And what of Murielle? was the constant thought of Gray.
She was now his, irrevocably his, and while aware of his existence could not, either by force or fraud, become the wife of another. Amid all the misery of a protracted captivity, there was comfort in his conviction, till after-thoughts suggested how heartless was the existence to which their precipitate marriage had perhaps condemned her!
But might not their enemies, by forgeries and false statements, delude her into an idea of his death, as they had attempted to do before? Douglas dared not trifle with the power and terror of the Church; so Gray drew consolation from his memory of the earl's superstition, if not of his religion.
Yet there were times when his mental agony became great; for no news from Scotland or of the external world ever reached his prison.
Was Murielle still living? Had the wild schemes of Douglas and Albany prospered? Was the latter on the throne as Robert IV., with the terrible earl for his lieutenant-general, his ally in council and his right arm in war—crowned like Baliol of old, by domestic treason and foreign treachery? Was the young king dead, a prisoner, or an exile in France or England? Was Albany's betrothal to Mademoiselle Radegonde, the eldest daughter of Charles VII., annulled? What changes were taking place in his secluded mountain home? Who were dead—who living, and who wedded? Was he quite forgotten there?
Such were the questions ever in his heart and on his tongue.
Slowly passed the weary days till they became months, and then season succeeded to season. Five times had Gray, from his barred window in that old tower of Otho count of Gueldres, seen the golden grain gathered on the flat and distant fields; five times had he seen the land ploughed, and sown, and reaped; and five times covered with the white mantle of winter, when frost locked the waters of the Waal, and moored, harder than ever hempen cable and iron anchor did, the great brown-varnished barges in the sedge-bordered canals, when the storks forsook their nests on the snow-covered gables, when the holy water froze in the stone fonts of the churches, and when the bulbous-shaped Flemings put on at least six pairs of additional breeches. At such a season as this, the poor prisoner pictured in fancy the crackling yule-log that blazed in his father's hall at home—the old kirk of Foulis all bedecked with green bays and greener holly—his mother mourning by the winter hearth for the loss of her absent son; and then his heart grew sick as he thought of his blighted love, his wasted life, and all the thousand memories of his native land.
He thought, too, of what he had seen in more than one Flemish market-place, in Antwerp, at Gueldres, Endhoven, Bommel, and elsewhere; the cruel and periodical exhibition of a long-secluded prisoner, in whose heart hope, and even the memory of the outer world, were long since dead; "for there on particular days," says a certain writer, "these victims are presented to the public eye, upon a stage erected in the open market, apparently to prevent their guilt and punishment from being forgotten. It is scarcely possible to witness a sight more degrading to humanity than this exhibition:—with matted hair, wild looks, and haggard features, with eyes dazzled by the unwonted glare of the sun, and ears deafened and astounded by the sudden exchange of the silence of a dungeon for the busy hum of men, the wretches sit like rude images fashioned to a fantastic imitation of humanity rather than like living and reflecting beings. In the course of time we are assured they generally become either madmen or idiots, as mind or matter happens to predominate, when the mysterious balance between them is destroyed."
Gray remembered to have seen these miserable captives thus exhibited, and his heart died within him with terror, lest such might be the fate reserved for himself.
So the year 1448 was in its spring when he reckoned that Murielle was no longer a girl—that in fact she would be about her four-and-twentieth year. He strove to picture what the girl would be now, when expanded into a woman! Would he ever see her more, or be free to tread his native soil again? Alas! there were times when he feared his brain would turn.