Spardo was interrupted by an inrush upon them of several persons. A broad-shouldered, obstinate-looking, middle-aged man, who obviously was the bailiff in question, pushed forward through some closely growing pine-tree trunks, and advanced into the open, making, as he did so, several rough and brutal jerks to get rid of the hold upon his sleeve of an old and extremely agitated serf, who in his turn was clutching the hand of a little girl, who, with big frightened eyes, surveyed the two men and the deformed horse as if they had been beings from another world.
The bailiff made the appropriate gesture of respect to the man on the horse, who was obviously, although in the garb of a Franciscan Friar, some sort of high-ranking ecclesiastic from abroad.
“Pardon me for disturbing you like this, reverend Father, but I must settle the affair of this troublesome fellow before I can pay my proper respects to you.”
The serf’s voice had a piercingly pitiful tone of appeal which arrested Spardo’s critical attention at once. “You’re taking our whole life, master bailiff,” the old man was saying, “when you take away our horse. My daughter has a good job in the Convent’s washhouse and her children are good children; but if you take away our horse, considering my son’s dead, you take the bread out of all our mouths.”
It would have been clear to any less self-absorbed listeners than the two men upon whom this group of people flung itself, that in the familiar pleading tone of her grand-dad’s voice there was something that spread a reassuring atmosphere round the child who was holding his hand. Tragic enough though the old man’s words were, there were so many use-and-wont associations aroused in her by his special tone that her eyes ceased to be so big and scared.
It even began to be exciting to her to watch this weird horse’s neck, with what really looked like a human head growing out of it, while the man with the feathery beard, like the moulting tail of Granny’s jackdaw, seemed to be making funny faces at her, as if he wanted her to play a game with him.
It was early afternoon by now, and the rays of the February sun were shimmering between the pine branches at an angle about midway between earth and sky.
“I tell you, master bailiff, if you take our horse it will be just simply a death-sentence to us all!”
“Pardon me, holy sir,” said the bailiff, looking straight into the twitching, high-coloured face of Bonaventura, whose excited eyes, always very prominent, were now literally bulging from his head; “pardon me till I’ve dealt with this fellow!”
Meanwhile the little girl, whose hand her grandfather was still tightly clutching, couldn’t keep the idea out of her mind that the interest of this hooded rider in what was going on was so intense that it might at any moment project those inflated eyes of his out of his head like a pair of globular puff-balls.
She was even beginning to imagine the simultaneous pop with which those two voracious peerers would strike the tree beside her and the amount of effervescent juice that would pour down the tree’s trunk at their bursting, when she heard the bailiff protest to the owner of those same orbs that he would give him his full attention as soon as he had got rid of these tiresome people.
“Full attention” was the very last thing any one of the group of human bipeds flung together beneath these pines could hope for. But at least the ragged little girl, whose name was Bet, and who had been endowed by Nature with several extra drops of imagination, derived an agreeably alarming impression from the bulging eyes of the saintly General of the Franciscan Order of Friars.
But there was nothing but distress in the shock she received when she saw her grand-dad throw himself down on his knees before ‘Master Sygerius and actually embrace his straddling pair of sturdy legs, while with head thrown back he gazed up imploringly at all that could possibly be seen from that position of the man’s physiognomy, which could only have been the reddish-brown beard protruding from the obstinately square jaw.
“If you take our horse away, master,” cried the old man, “it just means starvation! While my son was alive, he could plough as fast as any man on the manor. And plough he did, and sow and reap too, with the best in the land. But if after his death our only horse is to be what’s called your Heriot, considering I’m too old and feeble to plough or to sow or to reap or to carry in the harvest, it’s just murder you’re committing! Yes, what you’re doing, bailiff, is sheer murder! I tell you, here and now, it’s squeezing the orange dry!”
The bailiff, evidently no less conscious of the staring eyes of the hooded man on Cheiron’s back than was the ragged little Bet, stepped away so hurriedly that the old supplicant, losing his balance, fell forward with both his hands outstretched upon the red-brown earth. The spot where the old man fell was a spot strewn with several generations of pine-needles, but it was quite bare of moss and quite bare also of that particular sort of forest-grass, soft as the hair of a Dryad, which grew luxuriantly in those parts, especially in the district between the Fortress and Lost Towers.
Little Bet had so far only spent seven years upon earth but she had already noticed that, when her elders quarrelled among themselves and began to argue, something always seemed to be drawn into the contention that came from far away. Yes! she had often noticed that some unexpected bird or beast or reptile appeared at such times, or an unusual storm of wind, or a torrent of water, or even a falling star. And it now came about that as Bet’s grand-dad, whose name was Dod Pole, scrambled to his feet, with the palms of his hands and the undersides of his fingers pricking viciously from the pine-needles, and commenced in unabashed indignation to express his feelings, a tiny little bird, on the look-out for the crumbs that it had come to associate with these meetings of vociferous bipeds, was so absorbed in its own private quest that it remained oblivious to the nearby hovering of a hungry hawk, who, instinctively aware that no arrows were to be feared from that preoccupied party, descended like a feathered plummet and made its fellow-citizen of the air its helpless prey.
“O you bailiffs and reeves and forest-wardens,” shouted old Dod Pole, his voice growing harsher and huskier as he went on and his grip on little Bet’s hand hurting the child’s fingers more and more, “you are all the same in your fat-headed stupidity! You think the land belongs to the Barons whose castles on it we have built, or to the Church, whose barley and wheat and fruit and vegetables we have grown. O you wooden-headed coxcombs! I tell you a day will come when we shall have a King after our own hearts, a King as wise as Solomon, and as strong as Coeur-de-Lion, and as well-supported as Caesar, and with as many magic weapons as King Arthur, who will raise us up and thrust you down! Who gave your precious Barons the right to make us thresh our corn on their threshing-floors and grind it with their grind-stones? Are your Barons so many Gods? Did they create the land that we cultivate? Did they create the wheat and the barley that we sow and reap and gather in barns?
“Just because you call taking our horse a Heriot — a mighty grand lawyers’ word the word Heriot, ain’t it? — you think all is settled! You wait a bit, my good master bailiff, you wait a bit, my noble lord, Sir Mort! A day will come when it will be to a really great and true King chosen by us, yes! by us, who are now serfs and slaves, that you and your barons will have to come for the making of all the laws in the land! And I’ll tell you this, too, Master Sygerius—”