was afterwards known as Hobb's Hawth. She on her part spent her week in endeavoring to grow a perfect rose of a certain golden species, and her heart was given wholly to her father and her flower. And he watched her efforts with interest and advice, and for the first she thanked him but of the second took no heed. "For," said she, "this is MY garden, father, and MY rose, and I will grow it in my own way or not at all. Have you not had a lifetime of gardens and roses which you have brought to perfection? And would you let any man take your own upon his shoulders, even your own mistakes, and shoulder at last the praise after the blame?" Then Hobb, her father, laughed at her indulgently and said, "Nay, not any man; yet once I let a woman, and without her aid I would never have brought my rarest and dearest flower to perfection. So if I should let a woman help me, why not you a man?" "Was the woman your mother?" said she. And her father was silent. Then a day came when he trudged up and down the hills from Alfriston, and standing at the gate of her garden saw his child in the arms of a stranger; and her face, as it lay against his heart, seemed to her father also to be the face of a stranger, and not of his child. He recognized in the stranger the Lord of the Burgh. And he saw that what he had feared had come to pass, and that his daughter's heart would be no more divided between her father and her flower, for it was given whole to the lover who had first assailed it. Hobb came into the garden, and they looked up as the gate clicked, and their faces grew as red as though one had caught the reflection from the other. But both looked straight into his eyes. And his daughter, pointing to her bush, said, "Father, my rose is grown at last," and he saw that the bush was crowned with a glorious golden bloom, perfect in every detail. Then it was the turn of the Lord of the Burgh, and he said, "Sir, I ask leave to rob your garden of its rose." "Do robbers ask leave?" said Hobb. And he shook his head, adding, "Nay, when the thief and the theft are in collusion, what say is left to the owner of the treasure? Yet I do not like this. Sir, have you considered that she is a gardener's child? Daughter, have you considered that he is a lord?" And neither of them had considered these questions, and they did not propose to do so. Then Hobb shook his head again and said, "I will not waste words. I know when a plant can drink no more water. And though you pretend to ask my leave, I know that you are prepared to dispense with it. But by way of consent I will say this: whatever you may call your other sons, you shall call your first Hobb, to remind you to-morrow of what you will not consider to-day. For my daughter, when she is a lord's wife, will none the less still be a gardener's daughter, and your children will be grafted of two stocks. And if this seems to you a hard condition, then kiss and bid farewell." And they both laughed with joy at the lightness of the condition; but the gardener did not laugh. And so the Lord of the Burgh married the gardener's daughter, and they called their first son Hobb. He was born on a first of August, and thirty-five months later Ambrose was born on the first of July, and in due course Heriot in June, and Hugh in May, and Lionel in April. And the Lord, loving his sons equally, made them equal possessors of the Burgh when in time it should pass out of his hands. Which, since men are mortal, presently came to pass, and there were five lords instead of one.
It happened on a roaring night of March, when the wind was blustering over the barren ocean of the east Downs, and Lionel was still a boy of ten, but soon to be eleven, that the five brothers sat clustered about the great hearth in the hall, roasting apples and talking of this and that. But their talk was fitful, and had long pauses in which they listened to the gusty night, which had so much more to say than they. And after one of the silences Lionel shuddered slightly, and drawing his little stool close to Hobb he said:
"It sounds like witches." Hobb put his big hand round the child's head and face, and Lionel pressed his cheek against his brother's knee.
"Or lions," said Hugh, jumping up and running to the window, where he flattened his nose to stare into the night. "I wish it were lions coming over the Downs."
"What would you do with them?" said Hobb, smiling broadly.
"Fight them," said Hugh, "and chain them up. I should like to have lions instead of dogs--a red lion and a white one."
"I never heard tell of lions of those colors," said Hobb. "But perhaps Ambrose has with all his reading."
"Not I," said Ambrose, "but I haven't read half the books yet. The wind still knows more than I, and it may be that he knows where red and white lions are to be found. For he knows everything."
"And has seen everything," murmured Heriot, watching a lovely flame of blue and green that flickered among the red and gold on the hearth.
"And has been everywhere," muttered Hugh. "If I could find and catch him, I'd ask him for a red and a white lion."
"I'd rather have peacocks," said Heriot, his eyes on the fire.
"What would you choose, Ambrose?" asked Hobb.
"Nothing," said he, "but it's the hardest of all things to have, and I
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