall, toppling houses on
each side—was far from presenting a very cheerful appearance.
There was something decidedly cut-throatish
about it; and footpads then swarmed in London. A
dim lamp beginning to twinkle at long intervals, from
the ropes suspended across the street, only rendered
darkness visible, to use Mr. Milton's fine expression.
So I determined to issue from this suspicious-looking
place as soon as possible, and set forward, walking
rapidly towards the Tower.
I had gone about two hundred paces, when a roystering
party of apprentices apparently, armed with clubs,
came towards me, and, as they passed, one of them
jostled me rudely. As he did so, I looked at him;
our eyes met: it was the burly young man with whom
I had grappled in Oatlands Park.
“Fall on!” he shouted, suddenly. “I know this
popinjay, and you know him! He chased us in the
park,—and he pulled my ear, the fiend seize him!”
As he uttered these words, the speaker rushed upon
me, lifting his club to brain me.
“Hark! tackle to him, Hulet!” cried his friends;
“show him—”
A hoarse growl from my enemy drowned the rest.
He struck straight at me, and his associates closed in
on me at the same moment, reminding me of a pack of
hounds around a hare.
I was not precisely a hare, however, and I had my
rapier to meet the cudgel. With the determination to
give a good account of one or two of my assailants
at least, I lunged at the man called Hulet, and ran him
through the fleshy part of his arm. The wound seemed
to render him furious. He aimed a blow at my head
with his cudgel; I parried; the blow fell on my rapier,
and the treacherous iron snapped within a foot of the
hilt.
A loud cry followed; my assailants closed in upon
me, forced me to the wall, struck at me, keeping
out of reach of my sword-stump,—and I began to
realize that in a few moments I would probably be
knocked down and left senseless or dead on he paving-stones.
I looked hastily around. All the shops were closed.
I was in front of a gloomy-looking house, whose windows
were fast-barred, and against the door of this
house my assailants had now forced me.
“Kill him, Hulet!” rose in a wrathful shout, and
the whole party threw themselves upon me, aiming at
my head with their clubs. I endeavored in vain to
parry this storm of blows; my back was against the
door of the gloomy house; I lunged with my sword-stump,
shouting for the watch without result; then a
heavy blow fell upon my forehead, and I staggered,
dropping the stump of my weapon.
As I did so, the door against which I leaned opened
suddenly, and I felt myself dragged in. As the apprentices
rushed towards it, it was shut in their faces.
I then heard a bar fall, and a chain drawn across the
door. A voice said, “You are safe, sir,”—the voice
of a woman; and, half conscious, half fainting, with a
tremendous buzzing in my ears, I found myself led into
an apartment, where there was an arm-chair: into this
I fell, and the same voice said,—
“God be thanked! They have not killed you, sir!”
