“Not.”
“No, for the youth in me will not serve.”
Her face changed suddenly like a fickle sky, and she began to mock him as he stood before her, thrusting her tongue out and beating her hands. To Tristan she seemed like some sly elf changed from a child to an evil imp, as he turned and left her by the wall with a grim frown on his ugly face.
CHAPTER XVII
When Tristan returned to the Bishop’s palace, he found two horses standing saddled and bridled in the inner court. One of them was Tristan’s, a raw-boned roan with one white foot and a white muzzle. A man-at-arms, half asleep on a bench at the bottom of the guard-room stair, scrambled up when he saw Tristan, and opened a great mouth with the gusto of a news-teller.
“Hallo, laggard! Ogier has been calling for you this hour or more, blaspheming you till the stones blushed. Above with you, if you would hear good downright cursing.”
Tristan passed through the guard-room, found Ogier striding to and fro in his closet, armed for riding, the froth from a tankard still on his beard. He unbosomed himself when Tristan entered, like a volcano to whom periodic outbursts were the natural vent of much accumulated spleen. Tristan let the giant’s cursing pass over him like water. He gained time by sitting down before Ogier’s table and finishing the remnants of that gentleman’s dinner.
“Feed away, my son,” said the giant, with his hand on the tankard; “you can keep your mouth shut, I guess, when it is a matter of discretion. You and I ride out with Jocelyn.”
“Am I not an image that beholds and sees not?” said Tristan from the table.
“Ha, lad, you will stand in need of blindness to-night. The Bishop will amuse himself. And to be honest, he can out-devil all the Gadarene swine when the fit is on him.”