"But you have seen him? What is he like?"
"If my lord's slave"—Nasr was always respectful—"may speak,—the Spanish knight is a very noble cavalier. I saw him only once, yet my eye tells if a man has the port of a good swordsman and rider. Assuredly this one has, and his eyes are as keen and quick as a shooting star."
"Yet he keeps himself very retired about the country house?"
"True, Cid, yet this, they say, is because he is an exile in Sicily, and even here has fears for his life; so he remains quiet."
"Foh!" grunted Richard, "I am weary of quiet men and a quiet life. I will go back to Palermo, and leave my father to eat his dinners and doze over his barony. I have the old grudge with De Valmont to settle, and some high words with Iftikhar, captain of the Saracen guards, will breed into a very pretty quarrel if I am bent on using them. Better ten broils than this sleepy hawking and feasting!"
So they crossed the drawbridge, entered the outer walls of the bailey, with its squalid outbuildings, weather-beaten stables, the gray, bare donjon looming up above; and entering a tiny chapel, Richard and Herbert fell on their knees, while a priest—none other than Sebastian, who had stood at Hildebrand's side—chanted through the "Gloria" and "Preface" But when it came time for the sermon, the baron's two bears, caged in the bailey, drowned the pious prosings with an unholy roar as they fell on one another; and the good cleric cried, "Amen!" that all might run and drag them asunder.
There by the cage Richard greeted his father,—a mighty man even in his old age, though his face was hacked and scarred, and showed little of the handsome young cavalier who had stolen the heart of every maid in Rouen. But in his blue Norman eyes still burned the genial fire; his tread was heavy as a charger's, his great frame straight as a plummet; a stroke of his fist could fell a horse, and his flail-like sword was a rush in his fingers. He was smooth-shaven; round his neck strayed a few white locks, all his crown worn bare by the long rubbing of his helmet. One could have learned his rank by the ermine lining on his under-mantle, by the gold plates on his sword belt and samite scabbard; but in a "villain's" dress he would have been known as one of those lordly cavaliers who had carried the Norman name and fame from the Scottish Marches to Thessaly.
Father and son embraced almost in bear-fashion, each with a crushing hug. Then Richard must needs kiss his mother, the fair Lady Margaret of Auvergne, sweet and stately in her embroidered bleaunt, with golden circlet on her thick gray-gold hair; after her, Eleanor, a small maiden of sixteen, prim, demure, and very like her mother, with two golden braids that fell before her shoulders almost to her knees; and lastly, Stephen, a slight, dark lad, with a dreamy, contemplative face and an eye for books in place of arrow-heads, whom the family placed great hopes on: should he not be bishop, nay Pope, some bright day, if the saints favored?
"Hola, Richard!" cried the Baron, with a spade-like paw on his son's shoulder. "So you made test of the white falcon; does she take quarry?"
"A crane large enough to hold a dog at bay!"