The fellow might be contemptible, but it was such as he that led the Blatant Beast by the nose, and it is always possible to learn something, even from a Welshman with a red beard.
“Will it be so easy to eat up all the nobles and their people?”
He was very ready to prove to her how the kingdom would be won.
“See now, how can one knight in full harness fight a hundred ploughmen? Why, they have only to tumble him over, and beat him with hammers like any old pot. I know what I am saying; the lord on the high horse is only good to fight his peers. We have only to hamstring their horses, pull them down like big beetles, and then use the knife. I have seen it done in the French wars. Besides, half the lords are out of the country, and the rest shivering in their skins. The King’s but a boy, and most of the Londoners are with us. The whole country’s up, and we mean to have the King in our hands and to use him. By cock, what can a few hundred lobsters in steel coats do against so many?”
He pulled his beard, and looked at her with half-closed eyes, convinced that he was a devil of a fellow, and ready to challenge her to pose him with her questions. And for once his swagger had a fierce reality behind it. Even his boasting seemed to fall short of the truth.
“No doubt you will be a great captain,” she said; “and, my God, what a country it will be to live in!”
“We honest fellows are as good, and better, than the fops and squirelings.”
She spoke half in a whisper, and with an irony that went over his head.
“When are we to be in London, great captain?”
“We want to be in, and to have the glory, and some of the pickings, before the easterlings and the midlanders come up.”
She smiled at him as she might have smiled at some extravagantly bitter jest. He leant over the tailboard, and his eyes leered.
“I shall be nothing, my friend, just nothing.”
“Wait till some of us have our castles and our lands.”
“What, some of you mean to be lords in the places of—these gentlemen?”
He gave an inimitable shrug of the shoulders.
“Bah! these sheep! One must let them bleat. But the shepherds know whither they are going.”
She rested her chin on her hands and stared at him till he began to blink.
“You are not such a fool, then, lord Guy! You have caught the twist of Merlin’s tongue. Oh, these honest firebrands! Always the sheep—always the sheep!”