“Well. Why not?”
“Why not?—certainly. And has brought out of Scotland a few gallant gentlemen, and stout housecarles of my acquaintance.”
Gilbert laughed.
“You may well say that. To tell you the truth, we have flitted, bag and baggage. I don’t believe that we have left a dog behind.”
“So you intend to ‘colonize’ in England, as the learned clerks would call it? To settle; to own land; and enter, like the Jews of old, into goodly houses which you builded not, farms which you tilled not, wells which you digged not, and orchards which you planted not?”
“Why, what a clerk you are! That sounds like Scripture.”
“And so it is. I heard it in a French priest’s sermon, which he preached here in St. Omer a Sunday or two back, exhorting all good Catholics, in the Pope’s name, to enter upon the barbarous land of England, tainted with the sin of Simon Magus, and expel thence the heretical priests, and so forth, promising them that they should have free leave to cut long thongs out of other men’s hides.”
Gilbert chuckled.
“You laugh. The priest did not; for after sermon I went up to him, and told him how I was an Englishman, and an outlaw, and a desperate man, who feared neither saint nor devil; and if I heard such talk as that again in St. Omer, I would so shave the speaker’s crown that he should never need razor to his dying day.”
“And what is that to me?” said Gilbert, in an uneasy, half-defiant tone; for Hereward’s tone had been more than half-defiant.