He laughed.
'Since I have neither chick nor child and am main rich for a subject.'
'Why, she is happy in her servant,' Katharine said abstractedly. 'You are a very famous knight.'
'There are ballads of me,' he answered complacently. 'I pray to die in a good tulzie yet.'
'If Cicely Elliott have her scarf in your helmet,' Katharine said, 'I may not give you mine.' She was considering of her messenger to the bishop. 'Will you do me a service?'
'Why,' he answered, with a gentle mockery, 'you have one tricksy swordsman to bear your goodly colours.'
Katharine turned clean about to him and looked at him with attention, to make out whether he might be such a man as would carry her letter for her.
He returned her gaze directly, for he was proud of himself and of his fame. He had fought in all the wars that a man might fight in since he had been eighteen, and for fifteen years he had been captain of a troop employed by the Council in keeping back the Scots of the Borders. It was before Flodden Field that he had done his most famous deed, about which there were many ballads. Being fallen upon by a bevy of Scotsmen near a tall hedge, after he had been unhorsed, he had set his back into a thorn bush, and had fought for many hours in the rear of the Scottish troop, alone and with only his sword. The ballad that had been made about him said that seventeen corpses lay in front of the bush after the English won through to him. But since Cromwell had broken up the Northern Councils, and filled them again with his own men of no birth, the old man had come away from the Borders, disdaining to serve at the orders of knaves that had been butchers' sons and worse. He owned much land and was very wealthy, and, having been very abstemious, because he came of an old time when knighthood had still some of the sacredness and austerity of a religion, he was a man very sound in limb and peaceable of disposition. In his day he had been esteemed the most graceful whiffler in the world: now he used only the heavy sword, because he was himself grown heavy.
Katharine answered his gentle sneer at her cousin:
'It is true that I have a servant, but he is gone and may not serve me.' Yet the knight would find it in the books of chivalry that certain occasions or great quests allowed of a knight's doing the errands of more than one lady: but one lady, as for instance the celebrated Dorinda, might have her claims asserted by an illimitable number of knights, and she begged him to do her a service.