'Well, I am come to hear what ye do say!'
So he heard tales from all the sewers of London, and it was plain to him
that all the commonalty cried shame upon their King. He screamed and
twisted there in his chair at the last, and when he was come out into
the darkness he fell upon his companion, and beat him so that he
screamed out.
He might have died--for, though the King's guard with their torches and
halberds were within a bowshot of them, they stirred no limb. And it was
a party of fellows bat-fowling along the hedges of that field that came
through the dark, attracted by the glare of the torches, the blaze of
the scarlet clothes, and the outcry.
And when they came, asking why that great man belaboured this thin and
fragile one, black shadows both against the light, the big man answered,
howling--
'This man hath made me bounden to slay my wife.'
They said that that was a thing some of them would have been glad of.
But the great figure cast itself on the ground at the foot of a tree
that stretched up like nerves and tentacles into the black sky. He tore
the wet earth with his fingers, and the men stood round him till the
Duke of Norfolk, coming with his sword drawn, hunted them afar off, and
they fell again to beating the hedges to drive small birds into their
nets.
For, they said, these were evidently of the quality whose griefs were
none of theirs.