'Sir, Sir!' cried Malcolm petulantly. 'You took me from the straight way. You shall not hinder my return.'

'I hinder no true purpose,' said King James. 'I only hinder another rash and hasty pledge, to be felt as a fetter, or left broken on your conscience. Silence now. When men are sad and spent, they cannot speak as befits them, and had best hold their peace.'

These words were spoken on the way up the stair that led to the apartments of the King of Scots. On opening the door of the larger room, the first thing they saw was the tall figure of a distinguished looking knight, who, as they entered, flung himself at King James's feet, fervently exclaiming, 'O my Liege! accept my homage! Never was vassal so bound to his lord by thankfulness for his life, and for far more than his life!'

'Sir Patrick Drummond, I am glad to see you better at ease,' said James. Nay, suffer me,' he added, giving his hand to raise the knight; but finding it grasped, and kissed with passionate devotion, almost overpowering the only half-recovered knight, so that James was forced to use strength to support him; and would at once have lifted him up, but the warm-hearted Patrick resisted, almost sobbing out, 'Nay, Sir! king of my heart indeed! let me first thank you. I knew not how much more I owed you than the poor life you saved-my father's rescue, and that of all that was most dear.'

'Speak of such things seated, my good friend,' said James, trying to raise him; but Drummond still did not second his efforts.

'I have not given my parole of honour as the captive whose life is again due to you.'

'You must give that to the Duke of Bedford, Sir Patrick,' said James. 'I know not if I am to be put into ward myself. In any case, you are safe, by the good King's grace, so you pledge yourself to draw no sword against England in Scotland or France till ransom be accepted for you.'

'Alack!' said Patrick, 'I have neither sword nor ransom! I would I knew what was to be done with the life you have given me, my Lord.'

'I will find a use for it, never fear,' said James, sadly but kindly. 'Be my knight for the present, till better days come for us both.'

'With my whole heart!' said Patrick fervently. 'Yours am I for ever, my Liege.'

'Then my first command is that you should rise, and rest,' said James, assisting the knight to regain his feet, and placing him in the only chair in the room. 'You must become a whole man as soon as may be.'

For Patrick's arm was in a sling, and evidently still painful and useless; and he sank back, breathless and unresisting, like one who had by no means regained perfect health, while his handsome features looked worn and pale. 'I fear me,' said James, as the two cousins silently shook hands, that you have moved over soon.-You surely had my message, Bairdsbrae ?'

'Oh yes, my Lord,' replied Baird; but the lad was the harder to hold; and after the fever was gone, we deemed he could well brook the journey by water. 'Twas time I was here to guide ye too, my Lord; you and the callant baith look sair forefaughten.'

'We have had a sad time of it, Nigel,' said James, with trembling lip.

And if Brewster tells me right, ye've not tasted food the whole day?' said Nigel, laying an authoritative hand on his royal pupil. 'Nay, sit ye down; here comes the varlets with the meal I bade them have ready.'

James passively yielded, courteously signing to the others to share the food that was spread on a table; and with the same scarcely conscious grace, making inquiries, which elicited that Patrick Drummond's hurts had been caused by his horse falling, and rolling over with him, whilst with Sir John Swinton and other Scottish knights he was reconnoitring the line of the English march. He was too much injured to be taken back to the far distant camp, and had accordingly been entrusted to the French farmer, with no attendant but a young French horse-boy, since he was too poor to keep a squire. He knew nothing more, for fever had run high; and he had not even been sensible of his desertion by his French hosts on the approach of the English, far less of the fire, and of his rescue by the King and Malcolm; but for this, he seemed inclined to compensate to the utmost, by the intense eagerness of devotion with which he regarded James, who sat meanwhile crushed down by the weight of his own grief.

'I can eat no more, Baird,' said he, swallowing down a draught of wine, and pushing aside his trencher. Your licence, gentlemen. I must be alone.-Take care of the lads, Nigel. Malcolm is spent too. His deft service was welcome to-to my dearest brother.'

And though he hastily shut himself into his own inner chamber, it was not till they had seen that his grief was becoming uncontrollable. Patrick could not but murmur, 'Dearest brother!'

'Ay, like brothers they loved!' said Baird gravely.

A strange brotherhood,' began Drummond.

But Malcolm cried, with much agitation, 'Not a word, Patie! You know not what you say. Take heed of profaning the name of one who is gone to the Sion above.'

'You turned English, our wee Malcolm!' exclaimed Drummond, in

amaze.

6

There is no English, French, or Scot, where he is gone!' cried Malcolm. 'No Babel! O Patie, I have been far fallen! I have done you in heart a grievous wrong! but if I have turned back in time, it is his doing that lies there.'

His! what, Harry of Lancaster's?' demanded the bewildered Patrick. 'What had he to do with you?'

He has been my only true friend here!' cried Malcolm. 'Oh, if my

hand be free from actual spoil and bloodshed, it was his doing! Oh, that he could hear me bless him for the chastisement I took so bitterly!'

Chastisement!' demanded Patrick. 'The English King dared chastise you! of Scots blood royal! 'Tis well he is dead!'.

'The laddie's well-nigh beside himself!' said Baird. But he speaks true. This king, whom Heaven assoilzie, kept a tight hand over the youngsters; and falling on Lord Malcolm and some other callants, making free with a house at Meaux, dealt some blows, of which my young lord found it hard to stomach his share; though I am glad to see he is come to a better mind! Ay, 'tis pity of this King Harry! Brave and leal was he; never spake an untrue word; never turned eye for fear, nor foot for weariness, nor hand for toil, nor nose for ill savour. A man, look you, to be trusted; never failing his word for good or ill! Right little love has there been between him and me; but I could weep like my own lad in there, to think I shall never see that knightly presence more, nor hear those frank gladsome voices of the boys, as they used to shout up and down Windsor forest.'

"You too, Sir Nigel! and with a king like ours!'

'Ay, Sir Patrick! and if he be such a king as Scotland never had since St. David, and maybe not then, I'm free to own as much of it is due to King Harry as to his own noble self.-Did ye say they had streekit him in the chapel, Lord Malcolm? I'd fain look on the bonnie face of him, I'll ne'er look on his like again.'

No sooner had old Bairdsbrae gone, than Malcolm flung himself down before his cousin, crying, 'O Patrick, you will hear me ! I cannot rest till you know how changed I have been.'

'Changed!' said Patrick; 'ay, and for the better! Why, Malcolm, I never durst hope to see you so sturdy and so heartsome. My father would have been blithe to see you such a gallant young squire. Even the halt is gone!'

'Nearly,' said Malcolm. But I would fain be puny and puling, to have the clear heart that once I had. Oh, hear me! hear me and pardon me, Patie!'

And Malcolm, in his agitation, poured forth the whole story of his having shifted from his old cherished purpose of devoting himself to the service of Heaven, and leaving lands and vassals to the stronger hands of Patrick and Lilias; how, having thus given himself to the world, he had fallen into temptation; how he had let himself be led to persecute with his suit a noble lady, vowed like himself; how he had almost agreed to marry her by force; and how he had been running into the ordinary dissipations of the camp, abstaining from confession, avoiding Mass; disobeying orders, plunging into scenes of plunder, till he had almost been the death of Patrick, whom he had already so cruelly wronged. So felt the boy. Fresh from that death-bed, the evils his conscience had protested against from the first appeared to him frightfully heinous; and his anguish of self-reproach was such, that Patrick listened in the

greatest anxiety lest he should hear of some deadly stain on his young kinsman's scutcheon; but when the tale was told, and he had demanded, 'Is that all?' and found that no further overt act was alleged against Malcolm, he breathed a long sigh, and muttered, 'You daft laddie! you had fairly startled me! So this is the coil, is it? Who ever told you to put on a cowl, I should like to know? Why, 'twas what my poor father ever declared against. I take your lands? By my troth! 'twould be enough to make me break faith with your sister if I could!'

'The vow was in my heart,' faltered Malcolm.

'In a fule's head!' said Patrick. What right have babes to be talking of vows? "Twould be the best tidings I've heard for many a long day, that you were wedded to a lass with a good tocher, and fit to guide your silly pate. What's that? Her vows! If they are no better than yours, the sooner they are forgot the better.' If she had another love, 'twould be another matter; but with a bishop on your side, you've naught to fear.'

Malcolm turned away, sick at heart. To him his present position had become absolute terror. His own words had worked him up to an alarming sense of having lapsed from high aims to mere selfishness; of having profaned vows, consented to violence, and fallen away from grace; and he was in an almost feverish passion to utter something that would irrevocably bind him to his former intentions; but here were the King and Patrick both conspiring to silence him, and hold him back to his fallen and perilous state. Nay, Patrick even derided his penitence. Patrick was an honourable knight, a religious man, as times went; but he had been brought up in a much rougher and more unscrupulous school than Malcolm, and had been hardened by years of service as a soldier of fortune.

The Armagnac camp was not like that of England. Warriors of such piety and strictness as Henry and Bedford had never come within his ken; and that any man, professing to be a soldier, should hesitate at the licence of war, was incomprehensible to him. The discipline of Henry's army had been scoffed at in the French camp, and every infraction of it hailed as a token of hypocrisy; and to the stout Scot, Malcolm's grief for the rapine at Meaux, which after all he had not committed, seemed a simple absurdity. Even his own danger, on the second occasion, did not make him alter his opinion; it was all the fortune of war. And he was not sure that he had not best have been stifled at once, since his hands were tied from warfare. And as for Lily-how was he to win her now? Then, as Malcolm opened his mouth, Patrick sharply charged him to hold his tongue as to that folly, unless he wanted to drive him to make a vow on his side, that he would turn Knight of Rhodes, and never wed.

Malcolm, wearied out with excitement, came at last to weeping that no one would hear or understand him; but the scene was ended by Bairdsbrae, who, returning, brought a leech with him, who at once took the command of Patrick, and ordered him to his bed.

Malcolm could not rest. He was feverish with the shock of grief and awe, and absorbed in the thought which had mastered him, and which was much dwelt on in the middle ages:—the monastic path, going straight as a sunbeam to Heaven; the secular, twining its way through a tortuous difficult course—the 'broad way,' tending downward to the abyss. To his terrified apprehension, he had abandoned the direct and narrow path for the fatal road, and there might at any moment be captured, and whirled away by the grisly phantom Death, who had just snatched the mightiest in his inevitable clutch; and with something of the timidity of his nature, he was in absolute terror, until he should be able to set himself back on the shining road, from which he had swerved, and be rid of the load of transgression, which seemed ready to sink him into the gulf.

Those few and perfunctory confessions, to a courtly priest who knew nothing about him, and was sure not to be hard on a young prince, now seemed to add to his guilt; and wandering down-stairs, towards the chapel, he met a train of ecclesiastics slowly leaving it, having just been relieved by a bevy of monks from a neighbouring convent, who took up the chants where they had left them.

Looking up at them, he recognized Dr. Bennet's bent head; and throwing himself before him on his knee, he gasped, 'O Father, Father! hear me! Take me back! Give me hope!'

'What means this, my young Lord?' said Dr. Bennet, pausing, while his brethren passed on. 'Are you sick?' he added kindly, seeing the whiteness of Malcolm's face, and his startled eye.

'Oh, no, no! only sick at heart at my own madness, and the doom on it! O Sir, hear me! Take my vow again! give me absolution once more to a true shrift. Oh, if you will hear me, it shall be honest this time! Only put me in the way again.'

He it was whose ministra

To him it had been the loss

The chaplain was sorely sad and weary. tions had chiefly comforted the dying King. of a deeply loved son and pupil, as well as of almost unbounded hopes for the welfare of the Church; and he had had likewise, in the freshness of his sorrow, to take the lead in the ecclesiastical ceremonies that ensued, so that both in body and mind he was well-nigh worn out, and longed for peace in which to face his own private sorrow; but the wild words and anguished looks of the young Scot shewed him that the case was one for immediate hearing; and he drew the lad into the confessional, authoritatively calmed his agitation, and prepared to hear the outpouring of the boy's self-reproach.

He heard it all-sifting facts from fancies, and learning the early purpose, the terror at the cruel world, the longing for peace and shelter; the desire to smoothe his sister's way, which had led him to devote himself in heart to the cloister, though never permitted openly to pledge himself. Then the discovery that the world was less thorny than he had expected; the allurement of royal favour and greatness; the charm of amusement, VOL. 8.

3

PART 43,