“You won’t die!” said Lightfoot, shutting his teeth.
“If I die, go back to my people somehow, and tell them that I died like a true earl’s son.”
Hereward held out his hand; Martin fell on his knees and kissed it; watched him with set teeth till he disappeared in the wood; and then started forward and entered the bushes at a different spot.
“I must be nigh at hand to see fair play,” he muttered to himself, “in case any of his ruffians be hanging about. Fair play I’ll see, and fair play I’ll give, too, for the sake of my lord’s honor, though I be bitterly loath to do it. So many times as I have been a villain when it was of no use, why mayn’t I be one now, when it would serve the purpose indeed? Why did we ever come into this accursed place? But one thing I will do,” said he, as he ensconced himself under a thick holly, whence he could see the meeting of the combatants upon an open lawn some twenty yards away; “if that big bull-calf kills my master, and I do not jump on his back and pick his brains out with this trusty steel of mine, may my right arm—”
And Martin Lightfoot swore a fearful oath, which need not here be written.
The priest had just finished his chant of the seventy-third Psalm, and had betaken himself in his spiritual warfare, as it was then called, to the equally apposite fifty-second, “Quid gloriaris?”
“Why boastest thou thyself, thou tyrant, that thou canst do mischief, whereas the goodness of God endureth yet daily?”
“Father! father!” cried a soft voice in the doorway, “where are you?”
And in hurried the Princess.
“Hide this,” she said, breathless, drawing from beneath her mantle a huge sword; “hide it, where no one dare touch it, under the altar behind the holy rood: no place too secret.”