"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."
"Oh, Frank! Frank! is not His precious blood enough to cleanse all sin, without the sacrifice of our own?"
"We may need no more than His blood, mother, and yet He may need ours," said Frank.
*****
How that conversation ended I know not, nor whether Spenser fulfilled his purpose of introducing the two brothers and their mother into his Fairy Queen. If so, the manuscripts must have been lost among those which perished (along with Spenser's baby) in the sack of Kilcolman by the Irish in 1598. But we need hardly regret the loss of them: for the temper of the Leighs and their mother is the same which inspires every canto of that noblest of poems; and which inspired, too, hundreds in those noble days
