"Certainly; and habit will make familiarity easy. Sit beside me on the ground, and leave off putting your hand to your bonnet. Do we not look like two smart woodmen, enjoying, over our evening repast, a tale of other times?"
"I must turn my face from your honour," said Williams, "before I can attempt to forget that you was Sir Allan, my old master's favourite son; but it is in vain for you to try to pass for a country yeoman. They who have spent their lives in these mountains, and never seen a noble personage, rudely explain their notions of majesty and dignity by describing you; and, by the grace of Heaven, they shall find they guessed right, when they said the stranger from the south-country was a man of another sort of a world."
"Let us have no more day-dreams, I asked you about Walter de Vallance."
"He is now Earl of Bellingham."
Evellin gnawed his lip, and angrily struck his fawning spaniel. "True," replied he, "the King would have him so. He forced these honours on him; and if is thus, by prejudice and injustice, that he tampers with the loyalty of a brave nation. Canst thou blame De Vallance for catching my coronet before it fell to the ground by a false attainder? Why should the title lie in abeyance? Is it not better worn by one allied to our house than by an alien? Who so fit to sit in the baronial chair of our common ancestor as my sister's son, now I am exscinded as a diseased branch."
"He is a lad of the fairest promise," answered Williams, "but he will never live to be Earl of Bellingham. Grant that no singular judgments fall on the house of usurpation, yet the honourable blood which he inherits from the Nevilles will so strive with the foul current of De Vallance, that the ill-compounded body will not grow to manhood."
Evellin smiled: "Thou thinkest then," said he, "that Walter has played the thief's part, and stolen what he could not honestly acquire."
"'Tis past thinking about," answered Williams; "the blame rests not on the King's Majesty, whom Heaven prosper. He is too much raised above the common intercourse of life to look into the hearts of those who take care to approach him with a fair outside. His days are consumed by cares and perplexities, and those who are apt and courteous in business must needs have his ear. I well know that De Vallance gained the royal favour by appearing to be your devoted friend, and by praising you for those qualities in which it was Heaven's will to leave you somewhat defective. Thus he praised your prudence, and produced your flight in proof of your innocence; yet, in the same breath, gave some instance of your rashness, and shewed that flight was ever the villain's resource. So contrariwise were his pleadings and his praises, that His Grace said one day of him, jestingly, 'Whatever my council may decide about Neville, I must keep De Vallance in my service; for though he is an unapt advocate, he is a right trusty friend.'"
"We are now," returned Evellin, "acting as jurors, deciding upon the better part of a man's possessions, his honour. Let us then be candid and wary. Zeal, like anger, often overshoots the mark. The lively promptitude of feeling hurries our judgment beyond its natural pace. Let us admit that the stern character of that bloody conclave, before whom De Vallance often pleaded my cause, might confuse a man, among whose natural defects I have noted a constitutional timidity, apt to tremble at the frown of a fellow-creature. Before a court constituted like the Star-chamber, armed with unlimited powers to impose fines, imprisonment, sequestration, banishment, nay even the punishment of personal mutilation, no wonder the sole friend and unsupported advocate of a man, whom they were bent to ruin, took improper methods of serving him."
"It is too true," returned Williams, "that this court has of late stretched its originally unconstitutional powers, and has further provoked the unwarrantable licence of the times by trying to restrain it. The King's best friends allow that it has in many instances 'held that for honourable which pleased, and that for just which profited; and being the same persons who composed the council, the same individuals acted in two courts; in one, enjoining the people what was not law, and prohibiting what was not prohibited; and, in the other, censuring disobedience to their own decrees by heavy fines and severe imprisonments. But the tendency of these proceedings has been rather to supply the King's necessities with money, which, since his breach with his parliament he cannot legally obtain, than wantonly to sport with the rights of his people, from which no advantage can be derived to the crown[[1]].' And truly, those noble persons who compose this assembly are too well aware of the unpopularity and odium of their proceedings to give any needless cause of complaint; nor would they have dared to commit such a foul misdemeanor, as to condemn and sentence a peer of the realm for a capital offence, without giving him a solemn and public trial. Now, my dear master, has your clear understanding been so misled as to make you suppose their misdoings ever reached such atrocity, or that they would unwisely give contention such a handle."