And what was the subject of dispute, meet to environments so stern and so imposing? Why just a tame sparrow, which King Jamie was bent on appropriating from his young playmate, the Master of Mar, to whom it had been presented by a diplomatic gardener.
“Gie it me, Geordie,” cried his Majesty, snatching and struggling. “I wull hae it. Saul of my body, man, dinna ye ken the voice of royalty?”
The other, a ferrety, pink-lidded and ginger-headed boy, lithe but no match in avoirdupois for his thicker-set antagonist, answered only by cries and contortions. In the result, the sparrow changed hands, a crushed and lifeless little body. Geordie broke away, and made, howling, for a certain room in the Castle.
It was a room well known to him, sombre, rude in its scholastic appointments, but with the stony acerbities of its walls somewhat softened by a good lining of books. An old man of seventy, sitting reading by the bare strong table, raised his head as the intruder entered.
“Ye’ll be comin’ to tell me of some new act of tyranny, Geordie man?” he said.
He looked a very shrewd, observant old fellow, in the falling collar and long black tunic and gown of a grammarian. He had a high, bald forehead backing into a sparse crop of hair, like a track losing itself on a hill; a rough, bulbous nose, and rugged cheeks shaven down to where a thick moustache lost itself in a thicker chin-beard. There were plentiful bags and crow’s-feet about his eyes, which were like bright buttons in soft wrinkled leather.
The boy, thus encouraged, made the utmost of his wrong. In the midst his Majesty entered, a little shamefaced, but defiant. He condescended to avow his act and to justify it, and he exclaimed on his playfellow for a “snoovin’ taed,” which was the Scots for sneaking toad.
Papa Buchanan—Majesty’s preceptor—listened very serenely, slipping in a word here and there where the angry brabble permitted it. Probably in the end he would have summed up and dismissed the squabble with a warning, had not Master Jamie, incensed by some hint of correction, muttered just audibly an invitation to anyone to whom the peril of the essay might appeal “to come and bell the cat”—a challenge to which authority, in its own interests, was bound to respond. It did, in fact, respond promptly, with an amazing vigour for its years, and with the pliant persuasion of a leathern “tawse” kept for the purpose; and, when it had done with Majesty, it administered a similar dose to the other disputant, as the shortest way to restoring amity through fellow-suffering.
“Haud your rowt, Geordie, like a gude mannie, and rin awa,” said the breathed pedagogue, as he prepared to sit down and resume his reading. But it was not to be. Attracted by the uproar, the Countess of Mar—widowed sister-in-law to Mr. Alexander Erskine, the King’s present guardian—came hurrying into the room, and gathering, from the position of the royal hand, the true state of the case, caught the vociferous victim into her arms, and, rounding on the grammarian, demanded passionately of him how he dared lay his hands on the Lord’s anointed.
“The end justifies the means,” responded the pedagogue coolly. “I marle your ladyship’s confusion of pairts. The Lord shall keep to his ain and I to mine.”