In the midst of his exulting, a cloud came over the young Englishman’s smile. “I would I knew the truth concerning that,” he said slowly. “The man who passes to-day says one thing; whoso comes to-morrow tells another story. Yet since Canute is once more free to beset London—” He did not finish, and for a while it appeared as though he did not see the sunlit fields his eyes were resting on.
But suddenly the boy broke in upon him with a burst of stifled laughter. “Look, lord! In yonder field, behind the third haycock!”
The moment that he had complied, laughter banished the Etheling’s meditations. Cozily ensconced in the soft side of a haycock was Father Ingulph, a couple of jovial harvesters sprawled beside him, a fat skin of ale in his hands on its way to his mouth. As the pair on the hilltop looked down, one of the trio began to bellow out a song that bore no resemblance whatever to a hymn. Keeping under cover of the bushes, the eavesdroppers laughed with malicious enjoyment.
“But I will make him squirm for that!” the Etheling vowed. “I will tell him that your paganism has made spells over me so that I cannot tell a holy relique from an ale-skin; and a bedridden woman looks to me like two strapping yeomen. I will, I swear it!”
“And I shall be able to hold it against him as a shield, the next time he is desirous to fret me about taking a new belief,” the boy rejoiced.
But presently Sebert’s remarks began to take a new tone. “They have the appearance of relishing what they have in that skin,” he observed first. And then, “I should not mind putting my own teeth into that bread-and-cheese.” And at last, “By Saint Swithin, lad, I think they have more sense than we, that linger a half-hour’s ride from food with a noonday sun standing in the sky! It is borne in upon me that I am starving.”
Backing his horse out of the brush, he was putting him about in great haste, when the boy leaped in his stirrups and clapped his hands.
“Lord, we need not be a half-hour from food! Yonder, across the stubble, is a farmhouse. If you would consent that I might use your name, then would I ride thither and get their best, and serve it to you here in the elves’ own feast-hall.”
The answer was a slap on the green shoulders that nearly tumbled their owner from the saddle. “Now, I was right to call you elf, for you have more than human cleverness!” the Etheling cried gayly. “Do so, by all means, dear lad; and I promise in return that I will tell every puffed-up dolt at home that you are the blithest comrade who ever fitted himself to man’s moods. There, if that contents you, give wings to your heels!”