“Depardieux. thou sayest well, my lord,” replied Sir Piers Courtenay, “for such woman’s play and child’s tilting did I never before behold. Our Cheapside shop-boys would make better work on’t with their yard-measures. Then there is no fancy in their armour—a crude and barbarous taste, my Lord—yea, and a clownish and plebeian air about their very persons, too. Trust me, my Lord, I do not rashly venture on the grave and serious accusation I am now about to hazard, when I do declare, solemnly and fervently, that I have not seen one spur of the accurately proper fashion on any knightly heel in these Caledonian wildernesses.”
“Ha, ha, ha. The nicety of thy judgment in such matters, Courtenay, is unquestionable,” said the Lord Welles laughing.
A trumpet now sounded from one of the barriers, and was immediately answered from that at the other end of the lists. The voice of a pursuivant was next heard.
“Oyez! oyez! oyez! The good esquire Mortimer Sang doth call on the gallant Knight of Cheviot to appear to answer his challenge.”
There was some delay for a little time, during which all eyes were thrown towards the barrier, where Mortimer was steadily bestriding a superb chestnut charger, with an ease and grace that might have led the spectators to suppose that the horse and man were but one animal. One of Sir Patrick Hepborne’s pages, well mounted, attended him, to do him the necessary offices of the lists; and although his helmet displayed no crest, and that his arms were plain, and his shield without achievement, yet his whole appearance had something commanding about it, and all were prepossessed in his favour.
“That looks something like a man,” quoth the English knights to each other.
“What a noble-looking presence! If he be only an esquire, of a truth he deserves to be a knight,” went round among the spectators.
“How handsome he is, and how gallant-looking and warlike!” whispered the soft voice of Catherine Spears, who stood behind the Countess of Moray. [[313]]
The pursuivant from Sang’s barrier now repeated his challenge; a confused murmur soon afterwards arose from that at the opposite end of the lists, and by and by, the huge bulk of the Knight of Cheviot, mounted on his enormous charger, was seen moving like the mountains he took his name from, through an amazed group of wondering heads. The horse and man seemed to have been made for each other, and they looked like the creatures of a creation altogether different from that of this earth, and as if such inhabitants would have required a larger world than ours to have contained them.
“By’r Lady, but yonder comes no child, then,” exclaimed Sir Miles Templeton, one of the English knights, who sat behind the Lord Welles.