‘I bid you not, only I would I were there to see that all be not lost for want of a word in season; and it is high time that something be done. Here be letters from my Lord of Thérouenne, demanding the performance of the contract ere our return home.’
‘He cannot reach her here,’ said Malcolm.
‘No; but his outcry can reach your honour; and it were ill to have such a house as that of Luxemburg crying out upon you for breach of faith to their daughter.’
Malcolm smiled. ‘That I should heed little, Sir. I would fain bear something for her.’
‘Why, this is mere sublimated devoir, too fine for our gross understandings,’ said James, ironically. ‘Mayhap the sight of the soft roseate cheek may bring it somewhat down to poor human flesh and blood once more.’
‘Once I was tempted, Sir,’ said Malcolm, blushing deeply; ‘but did I not know that her holiness is the guardian of her earthly beauty, I would not see her again.’
‘Nay, there I command you,’ said the King; ‘soon I shall have subjects enough; but while I have but half a dozen, I cannot be disobeyed by them! I bid you go to Middleham, and there I leave all to the sight.’
The King spoke gaily, and with such kind good-humour that Malcolm, humiliated by the thought of the past, durst not make fresh asseverations. James, in the supreme moment of the pure and innocent romance of which he was the hero, looked on love like his own as the highest crown of human life, and distrusted the efforts after the superhuman which too often were mere simulation or imitation; but a certain recollection of Henry’s warnings withheld him from pressing the matter, and he returned to his own joys and hopes, looking on the struggles he expected with a strong man’s exulting joy, and not even counting the years of his captivity wasted, though they had taken away his first youth.
‘What should I have been,’ he said, ‘bred up in the tumults at home? What could I have known better than Perth? Nay, had I been sent home when I came to age, as a raw lad, how would one or other by fraud or force have got the upper hand, so as I might never have won it back. No, I would not have foregone one year of study—far less that campaign in France, and the sight of Harry in war and in policy.’
James also took Malcolm to see the child king, his little master. This, the third king of James’s captivity, was now a fair creature of two years old. He trotted to meet his visitor, calling him by a baby name for brother, and stretching out his arms to be lifted up and fondled; for, as Dame Alice Boteller, his gouvernante, muttered, he knew the King of Scots better than he did his own mother.