"Cheer thee, my noble lord and brother," he exclaimed, "the Lady Guendolen is not dead, nor like to die this time. 'Tis only fear, and perchance her fall, for it was a heavy one, that hath made her faint. Bustle, knaves, bustle. Bring water from the spring yonder. Has no one a leathern bottiau? You, Damian, gallop, as if you would win your spurs of gold by riding, to the sumpter mule with the panniers. It should be at the palmer's spring by this time; for, hark, the bells from the gray brothers' chapel, in the valley by the river, are chiming for the noontide service. Bring wine and essences, electuaries and ambergris, if the refectioner have any with him. You, Raoul," he continued, addressing a sturdy, grim-featured old verdurer, who was hanging over the still senseless girl with an expression of solicitude hardly natural to his rugged and scar-seamed countenance, "take a led horse, and hie thee to the abbey; tell the good prior what hath befallen, and pray the brother mediciner he will ride this way, as speedily as he may; and you," turning to the old, white-haired seneschal, "send up some of the varlets to the castle, for the horse-litter; she may not ride home this day." In the mean time, while he was accumulating order on order, while pages and horse-boys, grooms and esquires, were galloping off, in different directions, as if with spurs of fire, and while the barons themselves were awkwardly endeavoring to perform those ministrations for the fair young creature, which they were much more used themselves to receive at the hands of the softer sex, who were in those rude days often the chirurgeons and leeches, as well as the comforters and soothers of the bed of pain and sickness, than to do such offices for others, the bold defender of Guendolen--Kenric the dark-haired--lay in his blood, stark and cold, deemed dead, and quite forgotten, even by the lowest of the Norman varletry, who held themselves too noble to waste services upon a Saxon, much more upon a thral and bondsman. They--such of them, that is to say, as were not needed in direct attendance on the persons of the nobles, or as had not been dispatched in search of aid--applied themselves, with characteristic zeal and eagerness, to tend and succor the nobler animals, as they held them, of the chase; while they abandoned their brother man and fellow-countryman, military Levites as they were, to his chances of life or death, without so much as even caring to ask or examine whether he were numbered with the living or the dead. The palfrey was first seen to, and pronounced dead; when his rich housings were stripped off carefully, and cleaned as well as time and place permitted; when the carcass was dragged off the road, and concealed, for the moment, with fern leaves and boughs lopped from the neighboring bushes, while something was said among the stable boys of sending out some of the "dog Saxon serfs" to bury him on the morrow.