“Of the Veneti?” he said, in allusion to my dark un-British hair, and I answered “No.”
“What, then?”
I told him I was a knight just now in the service of the British King.
“How many of your men opposed us to-day?” was the next question.
“A third as many as you brought with you where you were not invited.”
“And how many are there in arms behind the downs and in this southern country?”
“How many pebbles are there on yonder beach? How many ears of corn did we pull last harvest?” I answered, for I thought I should die in the morning, and this made me brave and surly.
He frowned very blackly at my defiance, but curbing, I could see, his wrath, he put the lamp on the table, and, after a minute of communing with himself, he said, in a voice over which policy threw a thin veil of amiability:
“Perhaps, as a British knight and a good soldier, I have no doubt you could speak better with your hands untied?”
I thanked him, replying that it was so; and he came up, freeing, with a beautiful little golden stiletto he wore in his girdle, my wrists. This kindly, slight act of soldierly trust obliged me to the Roman general, and I answered his quick, incisive questions in the Gaulish tongue as far as honestly might be. He got little about our forces, finding his prisoner more effusive in this quarter than communicative. Once or twice, when my answers verged on the scornful, I saw the imperious temper and haughty nature at strife with his will in that stern, masterful face and those keen black eyes.