I shall be baked alive else, like a crab in its shell. How say you, illustrious, is it contravened by any of those thirty-nine articles of war which you bear about in your bosom?'
'The bearing of the weight of your harness, young man,' Saxon answered gravely, 'is one of the exercises of war, and as such only attainable by such practice as you are now undergoing. You have many things to learn, and one of them is not to present petronels too readily at folk's heads when you are on horseback. The jerk of your charger's movement even now might have drawn your trigger, and so deprived Monmouth of an old and tried soldier.'
'There would be much weight in your contention,' my friend answered, 'were it not that I now bethink me that I had forgot to recharge my pistol since discharging it at that great yellow beast yesternight.'
Decimus Saxon shook his head sadly. 'I doubt we shall never make a soldier of you,' he remarked. 'You fall from your horse if the brute does bit change his step, you show a levity which will not jump with the gravity of the true soldado, you present empty petronels as a menace, and finally, you crave permission to tie your armour--armour which the Cid himself might be proud to wear--around the neck of your horse. Yet you have heart and mettle, I believe, else you would not be here.'
'Gracias, Signor!' cried Reuben, with a bow which nearly unhorsed him; 'the last remark makes up for all the rest, else had I been forced to cross blades with you, to maintain my soldierly repute.'
'Touching that same incident last night,' said Saxon, 'of the chest filled, as I surmise, with gold, which I was inclined to take as lawful plunder, I am now ready to admit that I may have shown an undue haste and precipitance, considering that the old man treated us fairly.'
'Say no more of it,' I answered, 'if you will but guard against such impulses for the future.'
'They do not properly come from me,' he replied, 'but from Will Spotterbridge, who was a man of no character at all.'
'And how comes he to be mixed up in the matter?' I asked curiously.
'Why, marry, in this wise. My father married the daughter of this same Will Spotterbridge, and so weakened a good old stock by an unhealthy strain. Will was a rake-hell of Fleet Street in the days of James, a chosen light of Alsatia, the home of bullies and of brawlers. His blood hath through his daughter been transmitted to the ten of us, though I rejoice to say that I, being the tenth, it had by that time lost much of its virulence, and indeed amounts to little more than a proper pride, and a laudable desire to prosper.'
'How, then, has it affected the race?' I asked.
'Why,' he answered, 'the Saxons of old were a round-faced, contented generation, with their ledgers in their hands for six days and their bibles on the seventh. If my father did but drink a cup of small beer more than his wont, or did break out upon provocation into any fond oath, as "Od's niggers!" or "Heart alive!" he would mourn over it as though it were the seven deadly sins. Was this a man, think ye, in the ordinary course of nature to beget ten long lanky children, nine of whom might have been first cousins of Lucifer, and foster-brothers of Beelzebub?'
'It was hard upon him,' remarked Reuben.
'On him! Nay, the hardship was all with us. If he with his eyes open chose to marry the daughter of an incarnate devil like Will Spotterbridge, because she chanced to be powdered and patched to his liking, what reason hath he for complaint? It is we, who have the blood of this Hector of the taverns grafted upon our own good honest stream, who have most reason to lift up our voices.'
'Faith, by the same chain of reasoning,' said Reuben, 'one of my ancestors must have married a woman with a plaguy dry throat, for both my father and I are much troubled with the complaint.'
'You have assuredly inherited a plaguy pert tongue,' growled Saxon. 'From what I have told you, you will see that our whole life is a conflict between our natural Saxon virtue and the ungodly impulses of the Spotterbridge taint.