Chapter 19 - Page 2

"I am least grateful for it, Adam! and I am glad you put me in mind
of it."

"Well, but the news, my young master," said Woodcock, "spell me the
tidings--what are we to fly at next?--what did the Regent say to you?"

"Nothing that I am to repeat again," said Roland Graeme, shaking his
head.

"Why, hey-day," said Adam, "how prudent we are become all of a sudden!
You have advanced rarely in brief space, Master Roland. You have well
nigh had your head broken, and you have gained your gold chain, and
you have made an enemy, Master Usher to wit, with his two legs like
hawks' perches, and you have had audience of the first man in the
realm, and bear as much mystery in your brow, as if you had flown in
the court-sky ever since you were hatched. I believe, in my soul, you
would run with a piece of the egg-shell on your head like the curlews,
which (I would we were after them again) we used to call whaups in the
Halidome and its neighbourhood. But sit thee down, boy; Adam Woodcock
was never the lad to seek to enter into forbidden secrets--sit thee
down, and I will go and fetch the vivers--I know the butler and the
pantler of old."

The good-natured falconer set forth upon his errand, busying himself
about procuring their refreshment; and, during his absence, Roland
Graeme abandoned himself to the strange, complicated, and yet
heart-stirring reflections, to which the events of the morning had
given rise. Yesterday he was of neither mark nor likelihood; a vagrant
boy, the attendant on a relative, of whose sane judgment he himself
had not the highest opinion; but now he had become, he knew not why,
or wherefore, or to what extent, the custodier, as the Scottish phrase
went, of some important state secret, in the safe keeping of which the
Regent himself was concerned. It did not diminish from, but rather
added to the interest of a situation so unexpected, that Roland
himself did not perfectly understand wherein he stood committed by the
state secrets, in which he had unwittingly become participator. On
the contrary, he felt like one who looks on a romantic landscape, of
which he sees the features for the first time, and then obscured with
mist and driving tempest. The imperfect glimpse which the eye catches
of rocks, trees, and other objects around him, adds double dignity to
these shrouded mountains and darkened abysses, of which the height,
depth, and extent, are left to imagination.

But mortals, especially at the well-appetized age which precedes
twenty years, are seldom so much engaged either by real or conjectural
subjects of speculation, but that their earthly wants claim their hour
of attention. And with many a smile did