The Armourers Prentices | Page 2

the wild ducklings are out on the pool, and the woods are full of song. Oh! Ambrose! I never knew how hard it is to part--"
"Nay, now, Steve, where be all your plots for bravery? You always meant to seek your fortune--not bide here like an acorn for ever."
"I never thought to be thrust forth the very day of our poor father's burial, by a shrewish town-bred vixen, and a base narrow-souled--"
"Hist! hist!" said the more prudent Ambrose.
"Let him hear who will! He cannot do worse for us than he has done! All the Forest will cry shame on him for a mean-hearted skinflint to turn his brothers from their home, ere their father and his, be cold in his grave," cried Stephen, clenching the grass with his hands, in his passionate sense of wrong.
"That's womanish," said Ambrose.
"Who'll be the woman when the time comes for drawing cold steel?" cried Stephen, sitting up.
At that moment there came through the porch a man, a few years over thirty, likewise in mourning, with a paler, sharper countenance than the brothers, and an uncomfortable pleading expression of self- justification.
"How now, lads!" he said, "what means this? You have taken the matter too hastily. There was no thought that ye should part till you had some purpose in view. Nay, we should be fain for Ambrose to bide on here, so he would leave his portion for me to deal with, and teach little Will his primer and accidence. You are a quiet lad, Ambrose, and can rule your tongue better than Stephen."
"Thanks, brother John," said Ambrose, somewhat sarcastically, "but where Stephen goes I go."
"I would--I would have found Stephen a place among the prickers or rangers, if--" hesitated John. "In sooth, I would yet do it, if he would make it up with the housewife."
"My father looked higher for his son than a pricker's office," returned Ambrose.
"That do I wot," said John, "and therefore, 'tis for his own good that I would send him forth. His godfather, our uncle Birkenholt, he will assuredly provide for him, and set him forth--"
The door of the house was opened, and a shrewish voice cried, "Mr Birkenholt--here, husband! You are wanted. Here's little Kate crying to have yonder smooth pouch to stroke, and I cannot reach it for her."
"Father set store by that otter-skin pouch, for poor Prince Arthur slew the otter," cried Stephen. "Surely, John, you'll not let the babes make a toy of that?"
John made a helpless gesture, and at a renewed call, went indoors.
"You are right, Ambrose," said Stephen, "this is no place for us. Why should we tarry any longer to see everything moiled and set at nought? I have couched in the forest before, and 'tis summer time."
"Nay," said Ambrose, "we must make up our fardels and have our money in our pouches before we can depart. We must tarry the night, and call John to his reckoning, and so might we set forth early enough in the morning to lie at Winchester that night and take counsel with our uncle Birkenholt."
"I would not stop short at Winchester," said Stephen. "London for me, where uncle Randall will find us preferment!"
"And what wilt do for Spring!"
"Take him with me, of course!" exclaimed Stephen. "What! would I leave him to be kicked and pinched by Will, and hanged belike by Mistress Maud?"
"I doubt me whether the poor old hound will brook the journey."
"Then I'll carry him!"
Ambrose looked at the big dog as if he thought it would be a serious undertaking, but he had known and loved Spring as his brother's property ever since his memory began, and he scarcely felt that they could be separable for weal or woe.
The verdurers of the New Forest were of gentle blood, and their office was well-nigh hereditary. The Birkenholts had held it for many generations, and the reversion passed as a matter of course to the eldest son of the late holder, who had newly been laid in the burial- ground of Beaulieu Abbey. John Birkenholt, whose mother had been of knightly lineage, had resented his father's second marriage with the daughter of a yeoman on the verge of the Forest, suspected of a strain of gipsy blood, and had lived little at home, becoming a sort of agent at Southampton for business connected with the timber which was yearly cut in the Forest to supply material for the shipping. He had wedded the daughter of a person engaged in law business at Southampton, and had only been an occasional visitor at home, ever after the death of his stepmother. She had left these two boys, unwelcome appendages in his sight. They had obtained a certain amount of education at Beaulieu Abbey, where a school was kept, and where Ambrose daily studied, though for the last