ONE:
TWO:When he appeared before De Boteler the next morning, such a change had twenty hours of mental suffering produced in his countenance, that his lord, struck by the alteration, inquired if he were ill. Calverley said something about a fall that had partly stunned him, but assured De Boteler he was now perfectly well. While he yet spoke, the steward entered, to say that Stephen Holgrave had come to crave his lordship's pardon for marrying a nief without leave, and also to pay the merchet.
ONE:This would have been bad enough in any year, but in times when he bore the burden of his yet profitless milk-round it was only a little short of catastrophe. Making every allowance for a first year, that milk-round had[Pg 265] disappointed him. He found private custom hard to win, and even the ceasing of French dairy supplies, owing to the Franco-Prussian war, did not bring him the relief he had hoped. One or two small farms on the borders of Rye catered in dairy stuff for its inhabitants, and he found them hard to outbid or outwit. Also, owing to the scarcity of grass feed, it was a bad milk year, and poor supplies were put down by consumers to the new milkman, and in more than one case custom was withdrawn.A pause of a few minutes ensued, and though each was anxious to introduce some allusion to the intended trial, yet both hesitated to begin;Calverley, from a prudential fear of committing himself, and Black Jack from an apprehension of hazarding a chance of employment by too ready a proffer of his services.
TWO:The baron was standing apart from the other nobles, scanning, with a gloomy countenance, the dark undulating mass below. Once he could have sworn that Stephen Holgrave stood upon the verge of the ditch before him, but if it was he, he stood but an instant, and then was lost amidst the multitude. This circumstance gave a new turn to De Boteler's meditations; he thought too of the monk of Winchcombe Abbeythis John Ball, who was styled the prophet; and it seemed to be no less true than strange, that the germ of all this wide-spreading disorder had sprung from his own soil. So much, in fact, was he absorbed in these ideas, that he actually started when his page, who had been for the space of a minute endeavouring to draw his attention by repeated obeisances, ventured to pronounce his name in rather a high key, as he presented to him an arrow which had been found sticking in the door-post of the building in which father John was confined. "And this was shot from the river?" asked De Boteler, as he received the arrow and unrolled a parchment wrapped round it.
