"The King, sir. Who else?"
So then a great tumult came to Christopher. When he was a baby in the old homestead, the Squire had woven loyalty into the bones and tissues of him. Through the years it had grown with him, this honouring of the King as a man who took his sceptre direct from the hands of the good God. Let none pry into the soul of any man so reared who sees his King for the first time in the flesh.
With Michael it was the same. He did not cheer as the crowd did; his heart was too deeply touched for that. And by and by, when the townsfolk had followed the cavalcade toward Christ Church, the brothers found themselves alone.
"It was worth while," said Kit, seeking yet half evading Michael's glance.
They shook themselves out of their dreams by and by, and, for lack of other guidance, followed the route taken by the King. The Cavaliers had dispersed. The King had already gone into the Deanery. So they left the front of Christ Church and wandered aimlessly into the lane that bordered Merton, and so through the grove where the late rains and the glowing sun had made the lilacs and the sweet-briars a sanctuary of beaded, fragrant incense.
From Merton, as they dallied in the grove—not knowing where to seek Rupert, and not caring much, until the wine of Oxford grew less heady—a woman came between the lilacs. Her walk, her vivacious body, her air of loving laughter wherever she could find it, were at variance with the tiredness of her face. She seemed like sunlight prisoned in a vase of clouded porcelain.
Perhaps something of their inborn, romantic sense of womanhood showed in the faces of the Metcalfs as they stepped back to make a way for her. One never knows what impulse guides a woman; one is only sure that she will follow it.
However that might be, the little lady halted; a quick smile broke through her weariness. "Gentlemen," she said, with a pretty foreign lilt of speech, "you are very—what you call it?—so very high. There are few men with the King in Oxford who are so broad and high. I love big men, if they are broad of shoulder. Are you for the King?"
"We are Metcalfs of Nappa," said Kit. "Our loyalty is current coin in the north."
The little lady glanced shrewdly at them both, her head a little on one side like a bird's. "Are you of the company they call the Riding Metcalfs? Then the south knows you, too, and the west country, wherever men are fighting for the King. Gentlemen, you have a battle-cry before you charge—what is it?"