Again and again it was repeated. Horses neighed, and eyes were turned to other eyes in silent question. The lips of Avice turned pale, the cheeks of Idonea flushed crimson as her own roses, her heart beat quick as that of her gentler sister seemed to stop its beating.
"What can it bode?" rose to the lips of both in different intonations.
"No evil, Avice, rest assured," answered Sir Gilbert, cheerily, "and if there were, am I not here to guard you with my life?" Yet as he spoke he bethought him that a dagger was but a sorry trust to warrant such high words, and longed for his good sword.
The cavalcade had come to a standstill, and the horses pawed the ground impatiently, the hot-blooded earl chafing almost as impatiently as his steed.
"Marry!" cried he, "for what are we waiting here, like a brood of frightened chicks? Let us on and meet the messenger, whatever be his tidings." And forward he went, with the bold prior by his side, and the whole hawking party after him—some brave, all curious.
Two minutes more, and a mounted herald came in sight, guarded by four pursuivants; their horses' limbs and trappings wet, as if they had forded the river, then lowered by long draughts of the thirsty sun.
"Weareth he not the Earl of Leicester's badge and cognisance?" asked the earl. "My old eyes are hardly to be trusted."
"Aye, my lord, and he spurs as if in haste," replied the prior.
In haste, indeed! The herald bore a double message from his noble lord, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester; first—without the herald's long preamble—as the mouthpiece of their sovereign lord, King Henry, to summon his loyal barons and knights to assemble in a parliament at Oxford on the eleventh of that same month of June; and secondly from Simon de Montfort's self, to bid those same barons and knights come to the Oxford parliament armed, and with armed attendants, in order, if needful, to wrest from the king the ratification of the great charter they had obtained from his weak predecessor by like means at Runnymede.
They were moreover bidden to meet for conference in Leicester the following day. Desiring first to learn how many of the county knights were of the Bellamont company, so as to spare him needless journeying, the herald then set spurs to his steed, and was off with his followers in all haste to Derby, urgency serving as his excuse for declining the proffered hospitality of the good earl.