Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/131

Rh a man of sense should ever avoid a great talker. That being so, if all were men of sense, then thou wouldst be a lonesome man, coz.'

'Alas! Dicon, I fear that your logic is as bad as your philosophy or your divinity—and God wot it would be hard to say a worse word than that for it. For, hark ye: granting, propter argumentum, that I am a talker, then the true reasoning runs that since all men of sense should avoid me, and thou hast not avoided me, but art at the present moment eating herrings with me under a holly-bush, ergo you are no man of sense, which is exactly what I have been dinning into your long ears ever since I first clapped eyes on your sunken chops.'

'Tut, tut!' cried the other. 'Your tongue goes like the clapper of a mill-wheel. Sit down here, friend, and partake of this herring. Understand, first, however, that there are certain conditions attached to it.'

'I had hoped,' said Alleyne, falling into the humour of the twain, 'that a tranchoir of bread and a draught of milk might be attached to it.'

'Hark to him, hark to him!' cried the little fat man. 'It is ever thus, Dicon! Wit, lad, is a catching thing, like the itch or the sweating sickness. I exude it around me; it is an aura. I tell you, coz, that no man can come within seventeen feet of me without catching a spark. Look at your own case. A duller man never stepped, and yet within the week you have said three things which might pass, and one thing the day we left Pordingbridge which I should not have been ashamed of myself.'

'Enough, rattlepate, enough!' said the other. 'The milk you shall have and the bread also, friend, together with the herring, but you must hold the scales between us.'

'If he hold the herring he holds the scales, my sapient brother,' cried the fat man. 'But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at Oxenford or at Paris.'

'I have some small stock of learning,' Alleyne answered,