‘It was not booty, Sir; they said traitors were hid here,’ said Percy, sulkily.
‘Tush! the old story! Ever the plea for rapine and bloodthirstiness. After the warnings of last night you should have known better; but you are all alike in frenzy for a sack. You have both put off your knighthood till you have learnt not to become a shame thereto.’
‘I take not knighthood at your hands, Sir,’ burst out Malcolm, goaded with hot resentment, but startled the next moment at the sound of his own words.
‘I cry you mercy,’ said King Henry, in a cold, short tone.
Malcolm turned on his heel and walked away, without waiting to see how the poor old man in the house threw himself at the King’s feet with a piteous history of his sick daughter and her starving children, nor how Ralf hurried off headlong to the lower town to send them immediate relief in bread, wine, and doctors. The gay, good-natured, thoughtless lad no mere harboured malice for the chastisement than if his tutor had caught him idling; but things went deeper with Malcolm. True, he had undergone many a brutal jest and cruel practical joke from his cousins; but that was all in the family, not like a blow from an alien king, and one not apologized for, but followed up by a rebuke that seemed to him unjust, lowering him in his own eyes and those of Esclairmonde, and making him ready to gnaw himself with moody vexation.
‘You here, Malcolm!’ said King James, entering his quarters; ‘did you miss me in the throng? I have not seen you all day.’
‘I have been insulted, Sir,’ said Malcolm. ‘I pray your license to depart and carry my sword to my kinsmen in the French camp.’
‘How now! Is it the way to treat an insult to run away from it?’
‘Not when the world judges men to be on equal terms, my lord.’
‘What! Who has done you wrong, you silly loon?’