She spoke in an enticing and babyish way that diverted me, and warmed me too, when I thought she had so much kindliness for me.
So I said, 'It is monstrously well done of you thus to divert me.'
'Hoots,' she said, 'see what else I have brought you.'
And with that she took from her pocket all the apparatus of cleaning my pieces and sword, besides the links and buckles of Dom Nicholas's harness and equipment, the sight of which put me in a fever to see him again. Never was anything kindlier done. Also, she brought me from her father's scanty library such books as she thought I might care to read; though, indeed, I read but little, never having been greatly given to lear—save, as it might be, books of songs, troll-catches, wits' recreations and such like.
But amongst others she brought me a French manual of fence, which gave me infinite pleasure. For with her help I could spell out the instructions, and the plates of positions I was fain to imitate with my two rapiers, till I had hacked and scarred all the four posts of the bed most grievously. And Mistress Allison declared that it was not safe for anyone to come within the outer door.
But one day my bed-fast practice-at-arms stood mine hostess in good stead, for which afterwards she gave me full thankfulness. It chanced on a certain noontide of heat that all were at the hayfield. Even Kate and Nell had gone to toss the hay, which is a pleasant thing to do in good company, but, i' faith, ill enough to think on as I lay tossing my weary body, and cursing the luck that tied me here in a dull room—vexed with heat, the weight of bedclothing, and the broad buzzing flies which would light on the corner of one's nose, each time that sleep was on the verge of flapping down silently with his black wings to bring a welcome shortening of the weary hours. Mistress Allison stole about the kitchen on bare, broad feet, flapping and slapping the flags with them as she carried her cakes to the girdle plate, or swung it from the cleek above the clear baking fire of brown peats. She thought me asleep, for I had cleaned all my arms till I could see myself sitting up in bed, with my pale face and towsed haystack of a head, in every square inch of them.
Kate had brought me that day a book called The Whole Duty of Pilgrims, but finding it full of religious reflections and not tales of the Crusaders as I had hoped, I laid it aside for the Sabbath day, as being more reverent and fitting.
All at once the outer door of the Grieve's house was thrown back on its hinges, and a great sturdy caird entered—mayhap an Egyptian sorner, or bold robber, such as were vexing the realm at the time, or perhaps only a common muddy rascal of the road.
'Mistress, I bid you good-day,' he said. 'I am hungry and would have meat!'
Plain and quite short he said it—even as I have written it down.