CHAPTER VIII—­OF CERTAIN QUARRELS THAT CAME ON THE HANDS OF NORMAN LESLIE

Belike I had dropped asleep, outwearied with what had befallen me, mind and body, but I started up suddenly at the sound of a dagger-hilt smitten against the main door of the house, and a voice crying, “Open, in the name of the Dauphin.”  They had come in quest of me, and when I heard them, it was as if a hand had given my heart a squeeze, and for a moment my breath seemed to be stopped.  This past, I heard the old serving-woman fumbling with the bolts, and peering from behind the curtain of my casement, I saw that the ways were dark, and the narrow street was lit up with flaring torches, the lights wavering in the wind.  I stepped to the wide ingle, thinking to creep into the secret hiding-hole.  But to what avail?  It might have served my turn if my escape alive from the moat had only been guessed, but now my master must have told all the story, and the men-at-arms must be assured that I was within.  Thinking thus, I stood at pause, when a whisper came, as if from within the ingle—­

“Unbar the door, and hide not.”

It must be Elliot’s voice, speaking through some tube contrived in the ingle of the dwelling-room below or otherwise.  Glad at heart to think that she took thought of me, I unbarred the door, and threw myself into a chair before the fire, trying to look like one unconcerned.  The bolts were now drawn below; I heard voices, rather Scots than French, to my sense.  Then the step of one man climbed up the stair, heavily, and with the tap of a staff keeping tune to it.  It was my master.  His face was pale, and falling into a chair, he wiped the sweat from his brow.  “Unhappy man that I am!” he said, “I have lost my apprentice.”

I gulped something down in my throat ere I could say, “Then it is death?”

“Nay,” he said, and smiled.  “But gliff for gliff, {16} you put a fear on me this day, and now we are even.”

“Yet I scarce need a cup of wine for my recovery, master,” I said, filling him a beaker from the flagon on the table, which he drained gladly, being sore wearied, so steep was the way to the castle, and hard for a lame man.  My heart was as light as a leaf on a tree, and the bitterness of shameful death seemed gone by.

“I have lost my prentice another way,” he said, setting down the cup on the table.  “I had much a do to see Kennedy, for he was at the dice with other lords.  At length, deeming there was no time to waste, I sent in the bonny Book of Hours, praying him to hear me for a moment on a weighty matter.  That brought him to my side; he leaped at the book like a trout at a fly, and took me to his own chamber.  There I told him your story.  When it came to the wench in the King’s laundry, and Robin Lindsay, and you clad in girl’s gear, and kissed in the guard-room, he struck hand on thigh and laughed aloud.