"I pay him?" said the artist. "May the foul fiend pay me if I do! Had
it not been that I thought it might displease your worship, I would have
had an ounce or two of gold out of him, in exchange of the same just
weight of brick dust."
"I advise you to practise no such knavery while waiting upon me," said
Tressilian.
"Did I not say," answered the artist, "that for that reason alone I
forbore him for the present?--Knavery, call you it? Why, yonder wretched
skeleton hath wealth sufficient to pave the whole lane he lives in with
dollars, and scarce miss them out of his own iron chest; yet he goes mad
after the philosopher's stone. And besides, he would have cheated a poor
serving-man, as he thought me at first, with trash that was not worth
a penny. Match for match, quoth the devil to the collier; if his false
medicine was worth my good crowns, my true brick dust is as well worth
his good gold."
"It may be so, for aught I know," said Tressilian, "in dealing amongst
Jews and apothecaries; but understand that to have such tricks of
legerdemain practised by one attending on me diminishes my honour, and
that I will not permit them. I trust thou hast made up thy purchases?"
"I have, sir," replied Wayland; "and with these drugs will I, this very
day, compound the true orvietan, that noble medicine which is so seldom
found genuine and effective within these realms of Europe, for want
of that most rare and precious drug which I got but now from Yoglan."
[Orvietan, or Venice treacle, as it was sometimes called, was understood
to be a sovereign remedy against poison; and the reader must be
contented, for the time he peruses these pages, to hold the same
opinion, which was once universally received by the learned as well as
the vulgar.] "But why not have made all your purchases at one shop?" said his master;
"we have lost nearly an hour in running from one pounder of simples to
another."
"Content you, sir," said Wayland. "No man shall learn my secret; and
it would not be mine long, were I to buy all my materials from one
chemist."
They now returned to their inn (the famous Bell-Savage); and while the
Lord Sussex's servant prepared the horses for their journey, Wayland,
obtaining from the cook the service of a mortar, shut himself up in
a private chamber, where he mixed, pounded, and amalgamated the drugs
which he had bought, each in its due proportion, with a readiness
and address that plainly showed him well practised in all the manual
operations of pharmacy.