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"Take it take it give me my pitcher," said Alice, "and begone, yonder comes one of my father's servants. What, ho! Joceline Joceline!" The old fortune-teller hastily dropped something into the pitcher as she restored it to Alice Lee, and, plying her long limbs, disappeared speedily under cover of the wood.
"Come hither then, Albert Lee," said the Doctor, laying down his knife and fork, and plucking the towel from his throat, so soon as Joceline was withdrawn; "thou art still the same lad thou wert when I was thy tutor never satisfied with having got a grammar rule, but always persecuting me with questions why the rule stood so, and not otherwise over-curious after information which thou couldst not comprehend, as Bevis slobbered and whined for the duck-wing, which he could not eat."
"Not entirely, if it please your honour," said Joceline; "but it sounds as if you were preaching a sermon, and has a marvellous twang of doctrine with it." "Then, in one word thou knowest there is one Louis Kerneguy, or Carnego, or some such name, in hiding at the Lodge yonder?"
But his suspicions were removed, when, in the course of their subsequent conversation, Joseph Tomkins mentioned the King's escape from Bristol as a thing positively certain, and named both the vessel in which, he said, he had gone off, and the master who commanded her, seeming so convinced of the truth of the report, that Joceline judged it impossible he could have the slightest suspicion of the reality.
"It is monopolized, sure enough, though not by me, if it please your Majesty, but by Joceline Joliffe, the under-keeper, whom we must not disoblige, as we have trusted him so far already, and may have occasion to repose even entire confidence in him. I half think he suspects who Louis Kerneguy may in reality be." "You are an engrossing set, you wooers of Woodstock," said the King, laughing.
"Nay, your reverence may cut the service somewhat short," said Joceline; "assuredly he does not deserve the whole of it; only if something were not to be done, I believe I should flee the country. They were his last words; and methinks he sent Bevis with his glove to put me in mind of them." "Out, fool!
"I must to this gear myself, then," said Joceline, who, a soldier as well as a woodsman, still had great reluctance to the necessary task. Something in the face and broken words of the dying man had made a deep and terrific impression on nerves not easily shaken.
The Colonel hastened to appease this new alarm of the watchful jealousy of his consequence, which, joined with a natural heat of temper which he could not always subdue, were the good man's only faults. They had regained their former friendly footing, when Roger Wildrake returned from the hut of Joceline, and whispered his master that his embassy had been successful.
The effigies of the Saxon bishops in the choir aisles were probably an after-thought of Bishop Joceline, who perhaps thought that this tardy testimonial to the labours of his predecessors would be an effective advertisement of the priority of his see. The labelled stone coffins of Dudoc and Giso are said to have been unearthed within recent memory.
But Albert stopped not to make observations, anxious, it seemed, to get Joceline out of the room; which he achieved by hastily answering his offers of fresh fuel, and more liquor, in the negative, and returning, with equal conciseness, the under-keeper's good wishes for the evening.
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