“Have you asked Garton Rogers?” he asked. “What an interesting period!”
Murrel was not easily startled but for the moment he also almost staggered. He could only reply with a blank stare and the repetition of the word “Period! What period?”
“Well,” replied Mr. Herne, the librarian, half closing his eyes. “I suppose we might put the most interesting period say from 1080 to 1260. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a long time to wait for a meal,” answered Murrel. “Man alive, you must be starving. Have you really been perched up there for–for two hundred years, so to speak?”
“I do feel a little funny,” replied, Herne.
“I don’t approve of your taste in fun,” answered the other. “Look here, I’m going to get you some food. The servants aren’t up yet; but a knife-boy who was a friend of mine once showed me the way to the pantry.”
He hurried out of the room and returned in about five minutes bearing a tray loaded with incongruous things, among which beer bottles seemed to predominate.
“Ancient British cheese,” he said, setting down the several objects on the top of a revolving bookcase. “Cold chicken, probably not earlier than 1390. Beer, as drunk by Richard Coeur de Lion; or all of it that he left. Jambon froid a la mode Troubadour. Do start it at once. I assure you that eating and drinking were practised in the best period.”
“I really can’t drink all that beer,” said the librarian. “It’s very early.”
“On the contrary, it’s very late,” said Murrel. “I don’t mind joining you, for I’m just finishing off a sort of a feast myself. Another little drink won’t do us any harm, as it says in the old Troubadour song of Provence.”