'Launcelot,' Nell said, with a wonderful quiet, 'that is useless, and not well said. Be comforted. None would have done one-tenth so much as thou hast.'
'Bless you, Nell!' I said, for I had feared greatly she would have broken upon me with bitter railing.
It was by the great oak tree which sends its boughs over the road that we met the bier, and the horses stopped. Even thus Nell Kennedy met her father, and there was not a tear on her face, but only a great sweet calm. She silenced the noisy limmer wives that went behind crying and mourning aloud. So in this manner we went onward to Culzean, Nell walking on one side of the bier and I on the other, leading Dom Nicholas by the bridle.
And lo! as the body passed the drawbridge, a sudden gust out of the sea snatched his knightly pennon from the topmost turret tower of the battlements of Culzean, which was held a freit and a warning by all the folk of Carrick. But though the master had come home to his own, yet both Culzean and I were now masterless.
In due time we gave him stately funeral, carrying him forth upon a day so calm, so breathless, that the banners did not wave as they swept the dust. And thereafter all life seemed to stop, when we came home again to the darkened house. James and Sandy, the two young lads, played no more in the tennis-courts, but went about with linked arms speaking of revenge. But little David abode with Nell and went forth only with her, clinging winsomely to her hand; for we kept us close within bars and warded ramparts, with the drawbridge up, watching the fruit ripening on the walls of the orchard of Culzean all that splendid summer of the murder of our lord and master.
Slowly I thought over many things, till the resolve to bring the matter to a head came masterfully upon me. From the Earl as Bailzie of Carrick I got warrant, according to my dead master's word and direction, to be doer-in-ordinary for the young man James, who was now the heir of Cassilis. For Earl John knew that Launcelot Kennedy was no self-seeker; also they that stood about had told to him the Tutor's last words—that I was to be a good lad and to be kind to Nelly. It was Adam Boyd of Penkil, and David Somerville, hosier in Ayr, who told him this, and they were two of those that played golf by the sandhills on the day of that foul slaying under trust.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE BLUE BLANKET
Yet because I needed advice and had none to give it, I rode one day to Edinburgh to see Maister Robert Bruce. I found the whole city in an uproar. There was the beating of drums in all the streets and closes, and a great multitude of the common folk crying out 'For God and the Kirk!' Pikes danced merrily along the causeways, and good wives' heads were thrust through all the port-holes in the windings of the stairs. Their voices, shrill and vehement, kept up a constant deafening clamour, each calling to her John or Tam to 'come awa' in oot o' that,' or bidding them 'not to mell wi' what concerned them not.'
'What concern is the glory o' God o' yours—you that is but a baker in Coul's Close?' I heard one wife cry to her man, and it seemed to me a mightily pertinent question.