Slipping to the bedside with stealthy step, he laid a fat little Banbury cheese and some brown sweet cakes beside Nick’s pillow; then came out hurriedly and barred the door.
The fire in the great hall had gone out, and the room was growing cold. The table stood by the chimney-side, where supper had been laid, Carew brought a napkin from the linen-chest, and spread it upon the board. Then he went to the server’s screen and looked behind it, and tried the latches of the doors; and having thus made sure that all was safe, came back to the table again, and setting the rush-light there, turned the contents of his purse into the napkin.
There were both gold and silver. The silver he put back into the purse again; the gold he counted carefully; and as he counted, laying the pieces one by one in little heaps upon the cloth, he muttered under his breath, like a small boy adding up his sums in school, saying over and over again, “One for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew. One for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew”; and told the coins off in keeping with the count, so that the last pile was as large as both the others put together. Then slowly ending, “None for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew,” he laid the last three nobles with the rest.
Then he arose and stood a moment listening to the silence in the house. An old he rat that was gnawing a rind on the hearth looked up, and ran a little nearer to his hole. “Tsst! come back,” said Carew, “I’m no cat!” and from the sliding panel in the wall took out a buckskin bag tied like a meal-sack with a string.
As he slipped the knot the throat of the bag sagged down, and a gold piece jangled on the floor. Carew started as if all his nerves had leaped within him at the unexpected sound, and closed the panel like a flash. Then, setting his foot upon the fallen coin, he stopped its spinning, and with one hand on his poniard, peering right and left, blew the candle out.
A little while he stood and listened in the dark; a little while his feet went to and fro in the darkness. The wind cried in the chimney. Now and then the casements shivered. The timbers in the wall creaked with the cold, and the boards in the stairway cracked. Then the old he rat came back to his rind, and his mate came out of the crack in the wall, working her whiskers hungrily and snuffing the smell of the candle-drip; for there was no sound, and the coast of rat-land was clear.
CHAPTER XXX
AT THE FALCON INN
And then there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerald.
So says that wonder-ballad of the sea.