“Humph! There’s some sense in that,” quoth Amyas. “I’d run a mile for a woman when I would not walk a yard for a man; and— Who is this our mother is bringing in? The handsomest fellow I ever saw in my life!”
Amyas was not far wrong; for Mrs. Leigh’s companion was none other than Mr. Secretary, Amyas’s Smerwick Fort acquaintance; alias Colin Clout, alias Immerito, alias Edmund Spenser. Some half-jesting conversation had seemingly been passing between the poet and the saint; for as they came in she said with a smile (which was somewhat of a forced one)—“Well, my dear sons, you are sure of immortality, at least on earth; for Mr. Spenser has been vowing to me to give your adventure a whole canto to itself in his ‘Faerie Queene’”
“And you no less, madam,” said Spenser. “What were the story of the Gracchi worth without the figure of Cornelia? If I honor the fruit, I must not forget the stem which bears it. Frank, I congratulate you.”
“Then you know the result of my interview, mother?”
“I know everything, and am content,” said Mrs. Leigh.
“Mrs. Leigh has reason to be content,” said Spenser,” with that which is but her own likeness.”
Spare your flattery to an old woman, Mr. Spenser. When, pray, did I” (with a most loving look at Frank) “refuse knighthood for duty’s sake?”
“Knighthood?” cried Amyas. “You never told me that, Frank!”
“That may well be, Captain Leigh,” said Spenser; “but believe me, her majesty (so Hatton assures me) told him this day, no less than that by going on this quest he deprived himself of that highest earthly honor, which crowned heads are fain to seek from their own subjects.”
Spenser did not exaggerate. Knighthood was then the prize of merit only; and one so valuable, that Elizabeth herself said, when asked why she did not bestow a peerage upon some favorite, that having already knighted him, she had nothing better to bestow. It remained for young Essex to begin the degradation of the order in his hapless Irish campaign, and for James to complete that degradation by his novel method of raising money by the sale of baronetcies; a new order of hereditary knighthood which was the laughing-stock of the day, and which (however venerable it may have since become) reflects anything but honor upon its first possessors.
“I owe you no thanks, Colin,” said Frank, “for having broached my secret: but I have lost nothing after all. There is still an order of knighthood in which I may win my spurs, even though her majesty refuse me the accolade.”
“What, then? you will not take it from a foreign prince?”
Frank smiled.
“Have you never read of that knighthood which is eternal in the heavens, and of those true cavaliers whom John saw in Patmos, riding on white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, knights-errant in the everlasting war against the False Prophet and the Beast? Let me but become worthy of their ranks hereafter, what matter whether I be called Sir Frank on earth?”
“My son,” said Mrs. Leigh, “remember that they follow One whose vesture is dipped, not in the blood of His enemies, but in His own.”
“I have remembered it for many a day; and remembered, too, that the garments of the knights may need the same tokens as their captain’s.”