Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/109

Rh "I counsel him to keep it in its sheath," said Cavendish, "lest it prove a wayward servant." "I will prove its service on thy bosom where and when thou wilt, Lord of Chatsworth," said De Wodensley. "Lord of Darley," answered Cavendish, "it is a tempting moonlight, but there is a charm over Haddon to-night it would be unseemly to dispel. To-morrow I meet Lord John Manners to try whose hawk has the fairer flight and whose love the whiter hand. That can be soon seen; for who has so fair a hand as the love of young Rutland? I shall be found by Durwood Tor when the sun is three hours up, with my sword drawn: there's my hand on't, De Wodensley." And he wrung the knight's hand till the blood seemed starting from beneath his fingernails. "By the saints, Sir Knights," said Sir Godfrey Gernon, "you may as well beard one another about the love of 'some bright particular star, and think to wed it,' as the wild Wizard of Warwick says, as quarrel about this unattainable love. Hearken, minstrels: while we drain our cups to this beauteous lass sing some of you a kindly love strain, wondrously mirthful and melancholy. Here's a cup of Rhenish, and a good gold Harry in the bottom on't, for the minstrel who pleases me." The minstrels laid their hands on the strings, and a sound was heard like the swarming of bees before summer thunder. "Sir Knight," said one, "I will sing ye, 'Cannie Johnnie Armstrong' with all the seventeen variations." "He was hanged for cattle-stealing," answered the Knight; "I'll have none of him." "What say you to 'Dick of the Cow,' or the 'Harper of Lochmaben'?" said another, with something of a tone of diffidence. "What! you Northern knaves, can you sing of nothing but thievery and jail-breaking?" "Perhaps, your knightship," humbly suggested a third, "may have a turn for the supernatural, and I'm thinking the Fairy Legend of young Tamlane is just the thing that suits your fancy." "I like the naïveté of the young lady very much," answered the Knight; "but the fair dames of Derbyshire prize the charms of lovers with flesh and blood before the gayest elfin knight that ever ran a course from Carlisle to Caerlaverock." "What would your worship say to 'William of Cloudesley'?" said a Cumberland minstrel. "Or to the 'Friar of Orders Grey'?" said a harper from the halls of the Percys. "Minstrels," said Sir Ralph Cavendish, "the invention of sweet and gentle poesy is dead among you. Every churl in