MAID MARGARET
OF GALLOWAY

These papers were found among the archives of Philip Herault de Douglas, erewhile Lord of Cour Cheverney in Touraine, and Montreal, not far from Nantua in the Bugey. They have, as is evident, been originally written in the North English or Scots Lallan tongue by Margaret Douglas herself. But, by misfortune of years or lacune of transmission, parts of the lady’s narrative have been supplied in the French of a later period, probably by the hand of the aforesaid Philip Herault himself—who was sometime Chancellor to King Henry IV. of France, and claimed consanguinity, if not quite rectilineal descent, from the Scottish house of the Dukes of Touraine, Douglases of the Black. The worthy Chancellor has manifested the truth of the maxim—“like master, like man,” by adding to the simple Scots narrative many notes, of a nature calculated rather to please Maitre François of Meudon, or that high dame Marguerite of Navarre, than the discerning reader of other times, for whom the present transcript is intended. The editor has only glanced at these upon occasion, but the parts which have had to be translated over again from the French of Chancellor Philip (of the Bar Sinister) remain, in spite of all care of excision and rewriting to the original pattern, perfectly distinguishable to the critical eye.

CHAPTER I.
BREAD-AND-WATER—AND KITCHEN THERETO!

Oh, I was so tired—so weary. I could hear my jaw crack at the corners where the strings are, each time I yawned. And not without reason. For I was nearly eighteen and had been two years in the nunnery of the holy St. Brigida of Cheverney.

Lord, Lord! how I hated it—I, Margaret Douglas, who had been the petted of great men and strong men ever since I could remember—ay, and before! I, who had known Maud Lindsay (called the “Snarer of Hearts”) in her best time, who had sworn, when no more than thirteen, that I would outdo her—to end thus, to be despatched like a bale of goods at sixteen years of age out of Scotland! (Well, that I would not have minded so greatly. ’Tis a dull sour place, wet above and boggy below, with much damp mist between!)

But what irked me was that I, who before I could walk had been called the Fair Maid of Galloway, should be let grow fusty and frowsy as the Sister of Mercy who goes from door to door, begging for the poor—all because I had a cousin who wanted to marry me and so keep Galloway and the Highland estates in the family coffer—bah!

Well, at any rate, I had just to bear it. Tinkle-tankle! Oh yes, there went the weary bells, like cracked tin mugs which the gipsy-folk peddle out of their asses’ saddlebags along with coarse cloth for “jupes,” or sleeved waistcoats, and at the bottom red earth for marking sheep withal!

At six o’clock in the morning, black roaring winter or gracious June—out you must turn in this our Convent of the Birch—ay, though you be thrice a princess in your own right. And they would not let you have so much as a drop of warm water in a pottery jar for the foot of your bed (mightily comforting it is to lone women!), nor even suffer you to sleep in your woollen gonelle, which is to say gown, that hath a hood to it, and, being turned head-and-heels, makes an admirable nest for cold great-toes a-nights. I have suffered from cold feet all my days. Indeed, if I had not, perhaps I had been a happier woman.^[1]

Then tinkle-tankle all over again and prayers and reading of the Scripture at nine. Never a bite or a sup till half-past ten, when, while you feed in silence, they read to you out of the Lives of the Saints—about how Sister Brigida, afterwards martyred, established this holy order of nuns and died in the hope of a better life. The which I judged to be an espérance noways over-sanguine! For the Good God knows she would have had to travel fast and far, that same holy Bridget, to find a worse life than that rule conventual she established, and which, for my sins, had been transported from the savage land of Ireland (where it belonged) to the sweet and smiling Touraine that lay outside these weary walls. But since you cannot see a smile even thirty miles broad through walls four feet thick, I might just as well have been on the Bog of Allen.

So it went on. Tinkle-tank of bells—whirr of doves’ wings (we had them three times a week to evening refection—the wings oftener than the doves, so far as I was concerned). Coo-roo-coo-roo! From high up in the bell-tower the sound came. Then the buzz of flies and wasps and angry red-bottomed bees trying to find their way through the painted window-panes. Yes, oh yes, it was peaceful, and hungrysome and chastening, and made me wish to be a crow or a sparrow or a midge—I was not at all particular—at any rate something that could fly away into the blue beyond the confinement of these sorrowful walls, within which the Lady Superior for ever snored in her cell and Sister Eulalie yattered eternally at one’s tail, snivelling out threats of punishment if you climbed a tree or so much as took a garden ladder to look over the wall. Not that there was much to see, when you did look over—only the wide spread of the forest and the green fields—not in patches, as in Scotland, with heather and whin-bloom everywhere, but all in cultivated squares, like a painted chess-board. There were poor men, also, with legs blackened in the sun, half-naked or even with no more than a clout about them, that ran at a look, or shrieked for the clink of an iron ring.

Once I threw over the wall to one of these poor wretches my purple jupe (the colour never became me), which was of warm cloth—also because the weather, being August, made me to sweat when I wore it.

And for this, as well as for speaking to a man, Sister Eulalie docked me of all food save bread-and-water for four days. “Yet,” said I, “Bridget of Kildare, the holy, never had petticoat in her life to bless herself withal! So where is the harm?”

“You have looked upon a man—a mortal sin!” said she, turning up the sourish, plum-coloured tip of her nose, which had a drop on it chilly as winter, even in the summer heats.

“Well, people do not die of it. So did my mother before me!” quoth I, knowing well all the time that I was not wise, yet being tempted, and my choler getting the better of me.

“But he looked upon you,” she cried, raising her voice in order to wake the Superior, “the while you took off”—

“No, no,” I said, willing to appease her if possible before it was too late, “he was no man really, only a wild savage, black as a Moor of Barbary. And, besides, I went down the ladder backwards, and let my jupe fall to the ground betwixt the wall and a gooseberry bush”—

“Silence!” commanded Sister Eulalie, raising her hand, with one finger pointed to the zenith; “silence, or I will take you indoors forthwith to Madame the Superior!”

Then, being at the time but a girl, I pouted, and answered back.

“Why, it is nothing,” I said. “Did not the Scripture which was read from the lectern in the refectory on Wednesday tell of the never-to-be-sufficiently-reverenced Judith who did more than that? Yes, much more, or she is sore belied”—

“Take from me, thou wicked one, six days’ bread-and”—

But at that very moment the great gate opened, and through it I could see, with a train of churchmen behind him—shaven, shorn, clad in white and scarlet and green, with a peaked cap all glittering with gold upon his head—who but Laurence M‘Kim, my old playmate, who had helped to save me (though I had forgotten much of the details) from the terrible Sieur de Retz, at Machecoul. Also, who used to kiss me—I remember that. Yes, it is true, my memory only shows in patches, but the patches are mostly bright ones.

Well, who will blame if I broke away from Sister Eulalie, crying “Larry, Larry!”

Half crying too—or perhaps a little more than half. And so would anyone—yes, anyone! That is, anyone who had been as long as I in the convent-prison of St. Brigida of Cheverney.

I flung myself upon him. He was riding a white mule—oh, finer, much finer than that of the Bishop of Evreaux. And I was so agile from being fed like a greyhound, and with being so very glad to see him, that I would have kissed him if I could. Yes, truly, what is the use of being a princess else! But, as it was, I could only get my arm half about his waist, before Sister Eulalie was upon me.

He bent down to disengage me gently, murmuring in Scots, “Wait a little while!” And then he stretched out two fingers over my head and said in a voice full of the music which first made my uncle take him to Dulce Cor as a chorister, “Bless you, my child!”

As one stricken by palsy, Sister Eulalie fell back, marvelling at the great ecclesiast and his princely retinue. And (best of all) Larry, my Larry, gave her his ring to kiss. It was good to see. Also he queried with his eye if I loved her—if she had been good to me. But I shook my head and frowned till he understood, and nodded, meaning thereby that he had come to do some little regulating of accounts.

“I have been to Rome, sister,” he said; “the point of my right shoe and the four iron shoes of my beast have been blessed by the Holy Father. If there be sin upon you, bend down and kiss them also.”

And while Sister Eulalie was, for her soul’s good, embracing of the beast’s near front hoof (and doing it gingerly, too, for the mule had a spirit of its own), Larry whispered to me, “These behind there do not matter!” At the same time he waved his hand towards his followers. They all with one accord turned their heads from us in the direction of the garden gate.

He then pushed out his foot in the silver stirrup for a mounting step.

“Now!” he whispered.

And in a moment, with the help of his hand, I was up like a bird. And it is past telling how good it was. For, judge ye, it was two years since I had been kissed—by a man, that is. And others do not really count, as I have seen. Well, in a moment I was down again and toying demurely with my rosary, before the white mule and Sister Eulalie had agreed about the salutation of the last shoe of blessed iron. Larry had his people well trained. For nobody laughed. Indeed, what more natural than that I should embrace one of my own folk after two years. Yet what the young man’s manners at Rome must have been, to make them so biddable, it is, as I tell him, better only guessing.

Ah, it was a good world after all—that which God had made; and has a way of improving suddenly when it is at its black worst.

CHAPTER II.
ONE LEG GREEN AND ONE LEG PINK

For, after all, Laurence was a good deal older than I. And that makes a difference. Besides, he had known me from the time that Maud Lindsay sent me off to play with him, that she might have the more time (and the better) in which to torment his brother Sholto with her wilfulnesses.

That was, of course, before they were married and had five children. Some time before.

But all of that may be read in the history, that is titled after the chief of our house, The Black Douglas. But that is writ solemnly and of set purpose; also straight on, as a book should be, while this which for my pleasure I am writing contains just the things that a woman has done and thought and heard and seen ever since she was a girl, and is of little value save to herself and to make the winter nights pass.

And so Laurence M‘Kim was an abbot, and, indeed, might have been a bishop had he wished it. But he was not given that way, having enough knowledge of himself to know that he was not worthy. That he was a real Lord Abbot I knew. For had not I myself made him so—or, rather, my cousins William and James, who acted for me, and did not cross me in aught, save only in sending me to this abominable convent!

But that is always the way with men. They give us a thousand things we do not want; they refuse us the one thing we do.

I wonder, indeed, how they would have liked it themselves. William would have spitted the porteress in a week, I know, and broke open the great spiked door. But James, who was ever ready with his answer, had in after-times the effrontery to tell me that he would have liked it, contenting himself always well where women were.

Bah! At any rate, I am not come to that yet. Then I was glad enough to see Larry. Yes, glad with a great gladness that no man can tell. And he did not even damp me when he out with a great folded parchment, all done in purple and black, with the seal of St. Peter hanging to it, almost as big as the great censer of Trèves which only a six-foot man can swing.

And then, last of all, there came out the Lady Superior, whom we maids called the Bald Cat. I mean that I did—I, and two French girls who, for various kittenishnesses wrought in overstrait homes, had been sent to the Sign of the Bald Cat to repent themselves of their sins. The Lady Superior’s other name was Marie Noël de Saint Verrier, and she had (I remarked it myself, but not overtly to Sister Eulalie) as much discernment of the good things of life, or the honest, well-meaning thoughts of men and women, as a sow hath of the perfumes in a flower garden. She had but one table in her decalogue—that at which she did continually over-eat herself; but one article in her credo—that all was right which was done within the convent of St. Brigida of Cheverney, and all wrong that was done outside of it.

Well—there was more done in St. Brigida than was told to Madame Noël de Saint Verrier—otherwise and more exactly the Bald Cat.

But let it be understood that Laurence, Venerable Prior of the Abbey of Holy Devorgil, called Dulce Cor by Solway Side, did not in the least misbecome his errand. Troth, sirs, I wot not! William, my cousin, now Earl of Douglas, would not have sent him else. He was, albeit, a young and personable prelate, also well to look upon—a thing which always had its effect with the Bald Cat—that is, in a man. In girls she could not abide it. She cut their love-locks to the bristle with her own hand, and added an extra six inches to their poke bonnets if their eyes sparkled. But not to mine. For though she had been bidden to be strict with me in the matter of discipline, yet for all that, I was still a princess in my own country, and the daughter of one Duke of Touraine and the sister of another.

But the Bull—the papal Bull!

The Bald Cat took it, fumbling meanwhile for the pieces of Venice glass set together in an oval frame with water between them, by means of which it pleased her to think that she could read. But all the glasses in the world—no, not Agrippa’s ball of crystal itself, could have taught her to read that Papal Bull. It was in Latin, and so after turning it this way and that, she gave it back to the Abbot Laurence, who now stood before her, tall and young and fair to look upon.

“Read it, if you please, your learned reverency!” she said, softly for her.

But Laurence, with a proud gesture, which amounted almost to contempt, handed it to the almoner of the convent, Father Pierre Bartentane, called Gigot from his shape—this, by us ill-behaved girls.

“Let the Lady Abbess hear what says the Holy Father!” he said. “As I am come to carry off her fairest flower, I wish her to understand that I do not misconstrue my warrant!”

I leaped towards Larry, and would have hugged him in my arms.

“Am I indeed quit of this for ever and a day?” I cried in our own Scots, which I knew that none of the others could understand. “Am I to go away with you? Tell me quick!”

“Ay,” said Laurence, turning away his eyes, “you are to go with me. But—I am to take you to marry your Cousin William—my Lord Earl of Douglas.”

“The Man of Iron!” I said.

And I think I made a wry face and shrugged my shoulders—for I was but young, and knew no better. “I had rather it had been yourself I was to wed, Larry,” I said. “And that in spite of your clerkery!”

His face reddened till it became almost scarlet. But he did not look at me as he replied.

“My clerkhood would not stand in my way, God wot—if that were all,” he answered; “but, my lady, I do not forget that I am but a poor man’s son, and my princess’s very humble servant.”

Now, all this about young Laurence M‘Kim being Abbot of beautiful Dulce Cor, and yet no whit a monk (save that he could sing like an angel), may sound strange to ears accustomed to authority episcopal and papal, to monasteries French and Italian. But in Galloway we Douglases minded not the King of Scots at all, wet day or dry day, and the pope only when we had need of him—generally to give us leave to marry within the proscribed degrees, for the sake of the Douglas properties, family tree, and such-like. At other times we of the Southern House did much as we liked, in the Church as in the State, our yea being yea, and our nay nay.

Now, the Douglases of the Red grew great, and are to this day great and high, by reason of truckling and fawning on the king and the Stewarts. But the Douglases of the Black—never! All except my Lord James, that is, and he never could help trying to please all that came his way, man and woman, gentle and simple. For he was ruddy as young David, the shepherd boy that became a king; tall, too, like a god; and my heart—went after him. Ah! but enough of this. The time to tell these things is not yet. All the same, James was always at heart, as in his person, a Douglas of the Red. For me, I am Black of the Black.

It was, of course, impossible that all the great train of honour and of defence which William Douglas, my cousin, had given to the Abbot Laurence to travel to Rome withal should find lodging within the walls of the convent of St. Brigida. Indeed, as these (barring the churchmen) were exclusively soldiers, and dashing blades most of them, it was perhaps as well, or certain variations in the Rule of that most excellent founder might have been introduced.

So it fell out exceedingly à propos. While the Bald Cat was hesitating what she should do, hemming and hawing hither and thither, trying to grant and not to grant at the same time, as was her bald-cattish way, there appeared from the midst of the retinue a man in an ample “pelicon,” or pelisse, longer than was then in vogue, but with a rich under-garnishing of fur. This garment had a wide rolling collar, all covered over with the Bloody Heart of the Douglases, and a great “bar sinister” of threaded gold crossed the mantle from shoulder to its deepest fold, as if it had been a heraldic shield hung upon an altar.

The new-comer was a man of about fifty, quickly greying, and with a mouth that pouted continually like that of a pettish, changeable woman. His long hose were of silk, in what I afterwards found was the height of the fashion at Paris—one leg and thigh being covered with pale blush rose-colour and the other tucked out in clear greenish white, like that which one sometimes sees behind a windy sunset, far in the deeps of the sky.

The man was indeed a marvel to behold, and at the sight of him the High Lady Superior ordered all her pensionnaires, especially the two kittenish French girls, back to their cells. But in the circumstances, of course, she was forced to permit me to remain. I should not have obeyed in any case. I would have shaken the papal Bull in her face.

“My lady,” he said, “I am Paul Herault de Douglas, Sieur de Cheverney. Permit me, Madame the Superior, to kiss your fair and devoted hand!”

The haughty expression which had distinguished the Mother Superior swiftly gave place to another—one of almost fearful anticipation.

“Ah,” she said, “then you are our over-lord of Cour Cheverney, the Seignior and civil protector of this blessed house of religion?”

“I fear I have but ill done my duty,” said the Sieur Paul, smiling and pouting; “I have wasted my time, lingering so long in Paris, in the train of the king, helping to drive out the English, and also employed in other ways. I have somewhat neglected my property of Cheverney—more especially in so far as concerns my duty to you, and to this noble and beautiful establishment!”

And again he bowed and kissed the hand of the Lady Superior.

“A beautiful hand and one more fit for a king’s court than—!”

He stopped, and believe it who will (the sisters in the convent would not!) the Bald Cat lifted her forefinger and waggled it at him, right well pleased, smiling the while like a fox at a barnyard pullet.

“Ah, naughty,” she murmured coaxingly; “these are indeed the manners of a court. But in Touraine we are accustomed to plainer things, are we not, Sister Margaret?”

And she turned to me as she spoke. But I had suffered too much already, and was in no mood to be gracious at the eleventh hour.

“Indeed,” said I, “I am no sister, either of yours or of the Order of St. Bridget. Call in Sister Eulalie with her bread-and-water, if you like—she will tell you. I am on my way to be married to the greatest lord in all Scotland, and, besides, I am a princess in my own right!”

It was not, perhaps, very ladylike, though I have

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AND AGAIN HE BOWED AND KISSED THE HAND OF THE LADY SUPERIOR.

heard worse things said by much greater and wiser people. But then no more can bread-and-water for four days be called “ladylike.” If girls of eighteen are to be treated like galley-knaves—God wot, somebody has to pay for it in the end.

Yet I was no little ashamed when the Lady Superior took my ill-nature with great quietude, passing it over as the mere naughtiness of a child, as yet irresponsible—and so (I grant it) showing herself of the better breeding.

Then the Sieur Paul, advancing the rose-blush leg out of his armorial mantle (or, as we women say, pelisse), invited me to consider his castle of Cour Cheverney my home till such time as I should be ready to set out upon my journey to Scotland, there to wed with my Cousin William—my Lord High Buckram-and-Iron, as I had already named him in my heart.

Indeed, the phrase, which I thought happily invented, passed my lips that very night after we had departed for Cour Cheverney. I was speaking to Laurence at the time. But to my surprise and vexation he rebuked me for it, saying that William of Avondale was worth all the rest of the family put together—all, that is, who had been left on the earth after the Black Dinner which Chancellor Crichton, the fox, and Tutor Livingston, the Queen Mother’s fat spaniel, had given my brothers William and David within the castle of Edinburgh.

And at this rebuke I shrugged my shoulders and pouted, like the spoilt child I was at that time. God wot, I learned to behave better afterwards.

“Well, since it must be—so must it be!” I said, sighing, “but (I say it twice) I had rather have wedded with yourself, Larry!”

He turned on me, white this time, not red—yes, blue-white as the little shadows that sunshine makes behind snow-wreaths. (Oh, I love to see a man moved like that!)

“For God’s sake, girl, have ye no pity?” he cried, putting his hand to his brow—a gesture which his father also had when perplexed—“if ye say the like again, I will—I will—!”

“Ay, and what will ye do then?” said I, mocking his Galloway accent, which showed itself whenever he was excited. “Will ye refuse me your reverence’s blessing? Na, surely never! Or aiblins would ye smite a poor lass, that never did ye harm, with the Greater Excommunication?”

Larry turned away without speaking, and that made me a little sorry. But ah, the inward happiness to be among men again after two years! Yet even then I did not know the power which had come to me during these years, nor yet the good that all the greyhound fare of the convent had done me. In a word, I was just beginning to learn what I could do with the hearts of men.

And there is nothing like that to a woman! In her heart, carefully covered over, maybe—to be dug for deep and long, but still there—indisputable, unobtrusive, there is the same desire to every one of womankind. Bah—they tell you different, some of them, but they lie. To be beautiful and to turn men between their fingers this way and that, as a potter doth a vessel, moulding it to his thought. That is the Thing Desired of the Heart—the princesshood, the queen’s sceptre. All else, as I, who have tried all, do know—housewifery, maternity, charity, the life conventual, the chatter of a court, the mistressing of a great house—are, as the folk say in Galloway, but a “do-no-better”! And, indeed, among such men as I have known—Douglases of the Black and of the Red, Stewarts with the bitter, murderous Bruce blood in them—what better can a woman do?

Well, it is past for me now, and yet I can warm my heart at the fires of the past—yea, to this very day I chew the pleasant cud of memory. It was not all dust and ashes, as the priests say; it has not all turned to apples of Sodom, and the taste is not as of bitter ashes in my mouth. Still, even in old age, I judge that this is the second best thing which can happen to a woman—that she should have been beautiful in her youth, or, at least, by some quirk or trick of tongue or face or manner, witching, and capable of making herself desired.

I say that is the second best thing in a woman’s life. The absolute best, the gold centre of all, is that during her love-time she should have known one man good, and true, and great. Then only can she wholly forget self in another, which is a woman’s heaven of heavens.

CHAPTER III.
COUR CHEVERNEY

So to Cour Cheverney we went, the fat-faced goodman with the pouting lips and the unsteady Florentine eyes leading the way. The fields, how fine they smelt—hawthorn, red and white, single-flower and double-flower, on every tree! The hedgerows—as in the Galloway of my childhood, there are hedgerows in Touraine—full of red pimpernel and blue hyacinth, and with the yellow broom they named the kings after peeping over everywhere, while stone-chats and other small birds went swaying on the thin fishing-rod branches.

Ah, it was greatly good! Better still, to see the white convent walls that had held me so long sink behind the tall trees, which shut in also Sister Eulalie and her bread-and-water. To Cour Cheverney—yes, we were going. At the risk of I know not what dread penalty, I had looked across at the tall tower, a cliff of mason-work, higher than Thrieve by a score of feet, though not so massive and square in shape, from the perilous top of the gardener’s ladder.

Now I was to see it nearer at hand. The Abbot Laurence, in the pride of his ambassadorial office, rode beside the Mother Superior, while the Sieur Paul smiled over his shoulder at them both. It may be well understood that I was on the other side of Laurence on my pony, Varlet. Now Varlet was specially wicked and restive, because he had been most insufficiently exercised by Monsieur the Almoner of the Convent. For the Abbé Barré, our good father-confessor, was not a little afraid of Varlet’s hoofs and teeth. But as for me, I had no fear, and I specially wished to know all that Larry had to tell, before we arrived at Cour Cheverney. For I did not know how we might be lodged there, nor what chance there would be of my having speech with my ancient playmate in that great place.

“Tell me first how all goes at home,” I bade him; “they have settled you as abbot comfortably at Sweetheart Abbey—so much I know. None shall vex you there. So at least I bade them, and so Cousin Will promised!”

For I, too, could make myself great upon occasion.

“Oh, well enough,” he said, a little indifferently. Then, recollecting who had given him his preferment, he added quickly, “And indeed I am grateful, since no better may be. But the sword, and not the psalm-book, was my proper calling.”

“Time was when you were of the contrary opinion,” I said; “tell me—for once I will confess you—who is she?”

But he denied. There was nothing and no one.

“Nevertheless,” said he, “a man may sometimes lift his eyes and see the moon!”

“Yes,” I retorted on him, fast as words can follow words, “true, but only a baby will cry for it!”

“Then I am, I fear me, a gross pagan,” he said as swiftly, “for I worship her!”

“That is bad,” I said, “and most inconsistent in a man who must spend his life in swaddling and wet-nursing twoscore such sturdy Endymions as the fathers of Dulce Cor. How do you manage it? The Slave of the Lamp could not serve them all!”

“Oh, easily enough,” Laurence made answer. “I am (let us say) Abbot of Sweetheart. So far, well—but again better, I might have been the captain of a company, a soldier with men-at-arms under him, like Sholto, my brother—Sir Sholto, if you please, with his little regiment of five children! Still there remains to me the abbey of Sweetheart. From chapel to refectory, from dormitory to pantler’s cellarage, I conceive it as a barracks. The soldiers therein observe the Order of Citeaux, and, indeed, not St. Bernard himself could be firmer and stricter—in all, that is, which concerns the keeping of that Rule by others. But for myself—well, there are monks who, as it were, are eunuchs for the Kingdom’s sake. But for myself—no! I am only one set in authority over monks. You complain of bread-and-water at St. Brigida’s, but at Sweetheart, my dear lady, I can do more and better, and no man raise his voice to pipe a ‘What dost thou?’ ”

I changed the subject, for the grey towers of Cour Cheverney grew nearer apace.

“And what of William and James—and the lads? Are they at Thrieve? Tell me!”

For I could not bring myself to speak of my Cousin William as Earl of Douglas—at least not yet, still less as my husband!

Laurence gave a little hitch to his mule’s bridle. Of white leathern thongs it was, curiously plaited. Then he bent over to the side away from me, as if something there claimed his attention. Ever since his arrival he had had these strange habits. I had not observed them in him before; but perhaps that was because I was growing older, and so noticed more. So I thought, at any rate.

Then Larry pointed to the soaring keep and the grey flanking towers of the Cour Cheverney.^[2]

“Yonder,” he said, with a little bitter smile which I understood not then; “they are both yonder, my Lord William and my Lord James. Do you think that a young wooer, hot upon his love-making, and the brother, the friend of the bridegroom, he who is to stand by and see his joy, will be far away when the bride is brought home?”

Then a sudden terror seized me.

“I will not be married like this, here and now,” I cried; “signed for, taken from custody, guarded, delivered, and the note acquitted—I, Margaret Douglas, that am Princess of Galloway, and but eighteen years of age!”

And without a word more I set spurs in Varlet, and turned him about towards the woods. The king was at Amboise—Charles, the King of France, I mean. He would do me justice. He would make me a maid of honour in his court. That would be easy. There was great need of such. I had heard the Bald Cat say so more than once—Sister Eulalie too!

Then what a dance I led that cavalcade. I laugh now when I think of it. Off his saddle Larry could have caught me easily, having the gift of the fleet foot. Ay, I will wager if he had been in training, and in his hose and jerkin, he could have winded even Varlet over a long course. But, as it was, he sat there girning impotently on a churchman’s mule. He was full of the good beef and wine of Devorgilla’s abbey—though indeed neither showed in his profile, fine as that of a graven statue. Worst of all, he was swathed in bandages ecclesiastical, cope and soutane and mantle, or whatever these half-men please to call them.

As for me, I made a good start, and went through the cavalcade like an arrow from a bow.

Inwardly laughing, I could hear the din of pursuit thin out and grow silent behind me, as I urged Varlet onward faster and always faster. It is easy to get away from a lot of monks and a few knights and esquires heavily clad in armour—that is, with a good horse between one’s knees and a well-pointed spur of silver on either heel.

Amboise it was I was bound for—nothing less. I did not know the way to Amboise very exactly, but I had heard that it lay away to the west, down the valley, and someone had told me that by hard riding one could reach it by nightfall. The king would be glad to see me—of that I made no doubt. And in so much, at least, I made no mistake.

But as I galloped on my spirits rose at leaving Will of Avondale, my cousin, behind, together with the hateful thought of being dragged from a convent only to be married. I was not really dragged, but no matter—that was the way I liked to think about it then.

And I thought also, that if I could only have gone back to play with Larry about the braes of Boreland, crossing over in a boat from the Thrieve when it pleased us, I should have been perfectly happy. I did not want to be married, at least not so soon, and have done with girlhood before I had ever tasted it, and—and—well, not to have my own choosing of a husband, as Maud Lindsay had when she married Sholto. Even if I could have had the pick of the Avondale brothers, all set out in a row—William, James, Archibald, Hugh, and little John—that would not have seemed so bad. At least, it would have been fun to see them. Then I might not have run off like this. But to marry a sober-sides like William Douglas, whom everyone (of the Douglas faction) said was the best and wisest person in the world, and who looked as if he stuffed himself with smithy filings, wore buckram next his skin, and went to bed in complete armour with his head pillowed on the family tree! Ciel! How I gritted my teeth, set my heels into Varlet, and longed for the towers of Amboise to rise above the dwarf aspens and pollard poplars by the brook-sides, which seam all sweet Touraine as the Garden of France slopes gently to the Loire—like some gracious woman lying asleep, and smiling in a pleasant dream.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Maid Margaret of Galloway

MAID MARGARET
OF GALLOWAY

CONTENTS

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CHAPTER I.
BREAD-AND-WATER—AND KITCHEN THERETO!

CHAPTER II.
ONE LEG GREEN AND ONE LEG PINK

CHAPTER III.
COUR CHEVERNEY

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Maid Margaret of Galloway

MAID MARGARET OF GALLOWAY

CONTENTS

ADVERTISEMENT

CHAPTER I. BREAD-AND-WATER—AND KITCHEN THERETO!

CHAPTER II. ONE LEG GREEN AND ONE LEG PINK

CHAPTER III. COUR CHEVERNEY

MAID MARGARET
OF GALLOWAY

CHAPTER I.
BREAD-AND-WATER—AND KITCHEN THERETO!

CHAPTER II.
ONE LEG GREEN AND ONE LEG PINK

CHAPTER III.
COUR CHEVERNEY