'Tush! Sir Aimand had been at the banquet save for the need of keeping ward on the camp,' answered Sir Alain. 'I would have the pleasure of seeing his delight!' he added, with a coarse laugh, and half forced the Norman to enter the tent with him, when, pouring out a goblet of Gascon, he challenged Sir Aimand to pledge the enterprise.
'Nay! First I must know what it is,' said the Norman.
'To unseat that upstart and usurper, William the Bastard, from his ill-gotten seat on the throne of England, and to put a better man in his place,' answered Sir Alain in a hectoring tone; 'and to win for ourselves such good shares of the lands as is due to our valorous lances.'
Sir Aimand started back, looking fixedly at the Breton, and his hand instinctively sought his sword-hilt; but in a moment he regained his composure.
'Methinks the earl's somewhat ponderous Saxon hospitality has turned thy hot brains a bit, Sir Alain,' he said contemptuously. 'Neither thou nor I are likely to drink that pledge!'
Sir Alain smiled at him with an evil smile, but he kept his temper. 'St. Nicholas! But every man here has drunk it this evening, and every man who sat at Ralph de Guader's marriage board; and, sooth to say, if thou hadst been present to hear the list of that same William's crimes that were brought up against him, methinks so virtuous a knight as thyself had drunk it too, with a rider to vow that such vermin were best exterminated from the earth.'
'It is true, De Sourdeval! All drank the pledge,—Normans, Bretons, and Saxons,' chorused the knights around. 'We are under oath to pull William from the throne and set up Waltheof in his stead.'
'It cannot be!' cried Sir Aimand, overwhelmed. 'It is treachery! The earl cannot be guilty of such baseness!'
'And who art thou to stigmatise as baseness what so many men as good as thee hold fit and good?' chorused the Bretons.
'By the rood! ye are scarcely fair to the lad,' said one somewhat more sober than his companions. 'The communication is sudden, to say the least. Neither did he hear the eloquent catalogue of William's faults which wrought our blood to the boiling point.'