By midday the last signs of the siege were gone, the ashes of the circling camp fires were cold, and the great drawbridge was down once more. A messenger was sent to the Tarn Rock to bring in the horses and their guards. In the sunny spring afternoon, when we went forth to reconnoiter the deserted camps of our enemies, I rode at my father’s side, wearing for the first time the gold-hilted sword which had been brought from Damascus.
Two months later, the King returning to London, confirmed my father in possession of his estates, and sent messengers to old Lord Carleton demanding his instant attendance at court. Again the Old Wolf was ill, too much so to obey the command of his sovereign; but this time he was not to rise from his bed as soon as the messengers had turned their backs.
The wound in his throat made by Marvin’s bolt had never fully healed, and now this, coupled with his old distemper, had laid him low. Even while the heralds waited, the priest in the great upper chamber was saying the prayers for the dying. At sunset on that day, I could see from the Tarn Rock the blue and white banner of Carleton flying at half mast over the battlements of Teramore.
[CHAPTER III—CEDRIC THE FORESTER]
It was on a sunny noontide, in fair October, some six months after we had driven the hounds of Carleton from our castle of Mountjoy, that I was riding in the forest, three leagues and more from home, on the way to see my cousins of Leicester at their manor by the edge of Pelham Wood, and mayhap to share with them one of those goodly pasties of venison which their table never lacks.
My bonny white mare, Clothilde, did amble along the woodland path with dainty and springing steps, as though ’twere joy enough to be abroad and lightly burdened on such a day; and it seemed to me I felt my youth and growing bones and sinews as ne’er before. As I passed the Tarleton Water which was rippling most sweetly under the sun glints, I was minded of a fair dream that had come to me on that night we halted the second assault of the Carletons, and after old Marvin had bathed and dressed the wound I had from a cross-bow bolt. Here was the sparkling water, just as I had seen it then, and the glimmering of the light on the oak leaves of red and brown and gold; and here was I astride the goodly mare that I had raised and broken from a colt, and on an errand far enough removed from the grim business of that dark and dangerous time.
By my side was the gold-hilted sword from Damascus which had been mine since the return of my father, Lord Mountjoy, from the Scottish war; and I bore no other arms nor thought of any need for them. My sixteenth birthday would not now be long in coming; and already my mark on the lintel post was within a handsbreadth of my father’s own. My voice had grown more settled of late; and, in the lonely reaches of the forest, I was practicing for my own delight a sweet ballad which I had often heard him sing, and which he had from the minstrels of Provence who had journeyed with the armies to the Holy Land.
Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I marked the movement of a bush in a little glade two hundred yards to the right of my path. The swing it made was none such as are caused by the wind; and indeed at the time all the air about was still and warm with the quietness of the summer of St. Martin’s. Rather was the movement I had scarcely seen the twitch of the leafy top of a sapling when its stem is roughly seized or when some heavy thing hath fallen against it. To me it told, plainly and well, that either was a deer grazing in that thicket or that some man, mayhap with good reason for not wishing to be seen, was hiding there.
In a moment I had turned Clothilde’s head from the path and was riding through the light underbrush with my eyes fixed on the ferny glade. Soon I broke through the bushes that screened it and saw a youth in the Lincoln green of a forester, stripping the hide from a fine antlered buck. There had been, in the troublous times of the past year and more, while most of the knights and gentlemen of the countryside were with the King’s banner in Scotland, far too much of lawless slaying of deer by poaching villains and forest hiding thieves. Twice had I, in the thick of the woods, come on the half-flayed and mangled carcasses which had been left to waste or to feed the wolves after tenderloins and haunches had been cut away. Now my choler quickly rose within me, and I called out, full rough and loud:
“How now! Thou deer-stealing varlet! I have thee red-handed. By my faith, thou shalt smart well for this.”