'Not till my chamberlain attends with some clothes and necessaries, and you may call my sewer also.'
'My lord,' said Ramorny, 'time presses, and preparation will but excite suspicion. Your officers will follow with the mails tomorrow. For tonight, I trust my poor service may suffice to wait on you at table and chamber.'
'Nay, this time it is thou who forgets,' said the Prince, touching the wounded arm with his walking rod. 'Recollect, man, thou canst neither carve a capon nor tie a point—a goodly sewer or valet of the mouth!'
Ramorny grinned with rage and pain; for his wound, though in a way of healing, was still highly sensitive, and even the pointing a finger towards it made him tremble.
'Will your Highness now be pleased to take boat?'
'Not till I take leave of the Lord Constable. Rothsay must not slip away, like a thief from a prison, from the house of Errol. Summon him hither.'
'My Lord Duke,' said Ramorny, 'it may be dangerous to our plan.'
'To the devil with danger, thy plan, and thyself! I must and will act to Errol as becomes us both.'
The earl entered, agreeable to the Prince's summons.
'I gave you this trouble, my lord,' said Rothsay, with the dignified courtesy which he knew so well how to assume, 'to thank you for your hospitality and your good company. I can enjoy them no longer, as pressing affairs call me to Falkland.'
'My lord,' said the Lord High Constable, 'I trust your Grace remembers that you are—under ward.'
'How!—under ward? If I am a prisoner, speak plainly; if not, I will take my freedom to depart.'
'I would, my lord, your Highness would request his Majesty's permission for this journey. There will be much displeasure.'
'Mean you displeasure against yourself, my lord, or against me?'
'I have already said your Highness lies in ward here; but if you determine to break it, I have no warrant— God forbid—to put force on your inclinations. I can but entreat your Highness, for your own sake—'
'Of my own interest I am the best judge. Good evening to you, my lord.'
The wilful Prince stepped into the boat with Dwining and Ramorny, and, waiting for no other attendance, Eviot pushed off the vessel, which descended the Tay rapidly by the assistance of sail and oar and of the ebb tide.
For some space the Duke of Rothsay appeared silent and moody, nor did his companions interrupt his reflections. He raised his head at length and said: 'My father loves a jest, and when all is over he will take this frolic at no more serious rate than it deserves—a fit of youth, with which he will deal as he has with others. Yonder, my masters, shows the old hold of Kinfauns, frowning above the Tay. Now, tell me, John Ramorny, how thou hast dealt to get the Fair Maid of Perth out of the hands of yonder bull headed provost; for Errol told me it was rumoured that she was under his protection.'
'Truly she was, my lord, with the purpose of being transferred to the patronage of the Duchess—I mean of the Lady Marjory of Douglas. Now, this beetle headed provost, who is after all but a piece of blundering valiancy, has, like most such, a retainer of some slyness and cunning, whom he uses in all his dealings, and whose suggestions he generally considers as his own ideas. Whenever I would possess myself of a landward baron, I address myself to such a confidant, who, in the present case, is called Kitt Henshaw, an old skipper upon the Tay, and who, having in his time sailed as far as Campvere, holds with Sir Patrick Charteris the respect due to one who has seen foreign countries. This his agent I have made my own, and by his means have insinuated various apologies in order to postpone the departure of Catharine for Falkland.'
'But to what good purpose?'
'I know not if it is wise to tell your Highness, lest you should disapprove of my views. I meant the officers of the Commission for inquiry into heretical opinions should have found the Fair Maid at Kinfauns, for our beauty is a peevish, self willed swerver from the church; and certes, I designed that the knight should have come in for his share of the fines and confiscations that were about to be inflicted. The monks were eager enough to be at him, seeing he hath had frequent disputes with them about the salmon tithe.'
'But wherefore wouldst thou have ruined the knight's fortunes, and brought the beautiful young woman to the stake, perchance?'
'Pshaw, my Lord Duke! monks never burn pretty maidens. An old woman might have been in some danger; and as for my Lord Provost, as they call him, if they had clipped off some of his fat acres, it would have been some atonement for the needless brave he put on me in St. John's church.'
'Methinks, John, it was but a base revenge,' said Rothsay.
'Rest ye contented, my lord. He that cannot right himself by the hand must use his head. Well, that chance was over by the tender hearted Douglas's declaring in favour of tender conscience; and then, my lord, old Henshaw found no further objections to carrying the Fair Maid of Perth to Falkland, not to share the dulness of the Lady Marjory's society, as Sir Patrick Charteris and she herself doth opine, but to keep your Highness from tiring when we return from hunting in the park.'
There was again a long pause, in which the Prince seemed to muse deeply. At length he spoke. 'Ramorny, I have a scruple in this matter; but if I name it to thee, the devil of sophistry, with which thou art possessed, will argue it out of me, as it has done many others. This girl is the most beautiful, one excepted, whom I ever saw or knew; and I like her the more that she bears some features of—Elizabeth of Dunbar. But she, I mean Catharine Glover, is contracted, and presently to be wedded, to Henry the armourer, a craftsman unequalled for skill, and a man at arms yet unmatched in the barrace. To follow out this intrigue would do a good fellow too much wrong.'
'Your Highness will not expect me to be very solicitous of Henry Smith's interest,' said Ramorny, looking at his wounded arm.
'By St. Andrew with his shored cross, this disaster of thine is too much harped upon, John Ramorny! Others are content with putting a finger into every man's pie, but thou must thrust in thy whole gory hand. It is done, and cannot be undone; let it be forgotten.'
'Nay, my lord, you allude to it more frequently than I,' answered the knight—'in derision, it is true; while I— but I can be silent on the subject if I cannot forget it.'
'Well, then, I tell thee that I have scruple about this intrigue. Dost thou remember, when we went in a frolic to hear Father Clement preach, or rather to see this fair heretic, that he spoke as touchingly as a minstrel about the rich man taking away the poor man's only ewe lamb?'
'A great matter, indeed,' answered Sir John, 'that this churl's wife's eldest son should be fathered by the Prince of Scotland! How many earls would covet the like fate for their fair countesses? and how many that have had such good luck sleep not a grain the worse for it?'
'And if I might presume to speak,' said the mediciner, 'the ancient laws of Scotland assigned such a privilege to every feudal lord over his female vassals, though lack of spirit and love of money hath made many exchange it for gold.'
'I require no argument to urge me to be kind to a pretty woman; but this Catharine has been ever cold to me,' said the Prince.
'Nay, my lord,' said Ramorny, 'if, young, handsome, and a prince, you know not how to make yourself acceptable to a fine woman, it is not for me to say more.'
'And if it were not far too great audacity in me to speak again, I would say,' quoth the leech, 'that all Perth knows that the Gow Chrom never was the maiden's choice, but fairly forced upon her by her father. I know for certain that she refused him repeatedly.'
'Nay, if thou canst assure us of that, the case is much altered,' said Rothsay. 'Vulcan was a smith as well as Harry Wynd; he would needs wed Venus, and our chronicles tell us what came of it.'
'Then long may Lady Venus live and be worshipped,' said Sir John Ramorny, 'and success to the gallant knight Mars who goes a-wooing to her goddess-ship!'
The discourse took a gay and idle turn for a few minutes; but the Duke of Rothsay soon dropped it. 'I have left,' he said, 'yonder air of the prison house behind me, and yet my spirits scarce revive. I feel that drowsy, not unpleasing, yet melancholy mood that comes over us when exhausted by exercise or satiated with pleasure. Some music now, stealing on the ear, yet not loud enough to make us lift the eye, were a treat for the gods.'
'Your Grace has but to speak your wishes, and the nymphs of the Tay are as favourable as the fair ones upon the shore. Hark! it is a lute.'
