CHAPTER XXI
THE RETURN FROM THE BASTILE.
HE stepped down easily and lightly among the sheep. They rose without surprise or disorder, still with strict attention to business continuing to munch at the grass they had plucked as they lay, for all the world as if a famous adventure-seeking general had been only the harmless but boresome shepherd who came to drive them out to pastures new. For all the surprise they showed they might have been accustomed from their fleeciest infancy to small, dirty, scratched, bruised, infinitely tattered imps of imperial descent arriving suddenly out of unexplored secret passages in ancient fortresses.
The great commander's first instinct was to rush for home and so make sure that Cook Mary the Second had done enough kidneys for breakfast. His second idea, and one more worthy of his military reputation, was carefully to conceal the entrance to the doorway, by which he had emerged from the passage he had so wonderfully discovered. No one knew how soon the knowledge might prove useful to him. As a matter of attack and defence the underground passage was certainly not to be neglected.
Then Hugh John drove the sheep before him out of the fallen tower. As he did so one of them coughed, stretching its neck and holding its head near the ground. He now knew the origin of the sound which had—no, not frightened him (of course not!), but slightly surprised him the evening before.
And, lo! there, immediately in front of him as he emerged, was the Edam Water, sliding and rippling on under its willows, the slim, silvery-grey leaves showing their white under-sides just as usual. There, across the river, were the cattle, standing already knee-deep in the shallows, their tails nervy and switchy on the alert for the morning's crop of flies. There was Mike going to drive them in to be milked. Yonder in the far distance was a black speck which must be Peter polishing straps and buckles hung on a pin by the stable door.
"Horrid beasts every one of them!" said Hugh John indignantly to himself, "going on all as comfortable as you please, just as if I had not been pining in a dungeon cell for years and years."