And it came.
'Here! here! This way, my lads, this way!' cried the familiar voice of the faithful jester. 'Look you, galliards, there is my famous cap and cape! Saints be praised! He wears them still. The Lord grant there is a living skull in the cap. I shrewdly thought I heard him squeak!'
'Ay, Grillonne, thou didst, sure enough!' cried the earl; and the revulsion of feeling from despair to hope was so great that he fainted again.
When he revived, his head was in Grillonne's arms, and the intolerable weight of the slain who had fallen above him was removed from his limbs, which, however, were so numbed that he could not move them. Half-a-dozen stout fellows, archers, slingers, and spearmen, were bustling about him, dimly visible by the light of a horn lantern which one of them carried.
Grillonne, seeing his eyes open, instantly held a flask to his lips, and when the draught had helped his revival, nodded sagely.
''Tis well to be taken for a fool sometimes, nuncle.' he remarked, twitching his tinkling cap from the earl's head. 'Thy fine helmet has been carried off in triumph to the enemy's camp on the corse of poor Sir Guy de Landerneau, whom I bedecked with it; seeing that, as they had already killed him as dead as a Norwich red herring, they could do him no further hurt. 'Twill have given us time even if they discover the cheat, as most like they will, for so many of them are full well acquainted with thy noble hawk nose.'
'Ah, Grillonne ready-wit,' said the earl, 'St. Nicholas reward thee! That prince of hypocrisy, Lanfranc, may say that jesters have no hope, and are doomed without fail to the worm that dieth not and the fire that knows no quenching![ [5] But I tell thee, Grillonne, he in hell shall pray to thee in heaven as Dives to Lazarus!' and the groaning noble kissed the hand that lay upon his breast, albeit the member belonged to one of that despised class, for death is a greater leveller than any democrat or republican of them all, and Ralph de Guader had held long converse with him.
Grillonne raised the hand which had been so honoured to his own lips and added some hearty smacks to the aristocratic salute it had received.
'Nay, my dear lord,' he said in a rather husky voice, 'I would fain lay that hand up in lavender and take it to heaven with me when I die, since thou thinkest I have hope to get there. But alack! we have rough work before us to prevent thee from getting thither before thy palace is prepared for thee. Thou art not saved yet by a very long chalk. If St. Nicholas is half so generous as thou deemest, he will give me my reward at once, like a free-handed gentleman, in the shape of success to the safe ending of my undertaking; nor must we spend further time in palaver.'
He beckoned to the men who were with him, and four of them came forward with a litter roughly woven of osiers, of which a plentiful supply was near at hand. Grillonne and another lifted the earl into it, and they set off at a rapid pace, the jester guiding them along the smoothest path; and watching over his charge with tender care.