Rewards and Fairies - Penn State University

Rudyard Kipling
folk.” I gathered up my draft and crumpled it under my arm. him the money; his smile as though he’d won half France! I
“If that’s all you need of me I’ll be gone,” I says. “I’m pressed.” thought of my own silly pride and foolish expectations that
‘He turns him round and fumbles in a corner. “Too pressed some day he’d honour me as a master craftsman. I thought of
to be made a knight, Sir Harry?” he says, and comes at me the broken-tipped sword he’d found behind the hangings; the
smiling, with three-quarters of a rusty sword.
dirt of the cold room, and his cold eye, wrapped up in his
‘I pledge you my Mark I never guessed it was the King till own concerns, scarcely resting on me. Then I remembered
that moment. I kneeled, and he tapped me on the shoulder. the solemn chapel roof and the bronzes about the stately tomb
‘“Rise up, Sir Harry Dawe,” he says, and, in the same breath, he’d lie in, and—d’ye see? —the unreason of it all—the mad
“I’m pressed, too,” and slips through the tapestries, leaving high humour of it all—took hold on me till I sat me down
me like a stuck calf.
on a dark stair-head in a passage, and laughed till I could laugh
‘It come over me, in a bitter wave like, that here was I, a no more. What else could I have done?
master craftsman, who had worked no bounds, soul or body, ‘I never heard his feet behind me—he always walked like a
to make the King’s tomb and chapel a triumph and a glory cat—but his arm slid round my neck, pulling me back where
for all time; and here, d’ye see, I was made knight, not for I sat, till my head lay on his chest, and his left hand held the
anything I’d slaved over, or given my heart and guts to, but knife plumb over my heart—Benedetto! Even so I laughed—
expressedly because I’d saved him thirty pounds and a tongue- the fit was beyond my holding—laughed while he ground
lashing from Catherine of Castille—she that had asked for his teeth in my ear. He was stark crazed for the time.
the ship. That thought shrivelled me with insides while I was ‘“Laugh,” he said. “Finish the laughter. I’ll not cut ye short.
folding away my draft. On the heels of it—maybe you’ll see Tell me now” —he wrenched at my head—“why the King
why—I began to grin to myself. I thought of the earnest sim- chose to honour you,—you—you—you lickspittle Englishplicity
of the man—the King, I should say—because I’d saved man? I am full of patience now. I have waited so long.” Then
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