Seeming to be mollified by this, Gyll sat down again on the grass, while the new softness of her expression returned. “Prithee, Roger, make up your mind on that which troubles it, for if again I start, I go, and there’s the end.”
He gazed at her for a moment with solemn eyes, and now she smiled in an almost womanly way instead of laughing wantonly. “Tell me, Gyll, dost really—dost truly?—” but he broke off for want of a word.
“Truly what?” she asked, in a low voice.
His chin sank into its underfolds again, and he twirled a pair of globular thumbs tentatively. “Dost truly have that feeling for me which the poet would call ‘love’?”
The question touched her sense of the ludicrous keenly, yet his astonishing earnestness underlying it must have reached a deeper sense, for still she only smiled instead of laughing, and answered, “Yes.”
At this his rotund face grew brighter. “Come, then, to the Oxford preacher, Gyll, before we change our minds;” and, nothing loath, she rose quietly.
“Change our minds, Roger! I, for one, shall ne’er do that.”
“Nay,” he said, “nay, I pray you, do not change. Oh, that would be dire misfortune;” whereon, picking up the end of King Lud’s chain, which dangled from the tree, he tugged thereat until the beast, with a good-humored growl, descended. For an instant the sight of her animal friend brought the old, careless look to Gyll’s face—there was something so drolly suggestive of Roger in the bear’s bandy legs and awkward gait. A fit of devil-may-care recklessness seized her. The strain of even a moment’s seriousness on such a nature being unendurable, breaks in the end, and, as when a supporting rope is severed without warning the one who has been held thereby falls suddenly, so the snapping of a moral stay leaves one sprawling in abandonment.
Gyll went to the extreme of flippancy. “Come,” she said. “Look at King Lud. Let him give us his blessing. Let him tie the knot with his great paws upon our heads. I much mislike real parsons; we will have none o’ them. I’ll bind myself to no man. ‘Please one, please all,’ as the song hath it—‘please one, please all.’” So saying, she was on the point of profaning her troth by kneeling, with a laugh, before the bear, when a glance at Prat restrained her. The soldier had started back with an oath. His eyes, enraged as she had never seen them, were lowering, and his breath came quickly. With one hand he ground the bear’s chain until its links grated as if they must break in the tight-clinched fist, while with the other he sought his hip, and the fat palm ignored his flute and Uppowac pipe to cool itself on the metal of his sword.