The White Company
wild-looking fellow armed with a club, who sprang out from behind a tree
and barred his passage. He was a rough, powerful peasant, with cap and
tunic of untanned sheepskin, leather breeches, and galligaskins round
legs and feet.
“Stand!” he shouted, raising his heavy cudgel to enforce the order. “Who
are you who walk so freely through the wood? Whither would you go, and
what is your errand?”
“Why should I answer your questions, my friend?” said Alleyne, standing
on his guard.
“Because your tongue may save your pate. But where have I looked upon
your face before?”
“No longer ago than last night at the 'Pied Merlin,'” the clerk
answered, recognizing the escaped serf who had been so outspoken as to
his wrongs.
“By the Virgin! yes. You were the little clerk who sat so mum in the
corner, and then cried fy on the gleeman. What hast in the scrip?”
“Naught of any price.”
“How can I tell that, clerk? Let me see.”
“Not I.”
“Fool! I could pull you limb from limb like a pullet. What would you
have? Hast forgot that we are alone far from all men? How can your
clerkship help you? Wouldst lose scrip and life too?”
“I will part with neither without fight.”
“A fight, quotha? A fight betwixt spurred cock and new hatched chicken!
Thy fighting days may soon be over.”
“Hadst asked me in the name of charity I would have given freely,” cried
Alleyne. “As it stands, not one farthing shall you have with my free
will, and when I see my brother, the Socman of Minstead, he will raise
hue and cry from vill to vill, from hundred to hundred, until you are
taken as a common robber and a scourge to the country.”
The outlaw sank his club. “The Socman's brother!” he gasped. “Now,
by the keys of Peter! I had rather that hand withered and tongue was
palsied ere I had struck or miscalled you. If you are the Socman's
brother you are one of the right side, I warrant, for all your clerkly
dress.”
“His brother I am,” said Alleyne. “But if I were not, is that reason why
you should molest me on the king's ground?”
“I give not the pip of an apple for king or for noble,” cried the serf
passionately. “Ill have I had from them, and ill I shall repay them. I
am a good friend to my friends, and, by the Virgin! an evil foeman to my
foes.”
“And therefore the worst of foemen to thyself,” said Alleyne. “But I
pray you, since you seem to know him, to point out to me the shortest
path to my brother's house.”
The serf was about to reply, when the clear ringing call of a bugle
burst from the wood close behind them, and Alleyne caught sight for
an instant of the dun side and white breast of a lordly stag glancing
swiftly betwixt the distant tree trunks. A minute later came the shaggy
deer-hounds, a dozen or fourteen of them, running on a hot scent, with
nose to earth and tail in air. As they streamed past the silent forest
around broke suddenly into loud life, with galloping of hoofs, crackling
of brushwood, and the short, sharp cries of the hunters. Close behind
the pack rode a fourrier and a yeoman-pricker, whooping on the laggards
and encouraging the leaders, in the shrill half-French jargon which was
the language of venery and woodcraft. Alleyne was still gazing
after them, listening to the loud “Hyke-a-Bayard! Hyke-a-Pomers!
Hyke-a-Lebryt!” with which they called upon their favorite hounds, when
a group of horsemen crashed out through the underwood at the very spot
where the serf and he were standing.
The one who led was a man between fifty and sixty years of age, war-worn
and weather-beaten, with a broad, thoughtful forehead and eyes which
shone brightly from under his fierce and overhung brows. His beard,
streaked thickly with gray, bristled forward from his chin, and spoke
of a passionate nature, while the long, finely cut face and firm mouth
marked the leader of men. His figure was erect and soldierly, and he
rode his horse with the careless grace of a man whose life had been
spent in the saddle. In common garb, his masterful face and flashing
eye would have marked him as one who was born to rule; but now, with his
silken tunic powdered with golden fleurs-de-lis, his velvet mantle lined
with the royal minever, and the lions of England stamped in silver upon
his harness, none could fail to recognize the noble Edward, most warlike
and powerful of all the long line of fighting monarchs who had ruled
the Anglo-Norman race. Alleyne doffed hat and bowed head at the sight
of him, but the serf folded his hands and leaned them upon his cudgel,
looking with little love at the knot of nobles and knights-in-waiting
who rode behind the king.
“Ha!” cried Edward, reining up for an instant his powerful black steed.
“Le cerf est passe? Non? Ici, Brocas; tu parles Anglais.”
“The deer, clowns?” said a hard-visaged, swarthy-faced man, who rode at
the king's elbow. “If ye have headed it back it is as much as your ears
are worth.”
“It passed by the blighted beech there,” said Alleyne, pointing, “and
the hounds were hard at its heels.”
“It is well,” cried Edward, still speaking in French: for, though he
could understand English, he had never learned to express himself in so
barbarous and unpolished a tongue. “By my faith, sirs,” he continued,
half turning in his saddle to address his escort, “unless my woodcraft
is sadly at fault, it is a stag of six tines and the finest that we have
roused this journey. A golden St. Hubert to the man who is the first to
sound the mort.” He shook his bridle as he spoke, and thundered away,
his knights lying low upon their horses and galloping as hard as whip
and spur would drive them, in the hope of winning the king's prize. Away
they drove down the long green glade--bay horses, black and gray, riders
clad in every shade of velvet, fur, or silk, with glint of brazen horn
and flash of knife and spear. One only lingered, the black-browed Baron
Brocas, who, making a gambade which brought him within arm-sweep of
the serf, slashed him across the face with his riding-whip. “Doff, dog,
doff,” he hissed, “when a monarch deigns to lower his eyes to such as
you!”--then spurred through the underwood and was gone, with a gleam of
steel shoes and flutter of dead leaves.
The villein took the cruel blow without wince or cry, as one to whom
stripes are a birthright and an inheritance. His eyes flashed, however,
and he shook his bony hand with a fierce wild gesture after the
retreating figure.
“Black hound of Gascony,” he muttered, “evil the day that you and those
like you set foot in free England! I know thy kennel of Rochecourt. The
night will come when I may do to thee and thine what you and your class
have wrought upon mine and me. May God smite me if I fail to smite thee,
thou French robber, with thy wife and thy child and all that is under
thy castle roof!”
“Forbear!” cried Alleyne. “Mix not God's name with these unhallowed
threats! And yet it was a coward's blow, and one to stir the blood and
loose the tongue of the most peaceful. Let me find some soothing simples
and lay them on the weal to draw the sting.”
“Nay, there is but one thing that can draw the sting, and that the
future may bring to me. But, clerk, if you would see your brother you
must on, for there is a meeting to-day, and his merry men will await him
ere the shadows turn from west to east. I pray you not to hold him back,
for it would be an evil thing if all the stout lads were there and the
leader a-missing. I would come with you, but sooth to say I am stationed
here and may not move. The path over yonder, betwixt the oak and the
thorn, should bring you out into his nether field.”
Alleyne lost no time in following the directions of the wild, masterless
man, whom he left among the trees where he had found him. His heart was
the heavier for the encounter, not only because all bitterness and wrath
were abhorrent to his gentle nature, but also because it disturbed him
to hear his brother spoken of as though he were a chief of outlaws or
the leader of a party against the state. Indeed, of all the things which
he had seen yet in the world to surprise him there was none more
strange than the hate which class appeared to bear to class. The talk
of laborer, woodman and villein in the inn had all pointed to the
wide-spread mutiny, and now his brother's name was spoken as though he
were the very centre of the universal discontent. In good truth, the
commons throughout the length and breadth of the land were heart-weary
of this fine game of chivalry which had been played so long at their
expense. So long as knight and baron were a strength and a guard to the
kingdom they might be endured, but now, when all men knew that the great
battles in France had been won by English yeomen and Welsh stabbers,
warlike fame, the only fame to which his class had ever aspired,
appeared to have deserted the plate-clad horsemen. The sports of the
lists had done much in days gone by to impress the minds of the people,
but the plumed and unwieldy champion was no longer an object either of
fear or of reverence to men whose fathers and brothers had shot into the
press at Crecy or Poitiers, and seen the proudest chivalry in the world
unable to make head against the weapons of disciplined peasants. Power
had changed hands. The protector had become the protected, and the whole
fabric of the feudal system was tottering to a fall. Hence the fierce
mutterings of the lower classes and the constant discontent, breaking
out into local tumult and outrage, and culminating some years later in
the great rising of Tyler. What Alleyne saw and wondered at in Hampshire
would have appealed equally to the traveller in any other English county
from the Channel to the marches of Scotland.
He was following the track, his misgivings increasing with every step
which took him nearer to that home which he had never seen, when of a
sudden the trees began to thin and the sward to spread out onto a broad,
green lawn, where five cows lay in the sunshine and droves of black
swine wandered unchecked. A brown forest stream swirled down the centre
of this clearing, with a rude bridge flung across it, and on the other
side was a second field sloping up to a long, low-lying wooden house,
with thatched roof and open squares for windows. Alleyne gazed across
at it with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes--for this, he knew, must
be the home of his fathers. A wreath of blue smoke floated up through a
hole in the thatch, and was the only sign of life in the place, save a
great black hound which lay sleeping chained to the door-post. In the
yellow shimmer of the autumn sunshine it lay as peacefully and as still
as he had oft pictured it to himself in his dreams.
He was roused, however, from his pleasant reverie by the sound of
voices, and two people emerged from the forest some little way to his
right and moved across the field in the direction of the bridge. The one
was a man with yellow flowing beard and very long hair of the same tint
drooping over his shoulders; his dress of good Norwich cloth and his
assured bearing marked him as a man of position, while the sombre hue
of his clothes and the absence of all ornament contrasted with the flash
and glitter which had marked the king's retinue. By his side walked
a woman, tall and slight and dark, with lithe, graceful figure and
clear-cut, composed features. Her jet-black hair was gathered back under
a light pink coif, her head poised proudly upon her neck, and her step
long and springy, like that of some wild, tireless woodland creature.
She held her left hand in front of her, covered with a red velvet glove,
and on the wrist a little brown falcon, very fluffy and bedraggled,
which she smoothed and fondled as she walked. As she came out into the
sunshine, Alleyne noticed that her light gown, slashed with pink, was