Cedric, the Forester

by Bernard Gay Marshall

The poacher sprang up and faced me; and I saw that he was a youth of not more than my own time, though perhaps a thought broader of the shoulders and hips. He seemed not like a forest lurker either, for he had a good and open English face with the wide blue eyes that low-hearted knaves but seldom have. Now, however, he answered my threatening looks with a stare as bold as that of Robin Hood, and flung back at me in snarling tones:

“I steal no deer. I am the son of Elbert the forester of Pelham. My lord of Pelham allows us four good deer in each twelve-month; and this is but the third we have taken.”

“Thou liest, scurvy knave,” I shouted, drawing my sword and making it whistle through the air about my head, “leave that carcass and walk before me to Pelham Manor; and we shall see what Lord Pelham says to this pretty tale of thine.”

For answer the forester leaned forward and seized his cross-bow which was leaning, ready drawn and with bolt in groove, against the bole of a sapling near at hand. Leveling the piece at my throat, he growled, full surlily:

“Now, Sir Dickon of Mountjoy, turn thy horse and betake thee from here as fast as may be. I have spoken truth, as you may learn full easily if you ride to Pelham; but never will I, who go about my lawful business, consent to walk as your prisoner like a stealer of sheep. Get thee gone now, for truly my finger itches at the trigger.”

His blue eyes blazed at me with a menace not to be gainsaid. Here was no crouching knave who might receive a buffet for his insolence, but one full capable of making good his word. I was looking straight down the cross-bow groove at the steel bolt which another threat from me would send flying into my face. The knave was well beyond the reach of my sword, and could kill me as easily as he had the great buck that lay at his feet. I wheeled the mare and rode away out of the thicket, throwing over my shoulder the while a string of threats of the punishment his acts should bring down on his head when I had but spoken with his master of Pelham. To all these the young forester answered never a word, but stood with leveled weapon till I had passed from sight and hearing.

In the midst of my wrath at being thus balked I could not but admit that he bore himself well and truly. And I thought of a saying of my father’s that the greatness of England in battle was not the work of her armored horsemen or even of her stout men-at-arms, but of these same yeomen of the field and forest, who on many a hard-fought field had stood in leathern coats or homespun smocks like the oaks of their native woods and rained their arrows on the faces of the enemy spearmen till the lines wavered and broke and made way for the charge of the mail-clad knights.

I soon regained the pathway, and was riding slowly while I meditated the things I should say to Pelham of the insolence of his forester,—if indeed the churl were the son of Elbert as he claimed. And so were my thoughts disturbed that I saw no more the beauty of the day in the greenwood nor heard the trills and twitterings of the birds overhead. Thus engaged, and with my eyes fixed on the track in front, it was with surprise that I heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs and looked up to see approaching me, and but a hundred yards away, a tall young man, dressed in the style more affected at the court than in our rough Western land. It needed but a second glance for me to name him as Lionel, the twenty-years old son of the old Lord of Carleton, and the bitterest enemy of our house.

Early in the summer the Old Wolf of Carleton, as he was known to the countryside, had died of a wound given him two months before by our old Marvin with his good cross-bow when the Carletons were carrying forward their traitorous assault on the Castle of Mountjoy, the while my father with the best part of his men were with the King’s banner in Scotland.

For five years Lionel had been absent from Teramore, and one of a group of high-born youths who, at the great London house of the Duke of Cumberland, were being trained as squires-at-arms whilst they awaited the day for receiving the order of knighthood. At the news of his father’s death he hurried to Teramore to join his mother and take charge of the great estate.