"Sir William Geary," cried the King, "this is no jesting matter! Speak what it was you told me that you saw."
"I saw a fat monk," replied Sir William Geary, whose inclination for a joke could hardly be restrained--"a jolly monk as ever my eyes rested upon, and this fat monk, sire," he continued, more seriously, seeing that the King was becoming angry, "stopped, and asked his way to the apartments of the noble lord. He jested as wittily with Sir Harry Grey as a court fool does with a thick-headed country lad; but when he had gone on his way, Sir Guy de Margan here, a very serious and reputable youth, as your Majesty knows, told me, in mysterious secrecy, that the friar was a very treacherous piece of fat indeed--a traitor's messenger--a go-between of rebels--a personage whom he had himself known with Sir William Lemwood and the rest, in the marches of Wales. So, inviting him sweetly into my chamber, we two watched together for the monk's going forth from this noble lord's apartments which was not for more than an hour. In the meanwhile, pious Sir Guy entertained me with his shrewd suspicions, of how the monk and the valiant knight were hatching treason together, which, as you know, sire, is a cockatrice's egg, laid by male fowls, and hatched by dragons looking at it. A very pretty allegory of a conspiracy, if we did but read fools for fowls--that by the way; but to return to my tale:--the monk at length appeared in the courtyard again, and shortly after the Lord Hugh de Monthermer, him following. Thereupon; one of those irresistible inclinations which set the legs in motion, whether man will or not, seized upon me and good Sir Guy; and drawn as if by that rock of adamant on which the Earl is fixed, we pursued, without power of resistance, the path of knight and friar. Just at the gate of the city we found our ascetic friend mounted on a mule, and holding a horse for his knightly acquaintance, on which we saw the gallant Lord spring, and after that they rode away together. This is all I have to say, sire, and what I have said is true; but far be it from me to take any accusation against a knight who can squeeze a horse to death between his two knees, or stop a charger in full course by catching hold of an iron ring, and grasping the beast with his two legs."
"What have you to answer, sir?" demanded the King, turning to Hugh.
"Simply that I saw a monk yesterday, sire," replied the young nobleman, "and that he stayed with me nearly an hour, talking much of venison, and somewhat of hunting. He may, from his language, have committed the crime of taking a fat buck when he had no right to do so; but, by my faith, that is the only treason I should suspect him of, and not one word did he utter in my presence, either about risings, rebellions, or aught else that could move your royal displeasure."
"Ha! what say you to this, Sir Guy de Margan?" asked the King. "Tell us, who is this friar? Is he a rebel, or is he not?"
"Notoriously so, my lord," replied Guy de Margan. "I found him with Lemwood and the other traitors, to whom you, sire, sent me for the purpose of negotiation; and it would seem that he had come to comfort them with promises of assistance from the North."
"But yet that does not prove," said Mortimer, "that the Lord Hugh held any treasonable converse with him. His business with that good lord might have been of a very simple kind."
Malevolent injustice becomes most dangerous when it assumes the garb of equity; and Mortimer, who knew the whole that was to come, only assumed the style of an impartial judge, that his after persecution of the young nobleman might seem dictated by a sense of justice.
"It might have been so, indeed," replied Guy de Margan, "had it but been a visit from the friar to my Lord of Monthermer; but their setting forth together would seem strange; and the secrecy observed in the monk quitting the castle first, and the knight following at a little distance, renders it more strange still. Perhaps Lord Hugh will condescend to explain why he went, and where."
"Methinks," answered Hugh, "that the honourable spies who crept after my footsteps from the castle to the town gate, might have carried their inquiries a little farther, when they would have saved the necessity of such questions here."