“For God’s sake,” said he, “bring me a cup of red wine, for my wits are wandering. Deil’s buckie,” he said in the Scots, “will water not drown you? Faith, then, it is to hemp that you were born, as shall shortly be seen.”
I drew him some wine from a cask that stood in the corner, on draught. He drank it at one venture, and held out the cup for more, the colour coming back into his face.
“Did the archers tell me false, then, when they said that you had fired up at a chance word, and flung yourself and the sentinel into the moat? And where have you been wasting your time, and why went you from the bridge ere I came back, if the archers took another prentice lad for Norman Leslie?”
“They told you truth,” I said.
“Then, in the name of Antichrist—that I should say so!—how scaped you drowning, and how came you here?”
I told him the story, as briefly as might be.
“Ill luck go with yon second-sighted wench that has bewitched Elliot, and you too, for all that I can see. Never did I think to be frayed with a bogle, [{14}] and, as might have been deemed, the bogle but a prentice loon, when all was done. To my thinking all this fairy work is no more true than that you are a dead man’s wraith. But they are all wild about it, at the castle, where I was kept long, doing no trade, and listening to their mad clatter.”
He took out of his pouch a parcel heedfully wrapped in soft folds of silk.
“Here is this Book of Hours,” he said, “that I have spent my eyesight, and gold, purple, and carmine, and cobalt upon, these three years past; a jewel it is, though I say so. And I had good hope to sell it to Hugh Kennedy, for he has of late had luck in taking two English knights prisoners at Orleans—the only profitable trade that men now can drive,—and the good knight dearly loves a painted book of devotion; especially if, like this of mine, it be adorned with the loves of Jupiter, and the Swan, and Danäe, and other heathen pliskies. We were chaffering over the price, and getting near a bargain, when in comes Patrick Ogilvie with a tale of this second-sighted Maid, and how she had been called to see the King, and of what befell. First, it seems, she boded the death of that luckless limb of a sentinel, and then you took it upon you to fulfil her saying, and so you and he were drowned, and I left prenticeless. Little comfort to me it was to hear Kennedy and Ogilvie praise you for a good Scot and true, and say that it was great pity of your death.”
At this hearing my heart leaped for joy, first, at my own praise from such good knights, and next, because I saw a blink of hope, having friends at Court. My master went on—