“Strange sport, my dear.”
“Now you must not tell a soul, on your honour.”
“Not a living soul, on my honour.”
Igraine let her eyes flit a laughing look up at him.
“Why then, Master Eudol,” she said, “if you will order one of your men to walk, I will get up and ride along with you for a league or two. There is trust for you.”
Eudol appeared entranced with the suggestion. He ordered one of his fellows to dismount, to spread a cloak over the saddle, to shorten a stirrup leather and give Igraine his knee. The girl was soon mounted, seated side fashion with one sandalled foot in the stirrup and one hand on the pommel to steady her. She flanked Eudol’s white mule, and they rode on side by side at a level tramp, with the henchmen some twenty paces in the rear.
Eudol soon waxed fatherly, as was his custom. He twitted Igraine on the temerity of her venture with the senile and pedantic jocosity of an old man. He said things that would have been impertinent on the tongue of a youngster, and exerted to the full that eccentric fad of age, the supposition that youth needs pleasant patronage and nothing more. Old men, holding young folk to be fools, reserve to their rusty brains the privilege of seeming wise. They are content to straddle the crawling, leather-jointed circumspection that they call knowledge. The bird flutters to his mate, sings, soars, and is taken before night by the fowler. The snail creeps his rheumy round covered with the slime and slobber of prudence, to rot in the end under a tree-stump, unless some good throstle cracks him prematurely on a stone. Eudol had something of the snail about him, but he assayed none the less to ape the soaring of youth with a very ragged pair of wings. That morning he flew with a senile eagerness for Igraine’s favour, and thought himself a match for any young man in the matter of light chivalry.
“Come now, my dear,” he said, “let us have a good look at you.”
“Well, sir?”
“My word, you make a gorgeous nun. Who ever saw such eyes under a hood before! My dear, you are quite foolhardy to go pilgrimaging alone; men are such rogues, and you have such a pretty face.”