Then the Lady Sybilla ceased quickly and looked up, as it had been, smiling. Yet she was not smiling as maidens are wont to smile.
"Pretty innocent," she said, "you mean well, but you know not what the word 'sin' means to such as I. Confess—absolve! Not even the Holy One and the Just could give me that. I tell you I have eaten of the apple of the knowledge of good and evil—yes, the very core I have eaten. I have the taste of innocent blood upon my lips. I have seen the axe fall, the axe which I put into the headsman's hands. I am condemned, and that justly. But one of you shall live to taste sweet love, and the crown of life, and to feel the innocent lips of children at her breasts. And the other—but enough. Farewell. Fear not. God, who has been cruel in all else, has given your lives to Sybilla de Thouars, ere in His own time He strike that guilty one with His thunderbolt."
And as she went within, the eyes of the maids followed her; but the masked man with the naked sword never so much as turned his head, gazing straight forward over the battlements of the White Tower into the lilac mist which hung above the Atlantic.
CHAPTER LIII
SYBILLA'S VENGEANCE
There stands a solitary rock at the base of which is a cave, on the seashore of La Vendée. Behind stretch the marshes, and the place is shut in and desolate. Birds cry there. The bittern booms in the thickets of grey willow and wet-shot alder. The herons nest upon the pine trees near by, till the stale scent of them comes down the wind from far. Ospreys fish in the waters of the shallow lake behind, and the scales of their prey flash in the sun of morning as they rise dripping from the dive.
In this place Sholto, Malise, and the Lord James Douglas were presently abiding.
It was but a tiny cell, originally formed by two portions of marly rock fallen together in some ancient convulsion or dropped upon each other from a floating iceberg. In some former age the cleft had been a lair of wild beasts, or the couch of some hairy savage hammering flint arrowheads for the chase, and drawing with a sharp point upon polished bone the yet hairier mammoth he hunted. But this solitary lodging in the wilderness had been enlarged in more recent times, till now the interior was about eight feet square and of the height of a man of stature when he stands erect.