“Nay, but one word, good fair King!  I am French—­French by my father’s side!” cried the lad, as there was a halt, more from the instinct of the horse than the will of the King.  ’Bertram de Maisonforte!  My father married the Lady of Boyatt, and her inheritance was confirmed to him by your father, brave King William, my Lord; but now he is dead, and his kinsman, Roger de Maisonforte, hath ousted her and me, her son and lawful heir, from house and home, and we pray for justice, Sir King?’

‘Ha, Roger, thou there!  What say’st thou to this bold beggar!’ shouted the Red King.

‘I say,’ returned a black, bronzed hunter, pressing to the front, ’that what I hold of thee, King William, on tenure of homage, and of two good horses and staunch hounds yearly, I yield to no English mongrel churl, who dares to meddle with me.’

‘Thou hear’st, lad,’ said Rufus, with his accustomed oath, ’homage hath been done to us for the land, nor may it be taken back.  Out of our way, or—­’

‘Sir! sir!’ entreated the lad, grasping the bridle, ’if no more might be, we would be content if Sir Roger would but leave my mother enough for her maintenance among the nuns of Romsey, and give me a horse and suit of mail to go on the Holy War with Duke Robert.’

‘Ho! ho! a modest request for a beggarly English clown!’ cried the King, aiming a blow at the lad with his whip, and pushing on his horse, so as almost to throw him back on the heath.  ’Ho! ho! fit him out for a fool’s errand!’

’We’ll fit him!  We’ll teach him to take the cross at other men’s expense!’ shouted the followers, seizing on the boy.

‘Nay; we’ll bestow his cross on him for a free gift!’ exclaimed Roger de Maisonforte.

And Bertram, struggling desperately in vain among the band of ruffians, found his left arm bared, and two long and painful slashes, in the form of the Crusader’s cross, inflicted, amid loud laughter, as the blood sprang forth.

‘There, Sir Crusader,’ said Roger, grinding his teeth over him.  ’Go on thy way now—­as a horse-boy, if so please thee, and know better than to throw thy mean false English pretension in the face of a gentle Norman.’

Men, horses, dogs, all seemed to trample and scoff at Bertram as he fell back on the elastic stems of the heath and gorse, whose prickles seemed to renew the insults by scratching his face.  When the King’s horn, the calls, the brutal laughter, and the baying of the dogs had begun to die away in the distance, he gathered himself together, sat up, and tried to find some means of stanching the blood.  Not only was the wound in a place hard to reach, but it had been ploughed with the point of a boar-spear, and was grievously torn.  He could do nothing with it, and, as he perceived, he had further been robbed of his sword, his last possession, his father’s sword.

The large tears of mingled rage, grief, and pain might well spring from the poor boy’s eyes in his utter loneliness, as he clenched his hand with powerless wrath, and regained his feet, to retrace, as best he might, his way to where his widowed mother had found a temporary shelter in a small religious house.