Читать книгу Below the Salt - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 31

On one of the few occasions when Richard rode out alone, he found himself at a rather considerable distance from the priory and in unfamiliar surroundings. He was on a narrow dirt road which followed the course of a swift stream. The May flies were rising and he was so interested in this that he was not watching the road and came almost head on with a party riding from the other direction. It was a group of three, two of them keepers of the game, the third, who rode in the lead, a youth of his own age.

The latter reined in and regarded Richard with a lively dark eye. “By St. Hubert!” he said, aping the speech of his elders. “This is lucky. I know who you are. You’re Richard of Rawen.”

“Yes,” answered Richard. There was something very genial and friendly about this strange youth. Remembering Tostig’s instructions, however, he strove not to let his appreciation of this show too plainly.

“Do you know who I am?”

“I have never seen you before but I think you are Alain of Casserlie. I have heard much about you.”

“Yes, I am Alain of Casserlie,” said the other. His bright eye continued its survey of Richard and it was clear that he liked what he saw. “We could be friends, you and I, Richard of Rawen. I’m Norman and you’re Saxon. But what of that? In any event, you are half one and half the other.”

Richard closed his mind to all the warnings of the unbending Tostig. He liked this smiling Norman youth and agreed enthusiastically that they could get along together. “I would like to be friends,” he said.

“Do you know that my father is sheriff of the county?”

Richard nodded his head. Everyone knew the Lord of Casserlie and the great black castle he had built. It was on an island and the walls were thicker and higher than any others. Richard had seen them in the distance and had been Saxon enough to feel his heart contract, thinking of all the prisoners who had died in the cells of Casserlie and the unfortunates who had swung on the gallows there. Roger de Casserlie was a stern administrator of the law.

The sheriff’s son dismounted. “See, Friend Richard,” he said, “we will go over there by the stream and sit down. We can talk. There’s nothing like talk to get to know each other.”

If talking led to close acquaintance, then the friendship of the two boys was cemented that day for all time. They sat together on the bank of the stream and their tongues clacked incessantly. At least, Alain’s did. Richard had much less to say because he felt inevitably the inferiority of his position; but he was in agreement with everything that his companion expressed.

Alain was most handsomely attired in a fine garment which was called, in court circles and in all company where men of rank gathered, a cyclaton: a particolored tunic in black and yellow, which was quite long and had sleeves which tapered most correctly to the wrists. He wore a brimmed felt hat, turned up in the back and encircled by a curled plume, and yellow shoes as pointed as a field hound’s nose. Richard looked very plain in comparison, wearing a tunic of the abbreviated length of the quilted doublet called the pourpoint (which came into general use a little later), and everything about him was a solid unrelieved green. His shoes were made for utility and without so much as the hint of a point. Was it any wonder that he assumed the role of the listener, and reveled in and believed everything he heard?

Alain’s talk wandered far afield but always came back to a subject of which Richard had heard only the faintest echoes: chivalry. Nothing else in life, it seemed, counted at all. A man must live to do brave and honorable deeds, to rescue maidens in distress, to fight battles with dragons and men of false heart, to die if necessary and with great cheerfulness for his liege lord and his king. The perfect exponent of chivalry, according to the glib recital of Alain, was the prince who would be the next king of England, Richard of the mighty sword and the irresistible lance, Richard with the heart of a lion and the golden hair and flashing eye.

All this was so new to young Richard that he listened with wide-open eyes and mind, and he rose at the finish of the talk a fully confirmed believer in this new and exciting code.

Alain’s final dictum, delivered in a rather scornful tone and with a lofty gesture, proved equally acceptable to the new devotee. “A man must raise a family,” he said. “There must be sons. To carry on the name and assume the overlordship of the land. But if you want my honest opinion, Friend Richard, it’s all a very trifling matter. Women are—well, let’s put it this way: women are a nuisance. They take a man’s liberty away from him. Oh, we must come to it in the end. Even you and I, Friend Richard. But my wish is that we both have a long period of glorious freedom before we become entangled in this web called marriage.”