“Stand back, you cowards!  Who ever heard of fifty men against one, and he a cripple?  The first who touches him I strike dead.  A heretic!  Pooh! nonsense.  He is but a poor travelling peddler with his pack.  See, here is the pack to speak for itself.  For shame to mar a merry holiday in this unmannerly fashion!  No; I will not give him up!  Ye are no better than a pack of howling, ravening wolves.  I am the Lord of Chad, and I will see that no violence is done this day.  Back to your sports, ye unmannerly knaves.  Are ye fit for nothing but to set upon one helpless man and worry him as dogs worry their helpless prey?”

Howls, execrations, oaths followed freely; but the village people were to a man with their young lord, and the scions of Mortimer felt it by instinct.

“Who is he?  Whence came he?” was being asked on all sides; but none could give an answer.  He was a stranger to the village, but all those who had been drinking in his words rallied round him, and declared he was but a simple peddler whose wares they had been buying; and Bertram, who really thought so, stood beside the tree, opened the bundle, and showed the innocent nature of the wares.

His brothers had forced their way to his side by this time, and helped to make a ring round the poor hunchback; and Edred kept a very sharp eye upon the emptying of the pack, resolved if there should be any book at the bottom to contrive that it should not reach the eyes of any of the vindictive followers of Mortimer.

But there was nothing of the sort to be seen.  The man was both too poor and too wary to carry such dangerous things with him.  His own thin volume had been slipped into some secret receptacle about his person, and his calmness of bearing helped to convince all who were open to conviction that he was innocent of the charge brought against him.

With dark, lowering faces, and many muttered threats, the Mortimer retainers drew off, seeing that with public feeling dead against them they could not prevail to work their will upon the intended victim.  But Warbel was made very anxious by the words he heard openly spoken on all sides, and he would have given much to have hindered this act of Bertram’s, generous and manly though he knew it to have been.

“It is ill work drawing down the charge of heresy,” he remarked, as he got the boys at last in full march homeward.  “Any other charge one can laugh to scorn; but no man may tell where orthodoxy ends and heresy begins.  Godly bishops have been sent to prison, and priests to the stake.  How may others hope to escape?”

“Tush!” answered Bertram lightly; “there was never a heretic at Chad yet, and never will be one, I trow.  Was I to see a poor cripple like that done to death without striking a blow in his defence—­he in Chadwick, of which my father is lord of the manor?  Was I to see Mortimer’s men turning a gay holiday into a scene of horror and affright?  Never!  I were unworthy of my name had I not interposed.  The man was no heretic, and if he had been—­”