It was useless for Merrylips to say that Claus and Rupert were neither spies nor Spaniards.
They were foreign folk, were they not, Goody Trot asked. Go to, then! All foreigners were Spaniards, and had not the Spaniards, in her girlhood, sent a great fleet to conquer England? Now that there were rumors of war in the air, Goody Trot was sure that the Spaniards were coming again, and that Claus and Rupert were spies, sent before the general army.
It was almost as sad when Merrylips left the old woman and sought out Roger, the butler. She found him loading an old snaphance, over which he cocked his head wisely. These were troublous times, he hinted, and there were those not a thousand miles away who might be fain to see the inside of Larkland. Let them but try, and they should see more than they bargained on, he ended, with a grim chuckle, as he fondled his snaphance.
"But they are friends unto us, Rupert and Claus," cried Merrylips. "They are soldiers to the king whom we serve."
"And how know you that, mistress," asked the old man, "save by their own telling? And how know you that they tell the truth?"
In all her life Merrylips had never thought that any one could really lie. Wicked people did so, she had been told, but she had never dreamed that she herself should ever know such people. It hurt her now to believe that Rupert could have lied to her who had trusted him. Yet if he had not lied, Roger, her tried old friend, who called him false, was harsh and cruel.
It was a torn and tossed little heart that Merrylips carried to her godmother to be quieted, at the hour of twilight when they usually talked together.
"It is not true," she said stormily. "Oh, dear godmother, now that you have seen Rupert, you know it is not true—the evil things they all are saying of him."
"I know that he is ill and weary, poor lad!" said Lady Sybil, but when Merrylips would have protested further, she hushed her.
"Think not too harshly of thine old friends that they suspect this new friend thou hast made," she counselled. "Remember these are days when every man in this poor country doth suspect his fellow—when brother is arrayed against brother. We know not whence these two strangers come."