Child Royal. D. K. Broster
passing through a shaft of the June sunlight which, as it poured through the gules of a blazon in the glass, lay upon his shoulder for a moment like a stain of blood, came into a beam of untempered light—a man in the late thirties, spare, springy and upright. There was a faint touch of grey at his temples, but not a thread of it in the little pointed brown beard which left revealed a mouth more resolute than might well have accompanied eyes so reflective. His high boots were muddy with his fast riding from Leith; dust speckled the grey cloak flung over a chair. He had the bearing and air of the soldier he was, a soldier in alien service—though no Scot held it alien to serve, as he did, in the Scottish Archer Guard of King Henri II of France.
Laying down his sword, the returned exile set one knee upon the window seat, threw open one of the small panes and looked out upon his elder brother’s domain. Between the soft green meadows, held in place as they were by the gentle hills on either side, shone the river of his boyhood. He could still rehearse its every curve. Rather more of the countryside was Graham property now, for Robert had extended and improved the lands of Garthrose, though without imagination, as a merchant builds up his business. Yet everything in the prospect before Ninian’s eyes spoke to him, as it had always done, of his father, that charming and masterful Malise Graham, who had run so royally through his wealth that, but for the portion of his first wife’s dowry secured to her children (and but for Robert’s careful husbandry) there would have been little left to keep up Garthrose to-day. Catherine Hepburn, Sir Malise’s second wife, had been almost portionless—the main reason for her son’s entering foreign service. But this marriage, unlike the first, had been a love match, which was perhaps the reason why Malise Graham had always received from that son a devotion which his occasional brutality had had no power to quench. Yes, everything about Garthrose spoke to Ninian of his father, though that father was fifteen years dead. . . . And now Catherine Graham, who had mourned her husband so unremittingly, was following him. It was that news which had brought her son from France to-day.
The sound of the door opening caused Ninian to spring up. It was his half-brother who entered.
About Robert Graham of Garthrose there had never been any of his father’s carefree grace and radiance. Stoutish, greying (for he was over fifty), a perpetual harassed frown upon his forehead, he came forward with a quick and heavy tread.
“Ninian! My dear brother!” Despite that troubled look, there was no lack of warmth in his voice as he embraced the traveller. “Ill news has brought you, brother—but a good wind natheless. I’m gey glad to see you again after these many years!”
Ninian returned the greeting as cordially. “And my mother? Agnes tells me——”
Robert shook his head, the frown deepening. “She was anointed this morning. Indeed, Ninian, we thought she would have passed yesterday. You are but just in time.”
His brother stifled a sigh. “I wonder will she know me?” he said to himself. Then aloud: “How does your young brood, Robert, wanting their good mother?” For Robert’s somewhat shrewish wife had died a couple of years ago, leaving, besides two sons of seventeen and fifteen, a whole nursery of younger folk.
But before Robert could more than touch the fringe of a complete answer to this question, Agnes returned to the room—the sister in whom Ninian had some ado to recognise the child of thirteen who had sat beside him on a stool at his last visit, asking him so many questions about France that their mother had rebuked her. She was a young woman now, in a wide-spreading green gown.
“The news of Ninian’s coming hath not distressed your mother?” asked Robert Graham anxiously.
Agnes shook her gentle head. “Nay, for she was looking for it. Indeed, she has recovered her speech, which a while ago we thought gone. . . . Will you come with me now, Ninian?”
And seeing him glance down at his mud-splashed boots, she added: “Dear brother, that’s of small account!”
* * * * *
Was it possible to have become so small and shrunken when one was only fifty-three, and had been fair and fresh-coloured, like the miniature he had of her? In the enclosure of the great curtained bed, Lady Graham was lost, like a grey-haired child with watching eyes. She knew him; that was evident. Shaken with affection and emotion, the Archer knelt by the side of the bed and asked her blessing, kissing the thin hand as it slipped nervelessly from his head.
“Ninian, my dear son!” came the murmur; and again: “My dear, dear son!”
After he had kissed her and was seated by the bedside, she scanned him, for all her weakness, with intense eagerness, motioning for the curtains to be drawn farther apart. Then in her echo of a voice she asked him of his voyage, of his own health, of his circumstances; yet she seemed scarcely to listen to his answers, as she ceaselessly studied his face. And at last she said, less faintly:
“You grow liker your father . . . although he was of fair complexion . . . liker than Robert is, or his son James. . . . Doth he not, Agnes? But you scarce remember him, child . . . I mind me, before you were born, Ninian, how we used to ride . . .”
And from that moment onwards she talked more of her dead husband than of either Ninian or herself; talked of incidents and sayings, pathetic at this hour, which her love had preserved, as in amber. And as the flame sank, so did the mind become confused, till she was speaking of Malise Graham as though he were alive, but absent. Her hands were twisting feebly together as she murmured, with her eyes fixed on her son’s face:
“In France still, woe’s me . . . with my Lord of Albany. . . . Bid him hasten home . . . hasten home . . . Ninian . . . he bides too long there . . .”
Her eyes wavered, the lids sank; Agnes beckoned Ninian out.
“I have fatigued her,” he said remorsefully, once beyond the door.
“No, no. But she wanders in her wits more than of custom. I think the end is not far off. I shall send for Father Sandys.”
“Yet she doth not wander so much as you think, Agnes,” replied her brother gently. “Our father was in France once with my Lord Albany. He was there for a year, I remember, when I was a boy—years before you were born. ’Tis not so unnatural that, since our mother seems to think of him as still alive, she should fancy him to be in France now, as he is not by her bedside.”
(2)
Bewailing the ills of their country at the hands of the English, Robert Graham paced restlessly to and fro in front of the deplenished supper-table at the upper end of the raftered hall. Ninian sat back in his chair listening to him. The servants had some time ago withdrawn from their own table at the lower end, Agnes had quitted her brothers’ side for her mother’s, and young James and Henry, Robert’s two elder sons, had left in obedience to their father’s dismissal.
But not before they had been permitted to question their uncle about the famous corps to which he belonged, and which, it appeared, young Henry cherished an idea of joining one day. So Ninian, smiling, had answered: Yes, the Scottish Archers were all of good birth, and they did always guard the King’s person at home or abroad, an honour they divided with the Cent Gentilshommes. Moreover, Ninian told the boy, the Captain of the Archer Guard had the privilege of the nearest place to the King at his coronation, and the coronation robe for his perquisite, and he always received from the King’s hands any town-keys which had been delivered or presented to His Majesty. When the King of France crossed a river, it was the Scottish Archers who went ahead to guard the bridge or the boat; when he was in church it was they who guarded the entries as well as his person. Jacques de Lorges, Comte de Montgomery—himself of Scottish descent—was the captain, but would probably be succeeded before long by his son Gabriel, to whom the reversion had been promised.
“So you must not aspire to the captaincy of the Guard when you join it, Henry,” finished his uncle.
But now that the lads were gone from the hall, the only company left to the half-brothers were the two dogs watching their master, and Malise Graham looking down upon his sons from his full-length portrait on the wall.