He inquired in what battle Gray received the severe wound the mark of which yet remained upon his face; and for the first time since he had left Scotland, our hero felt his heart glow with petty anger, in having to acknowledge that he had gained it in a mere street brawl with the enemies of the king,—the adherents of the turbulent and unruly house of Douglas.
"Tête Dieu!" said the duke; "that is the family which gives the king, your master, so much trouble. By Saint Louis, I would make quick work in disposing of them."
"They can bring twenty thousand men into the field," urged Sir Patrick.
"The great lord of Douglas is now in Flanders."
"Here—here in Flanders!" exclaimed Gray.
"Not in my territories; but on the other side of Brabant, and when last heard of he was travelling with a brilliant train of knights towards Breda, for the purpose of visiting that city, after which he passes forward to France. He was at the Feast of the Assumption in Antwerp, but proudly and haughtily kept aloof from all."
This unexpected intelligence filled Gray with emotions of a varied character, and solved a great mystery, the recollection of which had greatly troubled him.
It was, then, really Murielle Douglas whom he had seen, and no visionary or fancied resemblance; and he felt a glow of pleasure at the conviction that he had looked upon her face so recently, that he had breathed the same air with her; and that even now she was separated from him, not by the stormy German Ocean, and many a league of hill and glen; but only by a few miles of level land, and he mentally resolved, at every hazard and danger, that on leaving the duke of Gueldres, he would follow the Douglases to Breda, and that if they had departed, he would track them elsewhere; so powerful a noble, with so brilliant a retinue, would be easily traced in Flanders.
Pleasure, anticipation, and excitement, made him alternately gay and abstracted; thus he could barely attend with becoming reverence to the kind old prince who, being anxious to make a favourable impression on one who seemed the trusted subject of his intended son-in-law, drew his attention to the various castles, spires, and other features of the country, beguiling the way by many a story and legend, as they rode towards his hunting-lodge, at which they were to pass the night.
It stood upon the Gueldrian side of the Peel Morass. The latter included great tracts of land now dry and fertile, which were then deep swamps; and strange old stories lingered there, of broken dykes and bursting sluices—of overflowings from the Waal and Maese, with inundations from the Zuider Zee, by which whole farms were swept away, strong castles overthrown, and villages submerged; and of mermaids and mermen being swept by the retiring waters to flounder in the slough until they were captured; and the duke averred that in the days of his ancestor, Reinold II., duke of Gueldres, two had been instructed in Christianity and taught to make reverence to a crucifix,—a story corroborated in later times.