‘The vow was in my heart,’ faltered Malcolm.

‘In a fule’s head!’ said Patrick.  ’What right have babes to be talking of vows?  ’Twould be the best tidings I’ve heard for many a long day, that you were wedded to a lass with a good tocher, and fit to guide your silly pate.  What’s that?  Her vows!  If they are no better than yours, the sooner they are forgot the better.  If she had another love, ’twould be another matter, but with a bishop on your side, you’ve naught to fear.’

Malcolm turned away, sick at heart.  To him his present position had become absolute terror.  His own words had worked him up to an alarming sense of having lapsed from high aims to mere selfishness; of having profaned vows, consented to violence, and fallen away from grace; and he was in an almost feverish passion to utter something that would irrevocably bind him to his former intentions; but here were the King and Patrick both conspiring to silence him, and hold him back to his fallen and perilous state.  Nay, Patrick even derided his penitence.  Patrick was an honourable knight, a religious man, as times went, but he had been brought up in a much rougher and more unscrupulous school than Malcolm, and had been hardened by years of service as a soldier of fortune.  The Armagnac camp was not like that of England.  Warriors of such piety and strictness as Henry and Bedford had never come within his ken; and that any man, professing to be a soldier, should hesitate at the license of war, was incomprehensible to him.  The discipline of Henry’s army had been scoffed at in the French camp, and every infraction of it hailed as a token of hypocrisy; and to the stout Scot Malcolm’s grief for the rapine at Meaux, which after all he had not committed, seemed a simple absurdity.  Even his own danger, on the second occasion, did not make him alter his opinion; it was all the fortune of war.  And he was not sure that he had not best have been stifled at once, since his hands were tied from warfare.  And as for Lily—­how was he to win her now?  Then, as Malcolm opened his mouth, Patrick sharply charged him to hold his tongue as to that folly, unless he wanted to drive him to make a vow on his side, that he would turn Knight of Rhodes, and never wed.

Malcolm, wearied out with excitement, came at last to weeping that no one would hear or understand him; but the scene was ended by Bairdsbrae, who, returning, brought a leech with him, who at once took the command of Patrick, and ordered him to his bed.

Malcolm could not rest.  He was feverish with the shock of grief and awe, and absorbed in the thought which had mastered him, and which was much dwelt on in the middle ages:—­the monastic path, going towards heaven straight as a sunbeam; the secular, twining its way through a tortuous difficult course—­the ‘broad way,’ tending downward to the abyss.  To his terrified apprehension, he had abandoned the direct and narrow path for the fatal road, and there might at any moment be captured, and whirled away by the grisly phantom Death, who had just snatched the mightiest in his inevitable clutch; and with something of the timidity of his nature, he was in absolute terror, until he should be able to set himself back on the shining road from which he had swerved, and be rid of the load of transgression which seemed ready to sink him into the gulf.