Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/307

Rh little church in the hollow, and the folk who cluster in the churchyard! By my hilt! it is a burial, and there is a passing bell!' He pulled off his steel cap as he spoke and crossed himself, with a muttered prayer for the repose of the dead.

'There too,' remarked Alleyne, as they rode on again, 'that which seems to the eye to be dead is still full of the sap of life, even as the vines were. Thus God hath written Himself and His laws very broadly on all that is around us, if our poor dull eyes and duller souls could but read what He hath set before us.'

'Ha! mon petit,' cried the bowman, 'you take me back to the days when you were new-fledged, as sweet a little chick as ever pecked his way out of a monkish egg. I had feared that in gaining our debonair young man-at-arms we had lost our soft-spoken clerk. In truth, I have noted much change in you since we came from Twynham Castle.'

'Surely it would be strange else, seeing that I have lived in a world so new to me. Yet I trust that there are many things in which I have not changed. If I have turned to serve an earthly master, and to carry arms for an earthly king, it would be an ill thing if I were to lose all thought of the great high King and Master of all, whose humble and unworthy servant I was ere ever I left Beaulieu. You, John, are also from the cloisters, but I trow that you do not feel that you have deserted the old service in taking on the new.'

'I am a slow-witted man,' said John, 'and, in sooth, when I try to think about such matters it casts a gloom upon me. Yet I do not look upon myself as a worse man in an archer's jerkin than I was in a white cowl, if that be what you mean.'

'You have but changed from one white company to the other,' quoth Aylward. 'But, by these ten finger-bones! it is a passing strange thing to me to think that it was but in the last fall of the leaf that we walked from Lyndhurst together, he so gentle and maidenly, and you, John, like a great red-limbed over-grown mooncalf; and now here you