“Nay,” said the old man, cunningly, “I meant not from the forest, but from my neighbours’ woodpiles.  Yet for lovely gold I would even venture to go thither—­that is, if I had my image of the Blessed Mother about my neck and the moon shone very bright.”

“Now haste thee with the barley brew,” said Lord James, “for my stomach is as deep as a well and as empty as the purse of a younger son.”

The strange cripple emitted another bird-like cachinnation, resembling the sound which is made by the wooden cogwheels wherewithal boys fright the crows from the cornfields when the August sun is yellowing the land.

“Poor old Caesar Martin can show you something better than that,” he cried, as he hirpled out (for so Malise described it afterwards) and presently returned dragging a great iron pot with a strength which seemed incredible in so ramshackle a body.

“Ha! ha!” he said, “here is fragrant stew; smell it.  Is it not good?  In ten minutes it will be so hot and toothsome that you will scarce have patience to wait till it be decently cool in the platters.  This is not common Angevin stew, but Bas Breton—­which is a far better thing.”

Malise rose, and, relieving the old man, with one finger swung the pot to a crook that hung over the cheerful blaze of the birchwood.

The old cripple Caesar Martin now mounted on a stool and stirred the mess with a long stick, at the end of which was a steel fork of two prongs.  And as he stirred he talked: 

“God bless you, say I, brave gentlemen and good pilgrims.  Surely it was a wind noble and fortunate that blew you hither to taste my broth.  There be fine pigeons here, fat and young.  There be leverets juicy and tender as a maid untried.  There—­what think you of that?” (he held each ingredient up on a prong as he spoke).  “And here be larks, partridge stuffed with sage, ripe chestnuts from La Valery, and whisper it not to any of the marshal’s men, a fawn from the park of a month old, dressed like a kid so that none may know.”

“I suppose that so much providing is for your four sons?” said Sholto.

The cripple laughed again his feeble, fleering laugh.

“I have no sons, honest sir,” he said; “it was but a weakling’s policy to tell you so, lest there should have been evil in your hearts.  But I have a wife and that is enough.  You may have heard of her.  She is called La Meffraye.”

As he spoke his face took on an access of white terror, even as it had done when he looked out of the window.

“La Meffraye is she well named,” he repeated the appellation with a harsh croak as of a night-hawk screaming.  “God forfend that she should come home to-night and find you here!”

“Why, good sir,” smiled James Douglas, “if that be the manner in which you speak of your housewife, faith, I am right glad to have remained a bachelor.”

Caesar the cripple looked about him and lowered his voice.