Through lowered lashes the boy stole him a glance, half mischievous, half coaxing. “How safe, lord?” he murmured.
But the Etheling only laughed at him, as he drew up his long riding-boots and readjusted his belt. “Safe enough so that I forgive you some dozen floggings a day, you imp; and choose you for my comrade when I should be profiting by the companionship of your betters. Waste no more golden moments on whims, youngling, but go bid them fetch the horses, and we will have another day of blithe wandering.”
Blithe they were, in truth, as they cantered through shaded lanes and daisied meadows, nothing too small to be of interest or too slight to give them pleasure. An orchard of pears, whose ripening they were watching with eager mouths, a group of colts almost ready for the saddle,—for the young master the fascination of ownership gave them all a value; while another fascination made his companion hang on his least word, respond to his lightest mood.
By grassy commons and rolling meadows sweet with clustering haycocks, they came at last to the crest of the hill that guarded the eastern end of the dale. The whole round sweep of the horizon lay about them in an unbroken chain of ripening vineyards and rich timber-land, of grain-fields and laden orchards; not one spot that did not make glorious pledges to the harvest time. Drinking its fairness with his eyes, the lord of the manor sighed in full content. “When I see how fine a thing it is to cause wealth to be where before was nothing, I cannot understand how I once thought to find my pleasure only in destroying,” he said. “Next month, when the barley beer is brewed, we will have a harvest feast plentiful enough to flesh even your bones, you bodkin!”
The Danish page laughed as he dodged the plaguing wand. “It is true that you owe something to my race, lord. He had great good sense, the Wide-Fathomer, to stretch his strips of oxhide around this dale and turn it into an odal.”
“Nay now, it was Alfred who had sense to take it away from him,” the Etheling teased.
But the boy shook back his long tresses in airy defiance. “Then will Canute be foremost in wisdom, for soon he will get it back, together with all England. Remember who got the victory last week at Brentford, lord.”
In the midst of his exulting, a cloud came over the young Englishman’s smile. “I would I knew the truth concerning that,” he said slowly. “The man who passes to-day says one thing; whoso comes to-morrow tells another story. Yet since Canute is once more free to beset London—” He did not finish, and for a while it appeared as though he did not see the sunlit fields his eyes were resting on.
But suddenly the boy broke in upon him with a burst of stifled laughter. “Look, lord! In yonder field, behind the third haycock!”
The moment that he had complied, laughter banished the Etheling’s meditations. Cozily ensconced in the soft side of a haycock was Father Ingulph, a couple of jovial harvesters sprawled beside him, a fat skin of ale in his hands on its way to his mouth. As the pair on the hilltop looked down, one of the trio began to bellow out a song that bore no resemblance whatever to a hymn. Keeping under cover of the bushes, the eavesdroppers laughed with malicious enjoyment.