"Yet the password," insisted the other gently. "Rupert of the Rhine. It has a pleasant sound. They say he is near York's gates, and it was we who brought him."
The Irishman, thinking him mad or drunk, or both, and irritated beyond bearing by his smooth, oily speech, reached forward and knocked his hat half across the room.
"Oh, by the saints!" he roared; "here's the rogue who came in last spring, pretty much in the clothes he was born in, after swimming Ouse River—the jolly rogue who swore he'd find Rupert for us."
"At your service, gentlemen—as dry as I was wet when we last encountered. Will none of you fill me a brimmer?"
Lord Newcastle, if something raw in experience of warfare and its tactics, was a great-hearted man of his world, with a lively humour and a sportsman's relish for adventure. He filled the brimmer himself, and watched Michael drain half of it at one thirsty, pleasant gulp. "Now for your news," he said.
"Why, my lord, I pledged the Metcalf honour that we'd bring Rupert to you, and he lies no further off than Knaresborough."
"Good," laughed the Irishman. "I said you could trust a man who swore by the sword he happened not to be carrying at the moment."
"And your friend?" asked Newcastle, catching sight of Christopher, as he stood moving restlessly from foot to foot.
"Oh, just my brother—the dwarf of our company. Little, but full of meat, as our Yoredale farmers say when they bring small eggs to market. To be precise, Kit here is worth three of me. They call him the White Knight in Oxford."
So Kit in his turn drank the heady wine of praise; and then Michael, with swift return to the prose of everyday, told all he knew of Rupert's movements, all that he had learned of the famine and dissension outside the city gates.