There upon the ribbed sea sand lay the dead body of the boy William Dalrymple. I knew him at a glance, for all that so much had come and gone since that day when I played at the golf game upon the green of Maybole. He lay with his arms stretched away from his sides, his face turned over, and one cheek dented deeply into the sand. It was a pitiful sight. Yet the lad was not greatly altered—wind-tossed and wave-borne as he had been, and now brought to cross the path of the unjust at the very nick of time, by the manifest judgment and providence of God.
'What means this?' said the King. 'Some poor drowned sailor boy. Let us avoid!' For of all things he loved not gruesome sights nor the colour of blood. But James Mure suddenly cried aloud at the vision, as if he had been stricken with pain. And as he did so, his father looked at him as though he would have slain him, so devilish was his glance of hate and contempt.
But a woman who had come running hot-foot after the party, now rushed to the front. She gave a loud scream, ear-piercing and frantic, when she saw the tossed little body lying all abroad upon the sand.
'My Willie, my ain son Willie!' she cried. For it was Meg Dalrymple. All her ignorant rudeness seemed to fade away in the presence of death, and as she lifted the poor mishandled head that had been her son's, each of us felt that she grew akin to our own mothers, widowed and bereaved. For I think that which touches us most in the grief of a widow, is not our feeling for a particular woman, but our obligation to the mother of all flesh.
So when Meg Dalrymple lifted her son's head, it might have been a mourning queen with a dead kingling upon her knee.
'My ain, my ain lad!' she cried. 'See, lammie, but I loved ye. Ye were the widow's ae son. Fleeter-footed than the mountain roe, mair gleg than the falcon that sits yonder on the King's wrist, ye were the hope o' thy mither's life. And they hae slain ye, killed my bonny wean, that never did harm to nae man—'
She undid a kerchief from about the white, swollen neck of her son.
'Kens ony man that image and superscription?' said she, pointing to an embroidered crest upon it. John Mure strode forward hastily. He had grown as pale as death.
'Give it me. I will pass it to His Majesty,' he said, holding out his hand for it.
But the woman leaped up fiercely.