‘God grant he may!’ muttered Bunce, ‘without his hum and ha, and swaying this way and that, till he never moves at all! Betwixt his caution, and this lad’s moonstruck ways, you have a fair course before you, Sir Giles! See, what’s the lad doing now?’
The lad was putting into his pouch the larger white pebbles that had represented tens in his calculation, and murmuring the numbers they stood for. ‘He will understand,’ he said almost to himself, but he showed himself ready to go with the party to Threlkeld, merely pausing at Hob’s cottage to pick up a few needful equipments. In the skin of a rabbit, carefully prepared, and next wrapped in a silken kerchief, and kept under his chaff pillow, was the hermit’s portuary, which was carefully and silently transferred by Hal to his own bosom. Sir Giles Musgrave objected to Watch, in city or camp, and Hal was obliged to leave him to Goodwife Dolly and to Piers.
With each it was a piteous parting, for Dolly had been as a mother to him for almost all his boyhood, and had supplied the tenderness that his mother’s fears and Sir Lancelot’s precautions had prevented his receiving at Threlkeld. He was truly as a son to her, and she sobbed over him, declaring that she never would see him again, even if he came to his own, which she did not believe was possible, and who would see to his clean shirts?
‘Never fear, goodwife,’ said Giles Musgrave; ‘he shall be looked to as mine own son.’
‘And what’s that to a gentle lad that has always been tended as becomes him?’
‘Heed not, mother! Be comforted! I must have gone to the wars, anyway. If so be I thrive, I’ll send for thee to mine own castle, to reign there as I remember of old. Here now! Comfort Piers as thou only canst do.’
Piers, poor fellow, wept bitterly, only able to understand that something had befallen his comrade of seven years, which would take him away from field and moor. He clung to Hal, and both lads shed tears, till Hob roughly snatched Piers away and threw him to his aunt, with threats that drew indignant, though useless, interference from Hal, though Simon Bunce was muttering, ‘As lief take one lad as the other!’ while Dolly’s angry defence of her nursling’s wisdom broke the sadness of the parting.
CHAPTER XII. — A PRUDENT RECEPTION
So doth my heart misgive me in these conflicts,
What may befall him to his harm and ours.
—SHAKESPEARE.