A King's Comrade: A Story of Old Hereford

by Charles W. Whistler

"Selred will be waiting me, and all men else will be within the walls," I said. "I must go to him. Will you bide here and search, or risk coming with me, comrade?"

"I come with you, of course," Erling answered. "The search can wait. There is moonlight enough for us to carry it on again this night, if we will, between these showers."

It rained again as we went through the thickets. Under cover of the driving squalls we might pass unseen to where the little copse we sought came close to the river. And we cloaked ourselves against the shower, pulling the hoods over our helms. None, if we were seen, would take us for aught but belated men hurrying to the hall.

Unseen, so far as we could tell, we came to the edge of the little copse and entered it. The whole breadth of it lay between us and the palace; and under its trees was pretty dark, for the sun had set. We turned into the path where I had walked with Hilda, and I half hoped to see the priest there, but it was lonely. Down that path we hurried and turned the corner, but an arrow shot from the ramparts, and again I saw no one coming.

"We must bide and wait," I said. "He will come when the men are in hall."

"I don't like it," Erling answered, speaking quietly. "You were to meet him at the same time as before; yet he cannot have come. None would wonder at a priest staying out after the supper call, but maybe men might wonder at his leaving after it had sounded."

For a quarter of an hour we walked to and fro in the wood, down one path and up another. Then we thought that we might be following the priest round the wood as he looked for us, and we dared not call. The watch on the ramparts was set already. Now the loneliness of the wood had made us bold, and we thought we had best go one each way, and so make sure that we should find Selred if he were here.

At that time we were at the far corner of the wood, which was square, with a path all round it and one each way across. It was a favourite walk of Offa's during summer, men told me.

Erling turned to the left and I to the right, and we walked fast away from each other. It was getting very dim in these overarched paths under the great trees, but not so dim that one could not see fairly well if any figure came down the way. There was no wind to speak of, and it was all very silent. One could hear the noises from the palace plainly at times, and in one place the red light from the hall shone from a high window through the trees. Just at this time the clouds fled from off the face of the moon, and it was light, with that strange brightness that comes of dying day and brightening night mingled.

I came to the corner where my path turned, and before me there was a figure, as it were of some one who had just turned into the wood from toward the ramparts. The way by which Selred and I came here last night was there. And it was surely the cassocked priest himself, though I could not see his face. I hurried toward him with a little word of low greeting which he could hardly have heard. My foot caught a dry twig in the path, and it cracked loudly, and with that the figure stopped suddenly and half turned away.