"Dicon lad, Dicon Snowe, is this the way in which thou dost follow the behests of thy prudent uncle? Is this how thou dost cater for true news for him? Is this how thou dost prudently wait the issue of events ere thou dost declare for one side or the other?"
Looking up quickly—for the enlisting was well-nigh done for the day, and there were few left to be enrolled—I encountered the gaze of my lord the Viscount's dark-blue eyes fixed full upon me with a glance half of reproach, half of humorous amusement.
Truth to tell, I had indeed forgotten my character of scout, and had flung myself into the very thick of the movement; though the future alone could say whether men would come to call it by the name of victorious revolution or seditious rebellion. I had been carried away by the excitement of the scene and by my personal bias, and I had thrown to the wind alike the prudence inculcated by my uncle and the diplomacy I had promised to exercise on his behalf. Nevertheless I had not betrayed myself, and I had not enlisted as a soldier; for who would enlist a hunchbacked lad like me? Nor had I even told my name, it not having been asked of me; so that I was not exactly committed to aught. Yet I felt a thrill of shame run through me, as though I had in some sort betrayed trust; and I said to my lord with some humbleness,—
"My uncle shall not suffer aught through any act of mine. I will keep my pledge to him, and let him know all I can find ere the Duke enters Taunton; but how may I hold back from him when I see him face to face, and when you, my lord, are serving with him, whom I would fain follow to the world's end or to death?"
The Viscount smiled that smile of his which I never quite understood, but the pressure of his hand upon my shoulder was kindly and friendly.
"It is like enough to be one or the other, wert thou simple enough to throw in thy lot with me," he said in a low voice. "Exile or death is like enough to be the fate of those who meddle in this matter."
His voice was only for my ear, and I heard his words with a start of dismay and incredulity.
"But, good my lord, look on these rolls—look on this list of names! A few hours have brought all these men flocking to the Duke's standard. What will not days do, and when all the country side knows that he is here at last?"
Over the Viscount's face there passed another fleeting smile, and his eye rested upon my scroll with a strange expression.
"A few hundred ill-armed, undisciplined, untrained rustic hinds, who know no more of warfare than I of the plough! Dicon, hast thou read thy history so ill as that thou thinkest England and England's armies can be subdued by such as these?"