The Caged Lion

by Шарлотта Мэри Йондж

  Malcolm would much rather have discussed the means of rescuing his sister, but James Kennedy's heart was full of a youth's ardent plans for the re-awakening of religion in his country, chiefly through the improved education of the clergy, and it was not easy to bring his discourse to a close.

  'You--you were to wed a great Flemish heiress?' he said. 'You will do your part, Cousin, in the founding of a University--such as has changed ourselves so greatly.'

  Malcolm smiled. 'My only bride is learning,' he said; 'my other betrothal is but in name, for the safety of the lady.'

  'Then,' cried Kennedy joyfully, 'you will give yourself. Learning and culture turned to God's service, for this poor country's sake, in one of birth like you, may change her indeed.'

  Was this the reading of Esclairmonde's riddle? suddenly thought Malcolm. Was the true search for heavenly Light, then, to consist in holding up to his countrymen the lamp he was kindling for himself? Must true wisdom consist in treasuring knowledge, not for his own honour among learned men, or the delectation of his own mind, but to scatter it among these rude northern souls? Must the vision of learned research and scholarly calm vanish, as cloistral peace, and chivalrous love and glory, had vanished before? and was the lot of a hard-working secular priest that which called him?

  CHAPTER XVIII: CLERK DAVIE

  For Malcolm to speak with his sister was well-nigh an impossibility. Had he been detected, he would have been immediately treated as a spy, and the suspicion thus excited would have been a dangerous preparation for the King as well as for himself; nor was there any pretext for giving the wandering scholar an interview with her.

  But harsh and strict as was the Duchess of Albany--a tall, raw-boned, red-haired woman, daughter of the fierce old Earl of Lennox--and resolved as she was to bend Lilias by persecution to accept her son, she could not debar a young gentleman of the royal kindred, like James Kennedy, from entering the apartment where the ladies of the family sat with their needles; and the Regent, half from pity, half from shame, had refused to permit Lilias Stewart's being treated as a mere captive.

  Thus Malcolm remained in Kennedy's room in much anxiety, while his cousin went forth to do his best in his cause, and after some hours returned to him with the tidings that he had succeeded in letting Lily know that he was in the Castle. Standing over her while she bent over her embroidery, and thus concealing her trembling agitation, he had found it possible to whisper in her ears the tidings of her brother having come to save her, and of hearing her insist that Malcolm, 'wee Malcolm, must run no peril, but that she would do and dare everything--nay, would prefer death itself to Walter Stewart.'

  'Have you any device in this matter?' demanded James Kennedy, when he had thus spoken.

  'Have you your college gown here?' inquired Malcolm.

  'I have, in yon kist,' said Kennedy. 'Would you disguise her therein? You and she are nearly of a height.'

  'Ay,' said Malcolm. 'The plot I thought on is this--the worst is that the risk rests with you.'

  'That is naught, less than naught,' said Kennedy. 'I had risked myself ten times over had I seen any hope for her in so doing.'

  Malcolm then explained his plan, namely, that if Lilias could have Kennedy's gown conveyed to her, she should array herself therein, and be conducted out of the castle by her cousin by one gate, he himself in secular garb going by another, and joining at some place of meeting, whence, as a pair of brothers, Malcolm and she might gain the English border.

  James Kennedy considered, and then added that he could improve on the plan. He had long intended leaving Doune for his brother's castle, but only tarried in case he could do anything for Lilias. He would at supper publicly announce to the Regent his departure for the next day, and also say that he had detained his fellow-scholar to go within him. Then arranging for Malcolm's exit in a secular dress among his escort, as one of the many unobserved loungers, Lilias should go with him in very early morning in the bachelor's gown, which he would place in a corner of a dark passage, where she could find it. Then if Malcolm and she turned aside from his escort, as the pursuit as soon as her evasion was discovered would be immediately directed on himself, they would have the more time for escape.

  It was a complicated plan, but there was this recommendation, that Malcolm need not lose sight of his sister. Clerk as he was, young Kennedy could not ride without an escort, and among his followers he could place Malcolm. Accordingly at supper he announced his desire to leave Doune at dawn next morning, and was, as a matter of course, courteously pressed to remain. Malcolm in the meantime eluded observation as much as possible while watching his sister, who, in spite of all her efforts, was pale and red by turns, never durst glance towards him, and trembled whenever any one went near him.

  The ladies at length swept out of the hall, and Robert and Alexander called for more wine for a rere-supper to drink to James's good journey; but Kennedy tore himself from their hospitable violence, and again he and Malcolm were alone, spending a night of anxiety and consultation.

  Morning came; Malcolm arrayed himself in a somewhat worn dress of Kennedy's, with the belt and dirk he had carried under his scholar's garb now without, and a steel cap that his cousin had procured for him on his head. With a parcel in his arms of Kennedy's gear, he might pass for a servant sent from home to meet him; and so soon as this disguise was complete, Kennedy opened the door. On the turret stair stood a hooded black figure, that started as the door opened.

  Malcolm's heart might well seem to leap to his lips, but both brother and sister felt the tension of nerve that caution required too much to give way for a moment.

  Kennedy whispered, 'Your license, fair Cousin,' and passed on with the free step of lordly birth, while a few paces behind the seeming scholar humbly followed, and Malcolm, putting on his soldier's tread and the careless free-and-easy bearing he had affected before Meaux, brought up the rear with Master Kennedy's mails.

  As they anticipated, the household was not troubling itself to rise to see the priest off. Not that this made the coast clear, for the floor of the hall was cumbered with snoring sleepers in all sorts of attitudes--nay, at the upper table, the flushed, debauched, though young and handsome, faces of Robert and Alexander Stewart might have been detected among those who lay snoring among the relics of their last night's revel.

  The old steward was, however, up and alert, ready to offer the stirrup-cup, and the horses were waiting in the court; but what they had by no means expected or desired was that Duke Murdoch himself, in his long furred gown, came slowly across the hall to bid his young kinsman Kennedy farewell.

  'Speed you well, my lad,' he said kindly. 'I ask ye not to tarry in what ye must deem a graceless household;' and he looked sadly across 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 be
ing 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.