The Fair Maid of Perth Part 17

"We are informed the Duke of Rothsay has been insulted, and I can scarce keep the Brandanes within door."

"Gallant MacLouis," said Albany, "and you, my trusty Brandanes, the Duke of Rothsay, my princely nephew, is as well as a hopeful gentleman can be. Some scuffle there has been, but all is appeased."

He continued to draw the Earl of Douglas forward. "You see, my lord," he said in his ear, "that, if the word 'arrest' was to be once spoken, it would be soon obeyed, and you are aware your attendants are few for resistance."

Douglas seemed to acquiesce in the necessity of patience for the time.

"If my teeth," he said, "should bite through my lips, I will be silent till it is the hour to speak out."

George of March, in the meanwhile, had a more easy task of pacifying the Prince. "My Lord of Rothsay," he said, approaching him with grave ceremony, "I need not tell you that you owe me something for reparation of honour, though I blame not you personally for the breach of contract which has destroyed the peace of my family. Let me conjure you, by what observance your Highness may owe an injured man, to forego for the present this scandalous dispute."

"My lord, I owe you much," replied Rothsay; "but this haughty and all controlling lord has wounded mine honour."

"My lord, I can but add, your royal father is ill--hath swooned with terror for your Highness's safety."

"Ill!" replied the Prince--"the kind, good old man swooned, said you, my Lord of March? I am with him in an instant."

The Duke of Rothsay sprung from his saddle to the ground, and was dashing into the palace like a greyhound, when a feeble grasp was laid on his cloak, and the faint voice of a kneeling female exclaimed, "Protection, my n.o.ble prince!--protection for a helpless stranger!"

"Hands off, stroller!" said the Earl of March, thrusting the suppliant glee maiden aside.

But the gentler prince paused. "It is true," he said, "I have brought the vengeance of an unforgiving devil upon this helpless creature. O Heaven! what a life, is mine, so fatal to all who approach me! What to do in the hurry? She must not go to my apartments. And all my men are such born reprobates. Ha! thou at mine elbow, honest Harry Smith? What dost thou here?"

"There has been something of a fight, my lord," answered our acquaintance the smith, "between the townsmen and the Southland loons who ride with the Douglas; and we have swinged them as far as the abbey gate."

"I am glad of it--I am glad of it. And you beat the knaves fairly?"

"Fairly, does your Highness ask?" said Henry. "Why, ay! We were stronger in numbers, to be sure; but no men ride better armed than those who follow the b.l.o.o.d.y Heart. And so in a sense we beat them fairly; for, as your Highness knows, it is the smith who makes the man at arms, and men with good weapons are a match for great odds."

While they thus talked, the Earl of March, who had spoken with some one near the palace gate, returned in anxious haste. "My Lord Duke!--my Lord Duke! your father is recovered, and if you haste not speedily, my Lord of Albany and the Douglas will have possession of his royal ear."

"And if my royal father is recovered," said the thoughtless Prince, "and is holding, or about to hold, counsel with my gracious uncle and the Earl of Douglas, it befits neither your lordship nor me to intrude till we are summoned. So there is time for me to speak of my little business with mine honest armourer here."

"Does your Highness take it so?" said the Earl, whose sanguine hopes of a change of favour at court had been too hastily excited, and were as speedily checked. "Then so let it be for George of Dunbar."

He glided away with a gloomy and displeased aspect; and thus out of the two most powerful n.o.blemen in Scotland, at a time when the aristocracy so closely controlled the throne, the reckless heir apparent had made two enemies--the one by scornful defiance and the other by careless neglect. He heeded not the Earl of March's departure, however, or rather he felt relieved from his importunity.

The Prince went on in indolent conversation with our armourer, whose skill in his art had made him personally known to many of the great lords about the court.

"I had something to say to thee, Smith. Canst thou take up a fallen link in my Milan hauberk?"

"As well, please your Highness, as my mother could take up a st.i.tch in the nets she wove. The Milaner shall not know my work from his own."

"Well, but that was not what I wished of thee just now," said the Prince, recollecting himself: "this poor glee woman, good Smith, she must be placed in safety. Thou art man enough to be any woman's champion, and thou must conduct her to some place of safety."

Henry Smith was, as we have seen, sufficiently rash and daring when weapons were in question. But he had also the pride of a decent burgher, and was unwilling to place himself in what might be thought equivocal circ.u.mstances by the sober part of his fellow citizens.

"May it please your Highness," he said, "I am but a poor craftsman. But, though my arm and sword are at the King's service and your Highness's, I am, with reverence, no squire of dames. Your Highness will find, among your own retinue, knights and lords willing enough to play Sir Pandarus of Troy; it is too knightly a part for poor Hal of the Wynd."

"Umph--hah!" said the Prince. "My purse, Edgar." (His attendant whispered him.) "True--true, I gave it to the poor wench. I know enough of your craft, sir smith, and of craftsmen in general, to be aware that men lure not hawks with empty hands; but I suppose my word may pa.s.s for the price of a good armour, and I will pay it thee, with thanks to boot, for this slight service."

"Your Highness may know other craftsmen," said the smith; "but, with reverence, you know not Henry Gow. He will obey you in making a weapon, or in wielding one, but he knows nothing of this petticoat service."

"Hark thee, thou Perthshire mule," said the Prince, yet smiling, while he spoke, at the st.u.r.dy punctilio of the honest burgher; "the wench is as little to me as she is to thee. But in an idle moment, as you may learn from those about thee, if thou sawest it not thyself, I did her a pa.s.sing grace, which is likely to cost the poor wretch her life. There is no one here whom I can trust to protect her against the discipline of belt and bowstring, with which the Border brutes who follow Douglas will beat her to death, since such is his pleasure."

"If such be the case, my liege, she has a right to every honest man's protection; and since she wears a petticoat--though I would it were longer and of a less fanciful fashion--I will answer for her protection as well as a single man may. But where am I to bestow her?"

"Good faith, I cannot tell," said the Prince. "Take her to Sir John Ramorny's lodging. But, no--no--he is ill at ease, and besides, there are reasons; take her to the devil if thou wilt, but place her in safety, and oblige David of Rothsay."

"My n.o.ble Prince," said the smith, "I think, always with reverence, that I would rather give a defenceless woman to the care of the devil than of Sir John Ramorny. But though the devil be a worker in fire like myself, yet I know not his haunts, and with aid of Holy Church hope to keep him on terms of defiance. And, moreover, how I am to convey her out of this crowd, or through the streets, in such a mumming habit may be well made a question."

"For the leaving the convent," said the Prince, "this good monk"

(seizing upon the nearest by his cowl)--"Father Nicholas or Boniface--"

"Poor brother Cyprian, at your Highness's command," said the father.

"Ay--ay, brother Cyprian," continued the Prince--"yes. Brother Cyprian shall let you out at some secret pa.s.sage which he knows of, and I will see him again to pay a prince's thanks for it."

The churchman bowed in acquiescence, and poor Louise, who, during this debate, had looked from the one speaker to the other, hastily said, "I will not scandalise this good man with my foolish garb: I have a mantle for ordinary wear."

"Why, there, Smith, thou hast a friar's hood and a woman's mantle to shroud thee under. I would all my frailties were as well shrouded.

Farewell, honest fellow; I will thank thee hereafter."

Then, as if afraid of farther objection on the smith's part, he hastened into the palace.

Henry Gow remained stupefied at what had pa.s.sed, and at finding himself involved in a charge at once inferring much danger and an equal risk of scandal, both which, joined to a princ.i.p.al share which he had taken, with his usual forwardness, in the fray, might, he saw, do him no small injury in the suit he pursued most anxiously. At the same time, to leave a defenceless creature to the ill usage of the barbarous Galwegians and licentious followers of the Douglas was a thought which his manly heart could not brook for an instant.

He was roused from his reverie by the voice of the monk, who, sliding out his words with the indifference which the holy fathers entertained, or affected, towards all temporal matters, desired them to follow him.

The smith put himself in motion, with a sigh much resembling a groan, and, without appearing exactly connected with the monk's motions, he followed him into a cloister, and through a postern door, which, after looking once behind him, the priest left ajar. Behind them followed Louise, who had hastily a.s.sumed her small bundle, and, calling her little four legged companion, had eagerly followed in the path which opened an escape from what had shortly before seemed a great and inevitable danger.

CHAPTER XII.

Then up and spak the auld gudewife, And wow! but she was grim: "Had e'er your father done the like, It had been ill for him."

Lucky Trumbull.

The party were now, by a secret pa.s.sage, admitted within the church, the outward doors of which, usually left open, had been closed against every one in consequence of the recent tumult, when the rioters of both parties had endeavoured to rush into it for other purposes than those of devotion. They traversed the gloomy aisles, whose arched roof resounded to the heavy tread of the armourer, but was silent under the sandalled foot of the monk, and the light step of poor Louise, who trembled excessively, as much from fear as cold. She saw that neither her spiritual nor temporal conductor looked kindly upon her. The former was an austere man, whose aspect seemed to hold the luckless wanderer in some degree of horror, as well as contempt; while the latter, though, as we have seen, one of the best natured men living, was at present grave to the pitch of sternness, and not a little displeased with having the part he was playing forced upon him, without, as he was constrained to feel, a possibility of his declining it.

His dislike at his task extended itself to the innocent object of his protection, and he internally said to himself, as he surveyed her scornfully: "A proper queen of beggars to walk the streets of Perth with, and I a decent burgher! This tawdry minion must have as ragged a reputation as the rest of her sisterhood, and I am finely sped if my chivalry in her behalf comes to Catharine's ears. I had better have slain a man, were he the best in Perth; and, by hammer and nails, I would have done it on provocation, rather than convoy this baggage through the city."

Perhaps Louise suspected the cause of her conductor's anxiety, for she said, timidly and with hesitation: "Worthy sir, were it not better I should stop one instant in that chapel and don my mantle?"

"Umph, sweetheart, well proposed," said the armourer; but the monk interfered, raising at the same time the finger of interdiction.

"The chapel of holy St. Madox is no tiring room for jugglers and strollers to shift their trappings in. I will presently show thee a vestiary more suited to thy condition."