‘We’ll fit him! We’ll teach him to take the cross at other men’s expense!’ shouted the followers, seizing on the boy.

‘Nay; we’ll bestow his cross on him for a free gift!’ exclaimed Roger de Maisonforte.

And Bertram, struggling desperately in vain among the band of ruffians, found his left arm bared, and two long and painful slashes, in the form of the Crusader’s cross, inflicted, amid loud laughter, as the blood sprang forth.

‘There, Sir Crusader,’ said Roger, grinding his teeth over him. ‘Go on thy way now—as a horse-boy, if so please thee, and know better than to throw thy mean false English pretension in the face of a gentle Norman.’

Men, horses, dogs, all seemed to trample and scoff at Bertram as he fell back on the elastic stems of the heath and gorse, whose prickles seemed to renew the insults by scratching his face. When the King’s horn, the calls, the brutal laughter, and the baying of the dogs had begun to die away in the distance, he gathered himself together, sat up, and tried to find some means of stanching the blood. Not only was the wound in a place hard to reach, but it had been ploughed with the point of a boar-spear, and was grievously torn. He could do nothing with it, and, as he perceived, he had further been robbed of his sword, his last possession, his father’s sword.

The large tears of mingled rage, grief, and pain might well spring from the poor boy’s eyes in his utter loneliness, as he clenched his hand with powerless wrath, and regained his feet, to retrace, as best he might, his way to where his widowed mother had found a temporary shelter in a small religious house.

The sun grew hotter and hotter, Bertram’s wound bled, though not profusely, the smart grew upon him, his tongue was parched with thirst, and though he kept resolutely on, his breath came panting, his head grew dizzy, his eyes dim, his feet faltered, and at last, just as he attained a wider and more trodden way, he dropped insensible by the side of the path, his dry lips trying to utter the cry, “Lord, have mercy on me!”

II. DE JURE

When Bertram de Maisonforte opened his eyes again cold waters were on his face, wine was moistening his lips, the burning of his wound was assuaged by cooling oil, while a bandage was being applied, and he was supported on a breast and in arms, clad indeed in a hauberk, but as tenderly kind as the full deep voice that spoke in English, “He comes round. 

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