Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/133

Rh sleep, or am in wine, then my thought having gone forth from me, lo the trees go forth also. How now, coz, have I touched thee on the raw?'

Alleyne sat between them munching his bread while the twain disputed across his knees, leaning forward with flushed faces and darting hands, in all the heat of argument. Never had he heard such jargon of scholastic philosophy, such fine-drawn distinctions, such cross-fire of major and minor proposition, syllogism, attack and refutation. Question clattered upon answer like a sword on a buckler. The ancients, the fathers of the Church, the moderns, the Scriptures, the Arabians, were each sent hurtling against the other, while the rain still dripped and the dark holly-leaves glistened with the moisture. At last the fat man seemed to weary of it, for he set to work quietly upon his meal, while his opponent, as proud as a rooster who is left unchallenged upon the midden, crowed away in a last long burst of quotation and deduction. Suddenly, however, his eyes dropped upon his food, and he gave a howl of dismay.

'You double thief!' he cried, 'you have eaten my herrings, and I without bite or sup since morning.'

'That,' quoth the other complacently, 'was my final argument, my crowning effort, or peroratio, as the orators have it. For, coz, since all thoughts are things, you have but to think a pair of herrings, and then conjure up a pottle of milk wherewith to wash them down.'

'A brave piece of reasoning,' cried the other, 'and I know of but one reply to it.' On which, leaning forward, he caught his comrade a rousing smack across his rosy cheek. 'Nay, take it not amiss,' he said; 'since all things are but thoughts, then that also is but a thought, and may be disregarded.'

This last argument, however, by no means commended itself to the pupil of Ockham, who plucked a great stick from the ground and signified his dissent by smiting the realist over the pate with it. By good fortune, the wood was so light and rotten that it went to a thousand splinters; but