"From his poor first wife, eh? Well, there can be no harm in that. Nor if
they came from this Lady Alftruda either, for that matter; let them go in
and out when they will."
"But they may be spies and traitors."
"Then we can but hang them."
Robert of Herepol, it would appear from the chronicle, did not much care
whether they were spies or not.
So the men went to and fro, and often sat with Hereward. But he forbade
them sternly to mention Torfrida's name.
Alftruda sent to him meanwhile, again and again, messages of passionate
love and sorrow, and he listened to them as sullenly as he did to his two
servants, and sent no answer back. And so sat more weary months, in the
very prison, it may be in the very room, in which John Bunyan sat nigh six
hundred years after: but in a very different frame of mind.
One day Sir Robert was going up the stairs with another knight, and met
the two coming down. He was talking to that knight earnestly, indignantly:
and somehow, as he passed Leofric and Martin he thought fit to raise his
voice, as if in a great wrath.
"Shame to all honor and chivalry! good saints in heaven, what a thing is
human fortune! That this man, who had once a gallant army at his back,
should be at this moment going like a sheep to the slaughter, to
Buckingham Castle, at the mercy of his worst enemy, Ivo Taillebois, of all
men in the world.
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