"The king would prefer them from the hands of the Lady Murielle," said Gray, with more anxiety than caution.
"Speak not to me of Murielle!" exclaimed the countess, with a shriek, as her head drooped; and she fainted in the arms of Lauder.
"What has happened—speak for mercy, sirs! what horror do you conceal from us?" exclaimed Sir Patrick Gray and the abbot together.
"Look here," said the old knight, in whose keen grey eyes there mingled a curious expression of commiseration and ferocity. He drew aside the countess's dule-weed, and then the Captain of the Guard and the abbot perceived that her white neck was stained with blood, her shoulder covered with hideous ligatures, and that her right hand and arm were gone—gone from the elbow!
"Who—what has done this?" asked Gray, as his sun-burned cheek grew pale.
"See you, sirs, what the first shot from yonder hellish engine hath achieved?" replied Lauder, reproachfully.
"The first," reiterated Gray.
"And I would give the last blood in my heart to have the seven makers of it hanging in a bunch from yonder gallows knob!"
Local history records that this terrible mutilation occurred when the countess was seated at table in the hall, through one of the windows of which the great bullet passed; and some years before the battle of Waterloo, when Thrave, like several other Scottish castles, was undergoing repair, as a barrack for French prisoners, a favourite gold ring which the countess wore upon the forefinger of her right hand, inscribed Margaret de Douglas, was found among the ruins, with one of Meg's granite balls beside it; and the old peasantry in Galloway yet aver, that in this terrible mutilation "the vengeance of Heaven was evidently manifested, in destroying the hand which had been given in wedlock unto two near kinsmen."[5]
By a strange coincidence, or an irresistible fatality, at the same moment that the countess was borne away, it came to pass that the man-at-arms who held the white flag let it drop from the summit of the keep into the barbican below. Then Sir John Romanno and his impatient cannoniers, perceiving that the flag was gone, and that some commotion had ensued about the gate of Thrave, supposed (in those days there were no telescopes), that the parley was broken, and that violence was offered to the envoys, so a shot was fired from the great brass bombarde named the Lion of Flanders.