Though the season was summer, a large piece of turf (the only fuel in Fuhnen) burned in the fireplace of her chamber; for these old castles by the sea are ever damp and cold. This was supplied from time to time by fresh peats heaped on by the Fourrier's wife, with an enormous pair of iron tongs, from an oak bunker, built into a recess, which, like the fireplace, the doors, windows, and every other opening in the edifice, had a low-browed narrow arch, with deep zigzag mouldings, springing from little shafted pillars with escalloped capitals. Great squares of hideous and uncouth tapestry, wrought, as tradition says, by the Princess Florentine, covered the walls. The figures and the subject were enough to appal even a stouter heart than Gabrielle's.
They represented the last human sacrifice offered up in Britain. In the midst of a wood of gloomy pines stood a group of tall, ghostly, and long-bearded Druids, armed with their brass celts, and bearing goblets of mead. Amidst them, stood Einhar, Earl or Jarl of Caithness, who, in a battle near Avon-Horsa, in the days when Gregory the Great was King of Scotland, had taken prisoner Haldona, Prince of Norway, and offered him up to Odin. On an altar of stone the prince lay bound, and in his throat was the knife of the arch-druid,* for even in Gregory's days, some priests of Paganrie still lingered in the northern isles.
* A mound still marks where this occurred, A.D. 893.
These horrible, misshapen, and ghastly figures, were unpleasant objects for Gabrielle to contemplate; and she always turned from them to the engrailed cross, the heraldic ships, and motto of the Sinclairs, which the princess had hung upon the pines of the forest, committing an anachronism by no means uncommon in ancient tapestries.
Lost in thought, with her cheek resting on her right hand, Gabrielle had been gazing on the waters of the Belt, which mellowed with the shore in the sunny evening haze. Her pretty feet, cased in high-heeled shoes of scarlet velvet, richly embroidered with gold, rested on a satin footstool. Her right hand played with her fine hair, which hung in short loose ringlets, according to the fashion of the time.
A step, and the touch of a hand aroused her.
She turned to meet the impassioned eyes of Merodé, with his lanky black mustache, long ringleted hair, parted in the centre of his forehead, and his sinister face a little flushed by wine and recent merriment. She gave a slight shudder—a shrug of her shoulder, and said—
"Oh—is it you again?"
"And have you really an aversion for me, whom even my enemies admit to be the first in the breach, the foremost in the charge, and the last in retreat—though the Imperialists never do retreat. The heedlessness and imprudence of youth have plunged me into an abyss of misery and error; but my pride still bears me up, Gabrielle—yea, above even your scorn."
She did not reply.