But the valley, which at first had been but as a dimple on a smooth fair skin, deepened into a lirk between two hills, narrowed into a gorge, and then—in a moment I came upon the little river (called the Cosson), which for a long distance runs a race with the Loire ere it decides to join forces with it. Had I mounted the brae again and kept the crown of the land, I had gotten easily enough to Amboise (though the way was far), but in my ears I seemed to hear the shouting of the enemy behind me—of my pursuers, I mean. And there, on the other hand, was the water lying green and deep beneath me.
Howsomever I was on the point of riding Varlet at it on the chance that he could swim (and, indeed, the feat itself is no great matter), when all of a sudden there burst a young man out of some green bracken and elderberry bushes by the bank of the river.
He was a tall, ruddy youth of weight and brawn, with eyes constantly laughing, and as he advanced methought I caught a glimpse of something white—the flutter of a neckerchief or a kilted petticoat belike—in the thicket out of which he came.
He ran alongside Varlet for a step or two, calling names to him (speaking all the while like one who has a way with horses and women). Then with a short, sharp grasp at the bridle, he brought him up all panting upon the very brink of the river.
Then the splendid young man took off his bonnet, which was of blue, light and clear, and had a white band and tassel. A white plume of some foreign bird was set in the side.
“I am happy, most happy to serve you, most noble young lady!” he said in French that was a little tashed with disuse, yet which had obviously proved sufficient for its owner’s purposes, as witness that flutter of jupe among the bracken. But as for me, I answered him in Scots. For I knew him at the first glint. They do not breed such acreages of flesh and bone, nor yet cover them with such milk-white skin, in the land of France.
“Jamie lad, my guid cozin,” I cried, “gang back an’ finish oot your half-cut rig! Or ye will keep a grudge again’ puir wee Marget a’ the days o’ your life!”
He stood still, fastened with embarrassment, and then threw up his hands with a long whistle.
“The Fair Maid o’ Galloway!” he said, as if stiff-stricken. “Certes, lass, but ye are grown indeed—and bonny as the day. Gie your kinsman a kiss for stopping that reckless galloper o’ yours at the peril o’ his neck!”
But though at another time—well—I had been glad enough to kiss Larry (and he not my cousin, but a plain blacksmith’s son), I refused him.
“Na, na, Jamie Douglas,” I cried daffingly. “Gang back yonder where ye cam frae. Ye will conquest mair than the braw French tongue, I am thinkin’! Fish and cranes and wild fowl bide in the marshes, I hae heard, and I ken ye were aye a braw sportsman. But as for the cozinly kiss—let me gie ye ae advice. And that is: Never ye mix the white wine and the black, lad! They gang na weel thegither, Jamie, my coz!”
And with that I turned and left him, standing “finger in his mouth,” as we say in Scotland. I even heard him mutter, “The besom! Hath she learned the like o’ that in a convent of nuns?”
Then because James never wasted anything (his one virtue!) I judge that he took my advice. For he went slowly back towards the thicket whence he had come, with his head bent meditatively to the ground.
But ere he went out of sight, I stood up in my stirrups and called out to him, “Tell me, cozin, where left you William?”
“What William?” said he, growling rather than speaking over his shoulder.
“Why,” cried I, “since when was there more than one William—Will Douglas, that was once Will of Avondale, and—my affianced husband?”
I fancy I made him wince at that, even as Larry had done. And I meant to. I always knew which men of those who came near me—that is, three out of four—would not like to hear of my marrying anyone else. And so, in spite of flags of truce fluttering from among elder thickets, I knew very well it was with James.
“How should I ken where he bides,” he growled. “I have not a string tied to our Will’s tail!”
“No, nor to your own!” I called back to him; “you rake the country overmuch, James!”
In which I had him at a vantage, for he answered me no more, seeming (as we say both in Scots and French) sore “fashed” with me for my free handling of his peccadilloes.
But I turned my horse’s head, and would have ridden after him.
“Where is Will?” I cried. “Tell me—or”—
I pointed with my hand to the boskage, turning at the same time my horse’s head.
“You are a shameless little vixen,” he cried (I am not sure that he did not say “villain”). “I know not where Will is—he is not at Cour Cheverney, but where he may be found, by St. Brice, I know not—making himself musty over parchments, and chilling of his blood by drinking cold well-water, I warrant him.”
“Ah, James,” I answered him, as I turned away to meet Larry, who, meantime, was in a perfect fume of anger, and the Sieur Paul, wholly out of breath, “I am not sure that elderberry wine, taken in quantity and by the wayside, is so muckle better for the health. It sours upon the stomach, my good Cozin James!”
Now, ever since I could run alone I have always tried to find out everything for myself, and to put my spoon into every dish the like of which I had never seen before. So, having easily passed off my escapade upon the friskiness of Varlet, and his having had no exercise for weeks at the convent, only Larry, who did not matter at all, understanding, I was resolved to make the most of our stay at Cour Cheverney.
I had seen greater things before, of course; for mine own home of Castle Thrieve yields to none in all the kingdoms where I have been, and I could recall, though dimly, those great days when my dear brother William held his tourney on the mead of Glenlochar, the one that lasted three days—ah, there never was aught finer than that in France—no, nor yet in Italy.
But then, at that time I was a little girl, scarce fit to hold the train of the Queen of Beauty, and Maud Lindsay it was who had all the honours and all the eye-glancings of the younger men. But now that has changed, and I felt for the first time, I know not how, that I could hold my own with a king’s daughter.
Moreover, Cour Cheverney was still empty of my bridegroom. That was its chief joy. I had an unexpected respite. As Margaret of Galloway I could laugh at Will of Avondale, my cousin, at his books and parchments, the great schemes in his head, and the little outcome there had been of them; but as my bridegroom, my husband, my master, the Earl of Douglas, the Duke of Touraine, I was not so sure that Cousin Will would be such a laughing matter.
So, for the present, Cour Cheverney, even with the presence of the Lady Superior, was to me highly desirable; a means of furthering my education, and, by incident, that of several other people as well.
And my chief joy and safety, in thus completing of my education, was that everyone knew that I was so soon to be married—by high pontifical dispensation, papal Bull, holy cord, and four pounds of wax thereto attached—not to speak, as it were, of bell, book, and candle. So they might sigh, the men of them, that is—but no one could think (no, not for a moment) that I meant any harm. Indeed, I never did, and said so frequently when the harm came.
Now Cour Cheverney was of itself a pleasant place. The Sieur Paul, a rich man, had recently had it put in repair. The chambers he had decorated with tapestry from Paris. The higher windows were widened, and balconies thrust out from the thickness of the wall. The courtyard was set about with a bordering of flowers. Bravest of all was a great Judas tree, with purple blossoms close set upon its branches, which cast a shade along the left side of the court, opposite to the great hall and the men’s apartments. I asked the Sieur Paul to have a bench put there, and I went often to that place of a sunny afternoon with my broidery—to be quiet and think.
But the strange thing was that I scarcely got five minutes of meditation, and as for the solitude which I had come there to seek—why, first came one and then another, my faith, past believing! The place was like a fair.
There was Laurence, who, being a prelate, or, at least, having the powers of one, could not go a-hunting. Yet, because I said once, to try him, that he was of no more use than to bide at home with the maids, he took to fishing, and made infinite work with his tackle, sitting beside me on that same seat. I never heard whether he landed anything—from the river, I mean. At the seat he certainly did not. So I mourned with him over his ill success, and when James Douglas came down in yet another new purple vest, with gold buttons and long sleeves of silk, I told him of the little progress that Larry was making in the art of fishing with the angle, innocently inquiring if he did not think that with a rod of elder and a busking of white jupon, our fisherman might try the banks of the Closson with better success.
“These French troutlets are shy. They have been tried so often before,” I said. “You can ask my Lord James as to the bait he is wont to use!”
Then Larry, knowing that James and I had some secret between us, would grow all of a sulk, and, bundling his things together, take leave of us upon the instant. At which James, making a little face behind his back, would sit down beside me, while the Sieur Paul went a-promenading along the other side of the court with the Bald Cat upon his arm. She had discovered that on the maternal side he could claim to be a cousin ten times removed (if not more) of her family. And as he was also kin to the great, and possessed a castle like Cour Cheverney, the wise Mother Superior had no objections to the alliance, in spite of the “bar sinister” which, like an oriflamme, he flaunted athwart his back.
It was one of the most frequent of our ploys to dance in the courtyard of an evening. James could not dance well. He was too big of bone, and too fair. Only dark men dance well. But he would snatch angrily at the strings of his doublet and kick at the house dogs as they slunk uneasily along the selvage of the flagged square, apprehensive of so many heels all going to a measure. Then he would affirm loudly that, thank Heaven, only fools and cropped poodles could dance; that as for himself, the “deil might care, but he, James Douglas, cared no jot!”
All which was, as one might say, meat to the hungry. And specially to me, who had been two long years in a convent, with Sister Eulalie tugging all the time at the tail of one’s gown! Well, I have heard speak a great deal of paradise. And it may all be true. But at eighteen one does not hunger after such doubtful exchanges. Cour Cheverney and the dance beneath the Judas tree were good enough for me.
Then Larry, who had a vast amount of music in his fingers as well as in his toes, and could play any instrument from an organ to a five-stringed guiterne or a mouth flute—by sheer wit, as it were, and without learning, used to play for us. At first it was all solemn-sounding tunes on the great harp—after which, perhaps, low, sweet harmonies on the psalterion. Then, as he warmed to his work, I, who knew him and saw the ichor mounting, would hand him a viol silently and hush the company with my hand. For, if left alone, they were bound to hear a marvellous thing.
Then would he sing, accompanying himself, like the carolling lark on the first day of May, in such a voice as never was heard save in the sky, till he would bring the very tears to our eyes, and set us to the sobbing for no reason at all. Songs of lost love he would sing, of desolate low shores and maids yet more desolate. Sadder and sadder the ballad would grow, till, with a sudden fling of the elbow through his embroidered robe, Larry would dash into some mirthful lilt of old Scottish song, all marriage-making and happiness, with white-mutched crones nodding heads at their gossip, and goodmen chaffering in the market-place.
As he played he grew fixed and lost, this daft Larry of ours, whom fate and the Douglases had made an abbot, and the ambassador of another man’s wooing. And though there was a shaven patch, the size of a clipped ducat, on his crown, I wot well the curls clustered so fair and maidenly about his brow, that, had he not worn breeches (or whatever holy men wear underneath their soutanes), the Bald Cat would have had them shorn by the roots in the twinkling of an eye.
Then, of course, at Cour Cheverney there were other exploits. Great brawny James was all for the tourneying, and (also of course) at that, among the country lords and Knights-of-the-Green-Fields, easily bore the gree. But Bevis Roland, the renegade Englishman, as easily beat him at the archery, which at least was exceedingly good for our brisk Jamie’s soul. But again at riding and hunting, and also at the horse-leaping, my Lord James Douglas could give a long start to all the company—an it were not Larry, who, being a clerk on a white mule, a cross on his breast, and a mitre on his head, could not, for very shame, compete with him. But he stood behind me, gritting his teeth and groaning in his spirit.
“I could beat him,” he said, “ ’fore the Lord, I could beat him at all but the jousting. And as for that bag-swagging Englisher, Bevis Roland, I could shoot three in the white to his one, for sixty golden crowns! If I could not, may the devil change me into a kailstock. Yet here I must stand like a draff-sack set upright. God rest my soul for it in the day of need! It is much to put up with for the sake of religion!”
Then, the devil he had imprecated entering into me, I encouraged him to cast his robe, his cope, and soutane, and to it in his hose and shirt. And by my fey, the mad wight would have done it in a twinkling. He had the heavy mantle half off his shoulder, when suddenly he caught sight of the great golden cross upon it, all wrought in thread as thick as wire.
Then some thought of his calling, as I hope, or shame of the people about him—as I fear—caused Larry to halt, and with a sigh he drew his cope again about him. But when I had egged him on a little further (the devil or one of his imps still possessing me), he turned upon me and said in Scots, “Mistress Meg, art a naughty wench! And if thou dost not mend thy manners, wilt come to no good! I ken what means thy trokings under the Judas tree yonder, thy blotched broiderings and sudden eye-liftings, thy seats set in the shade of an afternoon”—
“Concerning which, good lad,” I retorted, “you, holy Father Larry, of a certainty ought to know, for you sit there more than any! Ay, and hold thread for the winding, too, between these same thrice-blessed abbatical fingers! Pax vobiscum! Retro me! Requiescat in pace!”
And that being all my stock of Latin, I made to bless him backwards in sport, which angered him curiously.
“Ah, that I were your father,” he murmured, low and bitter in mine ear, “or your mother, ay—or even the Abbess of St. Brigida two days agone! There are some rules of that Order which would suit you!”
“Well, what would happen then, most reverend prior of the bare chin?” I demanded.
Larry said nothing in words, but his fingers itched visibly to box my ears—or, for aught I know, more and worse.
But in the midst of these occupations and the new joyance of freedom which had come to me, the Sieur Paul promised other entertainment. He was, I think, some little piqued that our big James had so easily borne his point against the gentlemen of Touraine. So said he one morning, when we were all at gossip under the Judas tree, “Messire James, my good lord, there are none of your mettle here, but over yonder at Loches with the Dauphin there are one or two knights of another web—La Hire and the younger Dunois—good lances and stout hearts. How will you like it if I send for them, make a fête day at Cour Cheverney, and see if you can break a lance with them as deftly as with us poor laggard oafs of the provinces?”
“Faith, I would like it greatly,” said James. “I ask no better!”
And to me, turning his head, he said in Scots, “Cousin Marget, ye will see me whammle them!” Which is the same as to say that he would make them all bite the dust.
For that was our James, root and branch of him—ready, self-confident, never blate, everyway large, hectoring, easy of manner, quick as a touch to draw on a gentleman, swinge a burgher, or drink pewter for pewter with a beggar. He never dreamed that he could fail in anything. Nor for that matter (to tell the truth) did I!
Well, they came. And I sat on a fine crimson-draped balcony which had been fastened out on struts from two lower windows of the keep. For (having none other) the Sieur Paul had perforce to make me Queen of Beauty; and as for James, he thought, as usual, that he had naught else to do but lift the jewel—a black diamond circled all about with points of brilliants and sapphires—which certainly would have become me excellently. So I hoped he would win.
The company arrived. There were knights on splendid horses, the like of which I have never seen in Scotland, except the noble black, which had belonged to William, my dear young brother, who was so treacherously slain at Edinburgh by Chancellor Livingston and the sneaking gutter-hound Crichton.
There was Dunois the younger, a tall, dark man, quiet and lissom, a velvety glitter in the eyes of him like a wandering Egyptian, with La Hire, a smart, grey-headed man of fifty, stout-backed, and with a long upper lip, also with little to say for himself. To them add the Count des Baux and Henri de Cayades, light, alert men of the South, Provençal through all their veins, both born within sight of the castle of good Roi Réné, and both as full of talk and apt to love as a willow bole is of sap in the springtime.
Ultimately to these were added a slight brown man with shifty eyes, with an ill-kept steel capote on his head, and, believe it who will, a rosary about his neck like the Bald Cat herself; and, last of all, a tall dark man, of whom, however, I caught but one glimpse disappearing into the stables to arm himself, for he had ridden over light, his armament having been sent from Loches with a groom.
There were banners hung from all the windows of Cour Cheverney and the air of a fête day everywhere. The very grooms and varlets of the stable were alert and active, with ribbons in their caps and fresh straws in their mouths.
Outside the newly set-up barriers there was a great press of the commons, with spearmen to tread upon their bare toes with mail-clad feet, and in case of need to stamp out a due and respectful space behind the barriers with the butts of their lances.
Of our house party there came first, of course, James Douglas, my cousin, who must always gallant it in the forefront. Then came the Sieur Paul, most like an apple dumpling done in steel plate and a helmet with plumes, but yet, so they affirmed, able to swing a good sword and grip a stout lance in his day. One of these last only he was to break. Then there was one who, though amongst the party of Cour Cheverney, and fighting in a borrowed suit of plate with the “bar sinister” of Herault de Douglas, had requested that his name should not be made known.
We of Cour Cheverney, being for the most part clerks and squires, had hard work to muster man for man. And, indeed, even with the young man of the Golden Bar, we were two men short, till there rode up another, the dark man I had seen disappearing in the stables. Through his banner-bearer he declared his readiness to fight upon the side of Cour Cheverney—which, when he had ranged himself with James, the Sieur Paul, and the young man of the Bar Sinister, gave us four to their four.
It was a good fight. Dunois and James broke four lances each and still held it even, which was little to the liking or expectation of either at the first shock. The Sieur Paul “keeled” over and lay like an egg of Pasch, fallen on his back, feebly swaying his arms and calling to all and sundry to hasten—that he was being choked in his armour. He had encountered La Hire. And though that stout-backed Samaritan tried to save him all he could, the shock of meeting so famous a lance was doubtless severe. Bar Sinister and our Succouring Knight lent us from the other side had both conquered their men, without even breaking their own lances, and the grooms were catching the runaway horses and setting the armed men back in the saddle. Towers of glistening metal they looked from my high bank of crimson cloth, and being men of the Midi, they spat out curses at their ill-fortune—the Count des Baux blaming De Cayades for riding across him, and De Cayades telling Des Baux of various places more or less discomfortable, to which an it pleased him he could immediately ride. Whereupon Des Baux said they could settle the matter elsewhere.
Crash went the arms again, and La Hire, having opposed himself to the Succouring Knight who had reinforced the party of Cour Cheverney, overbore him, and he went heavily to the ground. On the other hand James succeeded this time with Dunois, and his spear breaking, the brave young Frenchman was soon on the ground, crying with a loud voice, “Praise to St. Denis that my father is not here to see!” Upon which, James erected his lance as if to conquer Dunois were the simplest thing in the world, and rode again to the top of the lists. The Count des Baux and Henri de Cayades had rushed together upon the Knight of the Bar Sinister, but he, lightly reining his steed, had let them both pass him and crash heavily into each other like two ships in a strong sea, manœuvring too narrowly for the fairway.
A shout arose at his dexterity, and the little shifty-eyed man rushed into the arena and spoke some words to the fallen knights, which seemed to be ill enough taken.
At last La Hire and James Douglas came to it. They had met once before, and James, solely through self-confidence and lack of caution, had been overthrown. But this time our James made no mistakes. The prize was too high—a ring, a bird, and a kiss from the Queen of Beauty—as it is writ in the poem of Chivalry—
“Un cygne qui el pre sera,
Et si vous di qu’il baisera
La pucelle de Landemore.”
La Hire went down before the Douglas brawn and beef and bone. Porridge to breakfast and Martinmas cow to dinner for some score of years had done their work. Truth to tell, La Hire came at it with wonderful finesse, but the weight of man and horse bore him down. After this neither Henri de Cayades nor the Count des Baux was ready for the fray against the conqueror of La Hire and the young Dunois. The Knight of the Bar Sinister had mysteriously disappeared, and James rode round the lists like one vaunting himself, as indeed he never could help doing all his life, specially under the eyes of women. He had taken his new lance, with the pennon which had been carefully kept rolled until now by his standard-bearer, and, with a bow in my direction, he gave it to the wind. The “transfixed heart” of the Douglases flapped out bravely, together with the red and gold on his horse’s trappings. He set his visor up, and, as I told him afterwards, no cock on his own midden-head strutted ever more proudly than James Douglas that day.
Oh yes; and I liked him for it. It was a great deal to me to know that he loved me, and had done all that for my sake.
But when it came the turn of the victor to receive the chaplet, the swan, and the kiss, James had his headgear removed in his tent and came forth presently, looking tall and personable in a close-fitting suit with a golden tabard back and front. Then, according to custom, the beaten men had to unhelm also and see him receive the prize.
The Sieur Paul led them on, smiling and bowing to all about. He had his head wrapped up in a napkin as if for a deadly wound, but the good-humoured ironic cheering of the populace told that they understood other of it. Then came La Hire and Dunois, looking as if they had swallowed each a tankard of vinegar in lieu of good red wine. Lastly, the two men of the Midi, laughing, chattering, and jesting with an air which said plainly that it would be their turn next time. There was one other, the Succouring Knight, who had taken the side of Cour Cheverney, and after winning once had gone down before La Hire. He came up a little late, and at the very time when I was occupied in setting the chaplet of laurel on the head of the victor. Then, tossing the swan among the commons to be scrambled for, James bent over and took his legal kiss from my lips in the fashion prescribed and established by a hundred courts of love.
Perhaps he was unwontedly long about it. For the next thing I knew was the tall, dark Succouring Knight, he who had obstinately kept his visor down even when he stood among the vanquished, laying his hand upon my arm.
“Margaret!” he said quietly.
And then I knew him for my Cousin William, the man with whom I was to wed. I shuddered and caught my breath—as I do now, even as I write.
“And one for me!” he said. “I have come far to get it.”
Now I know not what it was that made me perverse that moment. A kiss was nothing, yet I would not.
“No,” I said; “it is not your right here in this place, but James’s!”
I think he sighed.
“Then a kiss by favour?” he said.
“Nay,” I answered, “you must win a tournament first!”
“I will win all Scotland for you,” he said. “As for this cracking of lances—it is but hammer-and-anvil play!”
“Ah, but then you cannot do it,” I retorted upon him, “and James can!”
And the victor of the combat stood preening himself behind his brother, and, I doubt not, trowing himself the greatest and the strongest man in Christendom.
But William Douglas went away softly without speaking another word.
Ah, these days at Cour Cheverney! How I loved the valley of the Loire and the little feeding rivers which would have been great ones anywhere else, but which shrank to brooklets in the presence of that mighty water going shining down the valley like a procession.
And then, seeing that she could do no more, and, it may be, jealous for the good name of her convent—fearful also of what the kittenish minettes of whom she had been put in charge might have done in her absence—the Lady Superior took her departure.
I could have danced! Indeed, I did—borrowing a pike from a yeoman of the Sieur Paul’s guard, sticking it in the ground and tying ribbons to it as for a May-pole, till the very men in the lodge ’neath the portcullis laughed, and even William Douglas deigned to smile from the window of the library.
But I must tell about the shabby little man with the ill-brushed clothes and the side-dagger, or coupe-gorge, in his belt. I hated him at first, yet withal there was a curious fascination about him.
Not that, indeed, which a man may have for a woman, but something disgustful and hardly full human. I think, if I had been married to such a thing, I should have been tempted to use his coupe-gorge upon himself—when he was asleep. Then the very way he had of looking at me made me uncomfortable. And he looked long and often.
One day we sat in the pleasant court. The Judas tree began to throw down its blossoms. A vagrant wind sprang up, making a pleasant birling sound among the leaves above. The little man—“ill-put-on” as we say—was not long in coming across to me. It appeared that he had something particular to say.
“By your leave I will present myself,” he said, “since there is none that will do the work for me. I am called Louis de Valois—concerning whom, from his insignificance, you may not have heard!”
“De Valois,” said I, somewhat astonished; “why, then, you are of the Royal House?”
“His Majesty’s poor relation,” he said carelessly, “some kin to royalty—I forget what—if anyone ever knew!”
“What are you doing here?” I asked him; for it was not my way to beat about the bush. “The king has surely not sent you also on a mission to Rome?”
A bitter smile wreathed his lips at some thought of his own.
“No,” he said slowly, dragging the words as if by force out of him, “nor does he go there himself—though he has much need, ay—all the way upon his knees.”
“You mean”—
“It is not for little girls out of convents to be told what I mean,” he said somewhat rudely, yet as if speaking unwillingly. But I had the word for him.
“You mean because he has so badly brought up his son, the Dauphin—whom all the world speaks ill of? Or because of—?”
“Tell me, does all the world speak ill of the Dauphin?” said the little man with the yellow-brown eyes, looking up sharply at me.
“My faith,” I said, “I am in France. I cannot abuse the king’s son to his own cousin. All cousins, you know, love one another. But, true it is that I have heard in the convent that the Dauphin is a bad man, and that he was right cruel to my kinswoman and countrywoman, Margaret of Scotland.”
“As for me,” he answered, “I do not believe it. I have, indeed, no great opinion of the man myself, but betwixt a man and a woman wedded, who can judge from the outside of the wall?”
“Well,” I answered, “there may be something in that. I myself have heard that she hath a fondness for poets! Now the Dauphin is certainly no poet.”
The yellow eyes glimmered with cat-like streaks, like melting snow on a mountain top. The king’s poor relation made a chuckling, hollow noise in his throat. He had a sense of humour, a thing highly undesirable in poor relations.
“Ah, belike,” he said, “but, at any rate, it is not a predilection which you share, my dear young lady!”
“Oh, poets!” I said to him, “they are doubtless very well in their place”—
“And that place is”—
“Below the salt and in company with the Merry-Andrew!”
He laughed, and then said, half meditatively, “And you are from the land of the Scots. I wish I had known in time, then I should not have married the daughter of a poet!”
“Your father-in-law was one?” I demanded, really careless whether he answered me or no.
“He was,” he answered, “writing English—well or ill I know not. It is a poor trade. Poets die young!”
He thought a while, and then said, “Your father, he was, I judge, no verse-maker, nor any great scholar?”
“He could sign his name if you gave him time,” I said. “He was the Earl of Douglas and Duke of Touraine!”
“Ah, that is better,” he said, his light cat’s eyes glinting rapidly over my face, and taking in the least detail of my dress, almost like a jealous woman who thinks you may prove prettier than she; “you have certainly most just views upon poetry and poets. I trust you think better of priests and religion?”
“Have I not come direct from a convent?” I asked him, smiling as demurely as I could, “and, besides, has not the pope sent a Bull all the way from Rome to enable me to marry a man I have scarce looked upon all my days? Have I not, therefore, cause to think well of holy men?”
“Religion has ever been my safeguard,” he said, shaking his head gravely at my tone, “particularly this part of the blessed goad wherewith St. Joseph pricked the ass on the night of the flight into Egypt. It is a relic beyond price and very efficacious. I had it from the shrine of St. Marthe in Provençe!”
And he took out of his cap a piece of worm-eaten wood, pointed with iron. The cap was certainly curious in itself, having a peak almost like a mountebank’s, with little furry pockets at the sides (though it was summer) exactly as if the wearer had no ears at all! He continued—
“The curé of St. Marthe had it from a pilgrim, who gat it directly from a wanderer on the beach of Askelon;” he went on, “it has averted evil from me more than once and brought great harm to my enemies—being (by a most curious device) made hollow, and so arranged as to contain a precious powder!”
We were talking thus when William Douglas came up and saluted the little man with more deference than I had ever seen him pay to anyone in all my life—which, to tell the truth, was not much. Then came James and bowed himself to the ground. But that also meant little. For such was our brave Jamie’s way, being, as he said, a younger son with his way to make in the world.
But Laurence stood apart and appeared to meditate. There was an awkward pause. Then the furry-eared little man, who had called himself the king’s poor relation, turned sharp upon William Douglas.
“My lord,” he said, “if you have no objections, I will take your bride here and the pope’s Bull along with her. You can have mine in exchange. She is a king’s daughter.”
William Douglas surveyed the speaker with the same gaze, quiet and steady, with which he took in all the world.
“Prince,” he answered, “if this be a jest, it is a poor one, and on a subject upon which, as all the world knows, it is ill jesting with a Douglas. We rude Scots do not understand the game as it is played in the palaces and châteaux of France. An evil might therefore easily befall.”
“Ah,” said the little man sharply, “you should go to Amboise, and my father would teach you right willingly.”
“Is he a poet too?” I asked, wishing to put a better face on the matter, “as you told me your father-in-law was?”
At this I saw them all start, and James gave a sort of gasp of apprehension. I knew I had said something I ought not. But what it was, or why they were aghast, I declare I knew no more than the Bald Cat—who was by this time snoring in her cell at St. Brigida’s.
But the furry-eared man only smiled indulgently, and patted the back of my hand, which I instantly snatched away from him.
“I have had a most interesting conversation with this little lady,” he said. “I have not felt the time go so fast for many a day. Nay truly, dear lady, my father is no poet, any more than was thine. Yet he carries about him rather more of the raw material of poets’ rhymings than is quite convenient for the world and for me!”
And at this the Sieur Paul laughed with much good humour as at a jest which he alone understood. But the little man with the unwashen face turned upon him with his hand on his dagger.
“Sir,” he said, “I am in your house, but had it been elsewhere I should have set this a hand’s-breadth deep in your belly for daring to laugh at the King of France!”
I think I felt much sympathy for the small pottle-shaped man who, from a simple desire to please, had crossed the chance tempers of this little impish moldiwort.
“The Dauphin of France!” I cried aloud. “My faith, and I took you for the king’s cellarman out for the day, and blinking in the sunshine!”
“But I told you,” said he, not at all losing his temper, “that my name was Louis de Valois. Do the maidens of Scotland never put two and two together?”
“Pshaw!” I cried, resolved that at least he should not intimidate me—not if he were the Grand Bashaw of all the Turks—“at home our cat is named Badrons de Douglas, our goat Billy de Douglas. Eight-and-twenty Crummie Douglases come to Thrieve every Martinmas to fill the beef tub for the men-at-arms. There are pecks and pecks of Border Douglases, and Ettrick Douglases, and Highland Douglases, and Angus Douglases, and Dalkeith Douglases. There be Douglases of the Red and of the Black—and surely I may be held excused if I knew not that there might not be another Louis de Valois in the world besides the son of the King of France!”
I had very nearly added, “And such a king’s son!” but I could see James shaping his lips to warn me to have a care, while Will looked on, hard and cold as ever. I thought that he disapproved of my flippancy, and that only made me the more reckless. I would show him that it was somewhat too soon to put on the airs of a husband.
“Will,” said I, “marriage begins with love-making. Love-making begins with writing verses. If I am to marry you—if you expect me to love you—go make me some! James there can turn them off by the barrelful—in French or in Scots—carols, ballads, rhymes royal or sermons in verse—he has them all at his finger-ends!”
But Will, my cousin, only smiled tolerantly.
“There is other work in the world than stringing rhymes!” he said. “The Dauphin and I have two lands to win from the Old to the New.”
There was always something of the preaching friar about William, which I resented. It sounded like the almoner of St. Brigida’s on Holy Thursday.
So I caught him up sharply. “Ay, Will, is it indeed so? Then let me tell you and His Highness the Dauphin one thing—nay, two. There is one thing, very old, that no one of you shall ever win, and that is a woman’s love! Also, one thing, very new, which neither one of you shall ever experience—the love of young children, thrusting their faces into your beards and shouting at your incoming!”
“So?” said William Douglas, his face firm and a little more hard than before; “well, I can but do my duty. But I will try for the other things too.”
And he turned away, leaving me with a question pricking at my heart.
Then came James, in his dark blue velvet and laced doublet, looking like a great blonde god who had strayed out of some old-time temple. He had heard that which had passed; for he leaned over the great black oak settle and touched my hair gently with his fingers. He had all sorts of ways like that, yet so done that one could not take offence.
“Will is wrong,” he said; “but you must forgive him. He is all set on this new-fangled setting of things right in Scotland. He threeps it down our throats that we are all barbarians, and I dare say he speaks truth. He says Scotland—highland, lowland, and borderland—needs one strong man to put down the raiding and rieving and thieving. Furthermore, that James Stewart is not that man. You can guess who is—in my brother Will’s esteem!”
I gazed at him in utter surprise. He nodded softly, and like one who makes an assured confidence.
“William Douglas would make himself king—king of Scotland!”
James smiled, and continued to stroke my hair, gently and abstractedly (for the others had gone away, and we were now alone). I did not reprove him; I could not.
“I think so,” he murmured. “And you will forgive him, therefore, if he has small time for love and the light concerns of a woman. These may well be left to a younger brother to console him for his meagre portion. God knows, we have little enough to concern ourselves with, poor fellows—save to be barbarians and crack each other’s crowns.”
But I was not attending to James very much. I was thinking, and with a kind of pride, too—the first I had ever felt in the man who was to be my husband.
“To be king of the Scots,” I thought, and, from James’s consternation, I judge that I spoke aloud, “Cousin Will to make himself the king—to be greater than all! That is to be a man and a true Douglas of the Black. Faith, I would marry him now, without Bull or dispensation, without pope, priest, or marriage-robe—ay, over the tongs if need were!”
After that James was silent for a long time. Above, there was a constant movement of leaves, and the cawing of jackdaws nesting high up in the crevices of the old towers of Cour Cheverney. I could feel my cousin’s breath on my neck. It made me vaguely uneasy, yet somehow I was not able to stir. I did not know I could feel like that. I suppose no woman does till she is tried.
“Yes,” he murmured in my ear, “you will marry him, Margaret. But will you love him? Are you sure of that?”
I tried to turn him off the subject.
“Ah,” I said, smiling up at him over my shoulder, “that is quite another thing. Surely when Will is to be a king, and I am already a princess, love is a superfluity, a work of—what is it the priests call it—supererogation? Indeed, to begin with, rather an impertinence than otherwise. Yet, after all”—
“Well?” said James, erect and waiting for my conclusion.
“Love may come—after!” I said. For, indeed, so Sister Eulalie had told me, and the girls at St. Brigida’s swore to me that their mothers loved their fathers, and this last was certainly a matter to give one on the threshold of marriage a certain confidence. Will, at least, after the dark and “fier” Douglas type, was a handsome man.
Then James bent down, and, though I could not see him, I could feel his presence near me—another strange thing.
“Nay, little one,” he murmured in my ear, “I know you. You will love neither the would-be King of Scots, nor yet William, eighth Earl of Douglas, nor yet your Cousin Will. You are both of you too Douglas in the bone. One day you will love—yes—but not my brother.”
“Since when have you put on the robe of prophecy, good Master Jacob?” I asked him sharply. “Is it that you would supplant your brother, or take away his birthright, without even the customary equivalent of a mess of pottage?”
James Douglas laughed.
“They have taught you your Scripture well at the convent, I can see,” he said. “I knew you would misunderstand me. I was prepared for it. But you will see! Behold, I will try my hand at prophecy again. Will intends to bring the realm of Scotland under his hand. King Jamie-of-the-Fiery-Face is a Stewart, and will die the ill death of all that brood; but he is also a Bruce—that is to say, a murderer from the first. In three years, if I took the king’s side in the strife that is bound to come, I, poor despised James Douglas, could be Earl of Douglas in my brother’s place. But, by God’s truth, I am no Jacob, no supplanter, as you have called me. You will see: there shall not one stand to it more staunchly in the Douglas quarrel than your poor stupid Cousin James, who can only sit a horse, drive a spear, and”—(he hesitated a moment before adding)—“make love to the woman he loves with all his heart, without thought or care for peoples, nations, kingships, principalities, or powers, in the heaven above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.”
I think I drew a long breath. I felt, light as a feather, his lips on the nape of my neck, and, looking upward with a start and a shudder, as if someone had trod upon my grave, I saw William Douglas silently pacing the rampart above us, his arms folded on his breast, and a stern expression on his face.
Had he seen, or was he only debating in his mind the chances of his great and final cast—the dicer’s throw which was to make or mar—the project which was to him more than love, more than life, and a thousand times more than Margaret Douglas?
I could not tell.
Until one day by the little brook which they call the river of Cheverney, William Douglas had never spoken to me of our marriage. But ere we were set out from the castle I knew it was coming. There had been breakfast as usual in the great hall, and much chatter among the ambassador’s suite of the wonders they had seen at Rome—Laurence alone brooding apart in silence or only responding in monosyllables when I spoke to him.
But that I wondered not at. For I had a sense of the stage at which the young man found himself. And (it is not a shameful confession for an old woman to make, who has gotten through the world with perhaps more credit than she has deserved) I was glad of it, and in my heart I laughed at his sulks. Of James, who sat and watched me (like a hungry cat, as I told him), I was not so sure. One was never quite sure what James might not do where a woman was concerned. I think, even then, I was more than a little afraid of his power over me. I liked the days when he went a-hunting, and yet they were lonely days too.
As for William, he had sat talking with the Dauphin, whose shifty eyes, webbed with a spider’s criss-cross of fire, like hot metal caked and cracking in the cooling, dwelt ever and anon upon me. How I hated snakes and Dauphins! Ugh! And still do hate!
Nevertheless, through all the hither and thither of their talk concerning Absolute Right, and the Supremacy of one man—the Strong Man, the man with mind, the man who could use all weapons and was ready to employ them—there came to me in wafts and glimpses, through I know not what senses (for a woman has at least a dozen, as compared with men’s ordinary five), the knowledge, net and fixed, that to-day, before it should be the stroke of noon, ere the earliest flowers should droop and close, I should see through a glass darkly into the soul of William Douglas, the man who was to be my husband.
And, indeed, that was all I succeeded in obtaining—then, or for many years after. I see more clearly now. But such seeing comes to women, for the most part, when it is too late.
It was in this fashion that he asked me to walk with him. How differently would James have done it! Even Laurence, poor fellow!
“Dear Cousin Margaret,” he began, coming over to me before all the others (figure what his upbringing must have been when, at four-and-twenty—and to all appearance of mind and body ten years older—William Douglas could yet show himself so inept!). Why, a scholar from a priests’ day-school had done better—that is, if it had been a French school. I remember—but no, I had begun to tell of my going out to walk in the fields with my Cousin William.
August in Galloway, May in Touraine. These are to me the height of earthly beauty, and whatever bliss can proceed from flowers and woods, from sun-speckled riverine paths and breadths of heather lands, across which great whale-backed cloud-shadows drift, lumberingly yet silently, as if they too were labouring wains drawn by the white celestial oxen.
It was Laurence, I think, and partly, also, my own liking, which taught me to observe things like that, but mostly—honour to whom honour!—it was Laurence. Not in the least Maud Lindsay, who, indeed, cared more to lift her eyelashes at a well-favoured man than to look upon all the sunsets which had ever been painted athwart the west. Nor yet did I learn the trick from Sholto, who never had a thought except for Maud Lindsay—that is, till the children came, when he became a nursery packhorse, and went on all fours. James Douglas only admired such things because I did, and William not at all, whether or no.
Nevertheless, we went our way, he and I—I, at least, in no wise keen, nor expecting much pleasure therefrom. So we went by a pretty woodland path within the enclosure of the Sieur Paul, which I had discovered (and in part trodden) during the days I had already spent in Cour Cheverney. Sometimes I took with me Larry, in guise of adviser spiritual, but more often James, my younger cousin. For you see, William was always too busy talking politics with the Dauphin. Indeed, Louis de Valois seemed to have come hither from Loches for no other purpose.
But this day, as I walked by Will’s side, I glanced up at his grave, dark-bearded face—the face of a man of forty at the least—and the weight of care that I saw there seemed to communicate itself at once to my heart and my heels. I had on pretty shoes, the same which James, with a forethought beyond most young men, had brought me from Paris. He told me how he had kept one of my old ones all the while as a gage, wearing it on his helm in time of fighting, and in his breast at other seasons. Whereat! retorted upon him that it was well these French shoes had no heels like those of Scotland. Nevertheless, in spite of his sentiment, I suspect some hidden troking with a handmaiden or servant at the convent. For why—otherwise he could never have hit on the right size and shape. But he did, and I loved him for it—or, at the least, I felt it was one of the little things that most of all touch a girl’s heart, and which not even the bravest, or the wisest, or the best of lovers can afford to mislippen. And he who walked by my side was all three. Yet for all that I longed to kilt my coats and run for it, just because he would not look at me and had brought me naught from Paris.
But I can tell you Will Douglas’s first words took me by surprise.
“Margaret,” he said, “I am to marry you. It is arranged. The family comes first. Neither of us can help it, yet, true it is, in this you have greatly the advantage of me.”
“How so?” said I, thinking it to be some matter of my principality, for which I care nothing, all Galloway and Ettrick thereto never having done me as much good as an orange of Italy!
“Because you do not love me, and—I, William Douglas, have the ill-fortune to love you.”
If he had struck me I could not have started back from him in greater amazement.
Surely it was not William Douglas who spoke thus. But even then he did not look once at me. Faith of my heart, what fools these wise men be!
Here was I, a young girl, ready to be loved—nay, plainly eager—and had this solemn dolt only possessed a tithe of James’s readiness, all might have been different. We had stopped at the place I had chosen beforehand—yes, and tested. It was a certain sweet privacy of leaves, with a stream running by over clean-shining pebbles, and a green bank to sit upon. I was certainly giving the man all the chances. But poor Will, though such a don at statecraft, had no more craft in the matter of women than the armour of Archibald the Grim set up in the entrance hall of Thrieve.
Now the place had a hundred advantages. Bees of all sorts were humming about. Glossy purple bees, big as hay-wains, blundered and boomed. Business-like honey-bees attended to the matter in hand, like the merchants of St. Giles—furred all over, too, with the golden dust of pollen. Moreover, there were little black bees, which appeared always to fly backward, starting angrily with their weapons out like touchy braggards. Then round woolly bees of the size of acorns, and with the rearward part all a fiery red, hustled the others or got up private quarrels on their own accounts among the flowers.
There were so many things Will could have said in such a place, and I sat near him on purpose.
Laurence would have sung a ballad to touch your heart, and that so delicately, the birds would have stopped to listen, and with so accurate and right an ear that the hum of the bees, the ripple of the water, the hush and tremor of the leaves would all have mingled in a fitting accompaniment.
Others, I doubt not, would have done after their kind, sitting thus alone with a young girl, and, as it were, with the marriage lines in their pocket. Even silence might then (’tis conceivable) have been golden.
But what did William Douglas do? This!
Imprimis—he betook himself a foot or two farther away from me—I think he meant to give me room to sit at my ease—and began to speak of his hopes and projects. I did not know then that was the greatest compliment he could have paid me.
Yet he never so much as took my hand—though, well, my hand was there for the taking. Of course it was! Since I was to marry him, I thought I might as well make the best of it. Afterwards in Italy I knew a woman who would have had a man knifed for less than Will’s present neglect.
“Margaret,” he said, “I have brought you here” (Oh, but had he?) “to show you what I have planned for my future and yours. You bring me as your dower almost a third part of Scotland. I myself possess another third, with about the same proportion of brave hearts to follow our banner from Galloway in the south on through Douglasdale and Marches, northward to Darnaway and Murray.”
I nodded, saying only, “Have a care, William; my brother had the like, and yet—in the flower of his age—the cruel slew him treacherously in the castle of Edinburgh!”
“I remember well,” he said. “God rest his soul for a good lad! But then he was young, and I am old”—
At that I laughed aloud!
“At twenty-four years! Verily a patriarch among men!”
“Yes,” he answered me, his dark face never once lighting up, “it is true that I am old. I it was who roused the Douglases after my cousin’s—your brother’s—murder. I have lived hard and in haste ever since—not as the young live, but as men do who have one business in life, and know not when death may be let loose upon them.”
“Then you mean to revenge my brother’s death—and little David’s?” I asked eagerly.
“Yes, of a certainty that,” he said; “vengeance is a part of it. It shall be done. I shall square accounts with Crichton and Livingston. But, as it were, on the way.”
“The way to what?”
“To the kingdom,” he said quietly, “the kingdom and the power!”
“You would rebel, and kill the king!” I cried, somewhat affrighted at the sound of the words—as was indeed no marvel, seeing that I had just come from listening to nothing more deadly than the all-day cooing of the doves at St. Brigida’s.
“By no means,” he answered, “though ’tis disputable if I have not at least as good a claim to the throne of Scotland as any Stewart that ever stepped. But let that pass. No, I count not on rebellion. But all the same, rule I must. I shall put down the fox and the sleek poodle—both of them. I will take the king and give him a palace and a garden and (according to his desires) playthings. None of that race is fit to rule. They should have been morris-dancers. God so intended it. No, I will be James Stewart’s chancellor, his tutor, his Mayor of the Palace. And then of that realm of Scotland I will make a new thing. Or, by St. Bride of Douglas, I shall die before my time!”
“And why could not my brother William do all this?” I said. “He also was brave!”
“I told you,” he answered, without hesitation, “your brother was too young. He let himself be entrapped. And besides, he had the misfortune to love a bad woman. I—love you.”
Then I took his hand of my own accord, for no woman can listen to words like these without a lump in the throat—that is, from a man true and great.
“And I will try to be a good wife,” I said, very softly, but I think he heard.
At that moment he might have done much with me—perhaps all. I might have been his, soul and body. But William Douglas had not, as we say in Scots, “the airt o’t,” which is everything (or almost) in the making of love. And so he went back, like a man reassured, to his weary politics.
“I have talked the matter all over with the Dauphin,” he said, his eyes growing dreamy and opaque to the world. “He is in exactly the other case. There is in his kingdom one great almost as the Douglas in Scotland. The Duke of Burgundy is his Mayor of the Palace, or desires to be. Him he joined for a time, even against his father, that he might learn the secrets of the enemy. For though he has great ideas, that young Louis de Valois, there are lacking to him as much fidelity and constancy as pertain to a tom-cat of the city tiles. But all the same he has more thoughts in his head, this slippery Dauphin, than all the men and women I have met and talked with in any country. He teaches me much—also, perhaps, I him. Each sees in the other what he has to contend against. Both learn from the enemy. For this Dauphin Louis will yet gather to him all the realm of France. See if he does not—and be hated as no man in France has been hated before in the doing of it.
“But, on the other hand, I, William of Douglas, shall do what the Duke of Burgundy might have done with a weaker sovereign. I shall remain a subject, and yet be the king. From the east sea to the west sea I shall stay the robber and the plunderer. The Highland folk will be held in leash. I will make the writ with the king’s name upon it run from Kirkmaiden to Cape Wrath. In truth, and not alone in proverb, the bracken-bush shall keep the cow.”
He paused a while, as if meditating. It was, indeed, strange talk for a young girl to hear, and I remember with a smile that only a few days agone Sister Eulalie had been threatening me with four days’ bread-and-water if I disobeyed her. And now the talk I heard was of the discomfiture of princes, and I sat speaking familiarly with men who felt themselves able to hold nations in the hollow of their hands.
Only I wished William Douglas had been a little more human about it. Faith of my body, I would rather have been listening to that muckle cuif James vaunt himself about the girls who had given him their favours to wear upon his helm.
“Scotland is not a kingdom,” Will went on, “it is not subject to one king, but to many. Every pretty lordling does that which is right in his own eyes—hangs on his own gallows-tree, drowns in his own well, burns on his own wood-pile, and if the king dares to say ‘Yea’ or ‘Nay,’ he will be upon his back in a trice with a pack of old charters as musty and useless as a cadger’s ballants, chattering like a magpie all the time.
“Now, with Galloway mine, and Clydesdale and Annandale and the Borders mine, together with the north from Darnaway to Loch Ness, with the king in my hands and the heads of the traitors where such heads should be, what shall hinder but that I shall say to each lord of a peel-tower, to each chief of clan or sept—Do justice, and, if you can, love mercy. But at least, attend to the first! For if you do not, by St. Bride, your head I will remove instead, and set it with the others.—For be assured, my lords, for once in the land of the Scots you have to do with a man of his word!”
And as I listened to Will, I knew that I was to have a man for my husband, and I daresay many women would have loved him as indeed he deserved. But not I. There is in me, somewhere, a spring, like that of a secret drawer, which if a man touch, I will serve him on bended knee all the days of my life, and go through fire and water for him! But if not—not.
And Will, alas for us both! had not the secret. He felt not the need. For even as he went on talking, his voice filled and shook, and—I could see that he had utterly forgotten my existence. His purpose and work were all to him.
It is the last thing a woman can bear. She would rather be crucified.
Well, at any rate, that was over. I knew what I had to expect. William had said that he loved me. It was possible. Nevertheless, the signs were lacking—all, at least, that I cared about.
Similarly, it is said to rain sometimes, about once in seven years, in that desert where (travellers say) the pyramids of Egypt look out across a world of sand. But—for me, I prefer a somewhat more human climate. I was fated to marry my Cousin Will. He was fated to regenerate Scotland, or die in the attempt. Well, so be it! To Egypt I would go. But that would not hinder me from yearning all the same for a land where the gentle rain and the humane dew kept green at once the herb and the heart of woman.
In the meantime I was glad to keep out of William’s way. A lifetime of the Prophet Ezekiel must have been trying to any woman, and surely every allowance is to be made for the imperfections of his wife. Will saw visions and dreamed dreams, but—I never came into them. I was not even a pawn in the game, though my principality of Galloway was pushed this way and that upon the board. It was hard to bear, and as often as I could I escaped to the bench under the Judas tree—or, better still, to the green bank above the running brook which I had wasted on William, and to which he never returned.
I think I liked the hours best when Laurence made mill-wheels with a knife, and the pair of us stole off a-tiptoe to set them running in the little stream which turned aside towards the Closson, stealing away from the ken of ungentle men, even as we from wars and rumours of war.
Then I was truly happy—happier, indeed, than I was with James, who constantly made me uneasy with his reckless ways—making love, as it were, almost under the very eyes of his brother, in the belief that, as he said, “If you want our Will to notice anything, you must call him to a halt with a naked sword at his breast, and then say, ‘My lord, dinner waits!’ ”
But as for me, I had my idea that William Douglas saw more than our feather-headed Jamie gave him credit for.
So as I say, I was happier with Laurence. Then it was that I became again a little girl as when I used to cry for Maud Lindsay to play with me. Only she never would bide long enough, but would be for ever running up to the knowe-top to spy out for Sholto or some other young man. Nevertheless, I had a great yearning to see her again, and bade Laurence tell me all that he knew about her. Which, indeed, was little more than that they all dwelt at Thrieve, where Sholto was captain of the guard, and, as ever, the earl’s right-hand man. He did not even know the names of Maud’s five children—but thought that three were girls and the rest boys—or else the other way about.
Now, by St. Jack of Dover, is there a woman in the world that would have been in the same uncertainty? Ay, would she not have known them, each one by headmark, their names and ages and dispositions? But men are like that all the world over. It is part of the burden laid on them when they went forth of that gate before which the sword of fire waves every way.
Laurence used to take off his monastic habit at the entrance of the glade, and in his laced black shoes and hosen, his silken pantaloons to the knee, and tight-fitting blouse buttoned to the neck, he looked (in spite of his abbatical dignity) scarce older than the page-boy who played impish tricks about the Mains of Thrieve, and was whipped for it by Dominie Gilston, my brother’s house-chaplain—the same who afterwards married Mary the cook, and now keeps a change-house and place of entertainment for travellers in the market-square of Dumfries.
Then he would tell me tales of the adventures he had in France, when Maud Lindsay and I were stolen away by the thrice-accursed De Retz, how Sholto, his father, and my Lord James had gone to seek for me, because Will could not be spared out of Scotland, which at the time was all in an uproar after the murder of my two brothers, William and David, in the castle of Edinburgh.
He told me, too, of the Lady Sybilla, whose beauty had led my brother to his doom. She had been sorry, he said, when it was too late, and she herself had been made to experience a far deeper and more abiding woe in being yet alive somewhere in this same land of France.
“Ah, that I could meet her!” I cried, clenching my hand. “Would I not set a knife in her heart, the traitress and murderess!”
At which Larry shook his head and said gently, “Margaret, it is not possible for any human being to judge another, least of all a woman a woman. She was sorely used, poor thing, and it will hurt none if it please God to be good to her in the days to come! May not you also do likewise without any great hurt?”
For there was about Laurence M‘Kim in these days a sweet and pitiful boyishness, and that in spite of his honours more than semi-ecclesiastic. At first I thought that his dissatisfaction with the position was assumed, and upon occasion would venture to rally him upon it.
“You are no right priest,” I said, to try him, “but only a tulchan abbot, to draw tithe milk for us Douglases—a lay prior! Who ever heard of such a thing? Why, man, you should join the king’s bodyguard, and I warrant that in a year you would be an officer; or, better still, our William hath great projects on hand, and will need good men. Come back with us to Thrieve. After James and Sholto, I warrant you there would be no knight like you in all the kingdom!”
“No?” he queried, pleased with my saying that; then, with a quick look, “I thank you, mistress. At least, I came out of the fight the other day without any dishonour—though, as for me, I gat neither kiss nor Christian goose!”
“You were not at the tourneying?” I cried in astonishment, for indeed the idea had never crossed my mind. He smiled softly.
“I wore the Douglas Heart, for my heart is Douglas,” he said, “but with the Sieur Paul’s Bar Sinister, to show that I had no right to it. But it is a secret which I trust only to you. For, as most men think, it is noways seemly that an abbot of Dulce Cor should ride a tourney in a borrowed coat.”
And with that he would fall to the whittling of his windmills and watermills again, cutting them out with a knife as daintily as cabinet work, or the China art of inlay. But, in spite of this, there was a curious constraint upon us—all the time that we were not playing like two children with puppets and fal-lals. The which was the more remarkable that often then we would talk of the most serious subjects, yet always freely and without reserve.
For instance, Larry would tell me, going on all the time with his enginery, how Chancellor Crichton was the worst and falsest man in all the world, and how, from being a small country laird, without power and without apparent parts, he had raised himself to be the richest and most influential man in Scotland.
“But the Earl William?” I queried, surprised. “What of him?”
Laurence nodded, a little sadly as I thought.
“Yes,” he answered, “I have not forgotten. There is no one like him. But he goes to work too straightforwardly to take a serpent in his grasp. A Douglas of the Black is no match for a Crichton, unless he first catch the serpent between the prongs of a forked stick, and then grind his head under heel! If William Douglas were to take my advice, he would gather together all the south, besiege Crichton the Fox in his own castle, having taken him and it, hang him high over the topmost battlement, and set the place on fire. It were a fine counter roast to the Black Dinner of Edinburgh!”
I could not but laugh.
“Certes, that is very well said for a man of peace, Laurence,” I cried, teasing him. “Assuredly if that was the way you spoke to the pope in Rome, it is a great marvel that His Holiness did not make you a cardinal!”
But he gave little heed to my words, thinking solely of the terrible days when my two brothers were put down before all Scotland.
“Ah,” he said, “you were then too young to remember. But we—we that were of the Douglases, who saw them ride gaily through that gate, with the Black Bull already killed for their funeral feast, we have neither forgotten nor forgiven—be we knight or knave, cottar or churchman, abbot or archer!”
“No,” said I, “forgotten I have not—no, nor ever will! But you think there is danger that Will, my cousin, may tread the same road. Why, then, do you not warn him?”
“Warn Will of Avondale!” He laughed a little bitterly. “As well warn the tide-race in the narrows of Solway! When William Douglas is set on a thing, he will turn neither for flood nor fire—nor for God nor man nor devil!”
“Could a woman turn him, think you?” I said, more for the sake of saying something than because I meant aught of serious import. Yet he took the question mighty soberly.
An expression of the most tender sympathy and gentleness came over all his face—sweet and gracious, and yet somehow very pitiful.
“I fear for you, little one!” he said, as if half to himself. “Yes, I fear greatly.”
And I suppose that I ought to have been angry with him to address me thus. But it was with him as with Jamie, though in another way. Simply I could not be angry with him. The thing was not in my heart.
Yet it was all different. For Laurence never meant but to be the best and the dearest of comrades. But James—well, ever since I knew him, James could not help making love to mistress or maid. He must fulfil his métier, which was that of cadet of a great house. And to tell the truth, the thing was no trouble to him—so far, at least, as I was concerned.
Ah, if men would only permit women to be the simple comrades to them that they wish to be, how easy and how wholesome the world would become!
Also, saith the Wise Man over my shoulder, how short-lived! But of that I did not consider then.
All the same, there are few things dearer to the heart of a woman than the love, simple and inexigent as the budding of a flower, which grows up in the heart of a boy, or of one who will all his life remain a boy. Of which last was Laurence M‘Kim. For Larry, older than I in years, yet never reached his majority, though I have seen the white hair fall thick upon his shoulders, and but for a pair of pruning shears he might have been able to tuck his beard into his girdle.