"Not yet. Take your hand from that pillion and hold it up; then say after me these words: 'This lady is my mistress, my master's wife, to be by me reverenced as such. Her face is not for my eyes nor her hand for my lips. If I keep not myself clean of all offence toward her, may God approve that which my master shall do!'"
The blood rushed to his face. I watched his fingers slowly loosening their grasp.
"Tardy obedience is of the house of mutiny," I said sternly. "Will you, sirrah, or will you not?"
He raised his hand and repeated the words.
"Now hold her as before," I ordered, and, straightening myself in the saddle, rode on, with my eyes once more on the path before me.
A mile further on, Mistress Percy stirred and raised her head from my shoulder. "Not at Jamestown yet?" she sighed, as yet but half awake. "Oh, the endless trees! I dreamed I was hawking at Windsor, and then suddenly I was here in this forest, a bird, happy because I was free; and then a falcon came swooping down upon me,--it had me in its talons, and I changed to myself again, and it changed to--What am I saying? I am talking in my sleep. Who is that singing?"
In fact, from the woods in front of us, and not a bowshot away, rang out a powerful voice:--
"'In the merry month of May, In a morn by break of day, With a troop of damsels playing Forth I went, forsooth, a-maying;'"
and presently, the trees thinning in front of us, we came upon a little open glade and upon the singer. He lay on his back, on the soft turf beneath an oak, with his hands clasped behind his head and his eyes upturned to the blue sky showing between leaf and branch. On one knee crossed above the other sat a squirrel with a nut in its paws, and half a dozen others scampered here and there over his great body, like so many frolicsome kittens. At a little distance grazed an old horse, gray and gaunt, springhalt and spavined, with ribs like Death's own. Its saddle and bridle adorned a limb of the oak.
"'Much ado there was, God wot: He would love and she would not; She said, "Never man was true." He said, "None was false to you."'"
"Give you good-day, reverend sir!" I called. "Art conning next Sunday's hymn?"
Nothing abashed, Master Jeremy Sparrow gently shook off the squirrels, and getting to his feet advanced to meet us.