Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other
things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums
boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in
the town of Bridgewater.
Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window
opposite, but went disregarded. Mr. Blood’s
attention was divided between his task and the stream
of humanity in the narrow street below; a stream which
poured for the second time that day towards Castle
Field, where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the
Duke’s chaplain, had preached a sermon containing
more treason than divinity.
These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed
of men with green boughs in their hats and the most
ludicrous of weapons in their hands. Some, it
is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there
a sword was brandished; but more of them were armed
with clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes
fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to the eye
as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers,
brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers,
cobblers, and representatives of every other of the
trades of peace among these improvised men of war.
Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously
of its manhood to the service of the bastard Duke
that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted
of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward
or a papist.
Yet Peter Blood, who was not only able to bear arms,
but trained and skilled in their use, who was certainly
no coward, and a papist only when it suited him, tended
his geraniums and smoked his pipe on that warm July
evening as indifferently as if nothing were afoot.
One other thing he did. He flung after those
war-fevered enthusiasts a line of Horace — a
poet for whose work he had early conceived an inordinate
affection:
“Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?”
And now perhaps you guess why the hot, intrepid blood
inherited from the roving sires of his Somersetshire
mother remained cool amidst all this frenzied fanatical
heat of rebellion; why the turbulent spirit which
had forced him once from the sedate academical bonds
his father would have imposed upon him, should now
remain quiet in the very midst of turbulence.
You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying
to the banners of liberty — the banners woven
by the virgins of Taunton, the girls from the seminaries
of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who — as the
ballad runs — had ripped open their silk petticoats
to make colours for King Monmouth’s army.
That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them as
they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his
mind. To him they were fools rushing in wicked
frenzy upon their ruin.
