The Caged Lion, Charlotte M. Yonge [dark books to read TXT] 📗

at his two sons, boys in age, but seniors in excess.  ‘I would we had mair lads like you.  I fear me a heavy reckoning is coming.’

‘You have ever been good lord to all, Sir,’ said Kennedy, affectionately, for he really loved and pitied the soft-hearted Duke.

‘Too good, maybe,’ said Murdoch.  ‘What! the scholar goes with you?’ and he fixed a look on Lily’s face that brought the colour deep into it under her hood.

‘Yes, Sir,’ answered Kennedy, respectfully.  ‘Here, you Tam,’ indicating Malcolm, ‘take him behind you on the sumpter-horse.’

‘Fare ye weel, gentle scholar,’ said Murdoch, taking the hand that Lily was far from offering.  ‘May ye win to your journey’s end safe and sound; and remember,’ he added, holding the fingers tight, and speaking under the hood, ‘if ye have been hardly served, ’twas to make ye the second lady in Scotland.  Take care of her—him, young laddie,’ he added, turning on Malcolm: ‘’tis best so; and mind’ (he spoke in the same wheedling tone of self-excuse), ‘if ye tell the tale down south, nae ill hath been dune till her, and where could she have been mair fitly than beneath her kinsman’s roof?  I’d not let her go, but that young blude is hot and ill to guide.’

An answer would have been hard to find; and it was well that he did not look for any.  Indeed, Malcolm could not have spoken without being heard by the seneschal, and therefore could only bow, take his seat on the baggage-horse, and then feel his sister mounting behind him in an attitude less unfamiliar on occasion even to the high-born ladies of the fifteenth century than to those of our day.  Four years it was since he had felt her touch, four years since she had sat behind him as they followed the King to Coldingham!  His heart swelled with thankfulness as he passed under the gateway, and the arms that clung round his waist clasped him fervently; but neither ventured on a word, amid Kennedy’s escort, and they rode on a couple of miles in the same silence.  Then Kennedy, pausing, said, ‘There lies your way, Brother.  Tam, you may show the scholar the way to the Gray Friars’ Grange, bear them greetings frae me, and halt till ye hear from me.  Fare ye well.’

Lilias trusted her voice to say, ‘Blessings on ye, Sir, for all ye have done for me,’ but Malcolm thought it wiser in his character of retainer to respond only by a bow.

Of course they understood that the direction Kennedy gave was the very one they were not to take, but they followed it till a tall bush of gorse hid them from the escort; and then Malcolm, grasping his sister’s hand, plunged down among the rowans, ferns, and hazels, that covered the steep bank of the river, and so soon as a footing was gained under shelter of a tall rock, threw his arms round her, almost sobbing in an under-tone, ‘My Lily, my tittie!—safe at last!  Oh, God be thanked!  I knew her prayers would be heard!  Oh, would that Patrick were here!’  Then, as her face changed and quivered ready to weep, he cried, ‘Eh, what! art still deeming him dead?’

‘How!’ she cried wildly.  ‘He fell into the hands of your English, and—’

‘He fell into the hands of your King and mine,’ said Malcolm.  ‘Yes, King James dragged him out of the burning house, and wrung his pardon out of King Harry.  He came with me to St. Abbs to fetch you, Lily, and only went back because his knighthood would not serve in this quest like my clerkship.’

‘Patrick living, Patrick safe!  Oh!’ she fell on her knees among the ferns, hid her face in her hands, and drew a long breath.  ‘Malcolm, this is joy overmuch.  The desolation of yesterday, the joy to-day!’

Malcolm, seeing her like one stifled by emotion, fell on his knees beside her, and whispered forth a thanksgiving.  She rested with her head on his shoulder in content till he started up, saying in a lively manner, ‘Come, Lily, we must be on our way.  A very bonnie young clerk you are, with your berry-brown locks cut so short round your face.’

Lilias blushed up to the short dark curls she had left herself.  ‘Had I thought he lived, I could scarce have done it.’

‘What, not to get to him, silly maid?  Here,’ as he shook out and donned the gown he had brought rolled up, ‘now am I a scholar too.  Stay, you must take off this badge of the bachelor; you have only been in a monastery school, you know; you are my young brother—what shall we call you?’

‘Davie,’ softly suggested Lilias.

‘Ay, Davie then, that I’ve come home to fetch to share my Paris lear.  You can be very shy and bashful, you know, and leave all the knapping of Latin and logic to me.’

‘If it is such as you did with Jamie Kennedy,’ said Lilias, ‘it will indeed be well.  Oh, Malcolm, I sat and marvelled at ye—so gleg ye took him up.  How could ye learn it?  And ye are a brave warrior too in battles,’ she added, looking him over with a sister’s fond pride.

‘We have had no battle, no pitched field,’ said Malcolm ‘but I have seen war.’

‘So that ugly words can never be flung in your face again!’ cried Lilias.  ‘Are you knighted, brother?’

‘No, but they say I have won my spurs.  I’ll tell you all, Lily, as we walk.  Only let me bestow this iron cap where some mavis may nestle in it.  Ay, and the boots too, which scarce befit a clerk.  There, your hand, Clerk Davie; we must make westward to-day, lest poor Duke Murdoch be forced to send to chase us.  After that, for the Border and Patie.’

So brother and sister set forth on their wandering—and truly it was a happy journey.  The weather favoured them, and their hearts were light.  Lilias, delivered from terrible, hopeless captivity, her brother beside her, and now not a brother to be pitied and protected, but to protect her and be exulted in, trod the heather with an exquisite sense of joy and freedom that buoyed her up against all hardships; and Malcolm was at peace, as he had seldom been.  His happiness was not exactly like his sister’s in her renewed liberty and restoration to love and joy, for he had known a wider range of life, and though really younger than Lily, his more complicated history could not but make him older in thought and mind.  Another self-abnegation was beginning to rise upon him, as he travelled slowly southwards by stages suited to his sister’s powers, and by another track than that by which he had gone.  On the moor, or by the burn side, there was peace and brightness; but wherever he met with man he found something to sadden him.  Did they rest in a monastery, there was often irregularity, seldom devotion, always crass ignorance.  The manse was often a scene of such dissolute life that Malcolm shunned to bring his sister into the sight of it; the peel tower was the dwelling of savagery; the farm homestead either rude and lawless or in constant terror; the black spaces on many a brae side showed where dwellings had been burned; more than once they passed skeletons depending from the trees or lying rotting by the way-side.  And it was frightful to Malcolm, after his four years’ absence, to find how little Lilias shared his horror, taking quite naturally what to Alice Montagu would have seemed beyond the bounds of possibility, and would have set Esclairmonde’s soul on fire, while Lilias seemed to think it her brother’s amiable peculiarity to be shocked, or to long to set such things straight.

He felt the truth of James Kennedy’s words—that reformation could not be the sole work of the King, but that his hands must be strengthened by all the few who knew that a different state of things was possible, and that, above all, the clergy needed to be awakened into vigour and intelligence.  Formerly, the miserable aspect of the country had merely terrified him, and driven him to strive to hide his head in a convent; but the strength and the sense of duty he had acquired had brought his heart to respond to Kennedy’s call to work.

Esclairmonde’s words wrought within him beyond her own ken or purpose in speaking them.  He began to understand that to bury himself in an Italian university and dive into Aristotle’s sayings, to heap up his own memory with the stores of thought he loved, or to plunge into the mazes of mathematics, philosophy, and music, while his brethren in his own country were tearing one another to pieces for lack of any good influence to teach or show them better things, would be a storing of treasure for himself on earth, a pursuit of the light of knowledge indeed, but not a wooing of the light of Wisdom, the true Light of the World, as seen in Him who went about doing good.  To complete his present course was, he knew, necessary.  He had seen enough of really learned scholars to know the depths of his own ignorance, and to be aware that certain books must be read under guidance, and certain studies gone through, before his cultivation would be on a level with the standard of the best working clergy of the English Church—such as Chicheley, Waynflete, or the like.  He would therefore remain at Oxford, he thought, long enough to take his Master of Arts degree, and then, though to his own perceptions only the one-eyed among the blind, he would make the real sacrifice of himself in the rude and cruel world of Scotland.

He knew that his king was well satisfied with Patrick, and also that a man of sound heart and prompt, hard hand was far fitter to rule as a secular lord than his own more fine-drawn mature could ever be; but as a priest, with the influence that his birth and the King’s friendship would give him, he already saw chances of raising the tone of the clergy, and thus improving the wild and lawless people.

A deep purpose of self-devotion was growing up in his soul, but without saddening him, only rendering him more energetic and cheerful than his sister had ever known him.

As they walked together over the long stretches of moor, many were Lily’s questions; and Malcolm beguiled the way with many a story of camp and court, told both for his own satisfaction in her sympathy, and with the desire to make the Scottish lassie see what was the life and what the thoughts of ladies of her own degree in other lands, so that the Lady of Glenuskie might be awake to somewhat of the high purpose of virtuous home government to which Alice of Salisbury had been trained.

As to the Flemish heiress, no representation would induce Lilias to love her.  Reject Malcolm for a convent’s sake!  It was unpardonable; and as to a bedeswoman, working uncloistered in the streets, Lily viewed that as neither the one thing nor the other, neither religious nor secular; and she was persuaded that a little exertion on the part of the brother, whom she viewed as a paladin, would overcome all coyness on the lady’s part.

Malcolm found it vain to try to show his sister his sense of his own deserts, and equally so to declare that if the maiden should so yield, she would indeed be the Demoiselle de Luxemburg to whom he was pledged, but not the Esclairmonde whom his better part adored.  So he let the matter pass by, and both enjoyed their masquing in one another’s company as a holiday such as they could never have again.

They had no serious alarms; the pursuit must have been disconcerted, and the two young scholars were not worth the attention of freebooters.  Their winsomeness of manner won them kindness wherever they harboured; and thus, after many days, without molestation they came to the walls of Berwick.  And now, while Malcolm thought his difficulties at an end, a horror of bashfulness fell upon Lilias.  She had been Clerk Davie merrily enough while there was no one to suspect her, but the transmutation into her proper self filled her with shame.

She hung back, and could be hardly dragged forward to the embattled gateway of the bridge by her brother—who, as the guards, jealously cautious even in this time of peace, called out to him to stand, showed his ring bearing the royal arms, and desired to speak within the captain of the garrison, who was commanding in the name of the Earl of Northumberland, Governor of Berwick and Warden of the Marches, and who had entertained him on his way north, and would have been warned by Patrick of his probable return in this guise.

Instead of the stalwart form of the