The Merriest Knight

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

  "It's the rogue Drecker," he said.

  "Drecker? But he's gone," the ladies protested.

  "That's it," he said. "He's gone, whole and horsed. Would they fear him now if he were dead and buried with the others? They'd not give him a thought. But now they must guard against his return."

  "But he dare not come back!" Clara cried.

  The dwarf shot an oblique glance at Mary; and as she was not watching him, but gazing thoughtfully at nothing, he risked a sneer.

  "Dare not?" he questioned, with curling lips. But he kept the curl out of his voice. "With all the outlaws of the forest at his heels? And this time it will be with fire and sword. This time he will take what he wants—and that will be what brought him here the first time, and everything else he can carry off—and hot torches and cold iron for the rest."

  "But our defenders?" she whispered. "Theyll not desert us?"

  "Six," Joseph said contemptuously. "They were enough against six—enough to slay five, anyway. But against sixty or eighty or a hundred? That will be another story."

  "Not so fast, little man," the governess interrupted. "Why not a thousand, while you are about it? But tell me first, does Drecker's army grow on trees?"

  "You can say that," the dwarf answered, with more than a hint of his old impudence. "On the ground under the trees, anyhow. Runaway serfs and all manner of masterless knaves and gypsies and thieving packmen and renegade warders and archers, and first of all, the band that has been receiving and marketing our beeves and cheeses all the while."

  "And just what have our defenders become so suddenly so busy about?" asked Damosel Mary.

  "Bringing the people closer in, with their livestock and goods and gear, and setting them to work on walls and ditches, and making men-at-arms of clodhoppers," Joseph told her, civilly enough.

  "We must get busy too!" Clara cried. "We're both good bowmen, Mary. Well teach the old men to shoot. My grandfather Cadwallader made me a little bow when I was only four years old; and when I was six, I could pick his cap clean off his head without waking him up, at ten paces. I hit him only once, and that was only a scratch; but after that he always retired to his chamber for his naps. There must be scores of old bows and arrows somewhere around here. Well look high and low; and well have new ones made, if need be. I know that one of the cooks used to be a bowyer. We'll start now. Where has Joseph gone?"

  "You let go of him, my dear," said the damosel resignedly.

  "Good riddance to him!" the dame cried. "He would only tell us where to look and then what to do and how. He will be much happier advising the King and Sir Lorn. Now to work!"

  Chapter Eight

  When Two Men Look Out of One Man's Eyes

  There was little rest in Joyous Vale that night, either within or without the manor house. Lady Clara permitted only the oldest and shakiest members of the household to retire to their couches at the customary hour. As for the old ex-bowyer Tomkyn, it was long past midnight when he was allowed to creep off to bed; and as for the dame and the damosel, they heard the false dawn saluted by sleepy roosters. And so it was without, abroad over the whole manor to the edges of the forest on every side. By sunrise, every farmstead and croft had been warned and set astir by one or another of the King's party, or by Joseph up on one of the King's ponies: and when the chatelaine, wakened from a short sleep by the hubbub without, looked out from her high window, she rubbed her eyes and looked again. For the inner court was gay with the colored pavilions which Drecker and his rogues had pitched, and left perforce, under the willows beside the river. The chivalry had moved in. The outer courtyard was not so gay, but it was far livelier. Here were tents of hide, makeshift shelters of spars and thatch, heaps of country provisions and household gear, pens of swine and poultry, excited women jabbering and gesticulating, gaffers seated on bundles of bedding, and barking dogs and shouting children dashing around.

  The home orchard and paddocks had also undergone a startling change. The latter were alive with horned cattle and sheep, all in confusion and many in violent disagreement, and herds and woolly sheep-dogs trying to restore order and keep the peace with sticks and teeth. Through the orchard greenery appeared the tops of hastily constructed stacks of last year's hay and straw, and arose the bellows, moos, and bleats of more displaced livestock. Beyond all this moved wains and wheel-less drags, horse-drawn and ox-drawn, the loaded approaching and the empty departing; and groups of rustics coming and going; and here and there a cavalier in half-armor riding this way or that.

  Dame and damosel were back at their self-appointed tasks when King Torrice presented himself. He had been in the saddle sixteen hours, with two changes of horses, and yet looked fresh as a daisy. It was only leg and footwork, or sitting on chairs, that fatigued him.

  "Lady, I crave your indulgence for the liberties I have taken with your people and property, and shall continue to take, for your own and their good—but all with due respect to your title and lordship, madam," he pronounced.

  Lady Clara dropped what she was about and jumped up and toward him, and extended both hands to him. Still regarding her gravely, he received her hands in his own, then blinked and started slightly and looked down curiously at the little hands in his big ones, at the right and at the left, then turned the right palm-upward and fairly stared at it, then the left and stared at it. "Blisters!" he exclaimed.

  "We have been making arrows, Mary and I," she answered gently and shyly. "And splicing old bows. And twisting and waxing bowstrings."

  He looked her in the eyes, then stooped over her hands again and touched his lips lightly to each of the blistered palms in turn, muttered "Gramercy, my dear!" and straightened and backed out by the way he had come in.

  Clara returned to her work, but fumblingly. She blinked to clear her vision, and tears sparkled on her cheeks.

  Mary eyed her thoughtfully.

  "A grand old man," said Mary. "Well, a grand old knight-at-arms, however—and as good a poet as any in Wales, even. But as simple and innocent as a baby, or poor Sir Gayling even, for all his questing and gallivanting; and Td liefer have him for a battling champion, in the ding-dong of rescue and defence, than for a husband or father."

  "Is that so?" cried Clara. "I don't believe it! We don't know anything of him as a father, but we can see that he is a good grandfather to poor Lorn; and I have my own opinion as to what your answer would be if he asked you to marry him."

  "Fiddlesticks, my dear! And if you contemplate becoming the Queen of Har yourself—and a crook of your finger is all that's needed—I advise you to be quick about it."

  Clara stared at her ex-governess and asked tremulously: "Why do you say that—and look so strange?"

  "Because you have no time to lose; and if I look strange, who wouldn't, after glimpsing a dead man in a living man's eyes?"

  "What d'ye mean by that? Speak out, or I´ll shake you!"

  "Calm yourself, child. I mean what I say. I saw him dead—that poor old king—just as surely as I foresaw your own grandmother dead while she was still walking and laughing, and just as surely as my grandsire True Thomas foresaw and foretold the death of King David at his marriage feast and was whipped for the telling. It is when you see two pairs of eyes glimmering in the eyeholes of the one head— and one pair of those eyes are cold and blind."

  Lady Clara cried out, "To the devil with your sooth-saying!" and clapped her hands to her face; and her tears burned and stung the abraded palms. Mary sighed, brushed a furtive hand over her own still face, and took up her work again.

  * * *

  At noon, Lady Clara told the major-domo to send Joseph to her. That important person received the command in silence, and with a weary shake of the head. He was thinking of the easy and peaceful years before poor dear Sir Gayling's mad expedition into Wales. Those had been the times. There had been no big Welsh damosel then to drive honest men around every day with besoms and mops, in pursuit of honest dirt and dust and cobwebs; and no giddy young dame to demand gleaming crystal
and shining plate, and tarts and jellies and custards for every meal till the cooks and scullions were fit to tear out their beards. And now it was worse. Now it was the very devil. Sweeping and scrubbing, and polishing and burnishing and cooking, had been hard enough on the poor fellows, but ferreting out ancient war-gear and repairing it, grinding edges onto rusty swords and axes, splicing old bows and whittling new bows and arrows, and being driven and drilled by Tomkyn the ex-bowyer, was harder.

  "The whole world be turned upside-down," grumbled the major-domo; and instead of going on the lady's errand, he went in search of some hole or corner in which he might evade Tomkyn's officious attentions for a little while. Imagine a major-domo hiding from a cook! Such a thing could never have been in the days of Sir Gayling. And so, quite naturally, the dwarf failed to answer his mistress' summons; but Squire Gervis presented himself some three hours later, and quite of his own volition. He was dusty, but in high spirits. When he took Dame Clara's proffered hand, he turned it over tenderly, gazed at it adoringly and said that he had heard about it from the King.

  "How fares the dear King?" she asked softly.

  "That old wonder-boy is as lively as a grig," he replied enthusiastically. "And as merry too. And even Sir Lorn is companionable. That's the way it always is with those two. The prospect of a fight, and never mind the odds against them, acts like mothers' milk—if you'll forgive the expression—on those mad questers."

  "Mad?" she whispered; and Damosel Mary looked up from her work with glue and feathers on a clothyard shaft and said, in the voice of a governess: "It's a very wise man, or a fool, who dares cry 'Mad!' at his fellows."

  Unabashed, Gervis replied with unabated good humor:

  "A fool, then! And in my folly I repeat that our noble friends are mad. Who but a madman would spend a hundred years and more—some say two hundred—in pursuit of the very thing from which he turns and flees whenever he catches up with it?"

  "What thing is that?" murmured Clara.

  "He calls it Beauty," he laughed.

  "Nay, he calls it the Soul of Beauty," she murmured. He shrugged a shoulder delicately and winked politely. "And what have you to say of Sir Lorn's madness?" she asked gently.

  "Ill say that is different," he answered, with a touch of gravity. "Who wouldn't be mad, after a year in Fairyland with the Maid of Tintagel, or Helen of Troy, or maybe it was Queen Mab herself? But he is mad, our poor Lorn; and it's struck deep, else he would forget her now, whoever she was."

  He gazed adoringly into her eyes, and she smiled back very kindly, and a little sadly and with just a flicker of pity.

  "It is sometimes difficult to distinguish madness from foolishness," said Damosel Mary.

  He turned to her and shook a playful finger, then turned back to Clara.

  "Ill tear myself away now, back to my duty, before one of those mad questers appears and drags me away inglori-ously by the scruff of the neck—for my folly."

  And he was gone as lightly as he had come.

  Chapter Nine

  The Invading Horde

  Dame Clara told the dwarf Joseph to take post on the tower and keep watch on the edges of the forest from dawn till dark: but he excused himself on the plea that he could not be spared from his duties as galloping aide-de-camp to King Torrice. This was on the night of the second day after the King's and Gervis' visits. For two days and a night now the lady had been neglected by her champions, save for the verbal message from Torrice, by Joseph, to the effect that she had nothing graver to worry about now than the blisters on her pretty hands, and that he would compose another song to her as soon as the dastard Drecker reappeared and was finally disposed of.

  "He sounds very sure," she said to the messenger.

  "And with reason," he replied condescendingly. "We are ready and waiting for Master Drecker and his riffraff. Every stratagem of defense and attack is planned; and we have made more than a score of men-at-arms, all horsed and harnessed and armed, out of your clodhoppers of yesterday."

  So Joseph escaped back to his active military duties; and at the first pale gleam of the next dawn, Lady Clara herself took post on the watchtower, leaving the command and business of the household archery to Damosel Mary and the bowyer Tomkyn.

  She peered down at a shadowy world, but not a sleeping one. A few dark figures moved to and fro about the inner court, and more in the outer court, and yet more in the paddocks beyond and about the edges of the home orchard; and her heart swelled with gentle pride and sweet gratitude and perhaps with even tenderer emotions at the thought that she was the inspiration and cause of this vigilance and devotion. She wept a little in happy sadness, but soon dried her eyes on the silken lining of one of the hanging sleeves of her green gown. As the clear light increased, rising and flooding, she saw more and more, and farther and farther. Thin feathers of smoke uncurled above the leafy roof of the orchard, the busy human figures increased in number and formless bulks of darkness took shape. Now she saw the abatis of new-felled forest trees which enforced and topped the old wall of tumbled field-stone around the home farm, and four massy clumps of leafy timber far out toward the four nearest screens of the surrounding forest, and at a point where nothing taller than hay had grown previously.

  By now she could see to the forest walls all around, beyond the farthest meadows and cornlands and deserted steadings. The forested edges to the westward, struck full by the level rays, showed leafy boughs and brown boles like a picture on tapestry, but to the eastward they were still gloomed with their own shadows. ... It was from the shadows that the first running figure appeared. It was of a tall man in leather, with a strung bow in his left hand. He checked for a backward look, then ran again. A horn brayed in the shadows and was answered from the right, and then from the left, as if by echoes. A second man in leather appeared, and three more a moment later, all running like partridges from the shadow of a stooping hawk. A leather cap lifted and fell to earth, leaving the shaggy hair of that runner streaming in the wind of his flight. The watcher on the tower could make nothing of that: but after another had stumbled and run on with bowed head and hunched shoulders and in zigzagging jumps, and yet another had fallen flat and then crawled like a snake, she made out little glints and gleams in the sunshine, and knew them for flying arrows.

  Again a horn brayed, but louder and nearer this time. Now a horseman appeared as if from nowhere, galloping toward the screen of shadow from which the men in leather were fleeing, gesticulating, and screaming. Four of the runners turned and set arrows to their bowstrings and shot, hard and fast, into the green gloom.

  The rider drove through them, wheeled, dismounted, and laid hold of the crawler with both hands. The wounded man rose to his knees, to his feet, and sagged across the horse. It was a small horse, but hardy; and so the rescue was made, with the pony running like a dog, the wounded forester draped across like a half-filled sack and the rescuer running beside and holding him in place. He was a small rescuer. Boys of nine years have been taller.

  "Joseph!" cried the lady on the tower. "'Tis none other, by my halidom! Run, Joseph, run!"

  All the visible actors in that flurry of action disappeared among the hedges and walls, and under the thatched roofs, of a steading. Now, for a long minute, nothing moved in Lady Clara's wide field of vision—though she looked in every direction—save a few feathers of smoke and wings of birds and ever-trembling leaves of tall poplars. No more arrows leaped from shadow to shine. Nothing moved on the ground. The horns were silent now, but cocks crowed in the home orchard. She gazed abroad and down in growing and fearful wonder, peering for some sign of awareness of danger, listening for a sudden commotion and shouting of armed men; but the great house below her, and the bright landscape all about her, were as still and quiet as if they lay under a spell. Was some wicked magic at work here, to her undoing? What of her champions?

  But no, she had already seen little Joseph and five scouts in action; and she refused to believe that any spell save death itself could withhold the
hands of that old king and the squires from her defense. Of Lorn she was not so sure. Even though she had made him tremble with a touch of her hand on his sword-belt, she did not blink the fact of his old bewitchment and sojourn in Fairyland. What were her frail enchantments, though exercised with all her heart, against those of ageless sorcery? For that dear knight—for succor from those dear hands—she could but hope and pray.

  Now from the lightening rim of gloom from which the five vanished foresters had emerged stirred again, and the base of that green obscurity was alive suddenly with a score of men in leather and wool, with strung bows in their hands. They did not dash forward, but extended to right and left and advanced cautiously, setting arrows to strings. As many more invaders now emerged and formed a second line. A few of these were bowmen too, but most of them carried boar-spears, short axes, or halberds. Close behind these came a fellow with a burning torch and two with a black kettle slung from a pole between them. The torch smoked blackly and flamed palely in the sunshine, and a thin haze of heat quivered above the kettle.

  "The rogues! They mean to set us afire!" cried Clara.

  Again she looked all around, and again in vain for any sign of a defender. The skirmishers continued to advance, and with more assurance. A big knight in full armor, on a black horse to match, came into view in rear of the two score skirmishers, riding at a foot-pace. He signaled with a hand—its mail flashed in the sunlight—and shouted a command, whereupon the fellows in front drew together on the run and headed straight for the steading into which Joseph and the five foresters had disappeared. The knight followed them, but neither fast nor far, and soon drew rein and sat with uneasy shiftings and turnings, as if he too (like the watcher on the tower) was puzzled by the stillness. The two score raiders halted and sent a flight of arrows into the farmstead, and then a second flight, and three fire-arrows flaming like comets: but no shaft came from hedge or wall in retaliation. They loosed a dozen fire-arrows, one of which struck a thatched roof, stuck there, and blossomed like a great poppy. And still the spell was unbroken.