"And at the last he ... sailed over the seas to his own land."— Frontispiece

The Black Douglas

By

S.R. Crockett

Author of "The Raiders," "The Stickit Minister," etc.

New York
Doubleday & McClure Co.
1899

Copyright, 1899,

By S.R. CROCKETT.

CONTENTS

THE BLACK DOUGLAS

CHAPTER I

THE BLACK DOUGLAS RIDES HOME

Merry fell the eve of Whitsunday of the year 1439, in the fairest and heartsomest spot in all the Scottish southland. The twined May-pole had not yet been taken down from the house of Brawny Kim, master armourer and foster father to William, sixth Earl of Douglas and Lord of Galloway.

Malise Kim, who by the common voice was well named "The Brawny," sat in his wicker chair before his door, overlooking the island-studded, fairy-like loch of Carlinwark. In the smithy across the green bare-trodden road, two of his elder sons were still hammering at some armour of choice. But it was a ploy of their own, which they desired to finish that they might go trig and point-device to the Earl's weapon-showing to-morrow on the braes of Balmaghie. Sholto and Laurence were the names of the two who clanged the ringing steel and blew the smooth-handled bellows of tough tanned hide, that wheezed and puffed as the fire roared up deep and red before sinking to the right welding-heat in a little flame round the buckle-tache of the girdle brace they were working on.

And as they hammered they talked together in alternate snatches and silences?—Sholto, the elder, meanwhile keeping an eye on his father. For their converse was not meant to reach the ear of the grave, strong man who sat so still in the wicker chair with the afternoon sun shining in his face.

"Hark ye, Laurence," said Sholto, returning from a visit to the door of the smithy, the upper part of which was open. "No longer will I be a hammerer of iron and a blower of fires for my father. I am going to be a soldier of fortune, and so I will tell him—"

"When wilt thou tell him?" laughed his brother, tauntingly. "I wager my purple velvet doublet slashed with gold which I bought with mine own money last Rood Fair that you will not go across and tell him now. Will you take the dare?"

"The purple velvet—you mean it?" said Sholto, eagerly. "Mind, if you refuse, and will not give it up after promising, I will nick that lying throat of yours with my gullie knife!"

And with that Sholto threw down his pincers and hammer, and valorously pushed open the lower door of the smithy. He looked with bold, dark blue eye at his father, and strode slowly across the grimy door-step. Brawny Kim had not moved for an hour. His great hands lay in his lap, and his eyes looked at the purple ridges of Screel, across the beautiful loch of Carlinwark, which sparkled and dimpled restlessly among its isles like a wilful beauty bridling under the gaze of a score of gallants.

But, even as he went, Sholto's step slowed, and lost its braggart strut and confidence. Behind him Laurence chuckled and laughed, smiting his thigh in his mocking glee.

"The purple velvet, mind you, Sholto! How well it will become you, coft from Rob Halliburton, our mother's own brother, seamed with red gold and lined with yellow satin and cramosie. Well indeed will it set you when Maud Lindesay, the maid who came from the north for company to the Earl's sister, looks forth from the canopy upon you as you stand in the archers' rank on the morrow's morn."

Sholto squared his shoulders, and with a little backward hitch of his elbow which meant "Wait till I come back, and I will pay you for this flouting," he strode determinedly across the green space towards his father.

The master armourer of Earl Douglas did not lift his eyes till his son had half crossed the road. Then, even as if a rank of spearmen at the word of command had lifted their glittering points to the "ready," Sholto MacKim stopped dead where he was, with a sort of gasp in his throat, like one who finds his defenceless body breast high against the line of hostile steel.

"The purple velvet!" came the cautious whisper from behind. But the taunt was powerless now.

The smith held his son a moment with his eyes.

"Well?" came in the deep low voice, more like the lowest tones of an organ than the speech of a man.

Sholto stood fixed, then half turning on his heel he began to walk towards the corner of the dwelling-house, over which a gay streamer of the early creeping convolvulus danced and swung in the stirring of the light breeze.

"You wish speech with me?" said his father, in the same level and thrilling undertone.

"No," said Sholto, hesitant in spite of himself, "but I thought—that is I desired—saw you my sister Magdalen pass this way? I have somewhat to give her."

"Ah, so," said Brawny Kim, without moving, "a steel breastplate, belike. Thou hast the brace-buckle in thy hand. Doth the little Magdalen go with you to the weapon-show to-morrow?"

"No, father," said Sholto, stammering, "but I was uneasy for the child. It is full an hour since I heard her voice."

"Then," said his father, "finish your work, put out the fire, and go seek your sister."

Sholto brought his hands together and made the little inclination of the head which was a sign of filial respect. Then, solemn as if he had been in his place in the ordered line of the Earl's first levy of archer men, he turned him about and went back to the smithy.

Laurence lay all abroad on the heap of charcoal of which the armourer's welding fire was made. He was fairly expiring with laughter, and when his brother angrily kicked him in the ribs, he only waggled an ineffectual hand and feebly crowed in his throat like a cock, in his efforts to stifle the sounds of mirth.

"Get up, fool," hissed his angry brother; "help me with this accursed hammer-striking, or I will make an end of such a giggling lout as you. Here, hold up."

And seizing his younger brother by the collar of his blue working blouse, he dragged him upon his feet.

"Now, by the saints," said Sholto, "if you cast your gibes upon me, by Saint Andrew I will break every bone in your idiot's body."

"The purple velvet—oh, the purple velvet!" gasped Laurence, as soon as he could recover speech, "and the eyes of Maud Lindesay!"

"That will teach you to think rather of the eyes of Laurence MacKim!" cried Sholto, and without more ado he hit his brother with his clinched knuckles a fair blow on the bridge of his nose.

The next moment the two youths were grappling together like wild cats, striking, kicking, and biting with no thought except of who should have the best of the battle. They rolled on the floor, now tussling among the crackling faggots, anon pitching soft as one body on the peat dust in the corner, again knocking over a bench and bringing down the tools thereon to the floor with a jingle which might have been heard far out on the loch. They were still clawing and cuffing each other in blind rage, when a hand, heavy and remorseless, was laid upon each. Sholto found himself being dabbled in the great tempering cauldron which stood by his father's forge. Laurence heard his own teeth rattle as he was shaken sideways till his joints waggled like those of a puppet at Keltonhill Fair. Then it was his turn to be doused in the water. Next their heads were soundly knocked together, and finally, like a pair of arrows sent right and left, Laurence sped forth at the window in the gable end and found himself in the midst of a gooseberry bush, whilst Sholto, flying out of the door, fell sprawling on all fours almost under the feet of a horse on which a young man sat, smilingly watching the scene.

Brawny Kim scattered the embers of the fire on the forge-hearth, and threw the breastplate and girdle-brace at which the boys had been working into a corner of the smithy. Then he turned to lock the door with the massive key, which stood so far out from the upper leaf that to it the horses waiting their turns to be shod were ordinarily tethered.

As he did so he caught sight of the young man sitting silent on the black charger. Instantly a change passed over his face. With one motion of his hand he swept the broad blue bonnet from his brow, and bowed the grizzled head which had worn it low upon his breast. Thus for the breathing of a breath the master armourer stood, and then, replacing his bonnet, he looked up again at the young knight on horseback.

"My lord," he said, after a long pause, in which he waited for the youth to speak, "this is not well—you ride unattended and unarmed."

"Ah, Malise," laughed the young Earl, "a Douglas has few privileges if he may not sometimes on a summer eve lay aside his heavy prisonment of armour and don such a suit as this! What think you, eh? Is it not a valiant apparel, as might almost beseem one who rode a-courting?"

The mighty master-smith looked at the young man with eyes in which reverence, rebuke, and admiration strove together.

"But," he said, wagging his head with a grave humorousness, "your lordship needs not to ride a-courting. You are to be married to a great dame who will bring you wealth, alliance, and the dower of provinces."

The young man shrugged his shoulders, and swung lightly off his charger, which turned to look at him as he stood and patted its neck.

"Know you not, Malise," he said, "that the Earl of Douglas must needs marry provinces and the Lord of Galloway wed riches? But what is there in that to prevent Will Douglas going courting at eighteen years of his age as a young man ought. But have no fear, I come not hither seeking the favour of any, save of that lily flower of yours, the only true May-blossom that blooms on the Three Thorns of Carlinwark. I would look upon the angel smile on the face of your little daughter Magdalen. An she be here, I would toss her arm-high for a kiss of her mouth, which I would rather touch than that of lady or leman. For I do ever profess myself her vassal and slave. Where have you hidden her, Malise? Declare it or perish!"

The smith lifted up his voice till it struck on the walls of his cottage and echoed like thunder along the shores of the lake.

"Dame Barbara," he cried, and again, getting no answer, "ho, Dame Barbara, I say!"

Then at the second hallo, a shrill and somewhat peevish voice proceeded from within the house opposite.

"Aye, coming, can you not hear, great nolt! 'Deed and 'deed 'tis a pretty pass when a woman with the cares of an household must come running light-toe and clatter-heel to every call of such a lazy lout. Husband, indeed—not house-band but house-bond, I wot—house-torment, house-thorn, house-cross—"

A sonsy, well-favoured, middle-aged head, strangely at variance with the words which came from it, peeped out, and instantly the scolding brattle was stilled. Back went the head into the dark of the house as if shot from a bombard.

Malise MacKim indulged in a low hoarse chuckle as he caught the words: "Eh, 'tis my Lord William! Save us, and me wanting my Ryssil gown that cost me ten silver shillings the ell, and no even so muckle as my white peaked cap upon my head."

Her husband glanced at the young Earl to see if he appreciated the savour of the jest. Then he looked away, turning the enjoyment over and over under his own tongue, and muttering: "Ah, well, 'tis not his fault. No man hath a sense of humour before he is forty years of his age—and, for that matter, 'tis all the riper at fifty."

The young man's eyes were looking this way and that, up and down the smooth pathway which skirted like a green selvage the shores of the loch.

"Malise," he said, as if he had already forgotten his late eager quest for the little Magdalen, "Darnaway here has a shoe loose, and to-morrow I ride to levy, and may also joust a bout in the tilt-yard of the afternoon. I would not ask you to work in Whitsuntide, but that there cometh my Lord Fleming and Alan Lauder of the Bass, bringing with them an embassy from France—and I hear there may be fair ladies in their company."

"Ah!" quoth Malise, grimly, "so I have heard it said concerning the embassies of Charles, King of France!"

But the young man only smiled, and dusted off one or two flecks of foam which had blown backwards from his horse's bit upon the rich crimson doublet of finest velvet, which, cinctured closely at the waist, fell half-way to his knees in heavy double pleats sewn with gold. A hunting horn of black and gold was suspended about his neck by a bandolier of dark leather, subtiley embroidered with bosses of gold. Laced boots of soft black hide, drawn together on the outside from ankle to mid-calf with a golden cord, met the scarlet "chausses" which covered his thighs and outlined the figure of him who was the noblest youth and the most gallant in all the realm of Scotland.

Earl William wore no sword. Only a little gold-handled poignard with a lady's finger ring set upon the point of the hilt was at his side, and he stood resting easily his hand upon it as he talked, drawing it an inch from its sheath and snicking it back again nonchalantly, with a sound like the clicking of a well-oiled lock.

"Clink the strokes strongly and featly, Malise, for to-morrow, when the Black Douglas rides upon Black Darnaway under the eyes of—well—of the ladies whom the ambassadors are bringing to greet me, there must be no stumbling and no mistakes. Or on the head of Malise MacKim the matter shall be, and let that wight remember that the Douglas does not keep a dule tree up there by the Gallows Slock for nothing."

The mighty smith was by this time examining the hoofs of the Earl's charger one by one with such instinctive delicacy of touch that Darnaway felt the kindly intent, and, bending his neck about, blew and snuffled into the armourer's tangled mat of crisp grey hair.

"Up there!" exclaimed MacKim, as the warm breath tickled his neck, and at the burst of sound the steed shifted and clattered upon the hard-beaten floor of the smithy, tossing his head till the bridle chains rang again.

"Eh, my Lord William," an altered voice came from the door-step, where Dame Barbara MacKim, now clothed and in her right mind, stood louting low before the young Earl, "but this is a blythe and calamitatious day for this poor bit bigging o' the Carlinwark—to think that your honour should visit his servants! Will you no come ben and sit doon in the house-place? 'Tis far from fitting for your feet to pass thereupon. But gin ye will so highly favour—"

"Nay, I thank you, good Dame Barbara," said the Earl, very courteously taking off the close-fitting black cap with the red feather in it which was upon his head. "I must bide but a moment for your husband to set right certain nails in the hoofs of Darnaway here, to ready me for the morrow. Do you come to see the sport? So buxom a dame as the mistress of Carlinwark should not be absent to encourage the lads to do their best at the sword-play and the rivalry of the butts."

And as the dame came forth courtesying and bowing her delighted thanks, Earl William, setting a forefinger under her triple chin, stooped and kissed her in his gayest and most debonair manner.

"Eh, only to think on't," cried the dame, clapping her hands together as she did at mass, "that I, Barbara MacKim, that am marriet to a donnert auld carle like Malise there, should hae the privileege o' a salute frae the bonny mou' o' Yerl William—(Thank ye kindly, my lord!)—and be inveeted to the weepen-shawing to sit amang the leddies and view the sport. Malise, my man, caa' ye no that an honour, a privileege? Is that no owing to me being the sister—on my faither's side—o' Ninian Halliburton, merchant and indweller in Dumfries?"

"Nay, nay, good dame," laughed the Earl, "'tis all for the sake of your own very sufficient charms! I trust that your good man here is not jealous, for beauty, you well do ken, ever sends the wits of a Douglas woolgathering. Nevertheless, let us have a draught of your home-brewed ale, for kissing is but dry work, after all, and little do I think of it save" (he set his cap on his head with a gallant wave of his hand) "in the case of a lady so fair and tempting as Dame Barbara MacKim!"

At this the dame cast up her hands and her eyes again. "Eh, what will Marget Ahanny o' the Shankfit say noo—this frae the Yerl William. Eh, sirce, this is better than an Abbot's absolution. I declare 'tis mair sustainin' than a' the consolations o' religion. Malise, do you hear, great dour cuif that ye are, what says my lord? And you to think so little of your married wife as ye do! Think shame, you being what ye are, and me the ain sister to that master o' merchandise and Bailie o' Dumfries, Maister Ninian Halliburton o' the Vennel!"

And with that she vanished into the black oblong of the door opposite the smithy.

CHAPTER II

MY FAIR LADY

The strong man of Carlinwark made no long job of the horseshoeing. For, as he hammered and filed, he marked the eye of the young Earl restlessly straying this way and that along the green riverside paths, and his fingers nervously tapping the ashen casing of the smithy window-sill. Malise MacKim smiled to himself, for he had not served a Douglas for thirty years without knowing by these signs that there was the swing of a kirtle in the case somewhere.

Presently the last nail was made firm, and Black Darnaway was led, passaging and tossing his bridle reins, out upon the green sward. Malise stood at his head till the Douglas swung himself into the saddle with a motion light as the first upward flight of a bird.

He put his hand into a pocket in the lining of his "soubreveste" and took out a golden "Lion" of the King's recent mintage. He spun it in the air off his thumb and then looked at it somewhat contemptuously as he caught it.

"I think you and I, Master-Armourer, could send out a better coinage than that with the old Groat press over there at Thrieve!" he said.

Malise smiled his quiet smile.

"If the Earl of Douglas deigns to make me the master of his mint, I promise him plenty of good, sound, broad pieces of a noble design—that is, till Chancellor Crichton hangs me for coining in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh."

"That would he never, with the Douglas lances to prick you a way out and the Douglas gold to buy the good-will of traitorous judges!"

Half unconsciously the Earl sighed as he looked at the fair lake growing rosy in the light of the sunset. His boyish face was overspread with care, and for the moment seemed all too young to have inherited so great a burden. But the next moment he was himself again.

"I know, Malise," he said, "that I cannot offer you gold in return for your admirable handicraft. But 'tis nigh to Keltonhill Fair, do you divide this gold Lion betwixt those two brave boys of yours. Faith, right glad was I to be Earl of Douglas and not a son of his master armourer when I saw you disciplining for their souls' good Messires Sholto and Laurence there!"

The smith smiled grimly.

"They are good enough lads, Sholto and Laurence both, but they will be for ever gnarring and grappling at each other like messan dogs round a kirk door."

"They will not make the worse soldiers for that, Malise. I pray you forgive them for my sake."

The master armourer took the hand of his young lord on which he was about to draw a riding glove of Spanish leather. Very reverently he kissed the signet ring upon it.

"My dear lord," he said, "I can refuse naught to any of your great and gracious house, and least of all to you, the light and pleasure of it—aye, and the light of a surly old man's heart, more even than the duty he owes to his own married wife! Oh, be careful, my lord, for you are the desire of many hearts and the hope of all this land."

He hesitated a moment, and then added with a kind of curious bashfulness—

"But I am concerned about ye this nicht, William Douglas—I fear that ye could not—would not permit me—"

"Could not permit what—out with it, old grumble-pate?"

"That I should saddle my Flanders mare and ride after you. Malise MacKim would not be in the way even if ye went a-trysting. He kens brawly, in such a case, when to turn his head and look upon the hills and the woods and the bonny sleeping waters."

The Earl laughed and shook his head.

"Na, na, Malise," he said, "were I indeed on such a quest the sight of your grey pow would fright a fair lady, and the mere trampling of that club-footed she-elephant of yours put to flight every sentiment of love. Remember the Douglas badge is a naked heart. Can I ride a-courting, therefore, with all my fighting tail behind me as though I besought an alliance with the King of England's daughter?"

Silently and sadly the strong man watched the young Earl ride away to the south along that fair lochside. He stood muttering to himself and looking long under his hand after his lord. The rider bowed his head as he passed under the rich blazonry of the white May-blossom, which, like creamy lace, covered the Three Thorns of Carlinwark, now deeply stained with rose colour from the clouds of sunset.

William of Douglas reined up Darnaway underneath the whispering foliage of a great beech.

"Aye, aye," he said, "the Douglas badge is indeed a heart—but it is a bleeding heart. God avert the omen, and keep this young man safe—for though many love him, there be more that would rejoice at his fall."

The rider on Black Darnaway rode right into the saffron eye of the sunset. On his left hand Carlinwark and its many islets burned rich with spring-green foliage, all splashed with the golden sunset light. Darnaway's well-shod hoofs sent the diamond drops flying, as, with obvious pleasure, he trampled through the shallows. Ben Gairn and Screel, boldly ridged against the southern horizon, stood out in dark amethyst against the glowing sky of even, but the young rider never so much as turned his head to look at them.

Presently, however, he emerged from among the noble lakeside trees upon a more open space. Broom and whin blossom clustered yellow and orange beneath him, garrisoning with their green spears and golden banners every knoll and scaur. But there were broad spaces of turf here and there on which the conies fed, or fought terrible battles for the meek ear-twitching does, "spat-spatting" at each other with their fore paws and springing into the air in their mating fury.

William of Douglas reined up Darnaway underneath the whispering foliage of a great beech, for all at unawares he had come upon a sight that interested him more than the noble prospect of the May sunset.

In the centre of the golden glade, and with all their faces mistily glorified by the evening light, he saw a group of little girls, singing and dancing as they performed some quaint and graceful pageant of childhood.

Their young voices came up to him with a wistful, dying fall, and the slow, graceful movement of the rhythmic dance seemed to affect the young man strangely. Involuntarily he lifted his close-fitting feathered cap from his head, and allowed the cool airs to blow against his brow.

"See the robbers passing by, passing by, passing by,
See the robbers passing by,
My fair lady!"

The ancient words came up clearly and distinctly to him, and softened his heart with the indefinable and exquisite pathos of the refrain whenever it is sung by the sweet voices of children.

"These are surely but cottars' bairns," he said, smiling a little at his own intensity of feeling, "but they sing like little angels. I daresay my sweetheart Magdalen is amongst them."

And he sat still listening, patting Black Darnaway meanwhile on the neck.

"What did the robbers do to you, do to you, do to you,
What did the robbers do to you,
My fair lady?"

The first two lines rang out bold and clear. Then again the wistfulness of the refrain played upon his heart as if it had been an instrument of strings, till the tears came into his eyes at the wondrous sorrow and yearning with which one voice, the sweetest and purest of all, replied, singing quite alone:

"They broke my lock and stole my gold, stole my gold, stole my gold,
Broke my lock and stole my gold,
My fair lady!"

The tears brimmed over in the eyes of William Douglas, and a deep foreboding of the mysteries of fate fell upon his heart and abode there heavy as doom.

He turned his head as though he felt a presence near him, and lo! sudden and silent as the appearing of a phantom, another horse was alongside of Black Darnaway, and upon a white palfrey a maiden dressed also in white sat, smiling upon the young man, fair to look upon as an angel from heaven.

Earl William's lips parted, but he was too surprised to speak. Nevertheless, he moved his hand to his head in instinctive salutation; but, finding his bonnet already off, he could only stare at the vision which had so suddenly sprung out of the ground.

The lady slowly waved her hand in the direction of the children, whose young voices still rang clear as cloister bells tolling out the Angelus, and whose white dresses waved in the light wind as they danced back and forth with a slow and graceful motion.

"You hear, Earl William," she said, in a low, thrilling voice, speaking with a foreign accent, "you hear? You are a good Christian, doubtless, and you have heard from your uncle, the Abbot, how praise is made perfect 'out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.' Hark to them; they sing of their own destinies—and it may be also of yours and mine."

And so fascinated and moved at heart at once by her beauty and by her strange words, the Douglas listened.

"What did the robbers do to you, do to you, do to you,
What did the robbers do to you,
My fair lady?"

The lady on the delicately pacing palfrey turned the darkness of her eyes from the white-robed choristers to the face of the young man. Then, with an impetuous motion of her hand, she urged him to listen for the next words, which swept over Earl William's heart with a cadence of unutterable pain and inexplicable melancholy.

"They broke my lock and stole my gold, stole my gold, stole my gold,
Broke my lock and stole my gold,
My fair lady!"

He turned upon his companion with a quick energy, as if he were afraid of losing himself again.

"Who are you, lady, and what do you here?"

The girl (for in years she was little more) smiled and reined her steed a little back from him with an air at once prettily petulant and teasing.

"Is that spoken as William Douglas or as the Justicer of Galloway—a country where, as I understand, there is no trial by jury?"

The light of a radiant smile passed from her lips into his soul.

"It is spoken as a man speaks to a woman beautiful and queenly," he said, not removing his eyes from her face.

"I fear I may have startled you," she said, without continuing the subject. "Even as I came I saw you were wrapped in meditation, and my palfrey going lightly made no sound on the grass and leaves."

Her voice was so sweet and low that William Douglas, listening to it, wished that she would speak on for ever.

"The hour grows late," he said, remembering himself. "You must have far to ride. Let me be your escort homewards if you have none worthier than I."

"Alas," she answered, smiling yet more subtly, "I have no home near by. My home is very far and over many turbulent seas. I have but a maiden's pavilion in which to rest my head. Yet since I and my company must needs travel through your domains, Earl William, I trust you will not be so cruel as to forbid us?"

"Yes,"—he was smiling now in turn, and catching somewhat of the gay spirit of the lady,—"as overlord of all this province I do forbid you to pass through these lands of Galloway without first visiting me in my house of Thrieve!"

The lady clapped her hands and laughed, letting her palfrey pace onwards through the woodland glades bridle free, while Black Darnaway, compelled by his master's hand, followed, tossing his head indignantly because it had been turned from the direction of his nightly stable on the Castle Isle.

CHAPTER III

TWO RIDING TOGETHER

"Joyous," she cried, as they went, "Oh, most joyous would it be to see the noble castle and to have all the famous two thousand knights to make love to me at once! To capture two thousand hearts at one sweep of the net! What would Margaret of France herself say to that?"

"Is there no single heart sufficient to satisfy you, fair maid?" said the young man, in a low voice; "none loyal enough nor large enough for you that you desire so many?"

"And what would I do with one if it were in my hands," she said wistfully; "that is, if it were a worthy heart and one worth the taking. Ever since I was a child I have always broken my toys when I tired of them."

The voices of the singing children on the green came more faintly to their ears, but the words were still clear to be understood.

"Off to prison you must go, you must go, you must go,
Off to prison you must go,
My fair lady!"

"You hear? It is my fate!" she said.

"Nay," answered the Earl, passionately, still looking in her eyes. "Mine, mine—not yours! Gladly I would go to prison or to death for the love of one so fair!"

"My lord, my lord," she laughed, with a tolerant protest in her voice, "you keep up the credit of your house right nobly. How goes the distich? My mother taught it me upon the bridge of Avignon, where also as here in Scotland the children dance and sing."

"First in the love of Woman,
First in the field of fight,
First in the death that men must die,
Such is the Douglas' right!"

"Here and now," he said, still looking at her, "'tis only the first I crave."

"Earl William, positively you must come to Court!" she shrilled into sudden tinkling laughter; "there be ladies there more worthy of your ardour than a poor errant maiden such as I."

"A Court," cried Earl William, scornfully, "to the Seneschal's court! Nay, truly. Could a Stewart ever keep his faith or pay his debts? Never, since the first of them licked his way into a lady's favour."

"Oh," she answered lightly, "I meant not the Court of Stirling nor yet the Chancellor's Castle of Edinburgh. I meant the only great Court—the Court of France, the Court of Charles the Seventh, the Court which already owns the sway of its rarest ornament, your own Scottish Princess Margaret."

"Thither I cannot go unless the King of France grants me my father's rights and estates!" he said, with a certain sternness in his tone.

"Let me look at your hand," she answered, with a gentle inclination of her fair head, from which the lace that had shrouded it now streamed back in the cool wind of evening.

Stopping Darnaway, the young Earl gave the girl his hand, and the white palfrey came to rest close beneath the shoulder of the black war charger.

"To-morrow," she said, looking at his palm, "to-morrow you will be Duke of Touraine. I promise it to you by my power of divination. Does that satisfy you?"

"I fear you are a witch, or else a being compound of rarer elements than mere flesh and blood," said the Earl.

"Is that a spirit's hand," she said, laughing lightly and giving her own rosy fingers into his, "or could even the Justicer of Galloway find it in his heart to burn these as part of the body of a witch?"

She shuddered and pretended to gaze piteously up at him from under the long lashes which hardly raised themselves from her cheek.

"Spirit-slender, spirit-white they are," he replied, "and as for being the fingers of a witch—doubtless you are a witch indeed. But I will not burn so fair things as these, save as it might be with the fervours of my lips."

And he stooped and pressed kiss after kiss upon her hand.

Gently she withdrew her fingers from his grasp and rode further apart, yet not without one backward glance of perfectest witchery.

"I doubt you have been overmuch at Court already," she said. "I did not well to ask you to go thither."

"Why must I not go thither?" he asked.

"Because I shall be there," she replied softly, courting him yet again with her eyes.

As they rode on together through the rich twilight dusk, the young man observed her narrowly as often as he could.

Her skin was fair with a dazzling clearness, which even the gathering gloom only caused to shine with a more perfect brilliance, as if a halo of light dwelt permanently beneath its surface. Faint responsive roses bloomed on either cheek and, as it seemed, cast a shadow of their colour down her graceful neck. Dark eyes shone above, fresh and dewy with love and youth, and smiled out with all ancientest witcheries and allurements in their depths. Her lithe, slender body was simply clad in a fair white cloth of some foreign fabric, and her waist, of perfectest symmetry, was cinctured by a broad ring of solid silver, which, to the young man, looked so slender that he could have clasped it about with both his hands.

So they rode on, through the woods mostly, until they reached a region which to the Earl appeared unfamiliar. The glades were greener and denser. The trees seemed more primeval, the foliage thicker overhead, the interspaces of the golden evening sky darker and less frequent.

"In what place may your company be assembled?" he asked. "Strange it is that I know not this spot. Yet I should recognise each tree by conning it, and of every rivulet in Galloway I should be able to tell the name. Yet with shame do I confess that I know not where I am."

"Ah," said the girl, her face growing luminous through the gloom, "you called me a witch, and now you shall see. I wave my hands, so—and you are no more in Galloway. You are in the land of faëry. I blow you a kiss, so—and lo! you are no more William, sixth Earl of Douglas and proximate Duke of Touraine, but you are even as True Thomas, the Beloved of the Queen of the Fairies, and the slave of her spell!"

"I am indeed well content to be Thomas Rhymer," he answered, submitting himself to the wooing glamour of her eyes, "so be that you are the Lady of the milk-white hind!"

"A courtier indeed," she laughed; "you need not to seek your answer. You make a poor girl afraid. But see, yonder are the lights of my pavilion. Will it please you to alight and enter? The supper will be spread, and though you must not expect any to entertain you, save only this your poor Queen Mab" (here she made him a little bow), "yet I think you will not be ill content. They do not say that Thomas of Ercildoune had any cause for complaint. Do you know," she continued, a fresh gaiety striking into her voice, "it was in this very wood that he was lost."

But William Douglas sat silent with the wonder of what he saw. Their horses had all at once come out on a hilltop. The sequestered boskage of the trees had gradually thinned, finally dwarfing into a green drift of fern and birchen foliage which rose no higher than Black Darnaway's chest, and through which his rider's laced boots brushed till the Spanish leather of their gold-embossed frontlets was all jetted with gouts of dew.

Before him swept horizonwards a great upward drift of solemn pine trees, the like of which for size he had never seen in all his domain. Or so, at least, it seemed in that hour of mystery and glamour. For behind them the evening sky had dulled to a deep and solemn wash of blood red, across which lay one lonely bar of black cloud, solid as spilled ink on a monkish page. But under the trees themselves, blazing with lamps and breathing odours of all grace and daintiness, stood a lighted pavilion of rose-coloured silk, anchored to the ground with ropes of sendal of the richest crimson hue.

"Let your horse go free, or tether him to a pine; in either case he will not wander far," said the girl. "I fear my fellows have gone off to lay in provisions. We have taken a day or two more on the way than we had counted on, so that to-night's feast makes an end of our store. But still there is enough for two. I bid you welcome, Earl William, to a wanderer's tent. There is much that I would say to you."

CHAPTER IV

THE ROSE-RED PAVILION

As the young Earl paused a moment without to tether Black Darnaway to a fallen trunk of a pine, a chill and melancholy wind seemed to rise suddenly and toss the branches dark against the sky. Then it flew off moaning like a lost spirit, till he could hear the sound of its passage far down the valley. An owl hooted and a swart raven disengaged himself from the coppice about the door of the pavilion, and fluttered away with a croak of disdainful anger. Black Darnaway turned his head and whinnied anxiously after his master.

But William Douglas, though little more than a boy if men's ages are to be counted by years, was yet a true child of Archibald the Grim, and he passed through the mysterious encampment to the door of the lighted pavilion with a carriage at once firm and assured. He could faintly discern other tents and pavilions set further off, with pennons and bannerets, which the passing gust had blown flapping from the poles, but which now hung slackly about their staves.

"I would give a hundred golden St. Andrews," he muttered, "if I could make out the scutcheon. It looks most like a black dragon couchant on a red field, which is not a Scottish bearing. The lady is French, doubtless, and passes through from Ireland to visit the Chancellor's Court at Edinburgh."

The Black Douglas paused a moment at the tent-flap, which, being of silken fabric lined with heavier material, hung straight and heavy to the ground.

"Come in, my lord," cried the low and thrilling voice of his companion from within. "With both hands I bid you welcome to my poor abode. A traveller must not be particular, and I have only those condiments with me which my men have brought from shipboard, knowing how poor was the provision of your land. See, do you not already repent your promise to sup with me?"

She pointed to the table on which sparkled cut glass of Venice and rich wreathed ware of goldsmiths' work. On these were set out oranges and rare fruits of the Orient, such as the young man had never seen in his own bleak and barren land.

But the Douglas did no more than glance at the luxury of the providing. A vision fairer and more beautiful claimed his eyes. For even as he paused in amazement, the lady herself stood before him, transformed and, as it seemed, glorified. In the interval she had taken off the cloak which, while on horseback, she had worn falling from her shoulders. A thin robe of white silk broidered with gold at once clothed and revealed her graceful and gracious figure, even as a glove covers but does not conceal the hand upon which it is drawn. Whether by intent or accident, the collar had been permitted to fall aside at the neck and showed the dazzling whiteness of the skin beneath, but at the bosom it was secured by a button set with black pearls which constituted the lady's only ornament.

Her arms also were bare, and showed in the lamplight whiter than milk. She had removed the silver belt, and was tying a red silken scarf about her waist in a manner which revealed a swift grace and lithe sinuosity of movement, making her beauty appear yet more wonderful and more desirable to the young man's eyes.

On either side the pavilion were placed folding couches of rosy silk, and in the corner, draped with rich blue hangings, glimmered the lady's bed, its fair white linen half revealed. Two embroidered pillows were at the foot, and on a little table beside it a crystal ball on a black platter.

No crucifix or prie-dieu, such as in those days was in every lady's bower, could be discerned anywhere about the pavilion.

So soon as the tent-flap had fallen with a soft rustle behind him, the Earl William abandoned himself to the strange enchantment of his surroundings. He did not stop to ask himself how it was possible that such dainty providings had been brought into the midst of his wide, wild realm of Galloway. Nor yet why this errant damsel should in the darksome night-time find herself alone on this hilltop with the tents of her retinue standing empty and silent about. The present sufficed him. The soft radiance of dark eyes fell upon him, and all the quick-running, inconsiderate Douglas blood rushed and sang in his veins, responsive to that subtle shining.

He was with a fair woman, and she not unwilling to be kind. That was ever enough for all the race of the Black Douglas. What the Red Douglas loved is another matter. Their ambitions were more reputable, but greatly less generous.

"My lord," said the lady, giving him her hand, "will you lead me to the table? I cannot offer you the refreshment of any elaborate toilet, but here, at least, is wheaten bread to eat and wine of a good vintage to drink."

"You yourself scarce need such earthly sustenance," he answered gallantly, "for your eyes have stolen the radiance of the stars, and 'tis evident that the night dews visit your cheek only as they do the roses—to render them more fresh and fair."

"My lord flatters well for one so young;" she smiled as she seated herself and motioned him to sit close beside her. "How comes it that in this wild place you have learned to speak so chivalrously?"

"When one answers beauty the words are somehow given," he said, "and, moreover, I have not dwelt in grey Galloway all my days."

"You speak French?" she queried in that tongue.

"Ah," she said when he answered, "the divine language. I knew you were perfect." And so for a long while the young man sat spellbound, watching the smiles coming and going upon her red and flower-like lips, and listening to the fast-running ripple of her foreign talk. It was pleasure enough to hearken without reply.

It seemed no common food of mortal men that was set before William Douglas, served with the sweep of white arms and the bend of delicate fingers upon the chalice stem. He did not care to eat, but again and again he set the wine cup down empty, for the vintage was new to him, and brought with it a haunting aroma, instinct with strange hopes and vivid with unknown joys.

The pavilion, with its cords of sendal and its silver hanging lamps, spun round about him. The fair woman herself seemed to dissolve and reunite before his eyes. She had let down the full-fed river of her hair, and it flowed in the Venetian fashion over her white shoulders, sparkling with an inner fire—each fine silken thread, as it glittered separate from its fellows, twining like a golden snake.

And the ripple of her laughter played upon the young man's heart carelessly as a lute is touched by the hands of its mistress. Something of the primitive glamour of the night and the stars clung to this woman. It seemed a thing impossible that she should be less pure than the air and the waters, than the dewy grass beneath and the sky cool overhead. He knew not that the devil sat from the first day of creation on Eden wall, that human sin is all but as eternal as human good, and that passion rises out of its own ashes like the phœnix bird of fable and stands again all beautiful before us, a creature of fire and dew.

Presently the lady rose to her feet, and gave the Earl her hand to lead her to a couch.

"Set a footstool by me," she bade him, "I desire to talk to you."

"You know not my name," she said, after a pause that was like a caress, "though I know yours. But then the sun in mid-heaven cannot be hidden, though nameless bide the thousand stars. Shall I tell you mine? It is a secret; nevertheless, I will tell you if such be your desire."

"I care not whether you tell me or no," he answered, looking up into her face from the low seat at her feet. "Birth cannot add to your beauty, nor sparse quarterings detract from your charm. I have enough of both, good lack! And little good they are like to do me."

"Shall I tell you now," she went on, "or will you wait till you convoy me to Edinburgh?"

"To Edinburgh!" cried the young man, greatly astonished. "I have no purpose of journeying to that town of mine enemies. I have been counselled oft by those who love me to remain in mine own country. My horoscope bids me refrain. Not for a thousand commands of King or Chancellor will I go to that dark and bloody town, wherein they say lies waiting the curse of my house."

"But you will go to please a woman?" she said, and leaned nearer to him, looking deep into his eyes.

For a moment William Douglas wavered. For a moment he resisted. But the dark, steadfast orbs thrilled him to the soul, and his own heart rose insurgent against his reason.

"I will come if you ask me," he said. "You are more beautiful than I had dreamed any woman could be."

"I do ask you!" she continued, without removing her eyes from his face.

"Then I will surely come!" he replied.

She set her hand beneath his chin and bent smilingly and lightly to kiss him, but with an imprisoned passionate cry the young man suddenly clasped her in his arms. Yet even as he did so, his eyes fell upon two figures, which, silent and motionless, stood by the open door of the pavilion.

CHAPTER V

THE WITCH WOMAN

One of these was Malise the Smith, towering like a giant. His hands rested on the hilt of a mighty sword, whose blade sparkled in the lamplight as if the master armourer had drawn it that moment from the midst of his charcoal fire.

A little in front of Malise there stood another figure, less imposing in physical proportions, but infinitely more striking in dignity and apparel. This second was a man of tall and spare frame, of a countenance grave and severe, yet with a certain kindly power latent in him also. He was dressed in the white robe of a Cistercian, with the black scapulary of the order. On his head was the mitre, and in his hand the staff of the abbot of a great establishment which he wears when he goes visiting his subsidiary houses. More remarkable than all was the monk's likeness to the young man who now stood before him with an expression of indignant surprise on his face, which slowly merged into anger as he understood why these two men were there.

He recognised his uncle the Abbot William Douglas, the head of the great Abbey of Dulce Cor upon Solway side.

This was he who, being the son and heir of the brother of the first Duke of Touraine, had in the flower of his age suddenly renounced his domains of Nithsdale that he might take holy orders, and who had ever since been renowned throughout all Scotland for high sanctity and a multitude of good works.

The pair stood looking towards the lady and William Douglas without speech, a kind of grim patience upon their faces.

It was the Earl who was the first to speak.

"What seek you here so late, my lord Abbot?" he said, with all the haughtiness of the unquestioned head of his mighty house.

"Nay, what seeks the Earl William here alone so late?" answered the Abbot, with equal directness.

The two men stood fronting each other. Malise leaned upon his two-handed sword and gazed upon the ground.

"I have come," the Abbot went on, after vainly waiting for the young Earl to offer an explanation, "as your kinsman, tutor, and councillor, to warn you against this foreign witch woman. What seeks she here in this land of Galloway but to do you hurt? Have we not heard her with our own ears persuade you to accompany her to Edinburgh, which is a city filled with the power and deadly intent of your enemies?"

Earl William bowed ironically to his uncle, and his eye glittered as it fell upon Malise MacKim.

"I thank you, Uncle," he said. "I am deeply indebted for your so great interest in me. I thank you too, Malise, for bringing about this timely interference. I will pay my debts one day. In the meantime your duty is done. Depart, both of you, I command you!"

Outside the thunder began to growl in the distance. An extraordinary feeling of oppression had slowly filled the air. The lamps, swinging on the pavilion roof tree, flickered and flared, alternately rising and sinking like the life in the eyes of a dying man.

All the while the lady sat still on the couch, with an expression of amused contempt on her face. But now she rose to her feet.

"And I also ask, in the name of the King of France, by what right do you intrude within the precincts of a lady's bower. I bid you to leave me!"

She pointed imperiously with her white finger to the black, oblong doorway, from which Malise's rude hand had dragged the covering flap to the ground.

But the churchman and his guide stood their ground.

Suddenly the Abbot reached a hand and took the sword on which the master armourer leaned. With its point he drew a wide circle upon the rich carpets which formed the floor of the pavilion.

"William Douglas," he said, "I command you to come within this circle, whilst in the right of my holy office I exorcise that demon there who hath so nearly beguiled you to your ruin."

The lady laughed a rich ringing laugh.

"These are indeed high heroics for so plain and poor an occasion. I need not to utter a word of explanation. I am a lady travelling peaceably under escort of an ambassador of France, through a Christian country. By chance, I met the Earl Douglas, and invited him to sup with me. What concern, spiritual or temporal, may that be of yours, most reverend Abbot? Who made you my lord Earl's keeper?"

"Woman or demon from the pit!" said the Abbot, sternly, "think not to deceive William Douglas, the aged, as you have cast the glamour over William Douglas, the boy. The lust of the flesh abideth no more for ever in this frail tabernacle. I bid thee, let the lad go, for he is dear to me as mine own soul. Let him go, I say, ere I curse thee with the curse of God the Almighty!"

The lady continued to smile, standing meantime slender and fair before them, her bosom heaving a little with emotion, and her hair rippling in red gold confusion down her back.

"Certainly, my lord Earl came not upon compulsion. He is free to return with you, if he yet be under tutors and governors, or afraid of the master's stripes. Go, Earl William, I made a mistake; I thought you had been a man. But since I was wrong I bid you get back to the monk's chapter house, to clerkly copies and childish toys."

Then black and sullen anger glared from the eyes of the Douglas.

"Get hence," he cried. "Hence, both of you—you, Uncle William, ere I forget your holy office and your kinsmanship; you, Malise, that I may settle with to-morrow ere the sun sets. I swear it by my word as a Douglas. I will never forgive either of you for this night's work!"

The fair white hand was laid upon his wrist.

"Nay," said the lady, "do not quarrel with those you love for my poor sake. I am indeed little worth the trouble. Go back with them in peace, and forget her who but sat by your side an hour neither doing you harm nor thinking it."

"Nay," he cried, "that will I not. I will show them that I am old enough to choose my company for myself. Who is my uncle that he should dictate to me that am an earl of Douglas and a peer of France, or my servant that he should come forth to spy upon his master?"

"Then," she whispered, smiling, "you will indeed abide with me?"

He gave her his hand.

"I will abide with you till death! Body and soul, I am yours alone!"

"By the holy cross of our Lord, that shall you not!" cried Malise; "not though you hang me high as Haman for this ere the morrow's morn!"

And with these words he sprang forward and caught his master by the wrist. With one strong pull of his mighty arm he dragged him within the circle which the Abbot had marked out with the sword's point.

The lady seemed to change colour. For at that moment a gust of wind caused the lamps to flicker, and the outlines of her white-robed figure appeared to waver like an image cast in water.

"I adjure and command you, in the name of God the One and Omnipotent, to depart to your own place, spirit or devil or whatever you may be!"

The voice of the Abbot rose high above the roaring of the bursting storm without. The lady seemed to reach an arm across the circle as if even yet to take hold of the young man. The Abbot thrust forward his crucifix.

And then the bolt of God fell. The whole pavilion was illuminated with a flash of light so intense and white that it appeared to blind and burn up all about. The lady was seen no more. The silken covering blazed up. Malise plunged outward into the darkness of the storm, carrying his young master lightly as a child in his arms, while the Abbot kept his feet behind him like a boat in a ship's wake. The thunder roared overhead like the sea bellowing in a cave's mouth, and the great pines bent their heads away from the mighty wind, straining and creaking and lashing each other in their blind fury.

Malise and the Abbot seemed to hear about them the plunging of riderless horses as they stumbled downwards through the night, their path lit by lightning flashes, green and lilac and keenest blue, and bearing between them the senseless form of William Earl of Douglas.

CHAPTER VI

THE PRISONING OF MALISE THE SMITH

[Now these things, material to the life and history of William, sixth Earl of Douglas, are not written from hearsay, but were chronicled within his lifetime by one who saw them and had part therein, though the part was but a boy's one. His manuscript has come down to us and lies before the transcriber. Sholto MacKim, the son of Malise the Smith, testifies to these things in his own clerkly script. He adds particularly that his brother Laurence, being at the time but a boy, had little knowledge of many of the actual facts, and is not to be believed if at any time he should controvert anything which he (Sholto) has written. So far, however, as the present collector and editor can find out, Laurence MacKim appears to have been entirely silent on the subject, at least with his pen, so that his brother's caveat was superfluous.]

The instant Lord William entered his own castle of Thrieve over the drawbridge, and without even returning the salutations of his guard, he turned about to the two men who had so masterfully compelled his return.

"Ho, guard, there!" he cried, "seize me this instant the Abbot of the New Abbey and Malise MacKim."

And so much surprised but wholly obedient, twenty archers of the Earl's guard, commanded by old John of Abernethy, called Landless Jock, fell in at back and front.

Malise, the master armourer, stood silent, taking the matter with his usual phlegm, but the Abbot was voluble.

"William," he said, holding out his hands with an appealing gesture, "I have laboured with you, striven with, prayed for you. To-night I came forth through the storm, though an old man, to deliver you from the manifest snares of the devil—"

But the Earl interrupted his recital without compunction.

"Set Malise MacKim in the inner dungeon," he cried. "Thrust his feet into the great stocks, and let my lord Abbot be warded safely in the castle chapel. He is little likely to be disturbed there at his devotions."

"Aye, my lord, it shall be done!" said Landless Jock, shaking his head, however, with gloomy foreboding, as the haughty young Earl in his wet and torn disarray flashed past him without further notice of the two men whom the might of his bare word had committed to prison. The Earl sprang up the narrow turret stairs, passing as he did so through the vaulted hall of the men-at-arms, where more than a hundred stout archers and spearmen sat carousing and singing, even at that advanced hour of the night, while as many more lay about the corridors or on the wooden shelves which they used for sleeping upon, and which folded back against the wall during the day. At the first glimpse of their young master, every man left awake among them struggled to his feet, and stood stiffly propped, drunk or sober according to his condition, with his eyes turned towards the door which gave upon the turnpike stair. But with a slight wave of his hand the Earl passed on to his own apartment.

Here he found his faithful body-servant, René le Blesois, stretched across the threshold. The staunch Frenchman rose mechanically at the noise of his master's footsteps, and, though still soundly asleep, stood with the latch of the door in his hand, and the other held stiffly to his brow in salutation.

Left to his own devices, Lord William Douglas would doubtless have cast himself, wet as he was, upon his bed had not Le Blesois, observing his lord's plight even in his own sleep-dulled condition, entered the chamber after his master and, without question or speech, silently begun to relieve him of his wet hunting dress. A loose chamber gown of rich red cloth, lined with silk and furred with "cristy" grey, hung over the back of an oaken chair, and into this the young Earl flung himself in black and sullen anger.

Le Blesois, still without a word spoken, left the room with the wet clothes over his arm. As he did so a small object rolled from some fold or crevice of the doublet, where it had been safely lodged till displaced by the loosening of the belt, or the removing of the banderole of his master's hunting horn.

Le Blesois turned at the tinkling sound, and would have stopped to lift it up after the manner of a careful servitor. But the eye of his lord was upon the fallen object, and with an abrupt wave of his hand towards the door, and the single word "Go!" the Earl dismissed his body-servant from the room.

Then rising hastily from his chair, he took the trinket in his hand and carried it to the well-trimmed lamp which stood in a niche that held a golden crucifix.

The Lord Douglas saw lying in his palm a ring of singular design. The main portion was formed of the twisting bodies of a pair of snakes, the jewel work being very cunningly interlaced and perfectly finished. Their eyes were set with rubies, and between their open mouths they carried an opal, shaped like a heart. The stone was translucent and faintly luminous like a moonstone, but held in its heart one fleck of ruby red, in appearance like a drop of blood. By some curious trick of light, in whatever position the ring was held, this drop still appeared to be on the point of detaching itself and falling to the ground.

Earl William examined it in the flicker of the lamp. He turned it every way, narrowly searching inside the golden band for a posy, but not a word of any language could he find engraved upon it.

"I saw the ring upon her hand—I am certain I saw it on her hand!" He said these words over and over to himself. "It is then no dream that I have dreamed."

There came a low knocking at the door, a rustling and a whispering without. Instantly the Earl thrust the ring upon his own finger with the opal turned inward, and, with the dark anger mark of his race strongly dinted upon his fair young brow, he faced the unseen intruder.

"Who is there?" he cried loudly and imperiously.

The door opened with a rasping of the iron latch, and a little girlish figure clothed from head to foot in a white night veil danced in. She clapped her hands at sight of him.

"You are come back," she cried; "and you have so fine a gown on too. But Maud Lindesay says it is very wrong to be out of doors so late, even if you are Earl of Douglas, and a great man now. Will you never play at 'Catch-as-catch-can' with David and me any more?"

"Margaret," said the young Earl, "what do you away from your chamber at all? Our mother will miss you, and I do not want her here to-night. Go back at once!"

But the little wilful maiden, catching her skirts in her hands at either side and raising them a little way from the ground, began to dance a dainty pas seul, ending with a flashing whirl and a low bow in the direction of her audience.

At this William Douglas could not choose but smile, and soon threw himself down on the bed, setting his clasped hands behind his head, and contenting himself with looking at his little sister.

Though at this time but eight years of age, Margaret of Douglas was possessed of such extraordinary vitality and character that she seemed more like eleven. She had the clear-cut, handsome Douglas face, the pale olive skin, the flashing dark eyes, and the crisp, blue-black hair of her brother. A lithe grace and quickness, like those of a beautiful wild animal, were characteristic of every movement.

"Our mother hath been anxious about you, brother mine," said the little girl, tiring suddenly of her dance, and leaping upon the other end of the couch on which her brother was reclining. Establishing herself opposite him, she pulled the coverlet up about her so that presently only her face could be seen peeping out from under the silken folds.

"Oh, I was so cold, but I am warmer now," she cried. "And if Maid Betsy A'hannay comes to take me away, I want you to stretch out your hand like this, and say: 'Seneschal, remove that besom to the deep dungeon beneath the castle moat,' as we used to do in our plays before you became a great man. Then I could stay very long and talk to you all through the night, for Maud Lindesay sleeps so sound that nothing can awake her."

Gradually the anger passed out of the face of William Douglas as he listened to his sister's prattle, like the vapours from the surface of a hill tarn when the sun rises in his strength. He even thought with some self-reproach of his treatment of Malise and of his uncle the Abbot. But a glance at the ring on his finger, and the thought of what might have been his good fortune at that moment but for their interference, again hardened his resolution to adamant within his breast.

His sister's voice, clear and high in its childish treble, recalled him to himself.

"Oh, William, and there is such news; I forgot, because I have been so overbusied with arranging my new puppet's house that Malise made for me. But scarcely were you gone away on Black Darnaway ere a messenger came from our granduncle James at Avondale that he and my cousins Will and James arrive to-morrow at the Thrieve with a company to attend the wappenshaw."

The young man sprang to his feet, and dashed one hand into the palm of the other.

"This is ill tidings indeed!" he cried. "What does the Fat Flatterer at Castle Thrieve? If he comes to pay homage, it will be but a mockery. Neither he nor Angus had ever any good-will to my father, and they have none to me."

"Ah, do not be angry, William," cried the little maid. "It will be beautiful. They will come at a fitting time. For to-morrow is the great levy of the weapon-showing, and our cousins will see you in your pride. And they will see me, too, in my best green sarcenet, riding on a white palfrey at your side as you promised."

"A weapon-showing is not a place for little girls," said the Earl, mollified in spite of himself, casting himself down again on the couch, and playing with the serpent ring on his finger.

"Ah, now," cried his sister, her quick eyes dancing everywhere at once, "you are not attending to a single word I say. I know by your voice that you are not. That is a pretty ring you have. Did a lady give it to you? Was it our Maudie? I think it must have been our Maud. She has many beautiful things, but mostly it is the young men who wish to give her such things. She never sends any of them back, but keeps them in a box, and says that it is good to spoil the Egyptians. And sometimes when I am tired she will tell me the history of each, and whether he was dark or fair. Or make it all up just as good when she forgets. But, oh, William, if I were a lady I should fall in love with nobody but you. For you are so handsome—yes, nearly as handsome as I am myself—(she passed her hands lightly through her curls as she spoke). And you know I shall marry no one but a Douglas—only you must not ask me to wed my cousin William of Avondale, for he is so stern and solemn; besides, he has always a book in his pocket, and wishes me to learn somewhat out of it as if I were a monk. A Douglas should not be a monk, he should be a soldier."

So she lay snugly on the bed and prattled on to her brother, who, buried in his thoughts and occupied with his ring, let the hours slip on till at the open door of the Earl's chamber there appeared the most bewitching face in the world, as many in that castle and elsewhere were ready to prove at the sword's point. The little girl caught sight of it with a shrill cry of pleasure, instantly checked and hushed, however, at the thought of her mother.

"O Maudie," she cried, "come hither into William's room. He has such a beautiful ring that a lady gave him. I am sure a lady gave it him. Was it you, Maud Lindesay? You are a sly puss not to tell me if it was. William, it is wicked and provoking of you not to tell me who gave you that ring. If it had been some one you were not ashamed of, you would be proud of the gift and confess. Whisper to me who it was. I will not tell any one, not even Maudie."

Her brother had risen to his feet with a quick movement, girding his red gown about him as he rose.

"Mistress Maud," he said respectfully, "I fear I have given you anxiety by detaining your charge so late. But she is a wilful madam, as you have doubtless good cause to know, and ill to advise."

"She is a Douglas," smiled the fair girl, who stood at the chamber door refusing his invitation to enter, with a flash of the eye and a quick shake of the head which betokened no small share of the same qualities; "is not that enough to excuse her for being wayward and headstrong?"

Earl William wasted no more words of entreaty upon his sister, but seized her in his arms, and pulling the coverlet in which she had huddled herself up with her pert chin on her knees, more closely about her, he strode along the passage with her in his arms till he stopped at an open door leading into a large chamber which looked to the south.

"There," he said, smiling at the girl who had followed behind him, "I will lock her in with you and take the key, that I may make sure of two such uncertain charges."

But the girl had deftly extracted the key even as she passed in after him, and as the bolts shot from within she cried: "I thank you right courteously, Lord William, but mine apothecary, fearing that the air of this isle of Thrieve might not agree with me, bade me ever to sleep with the key of the door under my pillow. Against fevers and quinsies, cold iron is a sovereign specific."

And for all his wounded heart, Earl William smiled at the girl's sauciness as he went slowly back to his chamber, taking, in spite of his earldom, pains to pass his mother's door on tiptoe.

CHAPTER VII

THE DOUGLAS MUSTER

The day of the great weapon-showing broke fair and clear after the storm of the night. The windows of heaven had had all their panes cleaned, and even after it was daylight the brighter stars appeared—only, however, to wink out again when the sun arose and shone on the wet fields, coming forth rejoicing like a bridegroom from his chamber.

And equally bright and strong came forth the young Earl, every trace of the anger and disappointment of the night having been removed from his face, if not from his mind, by the recreative and potent sleep of youth and health.

In the hall he called for Sir John of Abernethy, nicknamed Landless Jock.

"Conduct my uncle the Abbot from the chapel where he has been all night at his devotions, to his chamber, and furnish him with what he may require, and bring up Malise the Smith from the dungeon. Let him come into my presence in the upper hall."

William Douglas went into a large oak-ceiled chamber, wide and high, running across the castle from side to side, and with windows that looked every way over the broad and fertile strath of Dee.

Presently, with a trampling of mailed feet and the double rattle which denoted the grounding of a pair of steel-hilted partisans, Malise was brought to the door by two soldiers of the Earl's outer guard.

The huge bulk of Brawny Kim filled up the doorway almost completely, and he stood watching the Douglas with an unmoved gravity which, in the dry wrinkles about his eyes, almost amounted to humorous appreciation of the situation.

Yet it was Malise who spoke first. For at his appearance the Earl had turned his back upon his retainer, and now stood at the window that looks towards the north, from which he could see, over the broad and placid stretches of the river, the men putting up the pavilions and striking spears into the ground to mark out the spaces for the tourney of the next day.

"A fair good morrow to you, my lord," said the smith. "Grievous as my sin has been, and just as is your resentment, give me leave to say that I have suffered more than my deserts from the ill-made chains and uncouth manacles wherewith they confined me in the black dungeon down there. I trow they must have been the workmanship of Ninian Lamont the Highlandman, who dares to call himself house-smith of Thrieve. I am ready to die if it be your will, my lord; but if you are well advised you will hang Ninian beside me with a bracelet of his own rascal handiwork about his neck. Then shall justice be satisfied, and Malise MacKim will die happy."

The Earl turned and looked at his ancient friend. The wrinkles about the brow were deeply ironical now, and the grey eyes of the master armourer twinkled with appreciation of his jest.

"Malise," cried his master, warningly, "do not play at cat's cradle with the Douglas. You might tempt me to that I should afterwards be sorry for. A man once dead comes not to life again, whatever monks prate. But tell me, how knew you whither I had gone yester-even? For, indeed, I knew not myself when I set out. And in any event, was it a thing well done for my foster father to spy upon me the son who was also his lord?"

The anger was mostly gone now out of the frank young face of the Earl, and only humiliation and resentment, with a touch of boyish curiosity, remained.

"Indeed," answered the smith, "I watched you not save under my hand as you rode away upon Black Darnaway, and then I turned me to the seat by the wall to listen to the cavillings of Dame Barbara, the humming of the bees, and the other comfortable and composing sounds of nature."

"How then did you come to follow me in the undesirable company of my uncle the Abbot?"

"For that you are in the debt of my son Sholto, who, seeing a lady wait for you in the greenwood, climbed a tree, and there from amongst the branches he was witness of your encounter."

"So—" said the Douglas, grimly, "it is to Master Sholto that I am indebted somewhat."

"Aye," said his father, "do not forget him. For he is a good lad and a bold, as indeed he proved to the hilt yestreen."

"In what consisted his boldness?" asked the Earl.

"In that he dared come home to me with a cock-and-bull story of a witch lady, who appeared suddenly where none had been a moment before, and who had immediately enchanted my lord Earl. Well nigh did I twist his neck, but he stuck to it. Then came riding by my lord Abbot on his way to Thrieve, and I judged that the matter, as one of witchcraft, was more his affair than mine."

"Now hearken," cried the Earl, in quick, high tones of anger, "let there be no more of such folly, or on your life be it. The lady whom you insulted was travelling with her company through Galloway from France. She invited me to sup with her, and dared me to adventure to Edinburgh in her company. Answer me, wherein was the witchcraft of that, saving the witchery natural to all fair women?"

"Did she not prophesy to you that to-day you would be Duke of Touraine, and receive the ambassadors of the King of France?"

"Well," said the Earl, "where is your wit that you give ear to such babblings? Did she not come from that country, as I tell you, and who should hear the latest news more readily than she?"

The smith looked a little nonplussed, but stuck to it stoutly that none but a witch woman would ride alone at nightfall upon a Galloway moor, or unless by enchantment set up a pavilion of silk and strange devices under the pines of Loch Roan.

"Well," said Earl William, feeling his advantage and making the most of it, "I see that in all my little love affairs I must needs take my master armourer with me to decide whether or no the lady be a witch. He shall resolve for me all spiritual questions with his forehammer. Malise MacKim a witch pricker! Ha—this is a change indeed. Malise the Smith will make the censor of his lord's love affairs, after what certain comrades of his have told me of his own ancient love-makings. Will he deign to come to the weapon-showing to-day, and instead of examining the swords and halberts, the French arbalasts and German fusils, demit that part of his office to Ninian the Highlandman, and go peering into ladies' eyes for sorceries and scanning their lips for such signs of the devil as lurk in the dimples of their chins? In this he will find much employment and that of a congenial sort."

Malise was vanquished, less by the sarcasm of the Earl than by the fear that perhaps the Highlandman might indeed have his place of honour as chief military expert by his master's right hand at the examination of weapons that day on the green holms of Balmaghie.

"I may have been overhasty, my lord," he said hesitatingly, "but still do I think that the woman was far from canny."

The Earl laughed and, turning him about by the shoulders, gave him a push down the stair, crying, "Oh, Malise, Malise, have you lived so long in the world without finding out that a beautiful woman is always uncanny!"

The levy that day of clansmen owning fealty to the Douglas was no hasty or local one. It was not, indeed, a "rising of the countryside," such as took place when the English were reported to be over the border, when the beacon fires were thrown west from Criffel to Screel, from Screel to Cairnharrow, and then tossed northward by the three Cairnsmuirs and topmost Merrick far over the uplands of Kyle, till from the sullen brow of Brown Carrick the bale fire set the town drum of Ayr beating its alarming note. Still this muster was a day on which every Douglas vassal must ride in mail with all his spears behind him—or bide at home and take the consequences.

All the night from distant parishes and outlying valleys horsemen had been riding, clothed in complete panoply of mail. These were the knights, barons, freeholders, who owned allegiance to the house of Douglas. Each lord was followed by his appointed tail of esquires and men-at-arms; behind these dense clusters of heavily armed spearmen marched steadily along the easiest paths by the waterside and over the lower hill passes. Light running footmen slung their swords over their backs by leathern bandoliers and pricked it briskly southwards over the bent so brown. Archers there were from the border towards the Solway side—lithe men, accustomed to spring from tussock to tuft of shaking grass, whose long strides and odd spasmodic side leapings betrayed even on the plain and unyielding pasture lands the place of their amphibious nativity.

"The Jack herons of Lochar," these were named by the men of Galloway. But there was no jeering to their faces, for not one of those Maxwells, Sims, Patersons, and Dicksons would have thought twice of leaping behind a tree stump to wing a cloth-yard shaft into a scoffer's ribs at thirty yards, taking his chance of the dule tree and the hempen cord thereafter for the honour of Lochar.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CROSSING OF THE FORD

It was still early morning of the great day, when Sholto and Laurence MacKim, leaving their mother in the kitchen, and their young sister Magdalen trying a yet prettier knot to her kerchief, took their way by the fords of Glen Lochar to an eminence then denominated plainly the Whinny Knowe, the same which afterwards gained and has kept to this day the more fatal designation of Knock Cannon. The lads were dressed as became the sons of so prosperous a craftsman (and master armourer to boot) as Malise MacKim of the Carlinwark.

Laurence, the younger, wore his archer's jack over the suit of purple velvet, high boots of yellow leather, and, withal, a dainty cap set far back on his head, from which sprouted the wing of a blackcock in as close imitation as Master Laurence dared compass of the Earl Douglas himself. His bow was slung at his back all ready for the inspection. A sash of orange silk was twisted about his slim waist, and in this he would set his thumb knowingly, and stare boldly as often as the pair of brothers overtook a pretty girl. For Master Laurence loved beauty, and thought not lightly of his own.

Sholto, though, as we shall soon see, despised not love, had eyes more for the knights and men-at-arms, and considered that his heaven would be fully attained as soon as he should ride one of those great prancing horses, and carry a lance with the pennon of the Douglas upon it.

Meanwhile he wore the steel cap of the home guard, the ringed neck mail, the close-fitting doublet of blue dotted over with red Douglas hearts and having the white cross of St. Andrew transversely upon it. About his waist was a peaked brace of shining plate armour, damascened in gold by Malise himself, and filling out his almost girlish waist to manlier proportions. From this depended a row of tags of soft leather. Close chain-mail covered his legs, to which at the knees were added caps of triple plate. A sheaf of arrows in a blue and gold quiver on his right side, a sword of metal on his left, and a short Scottish bow in his hand completed the attire of a fully equipped and efficient archer of the Earl's guard.

The lads were soon at the fords of Lochar, where in the dry summers the stones show all the way across—one in the midst being named the Black Douglas, noted as the place where, as tradition affirms, Archibald the Grim used to pause in crossing the ford to look at his new fortress of Thrieve, rising on its impregnable island above the rich water meadows.

Now neither Sholto nor Laurence wished to wet their leg array before the work and pageant of the day began. This was the desire of Laurence, because of the maids who would assemble on the Boreland Braes, and of Sholto inasmuch as he hoped to win the prize for the best accoutrement and the most point-device attiring among all the archers of the Earl's guard. The young men had asked crusty Simon Conchie, the boatman at the Ferry Croft, to set them over, offering him a groat for his pains. But he was far too busy to pay any attention to mere silver coin on such an occasion, only pausing long enough to cry to them that they must e'en cross at the fords, as many of their betters would do that day.

There was nothing for it, therefore, but either to strip to the waist or to wait the chances of the traffic. Both Sholto and Laurence were exceedingly loath to take the former course. They had not, however, long to hesitate, for a train of sumpter mules, belonging to the Lord Herries of Terregles, whose father had been with Archibald the Tineman in France, came up laden with the choicest products of the border country which he designed to offer as part of the "Service-Kane" to his overlord, the Earl of Douglas.

Now mules are all of them snorting, ill-conditioned brutes, and are ever ready to run away upon the least excuse, or even without any. So as soon as those of Lord Herries' train caught the glint of Sholto's blue baldric and shining steel girdle-brace appearing suddenly from behind a knoll, they incontinently bolted every way with noses to the ground, scattering packs and brandishing heels like young colts turned out to grass. It chanced that one of the largest mules made directly towards the fords of Lochar, and the youths, catching the flying bridle at either side, applied a sort of brake which sufficiently slowed the beast's movements to enable such agile skipjacks as Sholto and Laurence to mount. But as they were concerned more with their leaping from the ground than with what was already upon the animal's back, their heads met with a crash in the midst, in which collision the superior weight of the younger had very naturally the better of the encounter.

Sholto dropped instantly back to the ground. He was somewhat stunned by the blow, but the sight of his brother triumphantly splashing through the shallows aroused him. He arose, and seizing the first stone that came to hand hurled it after Laurence, swearing fraternally that he would smite him in the brisket with a dirk as soon as he caught him for that dastard blow. The first stone flew wide, though the splash caused the mule to shy into deeper water, to the damping of his rider's legs. But the second, being better aimed, took the animal fairly on the rump, and, fetching up on a fly-galled spot, frightened it with bumping bags and loud squeals into the woods of Glen Lochar, which come down close to the fords on every side. Here presently Laurence found himself, like Absalom, caught in the branches of a beech, and left hanging between heaven and earth. A rider in complete plate of black mail caught him down, still holding on to his bow, and, placing him across the saddle, brought down the flat of his gauntleted hand upon a spot of the lad's person which, being uncovered by mail, responded with a resounding smack. Then, amid the boisterous laughter of the men-at-arms, he let Laurence slip to the ground.

But the younger son of Brawny Kim, master armourer of Carlinwark, was not the lad to take such an insult meekly, even from a man-at-arms riding on horseback. He threw his bow into the nearest thicket, and seizing the most convenient ammunition, which chanced to be in great plenty that day upon the braes of Balmaghie, pursued his insulter along the glade with such excellent aim and good effect that the black unadorned armour of the horseman showed disks of defilement all over, like a tree trunk covered with toadstool growths.

"Shoot down the intolerable young rascal! Shall he thus beard my Lord Maxwell?" cried a voice from the troop which witnessed the chase. And more than one bow was bent, and several hand-fusils levelled from the company which followed behind.

But the injured knight threw up his visor.

"Hold, there!" he cried, "the boy is right. It was I who insulted him, and he did right to be revenged, though the rogue's aim is more to be admired than his choice of weapons. Come hither, lad. Tell me who thou art, and what is thy father's quality?"

"I am Laurence MacKim, an archer of my lord's guard, and the younger son of Malise MacKim, master armourer to the Douglas."

Laurence, being still angry, rang out his titles as if they had been inscribed in the book of the Lion-King-at-Arms.

"Saints save us," cried the knight in swart armour, "all that!"

Then, seeing the boy ready to answer back still more fiercely, he continued with a courteous wave of the hand.

"I humbly ask your pardon, Master Laurence. I am glad the son of Brawny Kim hath no small part of his father's spirit. Will you take service and be my esquire, as becomes well a lad of parts who desires to win his way to a knighthood?"

The heart of Laurence MacKim beat quickly—a horse to ride—an esquire—perhaps if he had luck and much fighting, a knighthood. Nevertheless, he answered with a bold straight look out of his black eyes.

"I am an archer of my lord Douglas' outer guard. I can have no promotion save from him or those of his house—not even from the King himself."

"Well said!" cried the knight; "small wonder that the Douglas is the greatest man in Scotland. I will speak to the Earl William this day concerning you."

Lord Maxwell rode on at the head of his company with a courteous salutation, which not a few behind him who had heard the colloquy imitated. Laurence stood there with his heart working like yeast within him, and his colour coming and going to think what he had been offered and what he had refused.

"God's truth," he said to himself, "I might have been a great man if I had chosen, while Sholto, that old sober sides, was left lagging behind."

Then he looked about for his bow and went swaggering along as if he were already Sir Laurence and the leader of an army.

But Nemesis was upon him, and that in the fashion which his pride would feel the most.

"Take that, beast of a Laurence!" cried a voice behind him.

And the lad received a jolt from behind which loosened his teeth in their sockets and discomposed the dignified stride with which in imagination he was commanding the armies of the Douglas.

CHAPTER IX

LAURENCE SINGS A HYMN

Laurence turned and beheld his brother. In another instant the two young men had clinched and were rolling on the ground, wrestling and striking according to their ability. Sholto might easily have had the best of the fray, but for the temper aroused by Laurence's recent degradation, for the elder brother was taller by an inch, and of a frame of body more lithe and supple. Moreover, the accuracy of Sholto MacKim's shape and the severe training of the smithy had not left a superfluous ounce of flesh on him anywhere.

In a minute the brothers had become the centre of a riotous, laughing throng of varlets—archers seeking their corps, and young squires sent by their lords to find out the exact positions allotted to each contingent by the provost of the camp. For as the wappenshaw was to be of three days' duration in all its nobler parts, a wilderness of tents had already begun to arise under the scattered white thorns of the great Boreland Croft which stretched up from the river.

These laughed and jested after their kind, encouraging the youths to fight it out, and naming Laurence the brock or badger from his stoutness, and the slim Sholto the whitterick or, as one might say, weasel.

"At him, Whitterick—grip him! Grip him! Now you have him at the pinch! Well pulled, Brock! 'Tis a certainty for Brock—good Brock! Well done—well done! Ah, would you? Hands off that dagger! Let fisticuffs settle it! The Whitterick hath it—the Whitterick!"

And thus ran the comment. Sholto being cumbered with his armour, Laurence might in time have gotten the upper grip. But at this moment a diversion occurred which completely altered the character of the conflict. A stout, reddish young man came up, holding in his hand a staff painted with twining stripes of white and red, which showed him to be the marshal of that part of the camp which pertained to the Earl of Angus. He looked on for a moment from the skirts of the crowd, and then elbowed his way self-importantly into the centre, till he stood immediately above Laurence and Sholto.

"What means this hubbub, I say? Quit your hold there and come with me; my Lord of Angus will settle this dispute."

He had come up just when the young men were in the final grips, when Sholto had at last gotten his will of his brother's head, and was, as the saying is, giving him "Dutch spice" in no very knightly fashion.

The Angus marshal, seeing this, seized Sholto by the collar of his mailed shirt, and drawing him suddenly back, caused him to lose hold of his brother, who as quickly rose to his feet. The red man began to beat Sholto about the headpiece right heartily with his staff, which exercise made a great ringing noise, though naturally, the skull cap being the work of Malise MacKim, little harm ensued to the head enclosed therein.

But Master Laurence was instantly on fire.

"Here, Foxy-face," he cried, "let my brother a-be! What business is it of yours if two gentlemen have a difference? Go back to your Angus kernes and ragged craw-bogle Highland folk!"

Meanwhile Sholto had recovered from his surprise, and the crowd of varlets was melting apace, thinking the Angus marshal some one of consequence. But the brothers MacKim were not the lads to take beating with a stick meekly, and the provost, who indeed had nothing to do with the Galloway part of the encampment, had far better have confined his officiousness to his own quarters.

"Take him on the right, Sholto," cried Laurence, "and I will have at him from this side." The Red Angus drew his sword and threatened forthwith to slay the lads if they came near him. But with a spring like that of a grey Grimalkin of the woods, Sholto leapt within his guard ere he had time to draw back his arm for thrust or parry, and at the same moment Laurence, snatching the red and white staff out of his hand, dealt him so sturdy a clout between the shoulders that, though he was of weight equal to both of his opponents taken together, he was knocked breathless at the first blow and went down beneath the impetus of Sholto's attack.

Laurence coolly disengaged his brother, and began to thrash the Angus man with his own staff upon all exposed parts, till the dry wood broke. Then he threw the pieces at his head, and the two brothers went off arm in arm to find a woody covert in which to repair damages against the weapon-showing, and the inspection of their lord and his keen-eyed master armourer.

As soon as they had discovered such a sequestered holt, Laurence, who had frequent experience of such rough-and-tumble encounters, stripped off his doublet of purple velvet, and, turning the sleeve inside out, he showed his brother that it was lined with a rough-surfaced felt cloth almost of the nature of teasle. This being rubbed briskly upon any dusty garment or fouled armour proved most excellent for restoring its pristine gloss and beauty. The young men, being as it were born to the trade and knowing that their armament must meet their father's inexorable eye, as he passed along their lines with the Earl, rubbed and polished their best, and when after half an hour's sharp work each examined the other, not a speck or stain was left to tell of the various casual incidents of the morning. Two bright, fresh-coloured youths emerged from their thicket, immaculately clad, and with countenances of such cherubic innocence, that my lord the Abbot William of the great Cistercian Abbey of Dulce Cor, looking upon them as with bare bowed heads they knelt reverently on one knee to ask his blessing, said to his train, "They look for all the world like young angels! It is a shame and a sin that two such fair innocents should be compelled to join in aught ruder than the chanting of psalms in holy service."

Whereat one of his company, who had been witness to their treatment of the Angus provost and also of Laurence's encounter with the knight of the black armour, was seized incontinently with a fit of coughing which almost choked him.

"Bless you, my sons," said the Abbot, "I will speak to my nephew, the Earl, concerning you. Your faces plead for you. Evil cannot dwell in such fair bodies. What are your names?"

The younger knelt with his fingers joined and his eyes meekly on the grass, while Sholto, who had risen, stood quietly by with his steel cap in his hand.

"Laurence MacKim," answered the younger, modestly, without venturing to raise his eyes from the ground, "and this is my brother Sholto."

"Can you sing, pretty boy?" said the Abbot to Laurence.

"We have never been taught," answered downright Sholto. But his brother, feeling that he was losing chances, broke in:

"I can sing, if it please your holiness."

"And what can you sing, sweet lad?" asked the Abbot, smiling with expectation and setting his hand to his best ear to assist his increasing deafness.

"Shut your fool's mouth!" said Sholto under his breath to his brother.

"Shut your own! 'Tis ugly as a rat-trap at any rate!" responded Laurence in the same key. Then aloud to the Abbot he said, "An it please you, sir, I can sing 'O Mary Quean!'"

The Abbot smiled, well pleased.

"Ah, exceeding proper, a song to the honour of the Queen of Heaven (he devoutly crossed himself at the name),—I knew that I could not be mistaken in you."

"Your pardon, most reverend," interjected Sholto, anxiously, "please you to excuse my brother; his voice hath just broken and he cannot sing at present." Then, under his breath, he added, "Laurie MacKim, you God-forgotten fool, if you sing that song you will get us both stripped in a thrice and whipped on the bare back for insolence to the Earl's uncle!"

"Go to," said his brother, "I will sing. The old cook is monstrous deaf at any rate."

"Sing," said the Abbot, "I would hear you gladly. So fair a face must be accompanied by the pipe of a nightingale. Besides, we sorely need a tenor for the choir at Sweetheart."

So, encouraged in this fashion, the daring Laurence began:

"Nae priests aboot me shall be seen
To mumble prayers baith morn and e'en,
I'll swap them a' for Mary Quean!
I'll bid nae mess for me be sung,
Dies ille, dies iræ,
Nor clanking bells for me be rung,
Sic semper solet fieri!
I'll gang my ways to Mary Quean."

"Ah, very good, very good, truly," said the Abbot, thrusting his hand into his pouch beneath his gown, "here are two gold nobles for thee, sweet lad, and another for your brother, whose countenance methinks is somewhat less sweet. You have sung well to the praise of our Lady! What did you say your name was? Of a surety, we must have you at Sweetheart. And you have the Latin, too, as I heard in the hymn. It is a thing most marvellous. Verily, the very unction of grace must have visited you in your cradle!"

Laurence held down his head with all his native modesty, but the more open Sholto grew red in the face, hearing behind him the tittering and shoulder-shaking of the priests and lay servants in the Abbot's train, and being sure that they would inform their master as soon as he passed on concerning the true import of Master Laurence's song. He was muttering in a rapid recitative, "Oh, wait—wait, Laurie MacKim, till I get you on the Carlinwark shore. A sore back and a stiff skinful of bones shalt thou have, and not an inch of hide on thee that is not black and blue. Amen!" he added, stopping his maledictions quickly, for at that moment the Abbot came somewhat abruptly to the end of his speech.

The great churchman rode away on his fair white mule, with a smile and a backward wave of his hand.

"I will speak to my nephew concerning you this very day, my child," he cried.

And the countenance of that most gentle youth kept its sweet innocence and angelic grace to the last, but that of Sholto was more dark and frowning than ever.

CHAPTER X

THE BRAES OF BALMAGHIE

By ten of the clock the braes of Balmaghie were a sight most glorious to look upon. Well nigh twelve thousand men were gathered there, of whom five thousand were well-mounted knights and fully equipped men-at-arms, every man of them ready and willing to couch a lance or ride a charge.

The line of the tents which had been set up extended from opposite the Castle island of Thrieve to the kirk hill of Balmaghie. Every knight's following was strictly kept within its own pale, or fence of green wands set basket-wise, pointed and thrust into the earth like the spring traps of those who catch mowdiewarts. Many also were the quarrels and bickerings of the squires who had been sent forward to choose and arrange the several encampments. Nor were rough and tumble fights such as we have seen the MacKims indulging in, thought derogatory to the dignity of any, save belted knights only.

Each camp displayed the device of its own lord, but higher than all, from the top of every mound and broomy hillock floated the banner of the overlord. This was the lion of Galloway, white on a ground of blue, and beneath it, but on the same staff, a pennon whereon was the bleeding heart of the Douglas family.

The lists were set up on the level meadow that is called the Boat Croft. At either end a pavilion had been erected, and the jousting green was strongly fenced in, with a rising tier of seats for the ladies along one side, and a throne in the midst for the Douglas himself, as high and as nobly upholstered as if the King of Scots had been presiding in person.

At ten by the great sun-dial of Thrieve, the Earl, armed in complete armour of rare work, damascened with gold, and bearing in his hand the truncheon of commander, rode first through the fords of Lochar, and immediately after him came his brother David, a tall handsome boy of fourteen, whose olive skin and highbred beauty attested his Douglas birth.

Next rode the Earl of Angus, a red, foxy-featured man, with mean and shifty eyes. He sat his horse awkwardly, perpetually hunching his shoulders forward as if he feared to fall over his beast's head. And saving among his own company, no man did him any honour, which caused him to grin with wicked sidelong smiles of hate and envy.

Then amid the shouting of the people there appeared, on a milk-white palfrey, Margaret, the Earl's only sister, already famous over all Scotland as "The Fair Maid of Galloway." With her rode one who, in the esteem of most who saw the pair that day, was a yet rarer flower, even Maud Lindesay, who had come out of the bleak North to keep the lonely little maid company. For Margaret of Douglas was yet no more than a child, but Maud Lindesay was nineteen years of age and in the first perfect bloom of her beauty.

Behind these two came the whole array of the knights and barons who owned allegiance to the Douglas,—Herons and Maxwells, Ardwell Macullochs, Gordons from the Glen of Kells, with Agnews and MacDowalls from the Shireside. But above all, and outnumbering all, there were the lesser chiefs of the mighty name—Douglases of the North, the future Moray and Ormond among them, the noble young sons of James the Gross of Avondale, who rode nearest their cousin, the head of the clan. Then came Douglases of the Border, Douglases of the Hermitage, of Renfrew, of Douglasdale. Every third man in that great company which splashed and caracoled through the fords of Lochar, was a William, a James, or an Archibald Douglas. The King himself could not have raised in all Scotland such a following, and it is small wonder if the heart of the young man expanded within him.

Presently, soon after the arrival of the cavalcade, the great wappenshaw was set in array, and forming up company by company the long double line extended as far as the eye could reach from north to south along the side of the broad and sluggish-moving river.

Sholto, who in virtue of his courage and good marksmanship had been placed over the archer company which waited on the right of the ford, fell in immediately behind the cortège of the Earl. He was first man of all to have his equipment examined, and his weapons obtained, as they deserved, the commendation of his liege lord, and the grim unwilling approval of Malise, the master armourer, whose unerring eye could not detect so much as a speck on the shirt of mail, or a grain of rust on the waist brace of shining steel.

Then the Earl rode down the lines, and Sholto, remembering the encounter amidst the dust of the roadway, breathed more freely when he saw his father's back.

And surely that day the heart of the Douglas must have beat proud and high within him, for there they stood, company behind ordered company, the men on whom he could count to the death. And truly the lad of eighteen, who in Scotland was greater than the King, looked upon their steadfast thousands with a swelling heart.

The Abbot had made particular inquiries where Laurence was stationed, which was in the archer company of the Laird of Kelton. Most of the monkish band had been made too happy by the deception practised on their Abbot concerning "Mary Quean," and were too desirous to have such a rogue to play his pranks in the dull abbey, to tell any tales on Laurence MacKim. But one, Berguet, a Belgian priest who had begged his way to Scotland, and whose nature was that of the spy and sycophant, approached and volunteered the information to the Abbot that this lad to whom he was desirous of showing favour, was a ribald and hypocritical youth.

"Eh, what?" said the Abbot, "a bodle for thy ill-set tongue, false loon, dost think I did not hear him sing his fair and seemly orisons? I tell thee, rude out-land jabberer, that I am a Douglas, and have ears better than those of any Frenchman that ever breathed. For this thou shalt kneel six nights on the cold stone of the holy chapel house, and say of paternosters ten thousand and of misereres thou shall sing three hundred. And this shall chance to teach thee to be scanter with thy foul breath when thou speakest to the Abbot of the Foundation of Devorgill concerning better men than thyself."

The Belgian priest gasped and fell back, and none other was found to say aught against Master Laurence, which, considering the ten thousand paternosters and the three hundred misereres, was not unnatural.

As the Earl passed along the line he was annoyed by the iterated requests of his uncle to be informed when they should come to the company of the Laird of Kelton. And the good Abbot, being like all deaf men apt to speak a little loud, did not improve matters by constantly making remarks behind his hand, upon the appearance or character (as known to him) of the various dependents of the Douglas House who had come out to show their loyalty and exhibit their preparedness for battle.

As thus it was. The young Earl would come in his inspection to a company of Solway-side men—stiff-jointed fishers of salmon nets out of the parishes of Rerrick or Borgue—or, as it might be, rough colts from the rock scarps of Colvend, scramblers after wild birds' nests on perilous heuchs, and poachers on the deer preserves of Cloak Moss, as often as they had a chance. Then the Earl, having zealously commended the particular Barnbacle or Munches who led them, all would be peace and concord, till out of the crowd behind would issue the growling comment of his uncle, the Abbot of Dulce Cor.

"A close-fisted old thief! The saints pity him not! He will surely fry in Hell! Last Shrovetide did he not drive off five of our best milch cows, and hath steadfastly refused to restore them? Anathema maranatha to his vile body and condemned be his huckstering soul!"

Needless to add, every word of this comment and addition was heard by the person most concerned.

Or it might be, "Henry A'milligan—his mother's son, God wot. And his father's, too, doubtless—if only one could know who his father was. The devil dwell in his fat belly! Exorciso te—"

So it went on till the temper of the young lord of Galloway was strained almost to the breaking point, for he wished not to cause a disturbance among so great a company and on a day of such renown.

At last they came to the muster of the clean-run limber lads of Kelton, artificers mostly, and stated retainers of the castle and its various adjacent bourgs of Carlinwark, Rhonehouse, Gelston, and Mains of Thrieve.

Some one at this point took the Abbot by the elbow and shouted in his ear that this was the company he desired to see. Then he rode forward to the left hand of his nephew, as Malise and he passed slowly down the line examining the weapons.

"Laurence MacKim, I would see Laurence MacKim!" cried the Abbot, holding up his hand as if in the chapel of his monastery. The Earl stopped, and Malise turned right about on his heel in great astonishment.

"What wants old marrowbones with our Laurie?" he muttered; "surely he cannot have gotten into mischief with the lasses already. But I kenna—I kenna. When I was sixteen I can mind—I can mind. And the loon may well be his father's own son."

And Malise, the man of brawn, watched out of his quiet grey eyes the face of the Abbot William, wondering what was to come next.

Laurence stood forth at a word of command from the Earl. He saluted, and then dropped the point of his sword meekly upon the ground. His white-and-rose cherub's face expressed the utmost goodness and innocence.

"Dear kinsman," said the Abbot to his nephew, "I have a request to prefer which I hope you will grant, though it deprive you of one retainer. This sweet youth is not fit company for rude soldiers and ill-bred rufflers of the camp. His mind is already on higher things. He hath good clerkly Latin also, being skilled in the humanities, as I have heard proven with mine own ears. His grace of language and deportment is manifest, and he can sing the sweetest and most spiritual songs in praise of Mary and the saints. I would have him in our choir at Sweetheart Abbey, where we have much need both of a voice such as his, and also of a youth whose sanctity and innocence cannot fail to leaven with the grace of the spirit the neophytes of our college, and the consideration of whom may even bring repentance into older and more hardened hearts."

Malise MacKim could not believe his ears as he listened to the Abbot's rounded periods. But all the same his grey eyes twinkled, his mouth slowly drew itself together into the shape of an O, from which issued a long low whistle, perfectly audible to all about him except the Abbot. "Lord have mercy on the innocence and cloistered quiet of the neophytes if they get our Laurie for an example!" muttered Malise to himself as he turned away.

Even the young Earl smiled, perhaps remembering the last time he had seen the youth beside him, clutching and tearing like a wild cat at his brother's throat in the smithy of Carlinwark.

"You desire the life of a clerk?" said Lord William pleasantly to Laurence. He would gladly have purchased his uncle's silence at even greater price.

"If your lordship pleases," said Laurence, meekly, adding to himself, "it cannot be such hard work as hammering at the forge, and if I like it not, why then I can always run away."

"You think you have a call to become a holy clerk?"

"I feel it here," quoth Master Laurence, hypocritically, indicating correctly, however, the organ whose wants have made clerks of so many—that is, the stomach.

Earl William smiled yet more broadly, but anxious to be gone he said: "Mine Uncle, here is the lad's father, Malise MacKim, my master armourer and right good servant. Ask him concerning his son."

"'Tis all up a rotten tree now," muttered Laurence to himself; "my father will reveal all."

Malise MacKim smiled grimly, but with a salutation to the dignitary of the church and near relative of his chief, he said: "Truly, I had never thought of this my son as worthy to be a holy clerk. But I will not stand in the way of his advancement nor thwart your favour. Take him for a year on trial, and if you can make a monk of him, do so and welcome. I recommend a leathern strap, well hardened in the fire, for the purpose of encouraging him to make a beginning in the holy life."

"He shall indeed have penance if he need it. For the good of the soul must the body suffer!" said Abbot William, sententiously.

"Saints' bones and cracklings," muttered Laurence, "this is none so cheerful! But I can always run away if the strap grows overlimber, and then let them catch me if they can. Sholto will help me."

"Fall out!" commanded the Earl, sharply, "and join yourself to the company of the Abbot William. Come, Malise, we lose our time."

Thus was one of our heroes brought into the way of becoming a learned and holy clerk. But all those who knew him best agreed that he had a far road to travel.

CHAPTER XI

THE AMBASSADOR OF FRANCE

The Earl had almost arrived at the pavilion erected at the southern end of the jousting meadow, when a gust of cheering borne along the lines announced the arrival of a belated company. The young man glanced northward with intent to discover, by their pennons, who his visitors might be. But the distance was too great, and identification was made more difficult by the swarming of the populace round the newcomers. So, being unable to make the matter out, Earl William despatched his brother David to bring him word of their quality.

Presently, however, and before David Douglas' return, shouts of "Avondale, Avondale!" from the men of Lanarkshire informed the young Earl of the name of one at least of those who had arrived. A frown so quick and angry darkened his brow that it showed the consideration in which the Douglas held his granduncle James the Gross, Earl of Avondale.

"I hope, at least," he said in a low voice to Malise, who stood half a step behind him, "that my cousins Will and James have come with him. They are good metal for a tourney, and worth breaking a lance with."

By this time the banners of the visitors were discernible crossing the fords of Lochar, while high advanced above all private pennons two standards could be seen, the banner royal of Scotland, and close beside the rampant lion the white lilies of France.

"Saint Bride!" cried the Earl, "have they brought the King of Scots to visit me? His Majesty had been better at his horn-book, or playing ball in the tennis court of Stirling."

Then came David back, riding swiftly on his fine dark chestnut, which, being free from the mantle wherein the horses of knights were swathed, and having its mane and tail left long, made a gallant show as the lad threw it almost on its haunches in his boyish pride of horsemanship.

"William," said David Douglas, "a word in your ear, brother. The whole tribe are here,—fat Jamie and all his clan."

The brothers conferred a little apart, for in those troubled times men learned caution early, and though the Douglas was the greatest lord in Scotland, yet, surrounded by meaner men as he was, it behoved him to be jealous and careful of his life and honour.

Earl Douglas came out of the sparred enclosure of the tilt-ring in order to receive his guests.

First, as an escort to the ambassador royal of France and Scotland who came behind, rode the Earl of Avondale and his five sons, noble young men, and most unlikely to have sprung from such a stock. James the Gross rode a broad Clydesdale mare, a short, soft unwieldy man, sitting squat on the saddle like a toad astride a roof, and glancing slily sideways out of the pursy recesses of his eyes.

Behind him came his eldest son William, a man of a true Douglas countenance, quick, high, and stern. Then followed James, whose lithe body and wonderful dexterity in arms were already winning him repute as one of the bravest knights in all Christendom in every military and manly exercise.

Behind the Avondale Douglases rode two men abreast, with a lady on a palfrey between them.

The first to take the eye, both by his stature and his remarkable appearance, rode upon a charger covered from head to tail in the gorgeous red-and-gold diamonded trappings pertaining to a marshal of France. He was in complete armour, and wore his visor down. A long blue feather floated from his helmet, falling almost upon the flank of his horse; a truncheon of gold and black was at his side. A pace behind him the lilies of France were displayed, floating out languidly from a black and white banner staff held in the hands of a young squire.

The knight behind whom the banner royal of Scotland fluttered was a man of different mould. His spare frame seemed buried in the suit of armour that he wore somewhat awkwardly. His pale ascetic countenance looked more in place in a monkish cloister than on a knightly tilting ground, and he glanced this way and that with the swift and furtive suspicion of one who, while setting one trap, fears to be taken in another.

But the lady who rode on a white palfrey between these two took all men's regard, even in the presence of a marshal of France and a herald extraordinary of the King of Scots.

The Earl Douglas, having let his eyes once rest upon her, could not again remove them, being, as it were, fixed by the very greatness of the wonder which he saw.

It was the lady of the pavilion underneath the pines, the lady of the evening light and of the midnight storm.

She was no longer clothed in simple white, but arrayed like a king's daughter. On her head was a high-peaked coiffure, from which there flowed down a graceful cloud of finest lace. This, even as the Earl looked at her, she caught at with a bewitching gesture, and brought down over her shoulder with her gloved hand. A close-fitting robe of palest blue outlined the perfections of her body. A single fleur-de-lys in gold was embroidered on the breast of her white bodice, and the same device appeared again and again on the white housing of her palfrey.

She sat in the saddle, gently smiling, and looking down with a sweetness which was either the perfection of finished coquetry or the expression of the finest natural modesty.

Strangely enough, the first thought which came to the Earl Douglas after his surprise was one in which triumph was blended with mirth.

"What will the Abbot and Malise think of this?" he said, half aloud. And he turned him about in order to look upon the face of his master armourer.

He found Malise MacKim ashen-pale and drawn of countenance, his mouth open and squared with wonder. His jaw was fallen slack, and his hands gripped one upon the other like those of a suppliant praying to the saints.

The Earl smiled, and bidding Malise unlace his helmet in compliment to his guests, he stood presently bareheaded before them, his head appearing above the blackness of his armour, bright as a flower with youth and instinct with all the fiery beauty of his race.

It was James the Gross who came forward to act as herald. "My well-beloved nephew," he began in somewhat whining tones, "I bring you two royal embassies, one from the King of France and the other from the King of Scotland. I have the honour to present to you the Marshal Gilles de Retz, ambassador of the most Christian King, Charles the Seventh, who will presently deliver his master's message to you."

The marshal, who till now had kept his visor down, slowly raised it, and revealed a face which, being once seen, could never afterwards be banished from the memory.

It was a large grey-white countenance, with high cheek-bones and colourless lips, which were continually working one upon the other. Black eyes were set close together under heavy brows, and a long thin nose curved between them like the beak of an unclean bird.

"Earl William," said the marshal, "I give you greeting in the name of our common liege lord, Charles, King of France, and also in that of his son, the Dauphin Louis. I bring you also a further token of their good-will, in that I hail you heir to the great estates and dignities of your father and grandfather, sometime Dukes of Touraine and vassals premier of the King of France."

The young man bowed, but in spite of the interest of his message, the marshal caught his eyes resting upon the face of the lady who rode beside him.

"To this I add that which, save for the message of the King, my master, ought fitly to have come first. I present you to this fair lady, my sister-in-law, the Damosel Sybilla de Thouars, maid of honour to your high princess Margaret of Scotland, who of late hath expanded into a yet fairer flower under the sun of our land of France."

The Earl dismounted and threw the reins of his horse to Malise, whose face wore an expression of bitterest disappointment and instinctive hatred. Then he went to the side of the Lady Sybilla, and taking her hand he bowed his head over it, touching the glove to his lips with every token of respect. Still bareheaded, he took the reins of her palfrey and led her to the stand reserved for the Queen of Beauty.

Here the Earl invited her to dismount and occupy the central seat.

"Till your arrival it lacked an occupant, saving my little sister; but to-day the gods have been good to the house of Douglas, and for the first time since the death of my father I see it filled."

Smilingly the lady consented, and with a wave of his hand the Earl William invited the Marshal de Retz to take the place on the other side of the Lady Sybilla.

Then turning haughtily to the herald of the King of Scots, who had been standing alone, he said:—

"And now, sir, what would you with the Earl Douglas?"

The ascetic, monkish man found his words with little loss of time, showing, however, no resentment for Earl William's neglect of any reverence to the banner under whose protection he came.

"I am Sir James Irving of Drum," he said, "and I stand here on behalf of Sir Alexander Livingston, tutor and guardian of the King of Scots, to invite your friendship and aid. The Lord Crichton, sometime Chancellor of this realm, hath rebelled against the royal authority and fortified him in Edinburgh Castle. So both Sir Alexander Livingston and the most noble lady, the Queen Mother, desire the assistance of the great power of the Earl of Douglas to suppress this revolt."

Scarcely had these words been uttered when another knight stepped forward out of the train which had followed the Earl of Avondale.

"I am here on behalf of the Chancellor of Scotland, who is no rebel against any right authority, but who wishes only to bring this distracted realm back into some assured peace, and to deliver the young King out of the hands of flatterers and lechers. I have the honour, therefore, of requesting on behalf of the Chancellor of Scotland, Sir William Crichton, the true representative of royal authority, the aid and alliance of my Lord of Douglas."

A smile of haughty contempt passed over the face of the Earl, and he dismissed both heralds, uttering in the hearing of all those words which afterwards became so famous over Scotland:

"Let dog eat dog! Wherefore should the lion care?"

CHAPTER XII

MISTRESS MAUD LINDESAY

The sports of the first day of the great wappenshaw were over. The Lord James Douglas, second son of the Gross One, had won the single tourneying by unhorsing all his opponents without even breaking a lance. For the second time Sholto MacKim wore on his cap the golden buckle of archery, and took his way happily homeward, much uplifted that the somewhat fraudulent eyes of Mistress Maud Lindesay had smiled upon him whilst the French lady was fastening it there.

The knightly part of the great muster had already gone back to their tents and lodgings. The commonalty were mostly stringing away through the vales and hill passes to their homes, no longer in ordered companies, but in bands of two or three. Disputes and misunderstandings arose here and there between men of different provinces. The Galloway men called "Annandale thieves" at those border lads who came at the summons of the hereditary Warden of the Marches. The borderers replied by loud bleatings, which signified that they held the Galwegians of no better understanding than their native sheep.

It was a strange and varied company which rode home to Thrieve to receive the hospitality of the young Earl of Douglas and Duke of Touraine. The castle itself, being no more than a military fortress, containing in addition to the soldiers' quarters only the apartments designed for the family (and scant enough even of those) could not, of course, accommodate so great a company.

But as was the custom at all great houses, though more in England and France than in poverty-stricken Scotland, the Earl of Douglas had in store an abundant supply of tents, some of them woven of arras and ornamented with cloth of gold, others of humbler but equally serviceable material.

His mother, the Countess of Douglas, who knew nothing of the occurrences of the night of the great storm, nor guessed at the suspicions of witchcraft and diablerie which made a hell of the breast of Malise, the master armourer, received her son's guests with distinguished courtesy. Malise himself had gone to find the Abbot, so soon as ever he set eyes on the companion of the Marshal de Retz, that they might consult together—only, however, to discover that the gentle churchman had quitted the field immediately after he had obtained the consent of his nephew to the possession of the new chorister, to whom he had taken so sudden and violent a fancy.

The hoofs of the whole cavalcade were erelong sounding hollow and dull upon the wooden bridge, which the Earl's father had erected from the left bank to the southernmost corner of the Isle of Thrieve, a bridge which a single charge of powder, or even a few strokes of a wood-man's axe, had been sufficient to remove and disable, but which nevertheless enabled the castle-dwellers to avoid the extreme inconvenience of passing through the ford at all states of the river.

Sholto MacKim, throwing all the consciousness of a shining success into the stiffness of the neck which upheld the slight additional weight of the Earl's gold buckle in his cap, found himself, not wholly by accident, in the neighbourhood of his heart's beloved, Maud Lindesay. For, like a valiant seneschal, she had kept her place all day close beside the Fair Maid of Galloway.

And now the little girl was more than ever eager to keep near to her friend, for the ambassador of the King of France had bent one look upon her, so strange and searching that Margaret, though not naturally timid, had cried aloud involuntarily and clasped her friend's hand with a grasp which she refused to loosen, till Sholto had promised to walk by the side of her pony and allow her to net her trembling fingers into the thick of his clustering curls.

For the armourer's son was, in those simple days, an ancient ally and playmate of the little noble damsel, and he dreamed, and not without some excuse, that in an age when every man's strong arm and brave heart constituted his fortune, the time might come when he might even himself to Maud Lindesay, baron's daughter though she were. For both his father and himself were already high in favour with their master the Earl, who could create knighthoods and dispose lordships as easily as (and much more effectually and finally than) the King himself.

The emissaries of the Chancellor and Sir Alexander Livingston did not accompany the others back to the castle after the short and haughty answer which they had received, but with their followers returned the way they had come to their several headquarters, giving, as was natural between foes so bitter, a wide berth to each other on their northward journeys to Edinburgh and Stirling.

"What think you of this day's doings, Mistress Lindesay?" asked Sholto as he swung along beside the train with little Margaret Douglas's hand still clutching the thick curls at the back of his neck.

The maid of honour tossed her shapely head, and, with a little pretty upward curl of the lip, exclaimed: "'Twas as stupid a tourney as ever I saw. There was not a single handsome knight nor yet one beautiful lady on the field this day."

"What of James of Avondale when knights are being judged?" said Sholto, with a kind of gloomy satisfaction, boyish and characteristic; "he at least looked often enough in your direction to prove that he did not agree with you about the lack of the beautiful lady."

At this Maud Lindesay elevated her pretty nostrils yet further into the air. "James of Avondale, indeed—" she said, "he is not to be compared either for dignity or strength with the Earl himself, nor yet with many others whom I know of lesser estate."

"Sholto MacKim," cried the clear piping voice of the little Margaret, "how in the world am I to keep hold of your hair if you shake and jerk your head about like that? If you do not keep still I will send for that pretty boy over there in the scarlet vest, or ask my cousin James to ride with me. And he will, too, I know—for he likes bravely to be beside my dear, sweet Maud Lindesay."

After this Sholto held his head erect and forth-looking, as if he had been under the inspection of the Earl and were doubtful of his weapons passing muster.

There came a subtle and roguish smile into the eyes of Mistress Maud Lindesay as she observed the stiffening of Sholto's bearing.

"Who were those others of humbler estate?" he queried, sending his words straight out of his lips like pellets from a pop-gun, being in fear lest he should unsettle the hand of the small tyrant upon his hair.

"Your brother Laurence for one," replied the minx, for no other purpose than to see the flush of disappointment tinge his brow with sudden red.

"I wish my brother Laurence were in—" he began. But the girl interrupted him.

"Hush," she said, holding up her finger, "do not swear, especially at a son of the holy church. Ha, ha! A fit clerk and a reverend will they make of Laurence MacKim! I have heard of your ploys and ongoings, both of you. Think not I am to be taken in by your meekness and pretence of dutiful service. You go athwart the country making love to poor maidens, and then, when you have won their hearts, you leave them lamenting."

And she affected to heave a deep sigh.

"Ah, Maudie," said the little girl, reproachfully, "now you are being bad. I know it by your voice. Do not be unkind to my Sholto, for his hair is so pleasant to touch. I wish you could feel it. And, besides, when you are wicked to him, you make him jerk, and if he does it often I shall have to send him away."

The Maid of Galloway was indeed entirely correct. For Maud Lindesay, accustomed all her life to the homage of many men, and having been brought up in a great castle in an age when chivalrous respect to women had not yet given place to the licence of the Revival of Letters, practised irritation like a fine art. She was brimful of the superfluity of naughtiness, yet withal as innocent and playful as a kitten.

But Sholto, both from a feeling that he belonged to an inferior rank, and also being exceedingly conscious of his youth, chose to be bitterly offended.

"You mistake me greatly, Mistress Lindesay," he said in an uneven schoolboy's voice, to which he tried in vain to add a touch of worldly coldness; "I do not make love to every girl I meet, nor yet do I love them and leave them as you say. You have been most gravely misinformed."

"Nay," tripped the maid of honour, with arch quickness of reply, "I said not that you were naturally equipped for such amorous quests. I meant to designate your brother Laurence. 'Tis pity he is to be a clerk. Though one day doubtless he will make a very proper and consolatory father confessor—"

Sholto walked on in silence, his eyes fixed before him, and in such high dudgeon that he pretended to be unconscious of what the girl had been saying. Then the little Margaret began to prattle in her pretty way, and the youth answered "yes" and "no" sulkily and at random, his thoughts being alternately on the doing of some great deed to make his mistress repent her cruelty, and on a leap into the castle pool, in whose unsunned deeps he might find oblivion from all the flouts of hard-hearted beauty.

Maud kept her eyes upon him, a smile of satisfaction on her lips so long as he was not looking at her. She liked to play her fish as satisfactorily as she could before grassing it at her feet.

"Besides, it will do him good," she said to herself. "He hath lately won the gold badge of archery, and, like all men, is apt to think overmuch of himself at such times. Moreover, I can always make it up to him after—if I like, that is."

But as often as Sholto dropped a little behind, keeping pace with Maid Margaret's slower palfrey so that Maud was sure he looked at her, the pretty coquette cast down her eyes in affected humility and sorrow. Whereupon immediately Sholto felt his resentment begin to melt like snow off a dike top when the sun of April is shining.

But neither of them uttered another word till they reached the drawbridge which crossed the nether moat and conducted to the noble gateway of Thrieve. Then, at the foot of the stairway to the hall, Sholto, having swung the little maid from her pony, after a moment of sullen hesitation went across to assist Mistress Maud Lindesay out of her saddle.

As he lifted the girl down his heart thundered tumultuously in his breast, for he had never so touched her before. Her lashes rested modestly on her cheek—long, black, and upcurled a little at the ends. As her foot touched the ground, she raised them a moment, and looked at him with one swift flash of violet eyes made darker by the seclusion from which she had released them. Then in another moment she had dropped them again, detaching them from his with a mighty affectation of confusion.

"Please, Sholto, I am sorry. I did not mean it." She spoke like a child that is sorry for a fault and is fearful of being chidden.

And even though knowing full well by bitter experience all her naughtiness and hypocrisy, Sholto, gulping his heart well down into his throat, could not do otherwise than forgive a thing so pretty and so full of the innocent artifices which make mown hay of the hearts of men.

With a touch of his lips upon the hand of Margaret the Maid in token of fealty, Sholto MacKim turned on his heel and went away towards the fords of Thrieve, muttering to himself, "No, she does not mean it, I do believe. But I have ever heard that of all women she who never means it is the most dangerous."

And this is a dict which no wise man can gainsay.

CHAPTER XIII

A DAUNTING SUMMONS

Not far before them had ridden the Earl and the Lady Sybilla. Behind these two came the Marshal de Retz and the fat Lord of Avondale. They were telling each other tales of the wars of La Pucelle, the latter laughing and shaking shoulders, but at the end of every side-splitting legend the Frenchman would glance over his shoulder at Maud Lindesay and the little maiden Margaret.

As Sholto passed them on his return he stood aside, poised at the salute, looking meanwhile with awe on the great and notable French soldier. Yet at the first glimpse of his unvisored face there fell upon the young man a dislike so fierce and instinctive that he grasped his bow and fumbled in his quiver for an arrow, in order to send it through the unlaced joints of the Marshal's gorget, which for ease's sake his squire had undone when they left the field.

Sholto MacKim was at the fords waiting the chance of crossing and the pleasure of the surly keeper of the bridge, Elson A'Cormack, who sat in his wheelhouse, grunting curses on all who passed that way.

"Foul feet, slow bellies, fushionless and slack ye are to run my lord's errands! But quick enow to return home upon your trampling clattering ruck of horses, and every rascal of you expecting to ride over my bridge of good pine planking instead of washing the dirt from your hoofs in honest Dee water."

The long files of horsemen threaded their way across the green plain of the isle towards the open space in front of Thrieve Castle, the points of their spears shining high in the air, and the shafts so thick underneath that, seen from a distance, they made a network of slender lines reticulated against the brightness of the sun.

The great island strength of the Douglases was then in its highest state of perfection as a fortress and of dignity as a residence. Archibald the Grim, who built the keep, could not have foreseen the wondrous beauty and strength to which Thrieve would attain under his successors. This night of the wappenshaw the lofty grey walls were hung with gaily coloured tapestries draped from the overhanging gallery of wood which ran round the top of the castle. From the four corners of the roof flew the banners of four provinces which owned the sway of the mighty house,—Galloway, Annandale, Lanark, and the Marches,—while from the centre, on a flagstaff taller than any, flew their standard royal, for so it might be called, the heart and stars of the Douglases' more than royal house.

While the outer walls thus blazed with colour, the woods around gave back the constant reverberation of cannon, as with hand guns and artillery of weight the garrison greeted the return of the Earl and his guests. The green castle island from end to end was planted thick with tents and gay with pavilions of many hues and various design, their walls covered with intricate devices, and each flying the colours of its owner, while on poles without dangled shields and harness of various kinds, ready for the younger squires to clean and oil for the use of their masters on the remaining days of the tournament.

Sholto waited at the bridge-head, impatient of the press, and eager to be left alone with his own thoughts, that he might con over and over the words and looks of his heart's idol, and suck all the sweet pain he could out of her very hardheartedness. Suddenly tossed backwards like a ball from lip to lip, according to the universal and, indeed, obligatory custom of the time, there reached him the "passing of the word." He heard his own name repeated over and over in fifty voices and tones, waxing louder as the "word" neared him.

"Sholto MacKim—Sholto MacKim, son of Malise, the armourer, wanted to speak with the Earl. Sholto MacKim. Sholto—"

A great nolt of a Moray Highlandman, with a mouth like a gash, shouted it in his very ear.

Surprised and somewhat anxious at heart, Sholto cast over in his mind all the deeds, good and evil, which might procure him the honour of an interview with Earl William Douglas, but could think of nothing except his having involuntarily played the spy at the young lord's meeting with the lady in the wood. It was therefore with some natural trepidation that the young man obeyed the summons.

"At any rate," he meditated with a slight return of complacency, as he butted and shoved his way castle-wards, "he can scarcely mean to have my head. For he was all day with my father at his elbow, and at the worst I shall have another chance of seeing"—he did not call the beloved by her Christian name even to himself, so he compromised by adding somewhat lamely—"her."

Thus Sholto, putting speed in his heels and swinging along over the trampled sward with the easy tireless trot of a sleuthhound, threaded his way among the groups of villein prickers and swearing men-at-arms who cumbered the main approaches of the castle.

He found the Earl walking swiftly up and down a little raised platform which extended round three sides of Thrieve, outside the main defences, but yet within the nether moat, the sluggish water of which it over-looked on its inner side.

Earl William was manifestly discomposed and excited by the events of the day, and especially by the fact that the Lady Sybilla seemed utterly unconscious of ever having set eyes upon him before, appearing entirely oblivious of having received him in a pavilion of rose-coloured silk under the shelter of a grove of tall pines. The young lord instinctively recoiled from any communication with his master armourer, whose grave and impassive face revealed nothing which might be passing in his mind. Then the Earl's thoughts turned upon Sholto, who had been the first to observe his beauteous companion of the Carlinwark woods.

Earl William was even younger than Sholto, but the cares and dignities of a great position had rendered him far less boyish in manner and carriage than the son of Malise MacKim.

His head, now released from his helm, rose out from the richly ornamented collar of his armour with the grace of a flower and the strength of a tree rooted among rocks. He had already laid aside his gorget, and when Sholto was announced, the Earl's ancient retainer, old Landless Jock of Abernethy, was bringing him a cap of soft velvet which he threw on the back of his head with an air of supreme carelessness. Then he rose and walked up and down, carrying his armour as if it had been a mere feather weight, whereas it was tilting harness of double plate and designed only for wearing on horseback.

Sholto marked in the young lord a boyish eagerness equal to his own. Indeed, his impatient manner recalled his late feelings, as he had stood on the bridge and desired to be left alone with his thoughts of Maud Lindesay.

Sholto stood still and quiet on the topmost step of the ascent from the moat-bridge waiting for the Earl to signify his will.

CHAPTER XIV

CAPTAIN OF THE EARL'S GUARD

"Sholto MacKim," said the Earl of Douglas, abruptly, "saw you the lady who arrived with the foreign ambassador?"

"She is indeed wondrous fair to look on," answered Sholto, the whole heart in him instantly wary, while outwardly he seemed more innocent than before.

"Have your eyes ever lighted on that lady before?"

"Nay, my lord, of a surety no. In what manner should they, seeing that I have never been in France in my life, nor indeed more than a score of miles from this castle of Thrieve?"

"Thou art a good lad, and also ready of wit, Master Sholto," said the Earl, looking at the armourer's son musingly. "Clear of eye and true of hand, so they tell me. Did you not win the arrow prize this day?"

Lord William raised his eyes to where in the bonnet of the youth his own golden badge of archery glistened.

"And I also won the swording prize at the last wappenshaw on the moot hill of Urr," said Sholto, taking courage, and being resolved that if his fortune stood not now on tiptoe, it should not be on account of any superfluity of modesty on his own part.

"Ah," said the Earl, "I remember. It was two golden hearts joined together with an arrow and a star in the midst—a fitting Douglas emblem, by the bones of Saint Bride! Where hast thou left that badge that thou dost not wear it along with the other?"

Sholto blushed and muttered that he had forgotten it at home. He was all of a breaking perspiration lest he should have to tell the Earl that he had given it to Maud Lindesay, as indeed he meant to do presently, along with the golden buckle of archery,—that is if the dainty, mischievous-hearted maiden could be persuaded to accept thereof.

"Ah," said the Earl, smiling, "I comprehend. There is some maid in the question, and if I advance you to the command of my house-guard and give you an officer's responsibility, you will of a surety be ever desiring to go gadding to the greenwood—and around the loch of Carlinwark are most truly dangerous glades."

"Nay, indeed nay," cried Sholto, eagerly. "If it is my lord's will to appoint me to his guard, by Saint Bride and all the other saints I swear never to leave the island, unless it be sometimes of a Sunday afternoon for an hour or two—just to see my mother."

"Your mother!" quoth the Earl, laughing heartily. "So then my two golden hearts are in your mother's keeping. Art a good lad, Sholto, and as for guile it is simply not in thee!"

Sholto looked modestly down upon the earth, as if conscious of his own exceeding merits, but willing for the nonce to say nothing about them. But the young Earl came over to him, and dealing him a sound buffet on the back, cried: "Nay, lad, that lamb-like look I have seen tried on mine uncle the Abbot of Sweetheart. Thy brother Laurence is in the way of clerkly advancement on account of that same sweetly innocent regard, which he hath in even greater perfection. But I am a young man, remember—and one youth flings not glamour easily into the eyes of another. Sholto, neither you nor I are any better than we should be, and if we are not so evil as some others, let us not set up as overwhelmingly virtuous. For at twenty virtue is mostly but lack of opportunity."

Sholto blushed so becomingly at this accusation that if the Earl had not seen the brothers locked in the death grip like crabs in a fishwife's creel, even he might have been deceived.

"Nevertheless," continued the Earl, "in spite of your claims to virtue, I am resolved to make you officer of my castle-guard—if not in name, at least in fact. For old Landless Jock of Abernethy must keep the name while he lives, and stand first when my steward pays out the chuckling golden Lions at Whitsun and eke Lady Day. But you shall have enough and be no longer a charge upon your father. Malise should be a proud man, having both his sons provided for in one day."

The Earl turned him about with his usual quick imperiousness. "Malise," he cried, "Malise MacKim!"

And again the "word" ran through the castle, escaped the gate, circumnavigated the moat, and ran round the circle of the tents till the shouts of "Malise, Malise," could have been heard almost at the deserted fords of Lochar, where sundry varlets were watching for a chance to search the deserted pavilions for anything left behind therein by the knights and squires.

Presently there was seen ascending to the moat platform the huge form of the master armourer himself. He stood waiting his master's pleasure, with a knife which he had been sharpening in his hand. It was a curious weapon, long, thin, and narrow in the blade, which was double-edged and ground fine as a razor on both sides.

"Ah, Malise," said the Earl, "you have not taught your son amiss. He threatens to turn out a most marvellous lad, for not only can he make weapons, but he can excel the best of my men-at-arms in their use. Have you any objection that he be attached to my guard?"

The strong man smiled with his usual calm, and kept his humorous grey eyes fixed shrewdly on the Earl.

"Aye," he said, "it is indeed more fitting that Sholto, my son, should ride behind my Lord of Douglas than stiff old Malise upon his Flanders mare."

The Earl blushed a little, for he remembered how the armourer had offered to ride behind him after he had shod Black Darnaway at the Carlinwark. He went on somewhat hastily.

"I have resolved to make your son, Sholto, officer of the castle-guard. It is perhaps over-responsible a post for so young a man, yet I myself am younger and have heavier burdens to bear. Also Landless Jock is growing old and stiff, and will not suffer to be spoken to. For my father's sake I cannot be severe with him. He will die in his charge if he will, but on Douglasdale and not at Thrieve. So now I would have your son do my bidding without question, which is more than his father ever did before him."

"I can answer for Sholto," said Malise MacKim. "He is afraid of nothing save perhaps the strength of his father's right arm. He is cool enough in danger. Nothing daunts him except the flutter of a farthingale. But then my lord knows well that is a fault most commendable in this castle of Thrieve. Sholto will be an honest captain of your house-carls, if you see to it that the steward locks up his loaves of sugar and his most toothsome preserves."

"Faith," cried the Earl, heartily, "I know not but what I would join Master Sholto in a raid on these dainties myself."

In this fashion was Sholto MacKim placed in command of the house-guard of the castle of Thrieve.

CHAPTER XV

THE NIGHT ALARM

At parting with his father, the young captain received many wise and grave instructions, all of which he resolved to remember and profit by—a resolution which he did not fail to keep for full five minutes.

"Be douce in deportment," said his father, speaking quietly and yet with a certain sternness of demeanour. "Think three times before you give an order, but let no man think even once before obeying it. Set him astraddle the wooden horse with a spear shaft at either foot to teach him that a soldier's first duty is not to think. Keep your eyes more on the alert for the approach of an enemy than for the ankles of the women-folk at the turnings of the turret stairs."

To these and many other maxims out of the incorporate wisdom of the elders, Sholto promised most faithful attendance, and, for the time being, he fully intended to keep his word. But no sooner was his father gone, and he introduced to his new quarters and duties by David Douglas, the Earl's younger brother, than he began to wonder which was the window of Maud Lindesay's chamber and speculate on how soon he would see her thereat.

In the castle of Thrieve that night there was little sleeping room to spare. The Earl and his brother lay wrapped in their plaids in one of the round towers of the outer defences. In the castle hall the retainers of the French ambassador slept side by side, or heads and tails with the archers of the house-guard. Lights flickered on the turnpike stair which led to the upper floors. The servitors had cleared the great hall, and here on a dais, raised above the "marsh" and sheltered by an arras curtain hastily arranged, James the Gross slept on a soft French bed, which he had caused to be brought all the way from his castle of Strathavon on the moors of Lanarkshire.

In the Earl's chamber on the third floor was lodged the Marshal de Retz. Next him ranged the apartment of the countess. Here also was the Lady Sybilla at the end of the passage in the guest chamber which looked to the north, and from the windows of which she could see the broad river dividing itself about the castle island, and flowing as calmly on as if the stern feudal pile had been a peaceful monastery and the waving war banners no more than so many signs of holy cross.

Above, in the low-roofed chambers, which gave upon the wooden balcony, were the apartments of Maud Lindesay and her charge, little Margaret Douglas, the Fair Maid of Galloway.

Now the single postern stair of the castle was shut at the foot, where it opened out upon the hall of the guard by a sparred iron gate, the key of which was put into Sholto's charge. The night closed early upon the castle-ful of wearied folk. The marshals of the camps caused the lights to be put out at nine-of-the-clock in all the tents and pavilions, but the lamps and candles burned longer in the castle itself, where the Earl had been giving a banquet to his guests, of the best that his estates could afford. Nevertheless, it was yet long before midnight when the cheep of the mouse in the wainscot, the restless stir or muffled snore of a crowded sleeper in the guardroom, was the only sound to be heard from dungeon to banner-staff of the great castle.

Sholto's heart throbbed tumultuous and insurgent within him. And small is the wonder. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined such a fate as this, to be actual captain of the Earl's own body-guard, even though neither title nor emolument was yet wholly his; better still, that he should dwell night and day within arm's reach almost of the desire of his heart, flinty-bosomed and mischievous as she was—these were heights of good fortune to which his imagination had never climbed in its most daring ascents.

No longer did he envy his brother's good fortune, as he had been somewhat inclined to do earlier in the day, when he thought of returning to wield the forehammer all alone in his father's smithy.

The first night of Captain Sholto's responsibility in the castle of Thrieve was destined to be a memorable one. To the youth himself it would have appeared so in any case. Only a panelled door divided him from the girl who, wayward and scornful as she had ever been to him, yet kept his heart dangling at her waist-belt as truly as if it had been the golden key of her armoire.

The ancient Sir John of Abernethy, dubbed Landless Jock, would not be separated from his masters, and slept with two sergeants of the guard in the turret adjacent to that in which the brothers of Douglas, William and David, lay in the first sleep of youth and an easy mind.

Sholto therefore found himself left with the undivided responsibility for the safety of the castle and all who dwelt within it. He was also the only man who, by reason of his charge and in virtue of his master-key, was permitted to circulate freely through all the floors and passages of the vast feudal pile.

Sholto went out to the barred gate of the castle, where in a little cubbyhole dark even at noonday, and black as Egypt now, the warder slept with his hand upon his keys, and his head touching the lever of the gear wherewith he drew the creaking portcullis up and rolled back the iron doors which shut the keep off from the world of the wide outer courtyard and the garrison which manned the turrets.

The porter, Hugh MacCalmont, sat up on his elbow at Sholto's salutation, only enough to see his visitor by the glint of the little iron "cruisie" lamp hanging upon the wall. He knew him by the golden chain of office which the Earl had given Sholto.

"Captain of the guard," he muttered, "Lord, here's advancement indeed. My lord might have remembered me that have served him faithfully these thirty years, opening and shutting without mistake. He might have named me captain of the guard, and not this limber Jack. But the young love the young, and in truth 'tis natural. But what Landless Jock will say when he comes to have this sprat set over him, I know not but I can guess!"

Satisfied that all was safe there, Sholto stepped gingerly over the reclining forms of the first relief guard, who lay wrapped in their cloaks, every man grasping his arms. Most of these were lying in the dead sleep of tired men, whilst others restlessly moved about this way and that, as if seeking an easier adaptation of their bones to the corners of the blue whinstones and rough shell lime than had been provided for when the castle was built by Archibald the Grim, Lord of Thrieve and Galloway.

Close by the last turn of the turret staircase yawned the iron-sparred mouth of the dungeon, in which in its time many a notable prisoner had been immured. It was closed with a huge grid of curved iron bars, each as thick as a man's arm, cunningly held together by a gigantic padlock, the key of which was nightly taken to the sleeping-room of the Earl—whether, as was now the case, the cell stood empty, or whether it contained an English lord waiting ransom or a rebellious baron expectant of his morning summons to the dule tree of the Black Douglas.

Then taking the master-key from his belt, Sholto unlocked the sparred gate leading from the salle de garde into the turret stair which was the sole communication with the upper floors of the castle.

Slowly, and with a step no louder than the beating of his own heart, he went upwards, glancing in midway upon the banquet hall, where the dim light from the postern without revealed a number of dark forms wrapped in slumber lying on the dining-table and on the floor; ascending yet higher he came to the floor where slept the Countess of Douglas, the Lady Sybilla, and in the Earl's own chamber the Marshal de Retz, ambassador of the King of France.

Sholto stood a moment with his hand raised in a listening attitude, before he ventured to ascend those narrower stairs which led to the uppermost floor of all, on which were the chambers occupied by the little Maid Margaret and her companion and gossip Mistress Maud Lindesay.

He told himself that it was his duty to see to the safety of the whole castle; that he had special instructions to visit three times, during the course of each night of duty, all the passages and corridors of the fortress. But nevertheless it needed all his courage to enable Sholto to perform the task which had been laid upon him. As he dragged one foot after the other up the turret stairs, it seemed as if a leaden clog had been attached to each pointed shoe.

He had also a vague sense of being watched by presences invisible to him, but malign in their nature. Again and again he caught himself listening for footsteps which seemed to dog his own. He heard mysterious whisperings that flouted his utmost vigilance, and mocking laughter that lurked in unseen crevices and broke out so soon as he had passed.

Sholto set his hand firmly upon his sword handle and bit his lips, lest even to himself he should own his uneasiness. It was not seemly that the captain of the Douglas guard should be frightened by shadows.

Passing the corridor which led towards the sleeping rooms of the maid and her companion, he ascended to the roof of the castle, thrusting aside the turret door and issuing upon the wide, open spaces with an assured step. The cool breeze from the west restored him to himself in a moment. The waning moon cast a pale light across the landscape, and he could see the tents on the castle island glimmer greyish white beneath him. Beyond that again was the shining confluence of the sluggish river about the isle, and the dark line of the woods of Balmaghie opposite. He had begun to meditate on the rapid changes of circumstance which had overtaken him, when suddenly a shrill and piercing shriek rang out, coming up through the castle beneath, again and again repeated. It was like the cry of a child in the grip of instant and deadly terror.

Sholto's heart gave a great bound. That something untoward should happen on this the first night of his charge was too disastrous. He drew his sword and set in his lips the silver call which depended from the chain of office the Earl had thrown about his neck when he made him captain of his guard.

His feet hardly touched the stone stairs as he flew downwards, and wings were added to his haste by the sounds of fear which continued to increase. In another moment he was upon the last step of the turnpike and at the entrance of the corridor which led to the rooms of the little Lady Margaret and Maud Lindesay.

As Sholto came rushing down the steep descent from the roof he caught sight of a dark and shaggy beast running on all fours just turning out of the corridor, and taking the first step of the descent towards the floor beneath. Without pausing to consider, Sholto lunged forward with all his might, and his sword struck the fugitive quadruped behind the shoulder. He had time to see in the pale bluish flicker of the cruisie lamp that the beast he had wounded was of a dark colour, and that its head seemed immensely too large for its body.

Nevertheless, the thing did not fall, but ran on and vanished out of Sholto's sight. The young man again set the silver call to his lips and blew. The next moment he could hear the soldiers of the guard clattering upward from their hall, and he himself ran along the corridor towards the place whence the screams of terror seemed to proceed.

CHAPTER XVI

SHOLTO CAPTURES A PRISONER OF DISTINCTION

He found that the noise came from the chamber occupied by the little Lady Margaret. When he arrived at the door it stood open to the wall. The child was sitting up on her bed, clothed in the white garmentry of the night. Bending over her, with her arms round the heaving shoulders of the little girl, Sholto saw Maud Lindesay, clad in a dark, hooded mantle thrown with the appearance of haste about her. The door of the next chamber also stood wide, and from the coverlets cast on the floor it was obvious that its occupant had left it hastily in order to fly to her friend's assistance.

At the sound of hasty footsteps Maud Lindesay turned about, and was instantly stricken pale and astonished by the sight of the young man with his sword bare. She cried aloud with a stern and defiant countenance, "Sholto MacKim, what do you here?"

And before he had time to answer, the little girl looked at him out of her friend's arms and called out: "O Sholto, Sholto, I am so glad you are come. I woke to find such a terrible thing looking at me out of the night. It was shaped like a great wolf, but it was rough of hide, and had upon it a head like a man's. I was so terrified that at first I could not cry out. But when it came nearer, and gazed at me, then I cried. Do not go away, Sholto. I am so glad, so glad that you are here."

Maud Lindesay had again turned towards Margaret.

"Hush," she said soothingly, "it was a dream. You were frighted by a vision, by a nightmare, by a succubus of the night. There is no beast within the castle."

"But I saw it plainly," the maid cried. "It opened the door as if it had hands—I saw it stand there by the bed and look at me—oh, so terribly! I saw its teeth glisten and heard them snap together!"

"Little one, be still, it was but a dream," said Sholto, untruthfully; "nevertheless I will go and search the rest of the castle."

And with these words he went along the corridor, finding the men whom he had summoned by means of his captain's silver call clustered upon the landing of the turret stair which communicated with the third floor. As he glanced along the oak-panelled corridor, it seemed to Sholto that he discerned a figure vanishing at the further end. Instantly he resolved on searching, and summoning his men to follow, he led the way down the passage, sword in hand. As he went he snatched the lamp from its pin on the wall, and held it in his left high above his head.

At the further end of the corridor was the door of a little chamber, and it seemed to Sholto that the shape he had seen must have disappeared at this point.

He knocked loudly on the door with the hilt of his sword, and cried, "If any be within, open—in the name of the Earl!"

No voice replied, and Sholto boldly set his foot against the lower panelling, and drove the door back to the wall with a clang.

Then at sight of a something dark, wrapped in a cloak, standing motionless against the window, the young captain of the guard elevated his lamp, and let the flicker of the light fall on the erect figure and haughty face of a young man, who, with his hand on his hip, stood considering the rude advance of his pursuers with a calm and questioning gaze.

It was the Earl of Douglas himself.

Sholto stood petrified at sight of him, and for a long minute could in no wise recover his self-control nor regain any use of his tongue.

"Well," said the Earl, haughtily, "whence this unseemly uproar? What do you here, Sholto?"

Then the spirit of his father came upon the young captain of the guard. He knew that he had only done his duty in its strictness, and he boldly answered the Earl: "Nay, my lord, were it not for courtesy, I have more right to ask you that question. Your sister hath been frighted, and at sound of her terror all we who were dispersed throughout the castle rushed to the spot. As I came down the stairs from the roof at speed, I saw something like to a great wolf about to descend the turret before me. With my sword I struck at it, and to all appearance wounded it. It vanished, and after searching the castle I can find neither wolf nor dog. But I saw, as it seemed, a figure enter this room, and upon opening it I find—the Earl of Douglas. That is all I know, and I leave the matter in my lord's own hands."

The haughty look gradually disappeared from the face of the Earl as Sholto spoke.

Smilingly he dismissed the guard with a word, saying that he would inquire into the cause of the disturbance in person, and then turned to Sholto.

"You are right," he said, "you have entirely done your duty and justified my appointment."

He paused, looked this way and that along the corridor, and continued:

"It chanced that in the tower without I could not sleep, and feeling uneasy concerning my guests, I entered the castle by the private door and staircase which leads into the apartment corresponding to this on the floor beneath. I was assuring myself that you were doing your duty when, being disturbed by the sudden hubbub, and judging it needless that the men-at-arms should know of my presence in the castle, I came in hither till the matter should have blown over. And so, but for your good conscience and the keenness of your vision, the matter would have ended."

Sholto bowed coldly.

"But, my lord," he said, ignoring the Earl's explanation, "the matter grows more mysterious than ever. Your sister, the little Lady Margaret, hath been grievously frighted by an appearance like a great beast which (so she affirms) opened the door of her chamber and looked within."

"She but dreamed," said the Earl, carelessly; "such visions come from supping late."

"But, with all respect, your lordship," continued Sholto, "I also saw the appearance even as I ran down the stairs from the roof at the noise of her crying."

"You were startled—excited, and but thought you saw."

Sholto reversed his sword, which he had held with the point towards the ground while he was speaking with his lord the Earl.

Holding the blade midway with much deference, he presented the hilt to William Douglas.

"Will you examine the point of this sword?" he said.

The Earl came a step nearer to him and Sholto advanced the steel till it was immediately beneath the lamp. There was blood upon the last inch or so of the blade. The Earl suddenly became violently agitated.

"This is indeed passing strange. There is no hound within the castle nor has there been for years. Even the presence of a lap-dog will fret my mother, so in my father's time they were every one removed to the kennels at the further end of the isle of Thrieve, whence even their howling cannot be heard. But let us proceed to the Lady Margaret, and on our way examine the place where you saw the apparition."

Sholto stood aside for the Earl to pass, but with a wave of his hand the latter said courteously, "Nay, but do you lead the way, captain of the guard."

They passed the door of the chamber where lay the Lady Sybilla. The niece of the ambassador must have been a heavy sleeper, for there was no sound within. Opposite was the chamber of the Earl's mother. She also appeared to be undisturbed, but the increasing deafness of the Countess offered a complete explanation of her tranquillity.

Next the two young men came to the door of the marshal's chamber. As they were about to pass, it opened silently, and a man-servant with a closely cropped obsequious head appeared within. He unclosed the door no further than would permit of his exit, and then he shut it again behind him, and stood holding the latch in his hand.

"His Excellency, being overfatigued, hath need of a little strong spirit," he said, with a curious gobbling movement of his throat as if he himself had been either thirsty or in deadly and overmastering fear.

The Earl ordered Sholto to wake the cellarer and bid him bring the ambassador of France that which he required. He himself would go onward to his sister's chamber. Sholto somewhat sullenly obeyed, for his heart was hot and angry within him. He thought that he began to see clearly the motive of the Earl's presence in the castle. The youth was himself so deeply and hopelessly in love with Mistress Maud Lindesay that he could not understand any other of his sex being insensible to the charm of her beauty and myriad winsome graces.

As he went down the stairs he recalled a thousand circumstances to mind which now seemed capable of but one explanation. It was evident that the Earl William came to visit some one by means of the private staircase under cloud of night. Nay, more, Maud Lindesay and he might be already privately married, and the matter kept secret on account of the pride of his family, who devised another match for him. For though the daughter of a knight, Maud Lindesay was assuredly no fit mate for the head of the more than regal house of Douglas. He remembered how on Sundays and saints' days Earl William always rode to and from the kirk with his sister on one side and Maud Lindesay on the other. That the young Earl was by no means insensible to beauty, Sholto knew well, and he remembered his words to his own father, when he had asked to be allowed to accompany him on his Flanders mare, that such attendance was not seemly when a man was going a-courting.

As is always the case, he grew more and more confirmed in his ill humour, so soon as the eye of jealousy began to view everything in the light of prepossession.

Sholto awaked the cellarer out of his crib, who, presently, with snorts of disdain and much jangling of steel keys, drew half a tankard from a keg of spirit in the cellar on the dungeon floor and handed it grudgingly to the captain of the guard.

"The Frenchman wants it, does he?" he growled. "Had the messenger been old Landless Jock, I had known down whose Scottish throat it had gone, but this one is surely too young for such tricks. See that you spill it not by the way, Master Sholto," he called out after him, as that youth betook himself up to the chamber of the ambassador of France.

At the shut portal he paused and knocked. His hand was on the pin to enter with the tankard as was the custom. But the door opened no more than an inch or two, and the dark face of the cropped servitor appeared in the crevice.

"In a moment, sir," he said, and again vanished within, while a strong animal odour disengaged itself almost like something tangible from the chinks of the doorway.

Sholto stood in astonishment with the eau de vie in his hand, till presently the door was opened again very quickly. The form of the servitor was seen, and with a swift edging motion he came out, drawing the door behind him as before. He held a bar of iron in his hand like the fastening of a window, and a little breath of heat told the smith's son that though black it was still warm from the fire.

"Take this iron," he said abruptly, "and bring it to me fully heated. I am finishing a little device which his Excellency needs for the combat of the morrow."

The captain of the guard was nettled at the man's tone. Also he desired much to know what his master was doing on the floor above.

"Heat it at your own nose, fellow," he said rudely; "I am captain of the castle-guard, and must attend to my own business. Take the spirit out of my hand if you do not want it thrown in your face."

The swarthy, bullet-headed man glared at him with eyes like burning coals, but Sholto cared no jot for his anger. Forthwith he turned his back upon him, glad at heart to have found some one to quarrel with, and hoping that the ambassador's squire might prove courageous and challenge him to fight on the morrow.

But the man only replied: "I am Henriet, servant of the marshal. I bid you remember that I shall make you live to regret these words."

CHAPTER XVII

THE LAMP IS BLOWN OUT

The door of Margaret Douglas's chamber still stood open, and Sholto found Earl William seated upon the foot of the bed, endeavouring by every means in his power to distract his sister's attention from her fears. Maud Lindesay, now more completely dressed than when he had first seen her, sat on the other side of the little lady's couch. She was laughing as he entered at some merry jest of the Earl's. And at the sound of her tinkling mirth Sholto's heart sank within him. So soon as she caught sight of the new captain of the guard the gladness left her face, and she became grave and sober, like a gossip long unconfessed when the holy father comes knocking at the door.

At sight of her emotion Sholto resolved that if his fears should prove to be well founded, he would resign his honourable office. For to abide continually in the castle, and hourly observe Maud Lindesay's love for another, was more than his philosophy could stand.

In the meantime there was only his duty to be done. So he saluted the Earl, and in a few words told him that which he had seen. But the soul of William Douglas was utterly devoid of suspicion, both because he held himself so great that none could touch him, and also because, being high of spirit and open as the sky, he read into the acts of others his own straightforwardness and unsuspicion.

The Earl rose smilingly, declaring to Margaret that to-morrow he would hang every dog and puppy in Galloway on the dule tree of Thrieve, whereupon the child began to plead for the life of this cur and that other of her personal acquaintances with a tearful earnestness which told of a sorely jangled mind.

"Well, at least," cried Earl Douglas, "I will not have such brutes prowling about my castle of Thrieve even in my sister's dreams. Captain Sholto, do you station a man of your guard in the angle of the staircase where it looks along each corridor. Pick out your prettiest cross-bowmen, for it were not seemly that my guests should be disturbed by the rude shots and villanous reek of the fusil."

Sholto bowed stiffly and waited the further pleasure of his master. Then the two young men went out without Maud Lindesay having uttered a word, or manifested the least surprise at the advancement which had befallen the heir of the master armourer of Carlinwark.

As soon as the door had closed upon the two maidens, the Earl turned a face suddenly grave and earnest on his young captain of the guard.

"What think you," he said, "was this appearance real?"

"Real enough to leave these upon the floor," answered Sholto, pointing to sundry gouts and drops of blood upon the turret stairs.

The Earl took the lamp from his hand and earnestly scrutinised each step in a downward direction. The spots ran irregularly as if the wounded beast had shaken his head from side to side as he ran. They turned along towards the corridor where at the first alarm Sholto had found the Earl, and in the very midst of it abruptly stopped. While Sholto and William Douglas were examining the floor, they both looked over their shoulders, uneasily conscious of a regard upon them, as if some one, unseen himself, had been looking down from behind.

"Do you place your men as I told you," said the Earl, abruptly, "and bring me a truckle bed out of the guardroom. I shall remain in this closet till morning. But do you keep a special lookout on the floor above, that the repose of my sister and her friend be not again disturbed."

Sholto bowed without speech, and hastening down to the guardroom he commanded two of his best bowmen to follow him with their apparatus, while he himself snatched up the low truckle couch which custom assigned to the captain of the guard should he desire to rest himself during the night, and on which Landless Jock had always passed the majority of his hours of duty. This he carried to the Earl, and placing it in the angle he saw his youthful master stretch himself upon it, wrapped in his cloak and with a naked sword ready to his hand.

"A good and undisturbed slumber to you, my lord," said Sholto, curtly, as he went out.

He saw that his two men were duly posted upon the lower landing of the stair, and then betook himself to the upper floor where slept the little Maid of Galloway.

He walked slowly to the end of the passage scrutinising every recess and closet door, every garde-robe and wall press from which it was possible that the beast he had seen might have emerged. He was wholly unsuccessful in discovering anything suspicious, and had almost resolved to station himself at the turn of the staircase which led down from the roof, when, looking back, at the sharp click of a latch, he saw Maud Lindesay coming out of the chamber of the little Maid of Galloway.

Softly closing the door behind her, she paused a moment as if undecided, and then more with her chin than with her finger she beckoned him to approach.

"She sleeps," said the girl, softly, "but so uncertainly and with so many startings of terror, that I will not leave her alone. Will you aid me to remove the mattress of my couch and lay it on the floor beside her?"

Sholto signified his willingness. His mind was more than ever oppressed by the thought that the Earl of Douglas loved this girl, whom he had found listening to his jests with such frank joyousness.

Maud stayed him with one of the long looks out from under her eyelashes. The dark violet orbs rested upon him a moment reproachfully with a hurt expression in their depths, and were then dropped with a sigh.

"You are still angry with me," she said, a little wistfully, "and I wanted to tell you how happy it made me—made us, I mean—when we heard that you were to be captain of the castle-guard instead of that grumbling old curmudgeon, Jock of Abernethy."

The heart of Sholto was instantly melted, more by her looks than by her words, though deep within him he had still an angry feeling that he was being played with. All the same, and in spite of his resolves, the eyeshot from under those dark and sweeping lashes did its usual and deadly work.

"I did not know that aught which might befall me could be anything to Mistress Maud Lindesay," said Sholto, with the last shreds of dignity in his voice.

"I said not to me, but to us," she corrected, smiling; "but tell me what think you of this appearance which has so startled our Margaret. Was it ghost or goblin or dream of the night? We have never had either witch or warlock about the house of Thrieve since the old Abbot Gawain laid the ghost of Archibald the Grim with four-and-forty masses, said without ever breaking his fast, down there in the castle chapel."

"Nay, ask me not," answered Sholto, "I am little skilled in matters spiritual. I should try sword point and arrowhead on such gentry, and if these do them no harm, why then I think they will not distress me much."

But all the same he said nothing to the girl about the red blood on his sword or the splashed gouts on the steps of the staircase.

He followed Maud Lindesay into her chamber, and being arrived there, lifted couch and all in his arms, with an ease born of long apprenticeship to the forehammer. The girl regarded him with admiration which she was careful not to dissemble.

"You are very strong," she said. Then, after a pause, she added, "Margaret and I like strong men."

The heart of the youth was glad within him, thus to be called a man, even though he kept saying over and over to himself: "She means it not! She means it not! She loves the Earl! I know well she loves the Earl!"

Maud Lindesay paused a moment before the chamber door of her little charge, finger on lip, listening.

"She sleeps—go quietly," she whispered, holding the door open for him. He set down the bed where she showed him—by the side of the small slumbering figure of the Maid of Galloway.

Then he went softly to the door. The girl followed him. "You will not be far away," she said doubtfully and with a perilous sort of humility, "if this dreadful thing should come back again? I—that is we, would feel safer if we knew that you—that any one strong and brave was near at hand."

Then the heart of Sholto broke out in quick anger.

"Deceive me not," he cried, "I know well that the Earl loves you, and that you love him in return."

"Well, indeed, were it for my lord Earl if he loved as honest a woman," said Maud Lindesay, pouting disdainfully. "But what is such a matter, yea or nay, to you?"

"It is all life and happiness to me," said Sholto, earnestly. "Ah, do not go—stay a moment. I shall never sleep this night if you go without giving me an answer."

"Then," said the girl, "you will be the more in the line of your duty, which allows not much sleep o' nights. You are but a silly, petulant boy for all your fine captaincy. I wish it had been Landless Jock. He would never have vexed me with foolish questions at such a time."

"But I love you, and I demand an answer," cried Sholto, fuming. "Do you love the Earl?"

"What do you think yourself now?" she said, looking up at him with an inimitable slyness, and pronouncing her words so as to imitate the broad simplicity of countryside speech.

Sholto vented a short gasp or inarticulate snort of anger, at which Maud Lindesay started back with affected terror.

"Do not fright a poor maid," she said. "Will you put me in the castle dungeon if I do not answer? Tell me exactly what you want me to say, and I will say it, most mighty captain."

And she made him the prettiest little courtesy, turning at the same time her eyes in mock humility on the ground.

"Oh, Maud Lindesay," said Sholto, with a little conflicting sob in his throat, ill becoming so noted a warrior as the captain of the castle-guard of the Black Douglas, "if you knew how I loved you, you would not treat me thus."

The girl came nearer to him and laid a white and gentle hand on the sleeve of his blue archer's coat.

"Nay, lad," she said more soberly, lifting a finger to his face, "surely you are no milksop to mind how a girl flouts you. Love the Earl—say you? Well, is it not our duty to the bread we eat? Is he not worthy? Is he not the head of our house?"

"Cheat me not with words. The Earl loves you," said Sholto, lifting his head haughtily out of her reach. (To have one's chin pushed this way and that by a girl's forefinger, and as it were considered critically from various points of view, may be pleasant, but it interferes most seriously with dignity.)

"He may, indeed," drolled the minx, "one can never tell. But he has never said so. He is perhaps afraid, being born without the self-conceit of some people—archers of the guard, fledgling captains, and such-like gentrice."

"Do you love him?" reiterated Sholto, determinedly.

"I will tell you for that gold buckle," said Maud, calmly pointing with her finger.

Instantly Sholto pulled the cap from his head, undid the pin of the archery prize, and thrust it into his wicked sweetheart's hands.

She received it with a little cry of joy, then she pressed it to her lips. Sholto, rejoicing at heart, moved a step nearer to her. But, in spite of her arch delight, she was on the alert, for she retreated deftly and featly within the chamber door of the Fair Maid of Galloway. There was still more mirthful wickedness in her eyes.

"Love the Earl?—Of course I do. Indeed, I doat upon him," she said. "How I shall love this buckle, just because his hand gave it to you!"

And with that she shut to the door.

Sholto, in act to advance, stood a moment poised on one foot like a goose. Then with a heart blazing with anger, and one of the first oaths that had ever passed his lips, he turned on his heel and strode away.

"I will never think of her again—I will never see her. I will go to France and perish in battle. I will throw me in the castle pool. I will—"

So the poor lad retreated, muttering hot and angry words, all his heart sore within him because of the cruelty of this girl.

But he had not proceeded twenty steps along the corridor, when he heard the door softly open and a low voice whispered, "Sholto! Sholto! I want you, Sholto!"

He bent his brows and strode manfully on as if he had not heard a word.

"Sholto!—dear Sholto! Do not go, I need you."

Against his will he turned, and, seeing the head of Maud Lindesay, her pouting lips and beckoning finger, he went sulkily back.

"Well?" he said, with the stern curtness of a military commander, as he stood before her.

She held the iron lamp in her hand. The wick had fallen aside and was now wasting itself in a broad, unequal yellow flame. The maid of honour looked at it in perplexity, knitting her pretty brows in a mock frown.

"It burned me as I was ordering my hair," she said. "I cannot blow it out. I dare not. Will you—will you blow it out for me, Captain Sholto?"

She spoke with a sweet childlike humility.

And she held the lamp up so that the iron handle was almost touching her soft cheek. There was a dancing challenge in her dark eyes and her lips smiled dangerously red. She could not, of course, have known that the light made her look so beautiful, or she would have been more careful.

Sholto stood still a moment, at wrestle with himself, trying to conquer his dignity, and to retain his attitude of stern disapproval.

But the girl swept her lashes up towards him, dropped them again dark as night upon her cheek, and anon looked a second time at him.

"I am sorry," she said, more than ever like a child. "Forgive me, and—the lamp is so hot."

Now Sholto was young and inexperienced, but he was not quite a fool. He stooped and blew out the light, and the next moment his lips rested upon other lips which, as it had been unconsciously, resigned their soft sweetness to his will.

Then the door closed, and he heard the click of the lock as the bolts were shot from within. The gallery ran round and round about him like a clacking wheel. His heart beat tumultuously, and there was a strange humming sound in his ears.

The captain of the guard stumbled half distracted down the turret stair.

The old world had been destroyed in a moment and he was walking in a new, where perpetual roses bloomed and the spring birds sang for evermore. He knew not, this poor foolish Sholto, that he had much to learn ere he should know all the tricks and stratagems of this most naughty and prettily disdainful minx, Mistress Maud Lindesay.

But for that night at least he thought he knew her heart and soul, which made him just as happy.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MORNING LIGHT

In the morning Sholto MacKim had other views of it. Even when at last he was relieved from duty he never closed an eye. The blowing out of the lamp had turned his ideas and hopes all topsy-turvy. His heart sang loud and turbulent within him. He had kissed other girls indeed before at kirns and country dances. He laughed triumphantly within him at the difference. They had run into corners and screamed and struggled, and held up ineffectual hands. And when his lips did reach their goal, it was generally upon the bridge of a nose or a tip of an ear. He could not remember any especial pleasure accompanying the rite.

But this! The bolt of an arbalast could not have given him a more instant or tremendous shock. His nerves still quivered responsive to the tremulous yielding of the lips he had touched for a moment in the dark of the doorway. He felt that never could he be the same man he had been before. Deep in his heart he laughed at the thought.

And then again, with a quick revulsion, the return wave came upon him. "How, if she be as untouched as her beauty is fresh, has she learned that skill in caressing?"

He paused to think the matter over.

"I remember my father saying that a wise man should always mistrust a girl who kisses overwell."

Then again his better self would reassert itself.

"No," he would argue, tramping up and down the corridor, wheeling in the short bounds of the turnpike head, and again returning upon his own footsteps, "why should I belie her? She is as pure as the air—only, of course, she is different to all others. She speaks differently; her eyes are different, her hair, her hands—why should she not be different also in this?"

But when Maud Lindesay met Sholto in the morning, coming suddenly upon him as he stood, with a pale face and dark rings of sleeplessness about his eyes, as he looked meditatively out upon the broad river and the blue smoke of the morning campfires, there was yet another difference to be revealed to him. He had expected that, like others, she would be confused and bashful meeting him thus in the daylight, after—well, after the volcanic extinguishing of the lamp.

But there she stood, dainty and calm under the morning sunshine, in fresh clean gown of lace and varied whiteness, her face grave as a benediction, her eyes deep and cool like the water of the castle well.

Sholto started violently at sight of her, recovered himself, and eagerly held out both his hands.

"Maud," he said hoarsely, and then again, in a lower tone, "sweetest Maud."

But pretty Mistress Lindesay only gazed at him with a certain reserved and grave surprise, looking him straight in the face and completely ignoring his outstretched hands.

"Captain Sholto," she said steadily and calmly, "the Lady Margaret desires to see you and to thank you for your last night's care and watchfulness. Will you do me the honour to follow me to her chamber?"

There was no yielding softness about this maiden of the morning hours, no conscious droop and a swift uplifting of penitent eyelids, no lingering glances out of love-weighted eyes. A brisk and practical little lady rather, her feet pattering most purposefully along the flagged passages and skipping faster than even Sholto could follow her. But at the top of the second stairs he was overquick for her. By taking the narrow edges of the steps he reached the landing level with his mistress.

His desire was to put out his hand to circle her lithe waist, for nothing is so certainly reproductive of its own species as a first kiss. But he had reckoned without the lady's mutual intent and favour, which in matters of this kind are proverbially important. Mistress Maud eluded him, without appearing to do so, and stood farther off, safely poised for flight, looking down at him with cold, reproachful eyes.

"Maud Lindesay, have you forgotten last night and the lamp?" he asked indignantly.

"What may you mean, Captain Sholto?" she said, with wonderment in her tone, "Margaret and I never use lamps. Candles are so much safer, especially at night."

CHAPTER XIX

LA JOYEUSE BAITS HER HOOK

On the morrow, the ambassador of France being confined to his room with a slight quinsy caught from the marshy nature of the environment of Thrieve, the Earl escorted the Lady Sybilla to the field of the tourney, where, as Queen of Beauty, her presence could not be dispensed with.

The Maid Margaret, the Earl's sister, remained also in the castle, not having yet recovered from her fright of the preceding evening.

With her was Maud Lindesay and her mother—"the Auld Leddy," as she was called throughout all the wide dominions of her son.

In spite of his weariness Sholto led his archer guard in person to the field of the tournament. For this day was the day of the High Sport, and many lances would be splintered, and often would the commonalty need to be scourged from the barriers.

But ere he went Sholto summoned two of the staunchest fellows of his company, Andro, called the Penman, and his brother John. Then, having posted them at either end of the corridor in which were the chambers occupied by the two girls, he laid a straight charge, and a heavy, upon them.

"On your heads be it if you fail, or let one soul pass," he said. "Stand ready with your hands on the wheel of your cross-bows, and if any man come hither, challenge him to stand, and bid him return the way he came. But if any dog or thing running on four feet ascend or descend the stair, make no sound, ask no question, cry no warning, but whang the steel bolt through his ribs, in at one side and out at the other."

Then Andro the Penman and his brother John, being silent capable fellows, said nothing, but spat on their hands, smiled at each other well pleased, and made the wheels of their cross-bows sing a clear whirring note.

"I would not like to be that dog—" said Andro the Swarthy.

"Whose foul carcase I pray God to send speedily," echoed John the Blond.

Sholto had hoped that whilst he was at the guard-setting, he might have had occasion to see once more the tantalising mischief-maker whom he yet loved with all his heart, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the distraction to which she continually reduced his spirit by means of her manifold and incalculable contrarieties.

Nevertheless, it was with an easier heart that Sholto wended his way out of the castle yett, all arrayed in the new suit of armour his lord had sent him. It was made of chain of the finest, composed of many rings set alternately thick and thin, and the whole was flexible as the deer leather which he wore underneath it. Over this a doublet of blue silk carried the Lion of Galloway done in white upon it, and all the cerulean of the ground was dotted over with the Douglas heart. But, greatest joy of all, there was brought to him by command of the Earl a suitable horse, not heavily armed like a charger for the tilt, but light of foot, and answering easily to the hand. Blue and red were the silken housings, fringed with long silver lace, through which could be seen here and there as the wind blew the sheen of the glossy skin. The buckles and bits were also of massive silver, and at sight of them the cup of Sholto's happiness was full. For a space, as he gazed upon his steed, he forgot even Maud Lindesay.

Then when he was mounted and out upon the green, waiting for the coming forth of his lord, what delight it was to feel the noble dark grey answer to each touch of the rein, obeying his master's thought more than the strength of his wrist or the prick of his heel.

As he waited there, his predecessor in office, old Sir John of Abernethy, Landless Jock as he was nicknamed, came out from the main doorway. He carried a gleaming headpiece from which the blue feather of the Douglas fell over his arm half-way to the ground. On its front was a lion crest which ramped among golden fleur-de-lys. The old man held it up for Sholto to take.

"Hae," he said in a surly tone, "this is his lordship's new helmet just brought as a present frae the Dauphin of France. So he has cast off the well-tried one, and with it also the auld servant that hath served him these many years."

"Nay, Sir John," said Sholto, with courtesy, taking the helmet which it was his duty as his master's esquire to carry before him on a velvet-covered placque, "nay—well has the good servant deserved his rest, and to take his ease. The young to the broil and the moil, the old to the inglenook and the cup of wine beneath the shade."

"Ah, lad, I envy ye not, think not that of puir Landless Jock," said the mollified old man, sadly shaking his head; "I also have tried the new office, the shining armour, and felt the words of command rise proudly in the throat. I envy you not, though your advancement hath been sudden—and well—for my own son John I had hoped, though indeed the loon is paper backed and feckless. But now there remains for me only to go to the Kirk of Saint Bride in Douglasdale, and there set me down by my auld master's coffin till I die."

At that moment there issued forth from the gateway the young Earl, holding by the hand the Lady Sybilla. His mother, the Countess, came to the door to see them ride away. The Queen of the Sports was in a merry mood, and as she tripped down the steps she turned, and looking over her shoulder she called to the Lady Douglas, "Fear not for your son, I will take good care of him!"

But the elder woman answered neither her smile nor yet her word, but stood like a mother who sees a first-born son treading in places perilous, yet dares not warn him, knowing well that she would drive him to giddier and yet more dangerous heights.

The pennons of the escort fluttered in the breeze as the men on horseback tossed their lances high in the air, in salutation of their lord. The archer guard stood ranked and ready, bows on their shoulders and arrows in quiver. Horses neighed, armour clanked and sparkled, and from the moat platform twenty silver trumpets blared a fanfare as the Lady Sybilla, the arbiter of this day's chivalry, mounted her palfrey with the help of Earl Douglas. She thanked him with a low word in his ear, audible only to himself, as he set her in the saddle and bent to kiss her hand.

A right gallant pair were Douglas and Sybilla de Thouars as they rode away, their heads close together, over the green sward and under the tossing banners of the bridge. Sholto was behind them giving great heed to the managing of his horse, and wondering in his heart if indeed Maud Lindesay were looking down from her chamber window. As they passed the drawbridge he turned him about in his saddle, as it were, to see that his men rode all in good order. A little jet of white fluttered quickly from the sparred wooden gallery which clung to the grey walls of Thrieve, just outside the highest story. And the young man's heart told him that this was the atonement of Mistress Maud Lindesay.

Earl Douglas was in his gayest humour on this second day of the great tourneying. He had got rid of his most troublesome guests. His uncle James of Avondale, his red cousin of Angus, the grave ill-assorted figure of the Abbot of Dulce Cor, had all vanished. Only the young and chivalrous remained,—his cousins, William and James, Hugh and Archibald, good lances all and excellent fellows to boot. It was also a most noble chance that the French ambassador was confined by the quinsy, for it was certainly pleasant to ride out alone with that beauteous head glancing so near his shoulder, to watch at will the sun crimsoning yet more the red lips, sparkling in the eyes that were bright as sunshine slanting through green leaves on a water-break, and to mark as he fell a pace behind how every hair of that luxuriant coif rippled golden and separate, like a halo of Florentine work about the head of a saint.

The Lady Sybilla de Thouars was merry also, but with what a different mirth to that of Mistress Maud Lindesay—at least so thought Captain Sholto MacKim, with a conscious glow of pride in his own Scottish sweetheart.

True, Sholto was scarce a fair judge in that he loved one and did not love the other. He owned to himself in a moment of unusual candour that there might be something in that. But when the gay tones of the lady's laughter floated back on the air, as his master and she rode forward by the edge of Dee towards the Lochar Fords, the first fear with which he had looked upon her in the greenwood returned upon the captain of the guard.

Earl William and the Lady Sybilla talked together that which no one else could hear.

"So after all you have not become a churchman and gone off to drone masses with the monks of your good uncle?" she said, looking up at him with one of her lingering, drawing glances.

"Nay," Earl William answered; "surely one Douglas at the time is gift enough to holy church. At least, I can choose my own way in that, though in most things I am as straitly constrained as the King himself."

"Speaking of the King," she said, "my uncle the Marshal must perforce ride to Edinburgh to deliver his credentials. Would it not be a most mirthful jest to ride with equipage such as this to that mongrel poverty-stricken Court, and let the poor little King and his starved guardian see what true greatness and splendour mean?"

"I have sworn never again to enter Edinburgh town," said the Earl, slowly; "it was prophesied that there one of my race must meet a black bull which shall trample the house of Douglas into ruins."

"Of course, if the Earl of Douglas is afraid—" mused the lady. The young man started as if he had been stung.

"Madame," he said with a sudden chill hauteur, "you come from far and do not know. No Douglas has ever been afraid throughout all their generations."

The lady turned upon him with a sweet and moving smile. She held out her fair hand.

"Pardon—nay, a thousand pardons. I knew not what I said. I am not acquainted with your Scottish speech nor yet with your Scottish customs. Do not be angry with me; I am a stranger, young, far from my own people and my own land. Think me foolish for speaking thus freely if you like, but not wilfully unkind."

And when the Earl looked at her, there were tears glittering in her beautiful eyes.

"I will go to Edinburgh," he cried. "I am the Douglas. The Tutor and the Chancellor are but as two straws in my hand, a longer and a shorter. I fling them from me—thus!"

The Lady Sybilla clapped her hands joyously and turned towards the young man. "Will you indeed go with me?" she cried. "Will you truly? I could kiss your hand, my Lord Douglas, you make me so glad."

"Your kiss will keep," said the Earl, with a quiet passion quivering in his voice.

"Nay, I meant it not thus—not as you mean it. I knew not what I said. But it will indeed change all things for me if you do but come. Then I shall have some one to speak with—some one with whom to laugh at their pitiful Court mummery, their fiasco of dignity. You are not like these other beggarly Scots, my Lord Duke of Touraine."

"They are brave men and loyal gentlemen," said the generous young Earl. "They would die for me."

"Nay, but so I declare would I," gaily cried the lady, glancing at his handsome head with a quick admiring regard. "So would I—if I were a man. Besides, there is so little worth living for in a country such as this."

The Earl was silent and she proceeded.

"But how joyous we shall be at Edinburgh! Know you that at the Court of Charles that was my name—La Joyeuse they called me. We will keep solemn countenances, you and I, while we enter the presence of the King. We will bow. We will make obeisances. Then, when all is over, we will laugh together at the fatted calf of a Tutor, the cunning Chancellor with his quirks of law, and the poor schoolboy scarce breeched whom they call King of Scotland. But all the while I shall be thinking of the true King of Scots—who alone shall ever be King to me—"

At this point La Joyeuse broke off short, as if her feelings were hurrying her to say more than she had intended.

"I did wrong to flout their messengers yesterday," said William Douglas, his boyish heart misgiving him at dispraise of others; "perhaps they meant me well. But I am naturally quick and easily fretted, and the men annoyed me with their parchments royal, their heralds-of-the-Lion, and the 'King of Scots' at every other word."

"Who is the youth who rides at the head of your company?" said the Lady Sybilla.

"His name is Sholto MacKim, and it was but yesterday that I made him captain of my guard," answered the Earl.

"I like him not," said the Lady Sybilla; "he is full of ignorance and obstinacy and pride. Besides which, I am sure he loves me not."

"Save that last, I am not sure that a Douglas has a right to dislike him for any such faults. Ignorance, obstinacy, and pride are, indeed, good old Galloway virtues of the ancientest descent, and not to be despised in the captain of an archer guard."

"And pray, sir, what may be the ill qualities which, in Captain Sholto, make up for these excellent Scottish virtues?" asked the lady, disdainfully.

"He is faithful—" began the Earl.

"So is every dog!" interjected Sybilla de Thouars.

The Earl laughed a little gay laugh.

"There is one dog somewhere about the castle, licking an unhealed sword-thrust, that wishes our Sholto had been a trifle less faithful."

The Lady Sybilla sat silent in her saddle for a space; then, striking abruptly into a new subject, she said, "Do you defend the lists to-day?"

"Nay," answered the Earl, "to-day it is my good fortune to sit by your side and hold the truncheon while others meet in the shock. But the knight who this day gains the prize, to-morrow must choose a side against me and fight a mêlée."

"Ah," cried the girl, "I would that my uncle were healed of his quinsy. He loveth that sport. He says that he is too old to defend his shield all day against every comer, but in the mêlée he is still as good a lance as when he rode by the side of the Maid over the bridge of Orleans."

"That is well thought of," cried the Earl; "he shall lead the Knights of the Blue in my place."

"Nay, my Lord Duke," cried the Lady Sybilla, "more than anything on earth I desire to see you bear arms on the field of honour."

"Oh, I am no great lance," replied the Douglas, modestly; "I am yet too young and light. As things go now, the butterfly cannot tilt against the beef barrel when both are trussed into armour. But with the bare sword I will fight all day and be hungry for more. Aye, or rattle a merry rally with the quarter-staff like any common varlet. But at both Sholto there is my master, and doth ofttimes swinge me tightly for my soul's good."

The lady went on quickly, as if avoiding any further mention of Sholto's name.

"Nevertheless, to-morrow I must see you ride in the lists. My uncle says that your father was a mighty lance when he rode at Amboise, on the famous day of the Thirteen Victories."

"Ah, but my father was twice the man that I am," said the Earl, who had not taken his eyes from her face since she began to speak.

"Great alike in love and war?" she queried, smiling.

"So, at least, it is reported of him in Touraine," answered his son, smiling back at her.

"He loved and rode away, like all your race!" cried the girl, with a strange sudden flicker of passion which died as suddenly. "But I think it not of you, Lord William. I know you could be true—that is, where you truly loved."

And as she spoke she looked at him with a questioning eagerness in her eyes which was almost pitiful.

"I do love and I am loyal," said the young man, with a grave quiet which became him well, and ought to have served him better with a woman than many protestations.

CHAPTER XX

ANDRO THE PENMAN GIVES AN ACCOUNT OF HIS STEWARDSHIP

In the fighting of that day James Douglas, the second son of the fat Earl of Avondale, won the prize, worsting his elder brother William in the final encounter. The victor was a nobly formed youth, of strength and stature greater than those of his brother, but without William of Avondale's haughty spirit and stern self-discipline.

For James Douglas had the easy popular virtues which would drink with any drawer or pricker at a tavern board, and made him ready to clap his last gold Lion on the platter to pay for the draught—telling, as like as not, the good gossip of the inn to keep the change, and (if well favoured) give him a kiss therefor. The Douglas cortège rode home amid the shoutings of the holiday makers who thronged all the approaches to the ford in order to see the great nobles and their trains ride by, and Sholto and his men had much trouble to keep these spectators as far back as was decent and seemly.

The Earl summoned his victorious cousins, William and James, to ride with him and the tourney's Queen of Beauty. But William proved even more silent than usual, and his dark face and upright carriage caused him to sit his charger as if carved in iron. Jolly James, on the other hand, attempted a jest or two which savoured rustically enough. Nevertheless, he received the compliments of the Lady Sybilla on his courage and address with the equanimity of a practised soldier. He was already, indeed, the best knight in Scotland, even as he was twelve years after when in the lists of Stirling he fought with the famous Messire Lalain, the Burgundian champion.

Earl William dropped behind to speak a moment with Sholto, and to give him the orders which he was to convey to the provost of the games with regard to the encounter of the morrow.

La Joyeuse took the opportunity of addressing her nearer and more silent companion.

"You are, I think, the head of the other Douglas House," said the Lady Sybilla, glancing up at the stern and unbending Master of Avondale.

"There is but one house of Douglas, and but one head thereof," replied Lord William, with a certain severity, and without looking at her. The lady had the grace to blush, either with shame or with annoyance at the rebuff.

"Pardon," she said, "you must remember that I am a foreigner. I do not understand your genealogies. I thought that even in France I had heard of the Black Douglas and the Red."

"The Red and the Black alike are the liegemen of William of Douglas, whom Angus and Avondale both have the honour of serving," answered he, still more uncompromisingly.

"Aye," cried the jovial James, "cousin Will is the only chief, and will make a rare lance when he hath eaten a score or two more bolls of meal."

The Earl William returned even as James was speaking.

"What is that I hear about bolls of meal?" he said; "what wots this fair damosel of our rude Scots measures for oats and bear? You talk like the holder of a twenty-shilling land, James."

"I was saying," answered James Douglas, "that you would be a proper man of your lance when you had laid a score or two bolls of good Galloway meal to your ribs. English beef and beer are excellent, and drive a lance home into an unarmed foe; but it needs good Scots oats at the back of the spear-haft to make the sparks fly when knight meets with knight and iron rings on iron."

"Indeed, cousin Jamie," said the Earl, "you have some right to your porridge, for this day you have overturned well nigh a score of good knights and come off unhurt and unashamed. Cousin William, how liked you the whammel you got from James' lance in your final course?"

"Not that ill," said the silent Master; "I am indeed better at taking than at giving. James is a stouter lance than I shall ever be—"

"Not so," cried jolly James. "Our Will never doth himself justice. He is for ever reading Deyrolles and John Froissard in order to learn new ways and tricks of fence, which he practises on the tilting ground, instead of riding with a tight knee and the weight of his body behind the shaft of ash. That is what drives the tree home, and so he gets many a coup. Yet to fall, and to be up and at it again, is by far the truer courage."

The Lady Sybilla laughed, as it seemed, heartily, yet with some little bitterness in the sound of it.

"I declare you Douglases stick together like crabs in a basket. Cousins in France do not often love each other so well. You are fortunate in your relations, my Lord Duke."

"Indeed, and that I am," cried the young man, joyously. "Here be my cousins, William and James—Will ever ready to read me out of wise books and advise me better than any clerk, Jamie aching to drive lance through any man's midriff in my quarrel."

"Lord, I would that I had the chance!" cried James. "Saint Bride! but I would make a hole clean through him and out at the back, though my elbuck should dinnle for a week after."

So talking together, but with the lady riding more silent and somewhat constrainedly in their midst, the three cousins of Douglas passed the drawbridge and came again to the precincts of the noble towers of Thrieve.

In an hour Sholto followed them, having ridden fast and furious across the long broomy braes of Boreland, and wet the fringes of his charger's silken coverture by vaingloriously swimming the Dee at the castle pool instead of going round by the fords. This he did in the hope that Maud Lindesay might see him. And so she did; for as he came round by the outside of the moat, making his horse caracole and thinking no little of himself, he heard a voice from an upper window call out: "Sholto MacKim, Maudie says that you look like a draggled crow. No, I will not be silent."

Then the words were shut off as if a hand had been set over the mouth which spoke. But presently the voice out of the unseen came again: "And I hate you, Sholto MacKim. For we have had to keep in our chamber this livelong day, because of the two men you have placed over us, as if we had been prisoners in Black Archibald.[1] This very day I am going to ask my brother to hang Black Andro and John his brother on the dule tree of Carlinwark."

[1] The pet name of the deepest dungeon of Castle Thrieve, yet extant and plain to be seen by all.

"Yes, indeed, and most properly," cried another voice, which made his very heart flutter, "and set his new captain of the guard a-dangle in the midst, decked out from head to foot in peacocks' feathers."

Sholto was very angry, for like a boy he took not chaffing lightly, and had neither the harshness of hide which can endure the rasping of a woman's tongue, nor the quickness of speech to give her the counter retort.

So he cast the reins of his horse to a stable varlet and stamped indoors, carrying his master's helmet to the armoury. Then still without speech to any he brushed hastily up the stairs towards the upper floor, which he had set Andro the Penman and his brother to guard.

At the turning of the staircase David Douglas, the Earl's brother, stopped him. Sholto moved in salute and would have passed by.

But David detained him with an impetuous hand.

"What is this?" he said; "you have set two archers on the stairs who have shot and almost killed the ambassador's two servants, Poitou the man-at-arms, and Henriet the clerk, just because they wished to take the air upon the roof. Nay, even when I would have visited my sister, I was not permitted—'None passes here save the Earl himself, till our captain takes his orders off us!' That was the word they spoke. Was ever the like done in the castle of Thrieve to a Master of Douglas before?"

"I am sorry, my Lord David," said Sholto, respectfully, "but there were matters within the knowledge of the Earl which caused him to lay this heavy charge upon me."

"Well," said the lad, quickly relenting, "let us go and see Margaret now. She must have been lonely all this fair day of summer."

But Sholto smiled, well pleased, thinking of Maud Lindesay.

"I would that I had a lifetime of such loneliness as Margaret's hath been this day," he said to himself.

At the turning of the stair they were stayed, for there, his foot advanced, his bow ready to deliver its steel bolt at the clicking of a trigger, stood Andro the Swarthy.

From his stance he commanded the stair and could see along the corridor as well.

David Douglas caught his elbow on something which stood a few inches out of the oaken panelling of the turnpike wall. He tried to pull it out. It was the steel quarrel of a cross-bow wedged firmly into the wood and masonry. He cried: "Whence came this? Have you been murdering any other honest men?"

The archer stood silent, glancing this way and that like a sentinel on duty. The two young men went on up the stair.

As their feet were approaching the sixth step, a sudden word came from the Penman like a bolt from his bow.

"Halt!" he cried, and they heard the gur-r-r-r of his steel ratchet.

Sholto smiled, for he knew the nature of the man.

"It is I, your captain," he said. "You have done your duty well, Andro the Penman. Now get down to your dinner. But first give an account of your adventures."

"Do you relieve us from our charge?" said the archer, with his bow still at the ready.

"Certainly," quoth Sholto.

"Come, Jock, we are eased," cried Andro the Swarthy up the stair, and he slid the steel bolt out of its grip with a little click; "faith, my belly is toom as a last year's beef barrel."

"Did any come hither to vex you?" asked Sholto.

"Not to speak of," said the archer; "there were, indeed, two varlets of the Frenchmen, and as they would not take a bidding to stand, I had perforce to send a quarrel buzzing past their lugs into the wall. You can see it there behind you."

"Rascal," cried David Douglas, indignantly, "you do not say that first of all you shot it through the arm of the poor clerk Henriet."

"It is like enough," said Andro, coolly, "if his arm were in the way."

Then came a voice down the stairs from above.

"And the wretches would neither let any come to visit us nor yet permit us to go into the hall that we might speak with our gossips."

"How should we be responsible with our lives for the lasses if we had let them gad about?" said Andro, preparing to salute and take himself off.

At this moment the little maid and her elder companion came forward meekly and kneeled down before Sholto.

"We are your humble prisoners," said Maud Lindesay, "and we know that our offences against your highness are most heinous; but why should you starve us to death? Burn us or hang us,—we will bear the extreme penalty of the law gladly,—but torture is not for women. For dear pity's sake, a bite of bread. We have had nothing to eat all day, except two lace kerchiefs and a neck riband."

"Lord of Heaven," cried Sholto, swinging on his heel and darting down towards the kitchen, "what a fool unutterable I am!"

CHAPTER XXI

THE BAILIES OF DUMFRIES

The combat of the third day was, by the will of the Earl, to be of a peculiar kind. It was the custom at that time for the mêlée to be fought between an equal number of knights in open lists, each being at liberty to carry assistance to his friends as soon as he had disposed of his own man. On this occasion, however, the fight was to be between three knights with their several squires on the one side, and an equal number of knights and squires on the other.

As the combat of the previous day had decided, young James Douglas of Avondale was to lead one party, being the successful tilter of the day of single combat, while the Earl himself was to head the other.

The chances of battle must be borne, and whatever happened in the shock of fight was to be endured without complaint. But no blow was to be struck at either knight or squire in any way disabled by wound.

To Sholto's great and manifest joy the Earl, his master, chose the new captain of his guard to support him in the fray, and told him to make choice of the best battle-axe and sword he could find, as well as to provide himself with the shield which most suited the strength of his left arm.

"By your permission I will ask my father," said Sholto.

"He also fights on our side as the squire of Alan Fleming," said the Earl; "if Laurence had not been a monk, he might have made a third MacKim."

Then was Sholto's heart high and uplifted within him, to think of the victory he would achieve over his brother less than two days after they had parted, and he hastened off to choose his arms under the direction of his father.

The party of James of Avondale consisted of his brother William and young John Lauder, called Lauder of the Bass. These three had already entered their pavilion to accoutre themselves for the combat when a trumpet announced the arrival from the castle of the ambassador of France, who, being recovered from his sickness, had come in haste to see the fighting of the last and greatest day of the tourney.

As soon as he heard the wager of battle the marshal cried: "I also will strike a blow this day for the honour of France. My quinsy has altogether left me, and my blood flows strong after the rest. I will take part with James of Avondale."

And, without waiting to be asked, he went off followed by his servant Poitou towards the pavilion of the Avondale trio.

Now as the Marshal de Retz was the chief guest, it was impossible for James of Avondale to refuse his offer. But there was anger and blasphemy in his heart, for he knew not what the Frenchman could do, and though he had undoubtedly been a gallant knight in his day, yet in these matters (as James Douglas whispered to his brother) a week's steady practice is worth a lifetime of theory. Still there was nothing for the brothers from Douglasdale but to make the best of their bargain. The person most deserving of pity, however, was the young laird of the Bass, who, being thus dispossessed, went out to the back of the lists and actually shed tears, being little more than a boy, and none looking on to see him.

Then he came back hastily, and besought James of Douglas to let him fight as his squire, saying that as he had never taken up the knighthood which had been bestowed on him by the Earl for his journey to France, there could be nothing irregular in his fighting once more as a simple esquire. And thus, after an appeal to the Earl himself, it was arranged, much to John Lauder's content.

For his third knight the Douglas had made choice of his cousin Hugh, younger brother of his two opponents, and at that William and James of Avondale shook their heads.

"He pushes a good tree, our Hughie," said James. "If he comes at you, Will, mind that trick of swerving that he hath. Aim at his right gauntlet, and you will hit his shield."

The conflict on the Boat Croft differed much from the chivalrous encounters of an earlier time and a richer country. And of this more anon.

It chanced that on the borders of the crowd which that day begirt the great enclosure of the lists two burgesses of Dumfries stood on tiptoe,—to wit, Robert Semple, merchant dealing in cloth and wool, and Ninian Halliburton, the brother of Barbara, wife of Malise MacKim, master armourer, whose trade was only conditioned by the amount of capital he could find to lay out and the probability he had of disposing of his purchase within a reasonable time.

It would give an entirely erroneous impression of the state of Scotland in 1440 if the sayings and doings of the wise and shrewd burghers of the towns of Scotland were left wholly without a chronicler. The burghs of Scotland were at once the cradles and strongholds of liberty. They were not subject to the great nobles. They looked with jealousy on all encroachments on their liberties, and had sharp swords wherewith to enforce their objection. They had been endowed with privileges by the wise and politic kings of Scotland, from William the Lion down to James the First, of late worthy memory. For they were the best bulwark of the central authority against the power of the great nobles of the provinces.

Now Robert Semple and Ninian Halliburton were two worthy citizens of Dumfries, men of respectability, well provided for by the success of their trade and the saving nature of their wives. They had come westward to the Thrieve for two purposes: to deliver a large consignment of goods and gear, foreign provisions and fruits, to the controller of the Earl's household, and to receive payment therefor, partly in money and partly in the wool and cattle; hides and tallow, which have been the staple products of Galloway throughout her generations.

Their further purposes and intents in venturing so far west of the safe precincts of their burgh of Dumfries may be gathered from their conversation hereinafter to be reported.

Ninian Halliburton was a rosy-faced, clean-shaven man, with a habit of constantly pursing out his lips and half closing his eyes, as if he were sagely deciding on the advisability of some doubtful bargain. His companion, Robert Semple, had a similar look of shrewdness, but added to it his face bore also the imprint of a sly and lurking humour not unlike that of the master armourer himself. In time bygone he had kept his terms at the college of Saint Andrews, where you may find on the list of graduates the name of Robertus Semple, written by the foundational hand of Bishop Henry Wardlaw himself. And upon his body, as the Bailie of Dumfries would often feelingly recall, he bore the memory, if not the marks, of the disciplining of Henry Ogilvy, Master in Arts—a wholesome custom, too much neglected by the present regents of the college, as he would add.

"This is an excellent affair for us," said Ninian Halliburton, standing with his hands folded placidly over his ample stomach, only occasionally allowing them to wander in order to feel and approve the pile of the brown velvet out of which the sober gown was constructed. "A good thing for us, I say, that there are great lords like the Earl of Douglas to keep up the expense of such days as this."

"It were still better," answered his companion, dryly, "if the great nobles would pay poor merchants according to their promises, instead of threatening them with the dule tree if they so much as venture to ask for their money. Neither you nor I, Bailie, can buy in the lowlands of Holland without a goodly provision of the broad gold pieces that are so hard to drag from the nobles of Scotland."

The rosy-gilled Bailie of Dumfries looked up at his friend with a quick expression of mingled hope and anxiety.

"Does the Earl o' Douglas owe you ony siller?" he asked in a hushed whisper, "for if he does, I am willing to take over the debt—for a consideration."

"Nay," said Semple, "I only wish he did. The Douglases of the Black were never ill debtors. They keep their hand in every man's meal ark, but as they are easy in taking, they are also quick in paying."

"Siller in hand is the greatest virtue of a buyer," said the Bailie, with unction. "But, Robert Semple, though I was willing to oblige ye as a friend by taking over your debt, I'll no deny that ye gied me a fricht. For hae I no this day delivered to the bursar o' the castle o' Thrieve sax bales o' pepper and three o' the best spice, besides much cumin, alum, ginger, seat-well, almonds, rice, figs, raisins, and other sic thing. Moreover, there is owing to me, for wine and vinegar, mair than twa hunder pound. Was that no enough to gar me tak a 'dwam' when ye spoke o' the great nobles no payin'!"

"I would that all our outlying monies were as safe," said Semple; "but here come the knights and squires forth from their tents. Tell me, Ninian, which o' the lads are your sister's sons."

"There is but one o' the esquires that is Barbara Halliburton's son," answered the Bailie; "the ither is her ain man—and a great ram-stam, unbiddable, unhallowed deevil he is—Guid forbid that I should say as muckle to his face!"

CHAPTER XXII

WAGER OF BATTLE

The knights had moved slowly out from their pavilions on either side, and now stood waiting the order to charge. My Lord Maxwell sat by the side of the Lady Sybilla, and held the truncheon, the casting down of which was to part the combatants and end the fight. The three knights on the southern or Earl's side were a singular contrast to their opponents. Two of them, the Earl William and his cousin Hugh, were no more than boys in years, though already old in military exercises; the third, Alan Fleming of Cumbernauld, was a strong horseman and excellent with his lance, though also slender of body and more distinguished for dexterity than for power of arm. Yet he was destined to lay a good lance in rest that day, and to come forth unshamed.

The Avondale party were to the eye infinitely the stronger, that is when knights only were considered. For James Douglas was little less than a giant. His jolly person and frank manners seemed to fill all the field with good humour, and from his station he cried challenges to his cousin the Earl and defiances to his brother Hugh, with that broad rollicking wit which endeared him to the commons, to whom "Mickle Lord Jamie" had long been a popular hero.

"Bid our Hugh there rin hame for his hippen clouts lest he make of himself a shame," he cried; "'tis not fair that we should have to fight with babes."

"Mayhap he will be as David to your Goliath, thou great gomeril!" replied the Earl with equal good humour, seeing his cousin Hugh blush and fumble uncomfortably at his arms.

Then to the lad himself he said: "Keep a light hand on your rein, a good grip at the knee, and after the first shock we will ride round them like swallows about so many bullocks."

The other two Avondale knights, William Douglas and the Marshal de Retz, were also large men, and the latter especially, clothed in black armour and with the royal ermines of Brittany quartered on his shield, looked a stern and commanding figure.

The squires were well matched. These fought on foot, armed according to custom with sword, axe, and dagger—though Sholto would much have preferred to trust to his arrow skill even against the plate of the knights.

The trumpets blew their warning from the judge's gallery. The six opposing knights laid their lances in rest. The squires leaned a little forward as if about to run a race. Lord Maxwell raised his truncheon. The trumpets sounded again, and as their stirring taran-tara rang down the wide strath of Dee, the riders spurred their horses into full career. It so chanced that, as they had stood, James of Avondale was opposite the Earl, each being in the midst as was their right as leaders. The Master of Avondale opposed his brother Hugh, and the Marshal de Retz couched spear against young Alan Fleming. In this order they started to ride their course. But at the last moment, instead of riding straight for his man, the Frenchman swerved to the left, and, raising his lance high in the air, he threw it in the manner of his country straight at the visor bars of the young Earl of Douglas. The spear of James of Avondale at the same time taking him fair in the middle of his shield, the double assault caused the young man to fall heavily from his saddle, so that the crash sounded dully over the field.

"Treachery! Treachery!—A foul false stroke! A knave's device!" cried nine-tenths of those who were crowded about the barriers. "Stop the fight! Kill the Frenchman!"

"Not so," cried Lord Maxwell, "they were to fight as best they could, and they must fight it to the end!"

And this being a decision not to be gainsaid, the combat proceeded on very unequal terms. Sholto, who had been eagerly on the stretch to match himself with the squire of James of Avondale, the young knight of the Bass, found himself suddenly astride of his lord's body and defending himself against both the French ambassador and his squire Poitou, who had simultaneously crossed over to the attack. For the Marshal de Retz, if not in complete defiance of the written rule of chivalry, at least against the spirit of gallantry and the rules of the present tourney, would have thrust the Earl through with his spear as he lay, crying at the same time, "À outrance! À outrance!" to excuse the foulness of his deed.

It was lucky for himself that he did not succeed, for, undoubtedly, the Douglases then on the field would have torn him to pieces for what they not unnaturally considered his treachery. As it was, there sounded a mighty roar of anger all about the barriers, and the crowd pressed so fiercely and threateningly that it was as much as the archers could do to keep them within reasonable bounds.

"Saints' mercy!" puffed stout Ninian Halliburton, "let us get out of this place. I am near bursen. Haud off there, varlet, ken ye not that I am a Bailie of Dumfries? Keep your feet off the tail o' my brown velvet gown. It cost nigh upon twenty silver shillings an ell!"

"A Douglas! A Douglas! Treachery! Treachery!" yelled a wild Minnigaff man, thrusting a naked brand high into the air within an inch of the burgess's nose. That worthy citizen almost fell backwards in dismay, and indeed must have done so but for the pressure of the crowd behind him. He was, therefore, much against his will compelled to keep his place in the front rank of the spectators.

"Well done, young lad," cried the crowd, seeing Sholto ward and strike at Poitou and his master, "God, but he is fechtin' like the black deil himself!"

"It will be as chancy for him," cried the wild Minnigaff hillman, "for I will tear the harrigals oot o' Sholto MacKim if onything happen to the Earl!"

But the captain of the guard, light as a feather, had easily avoided the thrust of the marshal's spear, taking it at an angle and turning it aside with his shield. Then, springing up behind him, he pulled the French knight down to the ground with the hook of his axe, by that trick of attack which was the lesson taught once for all to the Scots of the Lowlands upon the stricken field of the Red Harlaw.

The marshal fell heavily and lay still, for he was a man of feeble body, and the weight of his armour very great.

"Slay him! Slay him!" yelled the people, still furious at what, not without reason, they considered rank treachery.

Sholto recovered himself, and reached his master only in time to find Poitou bending over Earl Douglas with a dagger in his hand.

With a wild yell he lashed out at the Breton squire, and Sholto's axe striking fair on his steel cap, Poitou fell senseless across the body of Douglas.

"Well done, Sholto MacKim—well done, lad!" came from all the barrier, and even Ninian Halliburton cried: "Ye shall hae a silken doublet for that!" Then, recollecting himself, he added, "At little mair than cost price!"

"God in heeven, 'tis bonny fechtin!" cried the man from Minnigaff. "Oh, if I could dirk the fause hound I wad dee happy!"

And the hillman danced on the toes of the Bailie of Dumfries and shook the barriers with his hand till he received a rap over the knuckles from the handle of a partisan directed by the stout arms of Andro the Penman.

"Haud back there, heather-besom!" cried the archer, "gin ye want ever again to taste 'braxy'!"

Over the rest of the field the fortune of war had been somewhat various. William of Douglas had unhorsed his brother Hugh at the first shock, but immediately foregoing his advantage with the most chivalrous courtesy, he leaped from his own horse and drew his sword.

On the right Alan Fleming, being by the marshal's action suddenly deprived of his opponent, had wheeled his charger and borne down sideways upon James of Douglas, and that doughty champion, not having fully recovered from the shock of his encounter with the Earl, and being taken from an unexpected quarter, went down as much to his own surprise as to that of the people at the barriers, who had looked upon him as the strongest champion on the field.

It was evident, therefore, that, in spite of the loss of their leader, the Earl's party stood every chance to win the field. For not only was Alan Fleming the only knight left on horseback, but Malise MacKim had disposed of the laird of Stra'ven, squire to William of Avondale, having by one mighty axe stroke beaten the Lanarkshire man down to his knees.

"A Douglas! A Douglas!" shouted the populace; "now let them have it!"

And the adherents of the Earl were proceeding to carry out this intent, when my Lord Maxwell unexpectedly put an end to the combat by throwing down his truncheon and proclaiming a drawn battle.

"False loon!" cried Sholto, shaking his axe at him in the extremity of his anger, "we have beaten them fairly. Would that I could get at thee! Come down and fight an encounter to the end. I will take any Maxwell here in my shirt!"

"Hold your tongue!" commanded his father, briefly, "what else can ye expect of a border man but broken faith?"

The archers of the guard rushed in, as was their duty, and separated the remaining combatants. Hugh and his brother William fought it to the last, the younger with all his vigour and with a fierce energy born of his brother James's taunts, William with the calm courtesy and forbearance of an old and assured knight towards one who has yet his spurs to win.

The stunned knights and squires were conveyed to their several pavilions, where the Earl's apothecaries were at once in attendance. William of Douglas was the first to revive, which he did almost as soon as the laces of his helm had been undone and water dashed upon his face. His head still sang, he declared, like a hive of bees, but that was all.

He bent with the anxiety of a generous enemy over the unconscious form of the Marshal de Retz, from whom they were stripping his armour. At the removal of the helmet, the strange parchment face with its blue-black stubbly beard was seen to be more than usually pale and drawn. The upper lip was retracted, and a set of long white teeth gleamed like those of a wild beast.

The apothecary was just commencing to strip off the leathern under-doublet from the ambassador's body to search for a wound, when Poitou, his squire, happened to open his eyes. He had been laid upon the floor, as the most seriously wounded of the combatants, though being the least in honour he fell to be attended last.

Instantly he cried out a strange Breton word, unintelligible to all present, and, leaping from the floor, he flung himself across the body of his master, dashing aside the astonished apothecary, who had only time to discern on the marshal's shoulder the scar of a recent cautery before Poitou had restored the leathern under-doublet to its place.

"Hands off! Do not touch my master. I alone can bring him to. Leave the room, all of you."

"Sirrah!" cried the Earl, sternly, striding towards him, "I will teach you to speak humbly to more honourable men."

"My lord," cried Poitou, instantly recalled to himself, "believe me, I meant no ill. But true it is that I only can recover him. I have often seen him taken thus. But I must be left alone. My master hath a blemish upon him, and one great gentleman does not humiliate another in the presence of underlings. My Lord Douglas, as you love honour, bid all to leave me alone for a brief space."

"Much cared he for honour, when he threw the lance at my master!" growled Sholto. "Had I known, I would have driven my bill-point six inches lower, and then would there have been a most satisfactory blemish in the joining of his neck-bone."

CHAPTER XXIII

SHOLTO WINS KNIGHTHOOD

The ambassador recovered quickly after he had been left with his servant Poitou, according to the latter's request. The Lady Sybilla manifested the most tender concern in the matter of the accident of judgment which had been the means of diverting her kinsman from his own opponent and bringing him into collision with the Earl Douglas.

"Often have I striven with my lord that he should ride no more in the lists," she said, "for since he received the lance-thrust in the eye by the side of La Pucelle before the walls of Orleans, he sees no more aright, but bears ever in the direction of the eye which sees and away from that wherein he had his wound."

"Indeed, I knew not that the Marshal de Retz had been wounded in the eye, or I should not have permitted him to ride in the tourney," returned the Earl, gravely. "The fault was mine alone."

The Lady Sybilla smiled upon him very sweetly and graciously.

"You are great soldiers—you Douglases. Six knights are chosen from the muster of half a kingdom to ride a mêlée. Four are Douglases, and, moreover, cousins germain in blood."

"Indeed, we might well have compassed the sword-play," said the Earl William, "for in our twenty generations we never learned aught else. Our arms are strong enough and our skulls thick enough, for even mine uncle, the Abbot, hath his Latin by the ear. And one Semple, a plain burgher of Dumfries, did best him at it—or at least would have shamed him, but that he desired not to lose the custom of the Abbey."

"When you come to France," replied the girl, smiling on him, "it will indeed be stirring to see you ride a bout with young Messire Lalain, the champion of Burgundy, or with that Miriadet of Dijon, whose arm is like that of a giant and can fell an ox at a blow."

"Truly," said the young Earl, modestly, "you do me overmuch honour. My cousin James there, he is the champion among us, and alone could easily have over-borne me to-day, without the aid of your uncle's blind eye. Even William of Avondale is a better lance than I, and young Hugh will be when his time comes."

"Your squire fought a good fight," she went on, "though his countenance does not commend itself to me, being full of all self-sufficience."

"Sholto—yes; he is his father's son and fought well. He is a MacKim, and cannot do otherwise. He will make a good knight, and, by Saint Bride, I will dub him one, ere this sun set, for his valiant laying on of the axe this day."