and of course it pleased me to think that he would hear and see. Which, indeed, he did, and grilled within him—not speaking a word for the better part of a day, as we took our way down the water-side towards the port of Nantes, where we were to embark in the little ship which was to bring us safe to Scotland.
* * * * * * *
But it is of Thrieve and my home-coming that I have to speak. One thing there was which appeared strange to me. Already William had taken all under his care. It was “my castle,” “my men,” “my lands,” “my fiefs”—till I was moved to say, “Not so fast, my dear Lord of Douglas and Avondale—here you are only my Cousin Will, come on a visit to MY castle. Do not, in the press of your plans, forget that poor little Margaret is still the châtelaine of Thrieve!”
Never did you see a man more taken aback.
“Betrothed or married—it is the same thing,” he said. “Besides, have I not faithfully administered your estates for you all the time you have spent in France?”
“Yes, surely, Will,” said I, in the tone that never failed to make him nettled, “it is of that I would speak. You were doubtless a good ‘doer,’ an excellent steward. But now that I am once more in my province and principality—why, I am proud to be able to entertain my Lord of Avondale, his brother, the Lord James, and the Abbot of Dulce Cor for as long as they will deign to remain with me.”
But in spite of myself, I could not keep my gravity at the dismay on his face, and I had perforce to laugh, which spoilt all.
“Margaret,” he said, “there is much to do—little time to do it in. Let us make all secure. Before we enter Thrieve, I would have you appoint a day for our wedding, and forewarn a priest”—
“Not Larry, then,” I cried. “He will never tie you firmly enough to the estates you wish so much to marry. Galloway itself might slip off the thread, with only such an apprentice at the parson work as Laurence M‘Kim to tie the knot. And that, you know, would break your heart, William.”
At which James laughed, till he chanced to observe the expression in his brother’s eyes. But for that I cared nothing. Will might be as angrisome as a wullcat of the Forest of Buchan—he would not fright me.
“Listen, Cousin Will,” I said. “There has come to me in the night a proposal which, if you accept, will end all your anxieties. Here it is. Take Galloway, take the north, take the Forest, take all that is mine on the Borderside! Leave me only the little Isle of Thrieve, with Maud Lindsay and her husband Sholto to look after me—enough meal in the meal-ark to make our porridge, a little beef in the larder for the house-carles, as many chickens as I can breed and feed—and as for me, I promise never to meddle with you or with your plottings any more! What say you to that?”
Then for a moment William Douglas said nothing. He still said nothing when James cried out, “Bravely said, cousin mine!—I for one will stay and help you feed the chickens—let them go follow glory who love glory. She is but an old unwashed dish-clout, an unstable wench that gives a man more cuffs than cossetings.”
Then for one wild moment there came a hope in my heart that Will would take me at my word. But his silence was only his accustomed way of examining everything seriously, and of giving a fair and equal consideration to each proposition that was placed before him. This it was which made it so easy for me to tease him, and also so impossible for him to reply. For, long before he had time to prepare his phrase, I was, so to say, “out of the window with the swallows.”
“Margaret,” he said, quite simply for so great a man, “I do not use ink-horn terms. But I tell you this—if you speak in earnest, you know not what you say. And if not—then I know not what you mean!”
So after this I said no word more, nor yet did James. For there is nothing so disconcerting to those who count themselves clever with the tongue (which both James and I did) as to be put down by the simplicity of one whom they know greater than they.
But there at the last was the boat waiting to ferry us across the river. (For be it not forgotten that the castle of Thrieve lies upon an island of twenty acres or thereby, with the river Dee running deep about it on every side—save at a place on the east where, as I remember, it was mostly possible to cross on stepping-stones in the long droughts of summer.) And in the boat, to my eye more beautiful than La Dame de Beauté herself, there sat—could it be?—yes—my old companion and only friend—sweetest Maud Lindsay, she who had married Sholto M‘Kim, now the governor of Thrieve and war-captain of all the levies of my lord the Earl of Douglas—most dear and notable, both of them.
“Maud!” I cried, slipping from my pony and running to the margent to meet her. I was about to clasp her in my arms as I used to do—as vividly and rapturously as if we had been lovers of only a handful of days. But, gazing at me, she seemed to be amazed somehow—I cannot tell why—perhaps because I was so grown and tall—having gowns of silk to my feet—that I too paused.
And then, to my utter astonishment, she suddenly bent down upon her knee, and, seizing my hand, she kissed it, weeping and murmuring words like these: “Oh, my gracious lady, you have grown so beautiful! But I knew it! I knew it would fall out so!”
Upon which I lifted her up and gave her a sound shake of anger. For I have a quick temper, and when people do not do just what I want, when I want it—well, I shake them!
So I shook Maud.
“You doting, silly little fool!” I cried; “do you not know that you are Maud—my Maud, whom I love more than a world of men? Why, it is for you I am come home, do you hear? I will be a goose-girl to you, if you will but let me stay, and love me as of old. I will nurse the last baby—though, indeed, really I love them not greatly till they can run and speak (being like a man in that)! I will play with them on the downs by the Three Thorns and listen to the clank of the armourer’s hammer if Malise is still at his anvil. But I will not—I swear it—be a princess and a great lady to you!”
And I fairly sprang upon her neck, putting my arms about and about—yes, and kissing her over and over till she was sobbing blindly in my arms without let or stint, truce or limit, happily weeping—which indeed is one of woman’s greatest luxuries, till at last she becomes old and awaits the end. Then (hard that it should be so) the fount of her tears is dried up, and she sorrows like a man, rendingly, and without pleasure. I that write these things know.
However, there, on the bank of Dee Water, I let Maud weep. And it did her good. For she was young and fair, and there were many there to see. I think Sholto had been wont to stop her, thinking (being a man, and, therefore, in these matters a fool!) that a woman’s tears signified unhappiness. But I knew my Maud better. And so in time we made a good end, with Laurence waiting behind with a solemn countenance, Will cutting impatiently at his boot with his riding switch, and James all upon the broad grin. (He thought he understood these things, women, and so forth—God help him! He who thinks that is the greatest fool of all.) And lo! looking up, there, on the opposite bank, was Sholto, looking like a prince, all in black armour, with the warden’s red favour on his helmet. He had his visor down, and at the head of his gentlemen, with his plume sweeping his shoulders, he appeared, as I say, like a very god. And Maud, wiping her tears, whispered, “Yes, I dressed him,” in answer to my words in her ear.
We went across, just Cousin Will and I, with Maud (whom I would not for anything leave behind) holding my hand all the time as if I might yet escape her. And when we were at the most half way across—lo, she smiled with eyes still wet, and it was like the sun of August shining through clouds on the dripping corn-stooks.
“Oh, I am so glad to have you again, my own little maid!” she said, and kissed me.
“Ah,” I cried triumphantly, “that is better! You are my Maud, after all—my Maud—my Maud!”
As for Cousin Will, he said nothing, only with his eye ran over the accoutrements of the knights of the escort and the soldiers of the guard, to see if he could pick a fault.
But he had Sholto M‘Kim to deal with, and his lieutenant, Andro the Penman. So all was as in such a case it could not help being. And then as the boat came gently to the little landing-place, which was built with pier and breakwater, all complete, like a tiny harbour—my dear brother David had taken a pride in it—I sprang directly upon my own Isle of Thrieve.
At the same moment Sholto leaped from his horse. Andro the Penman unlaced his helm, and the Captain of the Douglas Guard, bareheaded, kneeling on the soft grass of the river brink, presented to me the keys of the castle upon a golden paten.
But because all my life I loved not ceremony, I only clapped him on his head—which was covered all over with crisp curls, cut short so that his head would not be too hot within the leather-lined shell of steel they call a helmet, and bade him give the keys to William. Which when he had done, he kissed my hand, and I asked him if his father ever beat him with his buckled waist-strap nowadays?
This I did to make him laugh. For ceremonies, especially when only one person is ceremonious, are awkward things, and it needs tact to get quit of them without the hurting of feelings. But then—well, you learn how to manage such things in France. A convent is good for so much, at any rate.
So in a few moments we were all talking quickly together, while the boat went back to bring over James, together with Laurence and his people. My Cousin Will did not say much, but then no one expected it of him. When he had shaken hands with Sholto, kissed Maud Lindsay’s hand, nodded to Andro the Penman and his brother, forthwith he devoted himself to the examination of every part of the architecture of the castle as if he had never seen it before—the outer works, the moat, the great drawbridge, the flanking towers, the wall of enceinture, and the keep, with its high gallery of wood set on wooden beams.
I could see him shake his wise head. There was in the matter of shaking no one like Will. You could always tell when he had an idea. He shook it as a terrier shakes a rat, as the mill-hopper doth the corn.
“That will never do—never,” I heard him mutter. “We must have them of stone—as at Amboise. At the first red-hot ball from a mortar they would be in a blaze!”
From that I could discern very clearly the direction of his thoughts.
So Maud and I were left alone, Sholto directing his gentlemen of the Douglas Guard to ride on either side as an escort. It was good to see him mount his horse as easily as of yore, even though in full armour, which showed me that, though the father of a family, he had lost none of his old active ways. And indeed, as the future proved, Sholto had only grown stronger and firmer in his seat, so that even James was no longer a match for him at the spear-driving when they tried it in the lists of Thrieve Isle.
Then Maud went on to tell me how each of her babes was more wonderful than the others. She spoke of Marcelle, the eldest, who was learned in broidery work and could read like Clerk Laurence himself; of Cuthbert and Bride, the twins, who for ever fought and harcelled each other, even as their father and uncle had done about the old forge on the bank of Carlinwark. Then there was Ulric and little David, the one falling over the twitch-grass of the meadow-land and digging at the sandy rabbit-holes like a scent-dog, while as yet, David, being the youngest, was content to sit on the lap of his mother solemnly contemplating the grey walls of Archibald the Grim, where so many generations of M‘Kims had done their service to as many generations of Douglases.
At last, at last—there was the drawbridge coming down! But another porter louted low where surly old A’Cormack had so long turned his great creaking wheel. The willows along the waterside, the garden inside with its homely flowers, and without, that with the homelier plants for the pot! Thrieve! Thrieve! Could ever any place be so dear? It was good to see even the well in the courtyard, with the great beech twisting about it, and then, running to the edge, to mark, as of yore, the dripping leathern plants—hartstongues they call them. They were the same, only a little longer, a little more leathery, and a little more drippy than I had imagined when I thought of them in the convent, which I did often in chapel on hot afternoons.
Meanwhile, Will had gone about the house and about it, had examined the defences in detail, with an eye fresh from Loches and Amboise, picking out weak points, noting what must be altered, what must be done away with, what had grown antiquated, and, generally, how the naturally strong position of the castle could best be strengthened.
After a while he strode into the courtyard with the scowling brow which with him only betokened deep thought. I was holding up Ulric, that sturdy scion of the family of the M‘Kims, a lusty tribe enough; but, i’ faith, at the sight of Will’s dark face he dropped his head on my neck and howled most unvalorously. Maud laughed a little at some inarticulate words which came from his baby lips.
“What does he say?” I asked, smiling.
“He says,” murmured Maud, “that he will tell his father of the naughty black man who wants to carry Ulric away!”
I sighed.
“I wish it were only Ulric that Cousin William has it in his head to take away!” I cried.
At that moment came Will up, stalking over the flagged pavement, solemn as a stork in armour.
“Margaret,” he said, as if he asked “What’s o’clock?” “I forgot. You have not yet named a day for our marriage.”
“Why,” said I, “how am I to dare? I might cross your wondrous devices. Let your Highness choose your own time! Say, shall it be some morning a few years hence, when you have no plans to make, no rent-rolls to revise, no troops of horse to pass in review, when all your architects and builders have ceased from troubling, and there is not even an arrow-shooting or a wapenshaw in all the Douglas country from south to north, when all the thieves are hanged out of Annandale, and there is not a cow in her wrong byre from Edenmouth to Berwick bound, when you are the King of the King of Scots, and Lord of the Lords of the north—then, unless you have an unproven hawk to fly at a heron, or a main of lusty cocks to fight, or a leash of dogs to take out for the coursing—why, good sir, of your pleasure, will you please to marry me?”
But Will took it all quite solemnly, or at least appeared to do so.
“Thank you,” he said. “This is Wednesday—shall we say Saturday? There is nothing to take me away from Thrieve before that.”
I let the boy drop on the grass in my horror. His mother ran to rescue him, but Master Ulric was noways alarmed. He only rolled over, and putting his great toe in his mouth, lay regarding the sky.
“No, Will,” I said; “be good enough to remember that I am not a parcel of goods to be handed over the counter, nor yet a bullock to be delivered three days after sale, sound in wind and limb. Give me a month, if it were only, like the daughter of Jephthah, to bewail my”—
But I did not get time to finish my quotation.
“Child,” he cried, for the first time visibly angered, “you do not know what you say! This thing is the will of God.”
“It is the will of William, Earl of Douglas, which is considerably more to the point,” I retorted mockingly. But he did not heed. It took more than the flout of a girl to move Will of Douglas and Avondale from his purpose.
“Then, I take it,” he repeated, as it were extracting the kernel of meaning and leaving the husk of words as of no value, “you are willing that we should be married in a month!”
“If it is His Majesty’s good and gracious pleasure,” I said, “and he happens to have nothing better to do!”
And I made him a low reverence with the most provoking mock humility.
But I might as well have tried my agaceries on the blue ridge of Ben Gairn, steady on the horizon of the south.
“So be it!” he said, and, turning sharp on his heel, he went out.
“I declare,” cried Maud, “your bridegroom has gone to examine the state of the water-defences at the southern end of the isle!”
“I do not wonder,” I retorted; “he had them on his mind all the time.”
“Margaret!” she cried, pained at my manner of speech of William Douglas.
“Yes, Maud!” I answered in the same tone, nodding as one would say, “There it is! Make what you like of it!”
It was not long before I had made my case plain to Maud Lindsay. All my infancy and childhood she had been my companion. In the time of De Retz, she and I had been shut up in the White Tower together, and at the last had paced hand in hand the dread approaches to the Iron Altar—as has already been told in certain chronicles entitled The Black Douglas.
So to me Maud was no new friend—no confidante of a day.
Thrieve itself had grown a new place—what with the merry chink of children’s voices coming up from the green, and the rotund twins trying on pieces of armour in the great hall of the guard amid the riotous laughters of the men-at-arms.
More than once Sholto had declared that this Thrieve was no proper nursery for women and babes. He had even desired, during the presence of the Avondale Douglases and myself at the castle, to take Maud away to the Three Thorns, where my Cousin Earl William had caused them to repair the old cottage for his father, Malise M‘Kim, loving the situation better than the forty-shilling lands of Mollance with the grand new house thereon, which had been forced upon the armourer for his great and notable services to the family of Douglas.
So we two, just Maud and I, went out on the balcony of wood which opens upon the castle wall near the top, and makes a promenade about all four sides. But that was our favourite gossiping place which looked towards the south. William was, indeed, determined to new-make the higher battlements in stone, as well as the wooden galleries. But in the meantime we loved the old brown logs, rough-hewn and weather-stained, with the marks of the knives of three or four generations of Douglases, making transfixed hearts thereon, together with the initials of their sweethearts—the which, indeed, with the flourishing of their own signature, was mostly all the learning they ever had. For though we have had both abbots and bishops to our name, the Douglases of the Black could not be called a book-learned race.
As we sat, Maud worked busily, turning her head from side to side like a painter in a church, to observe the effect of her dainty confectionery of lace and fine linen. As for me, I looked over the river to the green Kelton fields and the swelling ridges of Arieland. All was sweet and covered with a great peace: or so, at least, it seemed to me at that time.
Who could have supposed that the slender figure yonder, clad in black, taking quick, alert strides, with Sholto and Murdoch the master-builder a little behind—now down by the great moat, pointing with ready index-finger wherever masonry was to be strengthened or water deepened—now erect as a spear against the sky-line of the topmost tower—everywhere planning, deciding, registering, commanding—was to bring the Douglas line to its highest glory, and by his death to sink it into utter extinction?
It was long before either Maud or I spoke. I think both of us were somewhat unwilling to begin. I had left her a girl, she was now a matron. She had last seen me a child. Now below us, there was my husband of a month hence, walking about—and—never giving me so much as a thought or a glance.
It was Maud who spoke first.
“Tell me,” she said softly, “are you happy?”
I think that I laughed. But somehow it was not a laugh that sounded as it ought.
“Happy?” I cried. “That is a strange word, Maud Lindsay, to be speaking to me! Should not the bride of Will of Avondale and Douglas be happy? Have I not looked forward to this ever since I could remember?”
Maud shook her head, very slowly and soberly.
“I wish I could be sure, little maid,” she said—it was her old pet name for me. “I am not fond of these agreements between high contracting parties. They are likely to leave love out of account.”
“But you knew your Sholto a long time?” I said sharply.
Maud laughed a laugh—a laugh—oh, quite different from mine. Even I could hear that.
“Ah, but,” she said, “that was because I never really made up my mind to marry Sholto till—till—well, I stood with him before the priest.”
“Fykes and fiddlesticks!” I cried; “how dare you tell me lies, Maud? I was, indeed, a child at the time; but I have a memory! So have a care! I know that you had your mind made up long before. Do you remember that night?”
She put her hand over my mouth and looked over her shoulder, smiling.
“Hush!” she said, “I give in; but, all the same, the thing is true enough. What I had made up my mind about was only that Sholto should not marry anyone but me!”
And as she said this she laughed again, a mellow, retrospective laugh, which somehow thrilled me between the heart and the throat, and then presently left me saddened with the sense of lacking I knew not what.
Why should this woman, the wife of a blacksmith’s son, be so much happier than I could ever be? It came nigh to making me desperate.
It was not Sholto I wanted—of course not. It was not Laurence. It was not even James Douglas. It was no man in particular. God knows—none. It was only the need to be loved, as women are loved for whom there is but one man in the world.
I wept quietly. Maud let me alone. She was a wise woman. She let me alone to ease myself with tears—many tears.
“Why is it,” I wailed, unable long to keep silence, “why do others have so much without knowing or caring, while I so little—worse than nothing, indeed?”
Then all at once Maud let the rich frillings and dentellations she had been putting together fall to the ground. She slipped them off her knee as if they had been horse-cloths, and came directly and kneeled down beside me, with her arms close held about me.
At first I pushed her away. I could be a pig when I chose—but not for long.
“You are like the rest,” I said; “you come to tell me how noble a man, how worthy, how truly like Solomon, King of the Jews, arrayed in all his glory, is my Lord William of Douglas!”
It was pettish, I know—like a child—like me. But Maud never so much as moved her finger.
“Little one,” she said gently, “when you were used to quarrel with your puppet, did I pick it up after you had thrown it on the ground and set about trying to convince you that there was never such a beautiful puppet in the world, so delightful a plaything? No, I knew better. I put it away till you yourself asked for it!”
Somehow the idea made me laugh.
“Oh, our Will a plaything! Look at him, Maud! I pray you look at him!”
And still laughing, I leaned over the wooden balcony. There he was—his head a-poke before him—eager as a sleuth-hound on the scent—the master-builder following meekly after with Sholto, the last not too much engaged to wave his hand to us, and, seeing Maud’s face, to throw us a kiss also balconywards over his shoulder.
“Look at my plaything,” I laughed, “my plaything that I have thrown down—only that I have never taken it up! Ask for it, indeed! Not if you locked it away for a thousand years! There he is—my father-confessor in armour—my black crow in nesting-time—see him gathering the sticks—see—see!”
And, indeed, at that moment William Douglas did stop and pick a piece of stick which a careless carpenter had left behind. With great solemnity, all absent of mind as if he had been thinking of something else, he went to the wood-pile and dropped it upon a heap of kindling chips.
“Ho, by St. Bride, saved!” I cried. “Now he will sleep sound. There is the thousandth part of a farthing saved! Ah, good crow—valiant crow—crow of parts! Who would not wed a crow like that? Ah, ah!”
And I laughed till I sobbed, and then sobbed till I laughed, stretching ever farther over the balcony to see what he would do next, and pointing at him through my streaming tears, as I cried, helplessly, “Oh, stop me, stop me, stop me, Maud! Why don’t you stop me? I shall die! He is so like a—no, I will not say it. Yes, I will stop. Do not be angry with me, Maud. I think I am not myself—overwrought! But, oh”—
And then I went back again into the same helpless laughter.
Then Maud, taking upon her the old authority, which when a child I had never thought of disputing, lifted me in her strong, soft, motherly arms, and compelled me to lie down in her chamber. It was nearer than my own, though smaller. The window looked to the north, and from it you could see the green double bosoms of Cairnsmore and Carsphairn.
Here she put me to bed like an infant, locking the door inside against intrusion, bathing my forehead, pressing her cheek against mine and murmuring tenderly, just as she used to do in the White Tower of Machecoul when the nights were hot and the Terror near at hand.
And, being quite tired out, I lay still, with Maud Lindsay’s arm about my neck, and her fingers gently moving among my hair, till with a sense of utter lassitude, and a certain slow-coming peace of well-being, I fell on sleep, long and dulcet. It was good, somehow, for anyone to be with Maud. That was all. No wonder her babes adored her. At that moment I felt like one of her children myself, though by the calendar she was not more than ten years older than I.
I awoke. The world slowly re-formed itself, emerging hazily, not all at once—rather a bit here and a bit there. I noted, as in a dream, the oak of a child’s crib, like that in which I had slept long ago when my brothers were alive and my mother gave me up to Maud Lindsay to take care of—pretty Maud from the north, that flouted all the men near and far who came a-wooing her.
Then my eye fell upon a wreath of withered flowers, then came the keen blue edge of a sword, the crossbars of a helmet, and, strange to be seen, thrown over it some of that dainty dentelling of white, fine as mist, which Maud had been making. There was also the scent of a woman’s chamber—not the cell of a pensionnaire at a convent, not even the great bald spaces of the guest-chambers of Cour Cheverney, with the red creepers flowering about the windows and the Judas tree budding purple all along its branches in the court beneath.
It was different, somehow. All smelt of home, yet was not, somehow. These things were Sholto’s and Maud’s—together. Together! Would it ever come that I would see William Douglas’s helm and gloves thrown thus on a chair with my kirtlings of silk and lace dentelles over it? No—a thousand times no! He could never be to me—this! Anything else—a friend, a companion, a guide, and adviser—yes! But this—No!
I raised myself, affrighted like one who starts from an ill dream and desires to sleep no more lest it should return. The thing had never come to me thus clearly. But I saw now what I had never realised before—the terrifying Solitude, the appalling Nearness of Two—a man and a woman left alone for life—by the mumble of a priest, by the will of a dead man, or by the land-hunger, the power-thirst of one who cared for women only as so many steps on the ladder of his greatness.
“No—no—no!”
I called the words out, like one starting back from deadliest terror. And as I said the words I felt about me loving arms, drawing me, heard a voice sweet and soothing as the hum of bees in clover on June meadow-lands.
“Margaret, Margaret—do not fear! I am with you!” It was the voice of Maud Lindsay. “Be my own little lass, my treasure, my bairn as of old. It shall not come to you—that which fears you. The back is made for the burden; and, as I love you (yes—the first-born of my bairns no better!), you shall not marry a man whom you do not love.”
“But I must—I must”—I again speaking (I mind it well) in a panting whisper strange even to myself, as I sat up in bed—“it is fixed for a month hence. Did you ever know of William of Douglas and Avondale going back on his word? Besides, has he not sent Laurence for the pope’s permission—and blessing? Figure it to yourself, Maud—the Holy Father’s blessing! He should have said his curse—the Greater Anathema the Bald Cat used to prate about at the convent!”
But still Maud kept her arm about me, sisterly and motherly at one and the same time.
“Listen,” she said. “I am but poor Maud Lindsay, who married the man she loved, Sholto, the blacksmith’s son of Thrieve: I, who might have married my cousin, Lord John, the Tiger Crawford, and, perhaps, healed a breach into which brave men have poured their blood. I married Sholto because I wished it so. Well, hear me out. I am not Will of Douglas and Avondale, but I have a will of my own. I have never wished greatly for anything in my life, never prayed for anything greatly (which is just the better way of wishing for it) without getting it at last. Perhaps not exactly as I figured it to myself, when I prayed and when I wished, but in a wiser and wholesomer way! Yes, always!”
I formed my lips to answer.
“Nay—hush—not yet. Do not speak. Let me say my say out! So, trust me when I say that happiness will come for you—or, at least, the happiness of making the man you love less sad. That is the pleasure most often granted to women in place of their own proper joy. Perhaps it will come to you thus. But that it will come, be sure—be very sure—I, Maud Lindsay tell you! Now, little one, have I said one word you thought I would say, given you any old-wife, good-my-gossip counsels, preached the orthodox submission of maids? ‘Love will come,’ they say, ‘come with the children’! Bah! I know different. Nothing tries the love of a woman for a man more than the re-repetition of the Eden curse; but where love is to begin with—small as the mustard seed that grows into the greatest of all herbs, as Father Ignace preached about once on Pasque Sunday—all things are possible. Bide, my bairn. I know William of Douglas far better than you. I know him. There is a shell over his heart, hard like the nether millstone; but the kernel within is true, and great—and unselfish!”
“Nay,” I cried, grasping her by the wrist, “the other qualities perhaps, but not that—not unselfish!”
“And unselfish!” Maud repeated with emphasis, and, kissing me, left the room.
That month fled all too fast away. Never had there been known a more perfect July. The scarlet poppies overleaped the corn already yellowing on the sandier knowes. Deep and lush grew the meadow-grass in which the Thrieve mowers, seeking far and near winter forage for the horses of Sholto’s guard, found (sometimes to their cost) the wild bees’ honey.
The hills in the mid distance began to turn a ruddier purple, as the heather flushed for that more glorious harvest of the eye, which usually in Galloway comes rather with the oats than with the meadow hay. And the days when I waited the outcome of my talk with Maud Lindsay fled also too fast away, without, as it appeared to me, anything being accomplished.
Moreover, Laurence had forsaken me. Whether it was the near approach of my marriage day, or the need (which he asserted) for his presence upon his domain abbatical of Sweetheart, I cannot tell. But certain it is that he left Thrieve the emptier for the want of his boyish face and bright smile.
But James remained. And the fates of the life of woman—or some other organising power, at that time unseen by me—drew us more and more together. And, indeed, there is little to do for such a man as James Douglas about a castle, save to tilt at the ring and try his strength at the crossbars above the dungeon mouth. But since he could lift up two stalwart guardsmen by sheer muscle, the one clinging to the other’s feet out of the deeps of the old cell
built in the north-west corner of the guards’ hall, there were few that cared to compete with him. All the same, he would bring me down to see him do it.
On the other hand, Will coursed everywhere, like a questing hound—to Douglas Castle, to Annandale, across the West and Middle Marches, athwart the brown barren moors to visit his earldom of Wigton—or, rather, that which would be his when he married me. The most feck of the days he would be up and away while the light was still pearly and pink in the east.
Often I would wake in the dawn to the clink of horses’ hoofs far down in the court. I would hear the men of the escort standing to their arms ready to mount. A word of command—that of Sholto, who rode ever at the earl’s right hand—and then, with a creak and a clang, down the drawbridge would go. To that succeeded a hollow rumble, which was the feet of the horses passing over, a neigh of some charger left lonesome in stall, and then for another day silence settled down upon all the precincts of the great old castle of Archibald the Grim.
I cannot think how it was that James and I gat into the habit of going to the little bushy “bouroch” (called the Lady’s Bower) at the northerly end of the island. It came about first, I think, that he might show me the damage wrought by the great flood of a year agone, which happened when I was still in France. He pointed out, too, how, by embanking with solid stone and lime, like that which is to be seen in Holland, William had strengthened not only the island but also all the defences on that side.
Now all the trees had been cut in the vicinity of the castle, for the sake of security in case of siege. But at the northern end of the island there were many—though, alas! sadly thinned in the late troubles.
But there was our bower in the midst of them, where, with the river blue and steady before us, wide almost as an arm of the sea, and scarce touched all that high summer-time by a single purl of wind, we two would sit on a rough seat which James had knocked together with driftwood and chance roofing beams floated down for the new stabling.
Now Maud Lindsay was much with me in the afternoons, but in the mornings she had the housewifery of the castle to attend to—napery and suchlike—while in the evening she used to sing her babies to sleep as her good way was. So it was chiefly in the forenoons and in the evenings that James and I strolled to the Lady’s Bower.
Indeed, we had no great distance to traverse, for the whole island does not extend more than half a mile from stem to stern, being, as one might say, a long, narrow vessel anchored in the mid-stream of the Water of Dee, the castle-keep set on the western bulwarks and somewhat towards the stern. So Thrieve was, and so, indeed, it is to this day.
Only James is no longer there, William devises no new defences, and the king’s bullocks profane my Lady’s Bower, which in the countryside clatter is now said to have been named after me. But it was not, taking its name from that Lady Sybilla who came from France and drew into her toils my brother William, as hath aforetime been told. But I have my own tale to tell, and it waits my pen.
Now it is always ill giving a reason why a woman loves this man and not that. For the most part, indeed, she would be hard pushed to tell herself. And so it was with my feeling for James Douglas. Sometimes I liked him, and again at others I could not abide that he should come near me.
But it was all the same to James whether I sulked or smiled. He had his answer ready, his excuse to his hand. He could be respectful and grave, quick-witted and carelessly gay, or simply companionable and full of gossip as an ale-wife, all in the space of an hour. He had the natural gift of taking a woman’s humour and making it his. Will knew no humour but his own, and if it chanced you were not of it, then you passed out of the world so far as he was concerned.
Did James Douglas make love to me wittingly? Curious and still unanswered the query! Did Maud know or suspect? And in any case, what did she mean by encouraging me to hope for a love which the future would bring me? She herself had no great liking, even then, for James Douglas; yet at Castle Machecoul he had saved her, as he had saved me. But women’s likings (I say it again) go not by these things.
Yes, I liked James—first of all, I think, because I knew that I ought not. Then he was a great, blond, towsy-haired giant, with the arm of Samson and the short thick beard of the statues on the king’s new house at Striveling. When, for sport, one struck his breast, it was like beating a drum, and when he struck back, the stricken was carried out and had water poured over him.
Then, he was fair, like his father and most of the Avondales—I, black of the black, a right Galloway Douglas. But mostly these things go by contraries—the fair young Davids mating with the maids, dark but comely, out of the patched tents of Kedar and the tans of dusky Sepharvaim.
Yet I never felt that James Douglas really mastered me. Will could have done it, if he had chosen, mayhap. But James rather herded me with the silent discretion of a well-trained sheep-dog, which meets and holds but never chases or frightens a refractory charge.
Never absent, never late, with a smile on his lips, a twinkle in his blue eyes, and such a sunny helpfulness in his every action, small wonder that James Douglas had been fortunate all his life. He was a twin of the one birth with his brother Archibald, and only the favour of his mother and the indulgence of his father had given him, by solemn declarator, the position of elder brother and heir male to the title and estates.
Of his weaknesses and sins I need not speak here. They have entered into judgment with him while yet he breathes the upper air. But, nevertheless, there was much lovable, much gracious, much heartful and hope-inspiring about James Douglas, and though I have suffered many things, God be witness, I say no different even unto this day.
Above all men generous, ready to go out of his way to do a service to any, great or small, he yet loved the praise of men as a girl watches for admiration. So much I could see—and—I know not that I liked him the worse for it.
This James of ours would go into a tavern and ruffle it with the best—tossing tankards of ale with Hob and Dob, the Selkirk “souters.” He would drink down the Bordeaux and the vintages of parched champagne with kings and princes, giving them toast for toast, bumper for bumper. And if midway the first carouse, Hob of the Elsin chanced to grow ill-haired and cantankerous, who so ready as James of Douglas to take to quarterstaff and break a “souter’s” head, or, in default of ready timber, with the sounder weapons of his clenched ten fingers.
Or if, again, my Lord of Bracieux, or His Highness the Prince of Albany, came to words with him as to the colour of a maid’s eyes, the degree of her beauty, or the immaculate perfection of her virtue, who so quick with sword and dagger to defend his opinion as James Douglas, or who, after all was done, more chivalrously willing to shake the hand of a fallen adversary, or assuage his wound with the ointment of marshmallows he kept in his spare helmet?
Besides which, there was something else about him which only a woman can feel, and even she cannot express. James Douglas was so made that no woman could be very angry with him, whatever he might do—that is, she could not keep up her anger for long.
So we walked together and talked, and it made me glad to know that the sword by his side had laid on the bent many an adversary, and that the strong arm which swung me so easily over the burns and hurled trunks of trees from near and far, so that we could cross the ditches and stagnant hags of the morass, was ready to protect me as none other in all Scotland could.
At any rate (I deny it not) it grew perilously pleasant to hear the clink of the departing steeds which carried Will and Sholto to the four winds of heaven, and to know that we had, James and I, one other great high-arched day of summer all to ourselves, in which to wander at our wayward wills, to watch the moor-birds and the sea-fowl blown up from Solway, or late-nesting about the marshes of Carlinwark.
Then, too, James would take my hand—not freely and of one consent and accord like as Laurence was wont to do, but whether I would or no. Yet ever laughingly, so that it would have seemed ill-tempered and dairy-maidish to make an objection about so light a thing.
“Cousins we are,” he would say, “and brother and sister soon to be!”
Then he would sigh and look upon the ground for some while, as we went farther and farther from the castle barrier down through the green pleasances of the wood.
“I would that I had been the elder brother,” he would bemoan himself. “ ’Tis hard to love as I love, and yet”—
At the thought he grew more sober, and once for a moment I thought of a surety he was about to cry. So, because that seemed more terrible than all in a man, I took him hastily by the hand, saying, “You do not really love me, James! You know well you have loved a dozen before—ay, and more, if all tales be true.”
“Lies! lies!” he would cry; “they are not true! I swear it by the bones of St. Bride. It is only a thing said by the common folk—the clash of the country! They fix on me—because Will is—as he is!”
“And how is he?” I asked, not too wisely, perhaps.
James laughed, yet not scornfully. For James Douglas was a gentleman, and true to his own. Not, however, a very great gentleman, like my brother William, whom they slew at Edinburgh—or another whom I came to know later. So he did not mock his brother even when in act, perhaps without intent, to win away from him the love of his promised wife.
But at least he could not do that, for I had never given it to Will of Avondale. No, nor even counted him playmate and “little lover,” as in the old childish days I had called Larry, when Maud and Sholto strolled afield picking forget-me-nots or star-gazing at the constellations, as if the sky of one night were different from that of another.[3]
James Douglas laughed, good-naturedly, carelessly, even affectionately, but at the same time like a man who feels himself armed cap-à-pie when there is talk of love-making.
“Ah, our Will,” he murmured, “he will be a new William the Lion or Robert the Bruce, so be his head does not fall too soon under the axe. But he will never know what it is to live.”
“And what,” said I, drolling with him, “in your well-informed younger-brotherly wisdom may it be to live? To eat and drink, to ride and sleep, to marry or to give in marriage. That hath been the general opinion. Is Will shut off from these, Sir Wiseacre? I judge not the last—to my cost.”
“The sap is in the trees, the honey in the flower, and the blood in men,” James answered enigmatically. “Our good Will’s veins are filled with the ink wherewithal to write State papers—a valuable fluid, doubtless, but not one from which to distil either life for oneself or happiness for others!”
“And how would you proceed, most learned St. James of Avondale, high master of the mysteries?”
“Even thus,” he said, slipping a hand about my waist. “If I had Will’s chances, I would not ride off every day at the crowing of the cock—to the north, to see whether Douglas Castle sits still on its knowe; anon to the west, to stir up the Agnew to hang a few more scores of Irelanders; then to the south, to hector the Tutor of Bombie; and (last of all) to the west, to see a new rigging put upon the pig-styes of Caerlaverock!”
I felt in my heart there was both meat and matter in what he said, and—I did not (to my shame) order him to take away his arm from about my waist. There was no barrier about the Lady’s Bower to rest the back. His arm was strong and good to lean upon—just as Maud had said of Sholto’s. I was curious to see if the thing were indeed true. And it was. It is useful to be told a thing, but after all that is only the hundredth part of knowledge.
“No,” he went on, “I would be—where I am now. But with more right—not doing another man’s work—tilling his ground that he may sow, planting that he may reap. Bah!” (here he broke off angrily) “Will has manhood, but it is that of a mechanism of iron, that drives onward to its purpose. You and I, little Margaret, are but puppets in his game, quintains to be strewn hither and thither as he birses yont, so that the house of Douglas may put the Stewarts in the dust, or of all these castles not one stone be left upon another!”
I had never seen him so moved.
“James,” I said, gently enough, for there was that which tightened in my throat—I knew not why, “it is not for you of all men to speak thus—least of all to me, who in a handful of days am to be your brother’s wife!”
“No,” he said, more quietly, “you say truth, Margaret. But I have loved you, do not forget, ever since we played together on the Hill of Daisies up yonder where through a gap in the cloud-drift the corn-stooks wink yellow in the sun. I have gone farther, taken greater risks, laid my life in pawn more often—yea, upon the turning of a hair for you—as did never Will! If I speak wrong—do wrong—lay these things in the other scale.”
And suddenly turning, he took me in his arms.
“After all you are mine,” he cried fiercely. “I love you better than the other, if he is my brother! Do not forget it. I will wait for you—if it be a thousand years!”
The days went by all too quickly. The preparations for the wedding itself were begun. Pavilions with silken cords and rich broideries of cloth of gold, brought from France, were set up on the green. The old grey castle itself became gay and parti-coloured.
All too fast the end was coming, like the last grains making a dimpling whirlpool in the sand-glass.
Day and night James had pled with me to meet him once more—only to say farewell; but since my first weakness of the Lady’s Bower, I was afraid. I would see him no more save in company of Maud or the children; for by this time we had made friends, and they were climbing all about me. And at these hard words James moved about sad and disconsolate, his eyes on the ground and his fine curled locks, lint-white like a schoolboy’s, all dishevelled and storm-tossed.
So after a time my heart had a little pity on him, and one day—it was the very afternoon before my marriage day (so little time was left me)—I set out without saying a word to any, going slowly through the meadows to the northward of the isle, plucking here a flower and there a broad leaf of bracken. I was assured that James would observe my way-going. I knew, too, that Maud would see James if he followed me. For it was the mid-afternoon, when, according to her custom, she rested in her chamber, and the window looked towards the Lady’s Bower.
At that time I had no clear knowledge what Maud’s thoughts were with regard to me, save that she meant me well. And indeed, if all had turned out as Maud meant them to do, and the man had proved as worthy as he seemed—well—who knows? At least I need not anticipate. I went my way. James followed; and there, in the north-looking chamber above (as I knew, but as James did not) was Maud Lindsay planning for my good.
Will, like the best and least exigent of bridegrooms, had gone a-hunting that there might be a sufficiency of game for his guests on the morrow. The sun overhead was munificently hot. The bower was green below. Dee ran brown over the pebbles, or sulked black in the pools.
In the bower I sat a long while—alone, breathing the summer air, warm-scented off the flowers, and cool off the water, as it came to me in alternate whiffs and little uncertain breezes from every quarter. I could hear the far-off clatter of the men arranging the tents, hauling at ropes, and singing catches as they pulled. Opposite, in the meadows of the Lochar, scythes flashed in rhythm; and once, keen as a bird’s cry, a mower sharpened his scythe with his white “strake.” The note set me on edge, and when James suddenly pushed aside the green branches, I leaped to my feet with a cry and my hand hard set against my heart.
He ran to me and clasped me to him.
“I have affrighted you, little dove,” he said. “I can see your heart beat. There, on your white throat, it flutters like a bird.”
But I put out my hand, firmly resolved to keep him at a distance. “Bide where you are, James, good cousin,” I said; “these are privileges neither cousinly nor yet fraternal!”
“Margaret, I love you,” he cried, and this time (I do him the justice) he was pale to the lips. “You will never love Will; you do love me. Even yet, say but the word, and I will carry you off and maintain you in France—ay, with the strong hand! The king offered me service there. He will not deliver the duchy of Touraine to Will. First, because he is in the favour of the Dauphin, and, moreover, he is like to grow too powerful. Second, neither Charles of France nor Louis his son desires another Duke of the Orient on their hands. Burgundy is thorn enough in their sides without a Will Douglas in Touraine.”
“And what has that to do with us?” I asked him.
“This,” he went on, speaking hot and fast: “the queen talked long with me that day when Dame Sorel and you went off together. On the part of the king she offered me high command and good service. ‘You could lead men,’ she said. ‘You can drive a good lance—I know.’ Let us take the queen at her word, little Margaret, you and I! Let us go to France. There is a sea-captain at the Ross of Kirkcudbright waiting for a word to transport us to Nantes. And Will hath it not in him to pursue. He will take your provinces and be content.”
“But, James,” said I, to try him—not in the least that I thought of agreeing to go—“no priest would marry us, if we were ten times in France.”
“Why, am I not your cousin even as Will was?” he said. “I’ faith, be not afraid; the King of the Scots would help along anything that would keep Will’s estates and yours apart, and for that matter so too would the King of France. Fear you nothing at all, little one! Come with me to the queen at Amboise. She will care for you, and I swear by sacred honour that I will wait faithfully till we have the same permission from Rome to marry that Will hath now in his pouch.”
As he was speaking his face was perfectly white, and that indeed was the best thing I had yet known about James Douglas. I saw of a truth that he loved me greatly. This time it was not an affair of a moment with him. And I was sorry for James—yes, and a little sorry for myself as well, being so hemmed in on every side.
Yet somehow now he did not stir my heart—not as he had done before in the Lady’s Bower. It was not, as formerly, the hour of my weakness. I saw that a woman may not do as a man. She cannot slip aside from duty for the sake of pleasure as a man may—and often does—yet suffer no shame. She must follow—because she is a woman—the higher things. It is her weird, and was laid upon her along with the Eden pain. Her path is narrow and the thorns hedge it about.
“James,” I said, gently laying my hand upon his shoulder, “it is my turn to be strong. This that you propose would ruin more than you and me. It would bring to the ground that great house whose blood is in our veins, in yours as in mine.
“You are a Douglas of the younger line, I the last of the elder branch. The traitor’s axe cut off both my brothers. The Stewarts desire to come between, to divide the inheritance of the Douglases. They thought that their work was done when the blade, already red, fell on the neck of the earl, my brother, in the accursed castle of Edinburgh. To me, a girl, and at that time a babe, the half would go, and that half the richer and stronger. Your father, a slack man and old (I speak it not unkindly), would take the remainder.
“But this they did, they and their lick-platter, knavish councillors, without at all counting on what hath been the Douglas strength. ‘Douglas, Douglas, haud thegither!’ That has been the gathering word of our folk, and so it shall be yet, dear James. I was but a lass when this heritage came to me, but, by the Lord and the Virgin, I also will ‘haud it thegither’!”
“But you do not love Will?” said James, looking up with a face still white and working.
“No,” said I, “I do not love him. What chance has he given me to love him? I am to him even as a new province or a few thousand hackbutmen. No, I do not love him. But that is nothing to the point. You too are a Douglas, and if the Stewarts pressed us, would not you close your helmet-bars, and, drawing the great two-handed sword that Malise made you, lay on for the honour of the house? Or, spear in rest, would you not charge in the great and bloody day so long as strength and life remained to you? You know that you would. Why, then, may not a weak girl do what she can—give the thing she has? Are there no battles for her to fight, alone, with none to help or hear—the heavens deaf, the earth iron, the night about black, with a darkness that may be felt?”
I could hear James Douglas sobbing. I know not that he understood my words; they were above him. He was not of great subtlety, being, as it were, built of rough, gross elements, strong and salt of flavour in word and deed. Nevertheless, something moved him, perhaps no more than that he knew at last that in no case would I marry him, but would carry out my promise to Will, whatever might be the cost to myself.
So hearing that, by what upturning of the heart of a woman I cannot tell, a wave of pity for this man swept over me. It was not that my purpose weakened. Only—it seemed that somehow I must needs comfort my ancient friend. How vain my thought was I know now. Men compacted like James Douglas need comfortings rough-rasping to the senses. Baked meats and dainties are thrown away upon them. Of honey comfits and conserve of rose leaves, sugar wafers filled with quince, seeded pomegranate jelly and stoned black cherries of Gascony—bah, they say, is this meat for men?
But these things I knew not then. I learned his taste later. This it was:
Salt beef biting with cabbage-wort and onions, cold pork and garlic thereto, a horn spoon and a potful of bone broth or cockyleekie hot off the fire, even a great platter of oat porridge with ale in a bicker—suchlike made our James’s concept of pleasant things. And his taste in eating is an allegory of his taste in other things. A big, lordly, overlording man that loved his bellyful of lustihood—to eat when he was hungry, drink when thirst nipped him, carry off on his saddle-bow the woman who pleased him, to swagger before all men as Saul among the people, haler, heartier, stronger, taller by a head than any there—these things made life for James Douglas, and for the many James Douglases of the world.
This being so, I wasted delicate words on him.
“James,” I said, “were I free to choose—I do not know—I might”—
Then in a moment I knew that I had done wrong, and that, though I might love James Douglas, he would never understand me.
For he took me in his great arms like a child and kissed me—just because I had said that—and hesitated. A man will never learn—at least, not such men as James. They are the bandits of love, and take silly women by brigandage. Strangely enough, some of us like it.
But not I—not I. That I did—in the end—come to think otherwise of this marauder was for altogether another reason. I do not know exactly what, but that it was another reason—of that I am sure.
So being held fast and kissed often, it was natural that I should struggle to be free—to cry out. But I might as well have rebelled against pillory on the Villeins’ Hill, had I been set there. And my most touching protestations had as much effect on James Douglas as upon the headsmen of Thrieve the appeals of some suffering wretch hard gripped by the law.
“Say you love me, then!” he said, smiling at me; “you said that if you had a choice, you would”—
“Would hate you,” I cried furiously, “and I do.”
“Ay, you would hate me if you had a choice,” he said, with unexpected subtlety, “but you have not. You love me therefore. Say it!”
“I will not say it! I love you not. I would die first!”
“Then you shall stay here till you do!”
For that I do not think I hated him so very much as I ought. His arms were so strong, and yet he held me gently. He had somehow “the airt o’t.”
There are worse things in the world. And besides, he was my cousin and playmate.
So I said that which he wished me to say—only, of course, to get away. But, all the same, I said it. At that he kissed me greatly, fiercely—so that my head swam. There came a singing in my ears that was not the murmur of the Dee Water. For a moment I seemed almost to lose consciousness. For there are times when James does not know how strong he is.
Then when I came to myself, being still held in his arms, there before us stood William Douglas, within two yards, his hand upon his sword-hilt and his face like to the face of the dead.
For a moment we stood there gazing at each other—thus. William Douglas was bareheaded, looking, as I remember, in his dress of black, simple as any squire. Yet in spite of all, James Douglas did not let me go. Courage of certain kinds he did not lack.
As for me, how I summoned myself to meet the ordeal I cannot now recall. I can remember only that through the first numbing chill of feeling that all life was overturned and changed, there shot a kind of thankfulness that it had come—before, and not after.
William Douglas might do with me what he listed. But at least he would know. There was comfort in that. And so for the breathing of twenty breaths, slowly respired, we stood facing one another without moving.
Then Will lifted his hand from his sword-hilt and pointed to the entrance of the bower.
“Go!” he commanded in a hard, bitter voice, not loud, but low and penetrating.
And James, with his arm still firm about my waist, never blenched or even quivered.
“No, brother Will,” he answered, “I will not go and leave you with—Margaret!”
“Margaret is my promised wife of to-morrow,” said William Douglas. “I have had little private converse with her. I desire a word or two here and now! Go!”
“I stay to defend the woman I love, and the woman who loves me!” said James, looking his brother in the eye. Douglas to Douglas—they stood—and a Douglas between! I could not help wondering what would come out of that—yes, even at the moment I wondered. But then I could never have devised anything so marvellous as has indeed come to us three.
“I do not lift my hand upon a woman,” said Will; “you may leave Margaret Douglas with me and safely. You have said your say. I have heard. Now, I have somewhat to add. Go and help them with the banquet tent yonder. I shall be with you later!”
And his eyes, till now steady and black as night, snapped upon his brother.
Still James hesitated; I think it was in his mind to poniard his rival. For with his free arm I could feel him grip nervously at the handle of his dagger—his mind evidently divided within him, wavering this way and that.
“Go,” said William, without raising his voice, “I am the Douglas!”
The loyalty to the head of his house, which James had sucked in with his mother’s milk, had the mastery. He went out, clicking back the dagger into its sheath and never once looking behind him.
So in these unimaginable circumstances I, Margaret Douglas, was left alone with the man who was to be my husband on the morrow. I stood wavering, about midway betwixt crying out nervously and fainting away. Had I not been a girl and innocent, I should assuredly have done the latter. For to faint in a man’s arms takes the edge off his anger, no matter how bitter it may be—even as a sleeping-draught of the apothecary dulls the ill dreams of the night.
But this I did not know, and so sate me down of my own accord on the seat of rough boards which James had put up in the bower. I only leaned back and breathed deeply with my eyes shut, for a period which seemed to be measured by years and ages. And all the while William Douglas kept his black eyes steadily on me, so that I could feel them even through my closed lids.
All at once a swift and strange anger against him surged up in my heart.
After all, had he the right? Marriage, indeed, he had spoken to me of. Once he had said that he “loved” me. But how? So that I could almost have laughed at the word. No, he would not terrify me. I was a Douglas as well as he. Therefore I rose—a little unsteadily, I fear, in spite of all my courage, and, walking to the river-edge, I dipped my kerchief in the clear brown Dee Water.
With this I dabbled my face well, and let it drip, cooling the palms of my hands. I was determined that Will, whatever he might do or say to me, should not have the advantage because of any girlish weakness on my part.
But I own, in spite of my preparedness, that what he did say to me took away my breath. That he should have slain me with his hand or sent me to a convent for my life’s term would have surprised me less. Douglases had done as much before to their women folk, even after they had been wedded a long time.
“I have spoken with Mistress Maud Lindsay,” he said. “She it was who bade me come to this place—because I would not believe!”
Then I sprang to my feet. Hot anger ran white as molten metal from my brain to my heart, and from my heart to my finger-tips.
“Maud—my Maud Lindsay, whom I trusted—believed my only friend—to betray me!” I cried.
“Nay,” he said in the same voice, low, even, and a little chill, “not your only friend, nor yet a traitress. Your best friend—save, perhaps, one!”
I do not know that for a long minute my brain took any meaning from these words. They might have been Latin, like the monk’s songs, for all they conveyed to me. But slowly there dawned the hope, inexpressible, unbelievable, that, knowing all, William Douglas was not angry with me.
I asked him in as many words. But as I drew nearer, I saw him shrink away a little—unconsciously, as I now know, but as I then thought because James had so recently held me in his arms.
“Angry with you, child?” he said, his voice vibrating strangely; “nay; but my eyes are opened.”
“It was nothing,” I said, trying to speak lightly. “James was but bidding me farewell. He teased and craked like a scarecrow in the cornfields till I had perforce to let him kiss me. I did wrong.”
William Douglas waved his hand, as if all that I spoke of was an afterthought, a nothing, even as I had said.
“My eyes were opened wide before ever I came hither,” he said. “Hitherto I have walked in darkness; but Maud Lindsay has made me see!”
I waited for that which should come next.
“Child,” he went on again, “I wonder if you will understand? I fear not. The matter is too great for you. But at first, when she spoke, I would not believe that you could think of another. Love, betrothals, marriage, the hope of children born to the house of Douglas: these had always appeared to my mind as so many links in a chain, a chain which was to bind you and me for always. To me, you have been all my life the Little Maid whom I used to see on my visits to Thrieve. But I forgat (having, indeed, many things upon my mind) that now you had grown into a woman; that you needed other love, other care; that if I did not speak—well, there were others less tied of tongue!”
I did not speak, for, indeed, he seemed to be speaking as much to himself as to me. Presently, I think, his mood changed. He sat down near me, and let his words fall with a commoner and more friendly accent.
“ ‘Your fault,’ said Maud Lindsay, ‘all your own fault, William Douglas!’ I agree! Only, you see, I did not know. But it is a crime for a man not to know. A man is maimed who goes through life thus, with eyes that tell him nothing of women, scarce even the colour of their hair, or whether the blush on their cheek is for his own incoming or for that of another man!”
“William,” I said, “I promised that I would be a true and good wife to you. I have continued to intend no less. Is that not enough for you and me? We need not expect great things of each other!”
He smiled very sadly.
“No,” he said. “I am well served. In my folly I thought it was enough to tell a girl that I loved her, knowing that one day she was to be my wife, and that then I could tell her better. Listen, child—what I say is strange. I love you. I love you as James yonder will never love you—no, nor any woman. He hath it not in him. Nevertheless, I know—I have seen—I have heard—the thing Maud Lindsay told me, that your love is not for me! Not now, my child—not ten years hence—not for ever!”
I laid my hand on his, and I think that I must have sobbed aloud. “I do love you, Cousin Will—as—as much as I can.” These were the words I said.
He touched the back of my hand gently. Then, stooping, he kissed it, laying it back again on my lap. But there was no caressing in his touch, only somewhat of that sad tenderness with which we resign our best loved dead to the white swathings and the hollow falling of the clods.
“Yes,” he said, “that is it in a word. You have said it—‘as well as you can’—so you would love your husband, It is a true word. But I saw your eyes as you lay in my brother’s arms. That is another sort of love—something I shall never know—shut away from me—lost for ever. And by my own fault. I have chosen the worser part, of that I do not doubt. But such as it is—’tis too late to go back upon it now!”
I had no word to say. For though there was no right tenderness for William Douglas in my heart—not, at least, such as he spake of—I could not love him as my husband—no, not if he had been the angel Gabriel, with all the virtues of heaven thick upon him. I am of the earth, earthy, and it was the chief of my good qualities that I was ever candid enough to acknowledge it.
“Listen, child,” he said again, and as he spoke all his great, clean, over-burdened soul seemed to unroll itself before my vision, “to-morrow I will wed you before the priest. The wheel of fate cannot go back. So much must be, if all I have striven for—all that your two brothers died for—is not to be lost in the ruin of our house. But I will hold you sacred—yes, even as my sister, even as my mother, until the day of my death. I am a strong man, and able for this thing. Also, William Douglas was not made for a long life. He fights with principalities and powers, and shall die—though in his death (I who speak see it) Scotland shall be new-born. Will you help me in this?”
“I do not wholly understand,” I said, “but at least I will do all you wish, so be that you are not angry with me for—for—caring about James! It is only a little, and I could not help it.”
I think he winced at this.
“Nay,” he said, “you I do not blame at all—and James not greatly. He is as incapable of refraining from the making of love, as I”—
“Of making it!” said I, smiling at my cousin for the first time. “It may not be too late—who knows? You should go to school to James!”