“It may be so, Spy,” answered the Saracen, looking at him with sombre, contemptuous eyes. “It may be that your life will pay the price.”
Wulf was dreaming, dreaming that he stood on his head upon a wooden plank, as once he had seen a juggler do, which turned round one way while he turned round the other, till at length some one shouted at him, and he tumbled off the board and hurt himself. Then he awoke to hear a voice shouting surely enough—the voice of Matthew, the chaplain of Steeple Church.
“Awake!” said the voice. “In God’s name, I conjure you, awake!”
“What is it?” he said, lifting his head sleepily, and becoming conscious of a dull pain across his forehead.
“It is that death and the devil have been here, Sir Wulf.”
“Well, they are often near together. But I thirst. Give me water.”
A serving-woman, pallid, dishevelled, heavy-eyed, who was stumbling to and fro, lighting torches and tapers, for it was still dark, brought it to him in a leathern jack, from which he drank deeply.
“That is better,” he said. Then his eye fell upon the bloody sword set point downwards in the wood of the table before him, and he exclaimed, “Mother of God! what is that? My uncle’s silver-hilted sword, red with blood, and Rosamund’s gold chain upon the hilt! Priest, where is the lady Rosamund?”
“Gone,” answered the chaplain in a voice that sounded like a groan. “The women woke and found her gone, and Sir Andrew lies dead or dying in the solar—but now I have shriven him—and oh! we have all been drugged. Look at them!” and he waved his hand towards the recumbent forms. “I say that the devil has been here.”
Wulf sprang to his feet with an oath.