e, or aught else that can detain them
before it for twenty-four hours. Meantime bear thou this scroll--But
soft--canst read, Sir Priest?"

"Not a jot I," answered Cedric, "save on my breviary; and then I know
the characters, because I have the holy service by heart, praised be Our
Lady and St Withold!"

"The fitter messenger for my purpose.--Carry thou this scroll to the
castle of Philip de Malvoisin; say it cometh from me, and is written by
the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and that I pray him to send it to
York with all the speed man and horse can make. Meanwhile, tell him
to doubt nothing, he shall find us whole and sound behind our
battlement--Shame on it, that we should be compelled to hide thus by a
pack of runagates, who are wont to fly even at the flash of our pennons
and the tramp of our horses! I say to thee, priest, contrive some cast
of thine art to keep the knaves where they are, until our friends
bring up their lances. My vengeance is awake, and she is a falcon that
slumbers not till she has been gorged."

"By my patron saint," said Cedric, with deeper energy than became his
character, "and by every saint who has lived and died in England, your
commands shall be obeyed! Not a Saxon shall stir from before these
walls, if I have art and influence to detain them there."

"Ha!" said Front-de-Boeuf, "thou changest thy tone, Sir Priest, and
speakest brief and bold, as if thy heart were in the slaughter of the
Saxon herd; and yet thou art thyself of kindred to the swine?"

Cedric was no ready practiser of the art of dissimulation, and would
at this moment have been much the better of a hint from Wamba's more
fertile brain. But necessity, according to the ancient proverb, sharpens
invention, and he muttered something under his cowl concerning the men
in question being excommunicated outlaws both to church and to kingdom.

"'Despardieux'," answered Front-de-Boeuf, "thou hast spoken the very
truth--I forgot that the knaves can strip a fat abbot, as well as if
they had been born south of yonder salt channel. Was it not he of St
Ives whom they tied to an oak-tree, and compelled to sing a mass while
they were rifling his mails and his wallets?--No, by our Lady--that jest
was played by Gualtier of Middleton, one of our own companions-at-arms.
But they were Saxons who robbed the chapel at St Bees of cup,
candlestick and chalice, were they not?"

"They were godless men," answered Cedric.

"Ay, and they drank ou