The Black Douglas

by S. R. Crockett

"I would that I had known there were such gallant blades as you three, my Lords of Douglas and their knight, sighing here in Scotland to have your hearts broke for the good of your souls. I had then brought with me a tierce of damsels fair as cruel, who had done it in the flashing of a swallow's wing. But 'tis a contract too great for one poor maid."

"Yet you yourself ventured all alone into this realm of forlorn and desperate men," answered the Earl, scarcely recking what he said, nor indeed caring so that her dark eyes should continue to rest on him with the look he had seen in them at his first coming.

"All alone—yes, much, much alone," she answered with a strange glance about her. "My kinsman loves not womankind, and neither in his castles nor yet in his company does he permit any of the sex long to abide."

The men now mounted again, and the three rode back in the midst of the cavalcade of Douglas spears, the Chancellor talking as freely and confidently to the Earl as if he had been his friend for years, while the Earl of Douglas kept up the converse right willingly so long as, looking past the Chancellor, his eyes could rest also upon the delicately poised head and graceful form of the Lady Sybilla.

And behind them a horse's length the Marshal de Retz rode, smiling in the depths of his blue-black beard, and looking at them out of the wicks of his triangular eyes.

Presently the towers of the Castle of Crichton rose before them on its green jutting spur. The Tyne Valley sank beneath into level meads and rich pastures, while behind the Moorfoots spread brown and bare without prominent peaks or distinguished glens, but nevertheless with a certain large vagueness and solemnity peculiarly their own.

The fêtes with which the Chancellor welcomed his guests were many and splendid. But in one respect they differed from those which have been described at Castle Thrieve. There was no military pomp of any kind connected with them. The Chancellor studiously avoided all pretence of any other distinction than that belonging to a plain man whom circumstances have raised against his will to a position of responsibility.

The thirty spears of the Earl's guard, indeed, constituted the whole military force within or about the Castle of Crichton.

"I am a lawyer, my lord, a plain lawyer," he said; "all Scots lawyers are plain. And I must ask you to garrison my bit peel-tower of Crichton in a manner more befitting your own greatness, and the honour due to the ambassador of France, than a humble knight is able to do."

So Sholto was put into command of the court and battlements of the castle, and posted and changed guard as though he had been at Thrieve, while the Chancellor bustled about, affecting more the style of a rich and comfortable burgess than that of a feudal baron.