"I have not time to waste, comrades; I would see my lords," said Sholto. "I must see them instantly."

And even as he spoke there on the steps before him appeared the dark, handsome face and tall but slightly stooping figure of William Douglas of Avondale. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, and his serious thought-weighted brow bent upon the concourse about Sholto.

With a push of his elbows this way and that, the young captain of the Earl's guard opened a road through the press.

In short, emphatic sentences he told his tale, and at the name of prisonment and treachery to his cousins the countenance of William Douglas grew stern and hard. His face twitched as if the news came very near to him. He did not answer for a moment, but stood biting his lips and glooming upon Sholto, as though the young man had been a prisoner waiting sentence of pit or gallows for evil doing.

"I must see James concerning this ill news," he said when Sholto had finished telling him of the Black Bull's Head at the Chancellor's banquet-table.

He turned to go within.

"My lord," said Sholto, "will you give me another horse, and let Darnaway rest in your stables? I must instantly ride south again to raise Galloway."

"Order out all the horses which are ready caparisoned," commanded William of Avondale, "and do you, Captain Sholto, take your choice of them."

He went within forthwith and there ensued a pause filled with the snorting and prancing of steeds, as, mettlesome with oats and hay, they issued from their stalls, or with the grass yet dewy about their noses were led in from the field. Darnaway took his leave of Sholto with a backward neigh of regret, as if to say he was not yet tired of going on his master's service.

Then presently on the terrace above appeared lazy Lord James, busily buckling the straps of his body-armour and talking hotly the while with his brother William.

"I care not even whether our father—" he cried aloud ere, with a restraining hand upon his wrist, his elder brother could succeed in stopping him.

"Hush, James," he said, "at least be mindful of those that stand around."

"I care not, I tell you, William," cried the headstrong youth, squaring his shoulders as he was wont to do before a fight. "I tell you that you and I are no traitors to our name, and who meddles with our coz, Will of Thrieve, hath us to reckon with!"

William of Avondale said nothing, but held out his hand with a slow, determinate gesture. Said he, "An it were the father that begat us." Whereat, with all the impetuousness of his race and nature, James dashed his palm into that of his brother.

"Whiles, William," he cried, "ye appear clerkish and overcautious, and I break out and miscall ye for no Douglas, when ye will not spend your siller like a man and are afraid of the honest pint stoup. But at the heart's heart ye are aye a Douglas—and though the silly gaping commons like ye not so well as they like me, ye are the best o' us, for all that."

So it came to pass that within the space of half an hour the Avondale Douglases had sent men to the four airts, young Hugh Douglas himself riding west, while James stirred the folk of Avondale and Strathavon, and in all the courtyards and streets of the little feudal bourg there began the hum and buzz of the war assembly.

Lord William went with Sholto to see staunch Darnaway duly stabled, and to approve the horse which was to bear the messenger to the south without halt, now that his mission was accomplished in the west. When they came out Sholto's riding harness had been transferred to a noble grey steed large enough to carry even the burly James, let alone the slim captain of the archer guard of Thrieve.

In the court, ranked and ready, bridle to bridle were ranged the knights and squires in waiting about the Castle of Avondale, while out on a level green spot on the edge of the moor gathered the denser array of the townfolk with spears and partisans.

In an hour the Avondale Douglases were ready to ride to the assistance of their cousins. Alas, that Earl William would take no advice, for had these and others gone in with him to the fatal town, there would have been no Black Bull's Head on the Chancellor's dinner table in the banqueting-hall of Edinburgh Castle.



CHAPTER XXXVII

A STRANGE MEETING

It was approaching the evening of the third day after riding forth upon his mission when Sholto, sleepless yet quite unconscious of weariness, approached the loch of Carlinwark and the cottage of Brawny Kim. West and south he had raised the Douglas country as it had never been raised before. And now behind him every armiger and squire, every spearman and light-foot archer, was hasting Edinburgh-ward, eager to be first to succour the young and headstrong chief of his great house.

Sholto had ridden and cried the slogan as was his duty, without allowing his mind to dwell over much upon whether all might not arrive too late. And ever as he rode out of village or across the desolate moors from castle to fortified farmhouse, it seemed that not he but some other was upon this quest.

Something sterner and harder stirred in his breast. Light-hearted Sholto MacKim, the careless lad of the jousting day, the proud young captain of the Earl's guard, was dead with all his vanity. And in his place a man rode southward grim and determined, with vengeful angers a-smoulder in his bosom,—hunger, thirst, love, the joy of living and the fear of death all being swallowed up by deadly hatred of those who had betrayed his master.

Maud Lindesay was doubtless within a few miles of Sholto, yet he scarcely gave even his sweetheart a thought as he urged his weary grey over the purple Parton moors towards the loch of Carlinwark and the little hamlet nestling along its western side under the ancient thorn trees of the Carlin's hill.

He rode down over the green and empty Crossmichael braes on which the broom pods were crackling in the afternoon sunshine, through hollows where the corn lingered as though unwilling to have done with such a scene of beauty, and find itself mewed in dusty barns, ground in mills, or close pressed in thatched rick. He breasted the long smooth rise and entered the woods which encircle the bright lakelet of Carlinwark, the pearl of all southland Scottish lochs.

With a strange sense of detachment he looked down upon the green sward between him and his mother's gable end, upon which as a child he had wandered from dawn to dusk. Then it was nearly as large as the world, and the grass was most comfortable to bare feet. There were children playing upon it now, even as there had been of old, among them his own little sister Magdalen, whose hair was spun gold, and her eyes blue as the forget-me-not on the marshes of the Isle Wood. The children were dressed in white, five little girls in all, as for a festal day, and their voices came upward to Sholto's ear through the arches of the great beeches which studded the turf with pavilions of green shade, tenderly as they had done to that of William Douglas in the spring-time of the year.

The minor note, the dying fall of the innocent voices, tugged at his heartstrings. He could hear little Magdalen leading the chorus:

"Margaret Douglas, fresh and fair, A bunch of roses she shall wear, Gold and silver by her side, I know who's her bride."

It was at "Fair Maid" they were playing, the mystic dance of Southland maidenhood, at whose vestal rites no male of any age was ever permitted to be present. The words broke in upon the gloom which oppressed Sholto's heart. Momentarily he forgot his master and saw Maud Lindesay with the little Margaret Douglas of whom the children sang, once again gathering the gowans on the brae sides of Thrieve or perilously reaching out for purple irises athwart the ditches of the Isle.

"Take her by the lily-white hand, Lead her o'er the water; Give her kisses, one, two, three, For she's a lady's daughter."

As Sholto MacKim listened to the quaint and moving lullaby, suddenly there came into the field of his vision that which stiffened him into a statue of breathing marble.

For without clatter of accoutrement or tramp of hoof, without companion or attendant, a white palfrey had appeared through the green arches of the woodlands. A girl was seated upon the saddle, swaying with gentle movement to the motion of her steed. At the sight of her figure as she came nearer a low cry of horror and amazement broke from Sholto's lips.

It was the Lady Sybilla.

Yet he knew that he had left her behind him in Edinburgh, the siren temptress of Earl Douglas, the woman who had led his master into the power of the enemy, she for whose sake he had refused the certainty of freedom and life. Anger against this smiling enchantress suddenly surged up in Sholto's heart.

"Halt there—on your life!" he cried, and urged his wearied steed forward. Like dry leaves before a winter wind, the children were dispersed every way by the gust of his angry shout. But the maiden on the palfrey either heeded not or did not hear.

Whereupon Sholto rode furiously crosswise to intercept her. He would learn what had befallen his master. At least he would avenge him upon one—the chiefest and subtlest of his enemies. But not till he had come within ten paces did the Lady Sybilla turn upon him the fulness of her regard. Then he saw her face. It broke upon him sudden as the sight of imminent hell to one sure of salvation. He had expected to find there gratified ambition, sated lust, exultant pride, cruelest vengeance. He saw instead as it had been the face of an angel cast out of heaven, or perhaps, rather, of a martyr who has passed through the torture chamber on her way to the place of burning.

The sight stopped Sholto stricken and wavering. His anger fell from him like a cloak shed when the sun shines in his strength.

The Lady Sybilla's face showed of no earthly paleness. Marble white it was, the eyes heavy with weeping, purple rings beneath accentuating the horror that dwelt eternally in them. The lips that had been as the bow of Apollo were parted as though they had been singing the dirge of one beloved, and ever as she rode the tears ran down her cheeks and fell on her white robe, and lower upon her palfrey's mane.

She looked at Sholto when he came near, but not as one who sees or recognises. Rather, as it were, dumb, drunken, besotted with grief, looked forth the soul of the Lady Sybilla upon the captain of the Douglas guard. She heeded not his angry shout, for another voice rang in her ears, speaking the knightliest words ever uttered by a man about to die. Sholto's sword was raised threateningly in his hand, but Sybilla saw another blade gleam bright in the morning sun ere it fell to rise again dimmed and red. Therefore she checked not her steed, nor turned aside, till Sholto laid his fingers upon her bridle-rein and leaped quickly to the ground, sword in hand, leaving his own beast to wander where it would.

"What do you here?" he cried. "Where is my master? What have they done to him? I bid you tell me on your life!"

Sholto's voice had no chivalrous courtesy in it now. The time for that had gone by. He lowered his sword point and there was tense iron in the muscles of his arm. He was ready to kill the temptress as he would a beautiful viper.

The Lady Sybilla looked upon him, but in a dazed fashion, like one who rests between the turns of the rack. In a little while she appeared to recognise him. She noted the sword in his hand, the death in his eye—and for the first time since the scene in the courtyard of Edinburgh Castle, she smiled.

Then the fury in Sholto's heart broke suddenly forth.

"Woman," he cried, "show me cause why I should not slay you. For, by God, I will, if aught of harm hath overtaken my master. Speak, I bid you, speak quickly, if you have any wish to live."

But the Lady Sybilla continued to smile—the same dreadful, mocking smile—and somehow Sholto, with his weapon bare and his arm nerved to the thrust, felt himself grow weak and helpless under the stillness and utter pitifulness of her look.

"You would kill me—kill me, you say—" the words came low and thrilling forth from lips which were as those of the dead whose chin has not yet been bound about with a napkin, "ah, would that you could! But you cannot. Steel will not slay, poison will not destroy, nor water drown Sybilla de Thouars till her work be done!"

Sholto escaped from the power of her eye.

"My master—" he gasped, "my master—is he well? I pray you tell me."

Was it a laugh he heard in answer? Rather a sound, not of human mirth but as of a condemned spirit laughing deep underground. Then again the low even voice replied out of the expressionless face.

"Aye, your master is well."

"Ah, thank God," burst forth Sholto, "he is alive."

The Lady Sybilla moved her hand this way and that with the gesture of a blind man groping.

"Hush," she said, "I only said that he was well. And he is well. As I am already in the place of torment, I know that there is a heaven for those who die as William Douglas died."

Sholto's cry rang sudden, loud, despairing.

"Dead—dead—Earl William dead—my master dead!"

He dropped the palfrey's rein, which till now he had held. His sword fell unheeded on the turf, and he flung himself down in an agony of boyish grief. But from her white palfrey, sitting still where she was, the maiden watched the paroxysms of his sorrow. She was dry eyed now, and her face was like a mask cut in snow.

Then as suddenly recalling himself, Sholto leaped from the ground, snatched up his sword, and again passionately advanced upon the Lady Sybilla.

"You it was who betrayed him," he cried, pointing the blade at her breast; "answer if it were not so!"

"It is true I betrayed him," she answered calmly.

"You whom he loved—God knows how unworthily—"

"God knows," she said simply and calmly.

"You betrayed him to his death. Why then should not I kill you?"

Again she smiled upon him that disarming, hopeless, dreadful smile.

"Because you cannot kill me. Because it were too crowning a mercy to kill me. Because, for three inches of that blade in my heart, I would bless you through the eternities. Because I must do the work that remains—"

"And that work is—?"

"Vengeance!!"

Sholto was silent, trying to piece things together. He found it hard to think. He was but a boy, and experience so strange as that of the Lady Sybilla was outside him. Yet vaguely he felt that her emotion was real, more real perhaps than his own instinct of crude slaying—the desire of the wasp whose nest has been harried to sting the first comer. This woman's hatred was something deadlier, surer, more persistent.

"Vengeance—" he said at last, scarce knowing what he said, "why should you, who betrayed him, speak of avenging him?"

"Because," said the Lady Sybilla, "I loved him as I never thought to love man born of woman. Because when the fiends of the pit tie me limb to limb, lip to lip, with Judas who sold his master with a kiss, when they burn me in the seventh hell, I shall remember and rejoice that to the last he loved me, believed in me, gloried in his love for me. And God who has been cruel to me in all else, will yet do this thing for me. He will not let William Douglas know that I deceived him or that he trusted me in vain."

"But the Vengeance that you spoke of—what of that?" said Sholto, dwelling upon that which was uppermost in his own thought.

"Aye," said the Lady Sybilla, "that alone can be compassed by me. For I am bound by a chain, the snapping of which is my death. To him who, in a far land, devised all these things, to the man who plotted the fall of the Douglas house—to Gilles de Retz, Marshal of France, I am bound. But—I shall not die—even you cannot kill me, till I have brought that head that is so high to the hempen cord, and delivered the foul fiend's body to the fires of both earth and hell."

"And the Chancellor Crichton—the tutor Livingston—what of them?" urged Sholto, like a Scot thinking of his native traitors.

The Lady Sybilla waved a contemptuous hand.

"These are but lesser rascals—they had been nothing without their master and mine. You of the Douglas house must settle with them."

"And why have you returned to this country of Galloway?" said Sholto. "And why are you thus alone?"

"I am here," said the Lady Sybilla, "because none can harm me with my work undone. I travel alone because it suits my mood to be alone, because my master bade me join him at your town of Kirkcudbright, whence, this very night, he takes ship for his own country of Brittany."

"And why do you, if as you say you hate him so, continue to follow him?"

"Ah, you are simple," she said; "I follow him because it is my fate, and who can escape his doom? Also, because, as I have said, my work is not yet done."

She relapsed into her former listless, forth-looking, unconscious regard, gazing through him as if the young man had no existence. He dropped the rein and the point of his sword with one movement. The white palfrey started forward with the reins loose on its neck. And as she went the eyes of the Lady Sybilla were fixed on the distant hills which hid the sea.

So, leaving Sholto standing by the lakeside with bowed head and abased sword, the strange woman went her way to work out her appointed task.

But ere the Lady Sybilla disappeared among the trees, she turned and spoke once more.

"I have but one counsel, Sir Knight. Think no more of your master. Let the dead bury their dead. Ride to Thrieve and never once lose sight of her whom you call your sweetheart, nor yet of her charge, Margaret Douglas, the Maid of Galloway, till the snow falls and winter comes upon the land."



CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE MACKIMS COME TO THRIEVE

Sholto MacKim stood watching awhile as the white palfrey disappeared with its rider into the purple twilight of the woods which barred the way to the Solway. Then with a violent effort of will he recalled himself and looked about for his horse. The tired beast was gently cropping the lush dewy herbage on the green slope which led downwards to his native cottage. Sholto took the grey by the bridle and walked towards his mother's door, pondering on the last words of the Lady Sybilla. A voice at once strenuous and familiar broke upon his ear.

"Shoo wi' you, impident randies that ye are, shoo! Saw I ever the like aboot ony decent hoose? Thae hens will drive me oot o' my mind! Sholto, lad, what's wrang? Is't your faither? Dinna tell me it's your faither."

"It is more bitter than that, mither mine."

"No the Earl—surely no the Earl himsel'—the laddie that I hae nursed—the laddie that was to Barbara Halliburton as her ain dear son!"

"Mother, it is the Earl and young David too. They are dead, betrayed into the hands of their enemies, cruelly and treacherously slain!"

Then the keening cry smote the air as Barbara MacKim sank on her knees and lifted up her hands to heaven.

"Oh, the bonny laddies—the twa bonny, bonny laddies! Mair than my ain bairns I loved them. When their ain mother wasna able for mortal weakness to rear him, William Douglas drew his life frae me. What for, Sholto, are ye standin' there to tell the tale? What for couldna ye have died wi' him? Ae mither's milk slockened ye baith. The same arms cradled ye. I bade ye keep your lord safe wi' your body and your soul. And there ye daur to stand, skin-hale and bane unbroken, before your mither. Get hence—ye are nae son o' Barbara MacKim. Let me never look on your face again, gin ye bringna back the pride o' the warld, the gladness o' the auld withered heart o' her ye ca' your mither!"

"Mother," said Sholto, "my lord was not dead when I left him—he sent me to raise the country to his rescue."

"And what for then are ye standin' there clavering, and your lord in danger among his foes?" cried his mother, angrily.

"Dear mother, I have something more to tell ye—"

"Aye, I ken, ye needna break the news. It is that Malise, my man, is dead—that Laurence, wha ran frae the Abbey to gang wi' him to the wars, is nae mair. Aweel they are worthily spent, since they died for their chief! Ye say that ye were sent to raise the clan—then what seek ye at the Carlinwark? To Thrieve, man, to Thrieve; as hard as ye can ride! To Castle Thrieve!"

"Mother," said Sholto, still more gently, "hearken but a moment. Thirty thousand men are on their way to Edinburgh. Three days and nights have I ridden without sleep. Douglasdale is awake. The Upper Ward is already at the gates of the city. To a man, Galloway is on the march. The border is aflame. But it is all too late already, I have had news of the end. Before ever a man could reach within miles, the fatal axe had fallen, and my lords, for whom each one of us would gladly have died with smiles upon our faces, lay headless in the courtyard of Edinburgh Castle."

"And if the laddies were alive when ye rode awa', wha brocht the news faster than my Sholto could ride—tell me that?"

"I came not directly to Galloway, mother. First I raised the west from Strathaven to Ayr. Thence I carried the news to Dumfries and along the border side. But to-day I have seen the Lady Sybilla on her way to take ship for France. From her I heard the news that all I had done was too late."

"That foreigneerin' randy! Wad ye believe the like o' her? Yon woman that they named 'Queen o' Beauty' at the tournay by the Fords o' Lochar!—Certes, I wadna believe her on oath, no if she swore on the blessed banes o' Saint Andro himsel'. To the castle, man, or I'll kilt my coats and be there afore you to shame ye!"

"I go, mother," said Sholto, trying vainly to stem the torrent of denunciation which poured upon him; "I came only to see that all was well with you."

"And what for should a' be weel wi' me? What can be ill wi' me, if it be not to gang on leevin' when the noblest young men in the warld—the lad that was suckled at my bosom, lies cauld in the clay. Awa wi' ye, Sholto MacKim, and come na back till ye hae rowed every traitor in the same bloody windin' sheet!"

The foster mother of the Douglases sank on the ground in the dusk, leaning against the wall of her house. She held her face in her hands and sobbed aloud, "O Willie, Willie Douglas, mair than ony o' my ain I loed ye. Bonny were ye as a bairn. Bonny were ye as a laddie. Bonny abune a' as a noble young man and the desire o' maidens' e'en. But nane o' them a' loed ye like poor auld Barbara, that wad hae gien her life to pleasure ye. And noo she canna even steek thae black, black e'en, nor wind the corpse-claith aboot yon comely limbs—sae straight and bonny as they were—I hae straiked and kissed sae oft and oft. O wae's me—wae's me! What will I do withoot my bonny laddies!"

It was with the sound of his mother's lament still in his ears that Sholto rode sadly over the hill to Thrieve. The way is short and easy, and it was not long before the captain of the guard looked down upon the lights of the castle gleaming through the gathering gloom. But instead of being, as was its wont, lighted from highest battlement to flanking tower, only one or two lamps could be discerned shining out of that vast cliff of masonry.

But, on the other hand, lights were to be seen wandering this way and that over the long Isle of Thrieve, following the outlines of its winding shores, shining from the sterns of boats upon the pools of the Dee water, weaving intricately among the broomy braes on either side of the ford, and even streaming out across the water meadows of Balmaghie.

Sholto was so full of his own sorrow and the certain truth of the terrible news he must bring home to the Lady of Douglas and those two whom he loved, Maud Lindesay and her fair maid, that he paid little heed to these wandering lanterns and distant flaring torches.

He was pausing at the bridge head to wait the lowering of the draw-chains, when out of the covert above him there dashed a desperate horseman, who stayed neither for bridge nor ford, but rode straight at the eastern castle pool where it was deepest. To the stirrup clung another figure strange and terrible, seen in the uncertain light from the gate-house and in the pale beams of the rising moon.

The drawbridge clattered down, and sending his spurs home into the flanks of his tired steed, in a moment more Sholto was hard on the track of the first headlong horseman. Scarce a length separated them as they reached the outer guard of the castle. Abreast they reined their horses in the quadrangle, and in a moment Sholto had recognised in the rider his brother Laurence, pale as death, and the figure that had clung to the stirrup as the horse took the water, was his father, Malise MacKim.

Thus in one moment came the three MacKims to the door-step of Thrieve.

The clatter and cry of their arrival brought a pour of torches from every side of the isle and from within the castle keep.

"Have you found them—where are they?" came from every side. But Laurence seemed neither to hear nor see.

"Where is my lady?" he cried in a hoarse man's voice; and again, "Instantly I must see my lady."

Sholto stood aside, for he knew that these two brought later tidings than he. Presently he went over to his father, who was leaning panting upon a stone post, and asked him what were the news. But Malise thrust him back apparently without recognising him.

"My lady," he gasped, "I would see my lady!"

Then through the torches clustered about the steps of the castle came the tall, erect figure of the Earl's mother, the Countess of Douglas. She stood with her head erect, looking down upon the MacKims and upon the dropped heads and heaving shoulders of their horses. Above and around the torches flared, and their reek blew thwartwise across the strange scene.

"I am here," she said, speaking clearly and naturally; "what would ye with the Lady of Douglas?"

Thrice Laurence essayed to speak, but his ready tongue availed him not now. He caught at his horse's bridle to steady him and turned weakly to his father.

"Do you speak to my lady—I cannot!" he gasped.

A terrible figure was Malise MacKim, the strong man of Galloway, as he came forward. Stained with the black peat of the morasses, his armour cast off piecemeal that he might run the easier, his under-apparel torn almost from his great body, his hair matted with the blood which still oozed from an unwashed wound above his brow.

"My lady," he said hoarsely, his words whistling in his throat, "I have strange things to tell. Can you bear to hear them?"

"If you have found my daughter dead or dying, speak and fear not!"

"I have things more terrible than the death of many daughters to tell you!"

"Speak and fear not—an it touch the lives of my sons, speak freely. The mother of the Douglases has learned the Douglas lesson."

"Then," said Malise, sinking his head upon his breast, "God help you, lady, your two sons are dead!"

"Is David dead also?" said the Lady of Douglas.

"He is dead," replied Malise.

The lady tottered a little as she stood on the topmost step of the ascent to Thrieve. One or two of the torch-bearers ran to support her. But she commanded herself and waved them aside.

"God—He is the God," she said, looking upwards into the black night. "In one day He has made me a woman solitary and without children. Sons and daughter He has taken from me. But He shall not break my heart. No, not even He. Stand up, Malise MacKim, and tell me how these things came to pass."

And there in the blown reek of torches and the hush of the courtyard of Thrieve Malise told all the tale of the Black Dinner and the fatal morning, of the short shrift and the matchless death, while around him strong men sobbed and lifted up right hands to swear the eternal vengeance.

But alone and erect as a banner staff stood the mother of the dead. Her eyes were dry, her lips compressed, her nostrils a little distended like those of a war-horse that sniffs the battle from afar. Outside the castle wall the news spread swiftly, and somewhere in the darkness a voice set up the Celtic keen.

"Bid that woman hold her peace. I will hear the news and then we will cry the slogan. Say on, Malise!"

Then the smith told how his horse had broken down time and again, how he had pressed on, running and resting, stripped almost naked that he might keep up with his son, because that no ordinary charger could long carry his great weight.

Then when he had finished the Lady of Thrieve turned to Sholto—"And you, captain of the guard, what have you done, and wherefore left you your master in his hour of need?"

Then succinctly and to the point Sholto spoke, his father and Laurence assenting and confirming as he told of the Earl's commission and of how he had accomplished those things that were laid upon him.

"It is well," said the lady, calmly, "and now I also will tell you something that you do not know. My little daughter, whom ye call the Fair Maid of Galloway, with her companion, Mistress Maud Lindesay, went out more than twelve hours agone to the holt by the ford to gather hazelnuts, and no eye of man or woman hath seen them since."

And, even as she spoke, there passed a quick strange pang through the heart of Sholto. He remembered the warning of the Lady Sybilla. Had he once more come too late?



CHAPTER XXXIX

THE GIFT OF THE COUNTESS

It was the Countess of Douglas who commanded that night in the Castle of Thrieve. Sholto wished to start at once upon the search for the lost maidens. But the lady forbade him.

"There are a thousand searchers who during the night will do all that you could do—and better. To-morrow we shall surely want you. You have been three nights without sleep. Take your rest. I order you in your master's name."

And on the bare stone, outside Maud Lindesay's empty room, Sholto threw himself down and slept as sleep the dead.

But that night, save about the chamber where abode the mother of the Douglases, the hum of life never ceased in the great Castle of Thrieve. Whether my lady slept or not, God knows. At any rate the door was closed and there was silence within.

Sholto awoke smiling in the early dawn. He had been dreaming that he and Maud Lindesay were walking on the shore together. It was a lonely beach with great driftwood logs whereon they sat and rested ere they took hands again and walked forth on their way. In his dream Maud was kind, her teasing, disdainful mood quite gone. So Sholto awoke smiling, but in a moment he wished that he had slept on.

He lay a space, becoming conscious of a pain in his heart—the overnight pain of a great disaster not yet realised. For a little he knew not what it was. Then he saw himself lying at Maud's open door, and he remembered—first the death of his masters, then the loss of the little maid, and lastly that of Maud, his own winsome sweetheart Maud. In another moment he had leaped to his feet, buckled his sword-belt tighter, slung his cloak into a corner, and run downstairs.

The house guard which had ridden to Crichton and Edinburgh had been replaced from the younger yeomen of the Kelton and Balmaghie levies, even as the Earl had arranged before his departure. But of these only a score remained on duty. All who could be spared had gone to join the march on Edinburgh, for Galloway was set on having vengeance on the Chancellor and had sworn to lay the capital itself in ashes in revenge for the Black Dinner of the castle banqueting-hall.

The rest of the guard was out searching for the bonny maids of Thrieve, as through all the countryside Margaret Douglas and Maud Lindesay were named.

Eager as Sholto was to accompany the searchers, and though he knew well that no foe was south of the Forth to assault such a strong place as Thrieve, he did not leave the castle till he had set all in order so far as he could. He appointed Andro the Penman and his brother John officers of the garrison during his absence.

Then, having seen to his accoutrement and providing, for he did not mean to return till he had found the maids, he went lastly to the chamber door of the Lady of Douglas to ask her leave to depart.

At the first knock he heard a foot come slowly across the floor. It was my lady, who opened the latch herself and stood before Sholto in the habit she had worn when at the castle gateway Malise had told his news. Her couch was unpressed. Her window stood open towards the south. A candle still glimmered upon a little altar in an angle of the wall. She had been kneeling all night before the image of the Virgin, with her lips upon the feet of her who also was a woman, and who by treachery had lost a son.

"I would have your permission to depart, my Lady Countess," said Sholto, bowing his head upon his breast that he might not intrude upon her eyes of grief; "the castle is safe, and I can be well spared. By God's grace I shall not return till I bring either the maids themselves or settled news of them. Have I your leave to go?"

The Lady of Douglas looked at him a moment without speech.

"Surely you are not the same who rode away behind my son William. You went out light and gay as David, my other young son. There is now a look of Earl William himself in your face—his mother tells you so. Well, you were suckled at the same breast as he. May a double portion of his spirit rest on you! That lowering regard is the Douglas mark. Follow on and turn not back till you find. Strike and cease not, till all be avenged. I have now no son left to save or to strike. Go, Sholto MacKim. He who is dead loved you and made you knight. I said at the time that you were too young and would have dissuaded him. But when did a Douglas listen to woman's advice—his mother's or his wife's? Foster brother you are—brother you shall be. By this kiss I make you even as my son."

She bent and laid her lips on the young man's brow. They were hot as iron uncooled from the smithy anvil.

"Come with me," she added, and with a vehemence strangely at odds with her calm of the night before, she took Sholto by the hand and drew him after her into the room that had been Earl William's.

From the bundle of keys at her side she took a small one of French design. With this she unlocked a tall cabinet which stood in a corner. She threw the folding doors open, and there in the recess hung a wonderful suit of armour, of the sort called at that time "secret."

"This," said the Lady of Douglas, "I had designed for my son. Ten years was it in the making. His father trysted it from a cunning artificer in Italy. All these years has it been perfecting for him. It comes too late. His eyes shall never see it, nor his body wear it. But I give it to you. No Avondale shall ever do it upon him. It will fit you, for you and he were of a bigness. No sword can cut through these links, were it steel of Damascus forged for a Sultan. No spear-thrust can pierce it, though I leave you to avenge the bruise. Yet it will lie soft as silk, concealed and unsuspected under the rags of a beggar or the robes of a king. The cap will turn the edge of an axe, even when swung by a giant's hand, yet it will fit into the lining of a Spanish hat or velvet bonnet. This your present errand may prove more dangerous than you imagine. Go and put it on."

Sholto kneeled down and kissed the hand of his liege lady. Then when he had risen she gave him down the armour piece by piece, dusting each with her kerchief with a sort of reverent action, as one might touch the face of the dead. In Sholto's hands it proved indeed light almost as woven cloth of homespun from Dame Barbara's loom, and flexible as the spun silk of Lyons which the great wear next their bodies.

With it there went an under-suit of finest and softest leather, that the skin should not be chafed by the cunning links as they worked smoothly over one another at each movement of the body within.

Sholto buckled on his lady's gift with a swelling heart. It was his dead master's armour. And as piece by piece fitted him as a glove fits the hand, the spirit of William Douglas seemed to enter more and more into the lad.

Then Sholto covered this most valuable gift with his own clothing which he had brought from the house of Carlinwark, and presently emerged, a well-looking but still slim squire of decent family.

Then the Countess belted on him the sword of price which went therewith, a blade of matchless Toledan steel, but covered with a plain scabbard of black pigskin.

"Draw and thrust," commanded the lady, pointing at the rough stone of the wall at the end of the passage.

Sholto looked ruefully at the glittering blade which he held in his hand, flashing blue from point to double guard.

"Thrust and fear not," said the Countess of Douglas the second time.

Sholto lunged out at the stone with all his might. Fire flew from the smitten blue whinstone where the point, with all the weight of his young body behind it, impinged on the wall. A tingling shock of acutest agony ran up the striker's wrist to the shoulder blade. The sword dropped ringing on the pavement, and Sholto's arm fell numb and useless to his side.

"Lift the sword and look," commanded the Lady Douglas.

Sholto did as he was bidden, with his left hand, and lo, the point which had bent like a hoop was sharp and straight as if just from the armourer's. "Can you strike with your left hand?" asked the lady.

"As with my right," answered the son of Malise the Brawny.

There was a bar at a window in the wall bending outward in shape like the letter U.

"Then strike a cutting stroke with your left hand."

Sholto took the sword. It seemed to him short-sighted policy that in the hour of his departure on a perilous quest he should disable himself in both arms. But Sholto MacKim was not the youth to question an order. He lifted the sword in his left hand, and with a strong ungraceful motion struck with all his might.

At first he thought that he had missed altogether. There was no tingling in his arm, no jar when the blade should have encountered the iron. But the Countess was examining the centre of the hoop.

"I have missed," said Sholto.

"Come hither and look," she said, without turning round.

And when he looked, lo, the thick iron had been cut through almost without bending. The sides of the break were fresh, bright, and true.

"Now look at the edge of your sword," she said.

There was no slightest dint anywhere upon it, so that Sholto, armourer's son as he was, turned about the blade to see if by any chance he could have smitten with the reverse.

Failing in this, he could only kneel to his lady and say, "This is a great gift—I am not worthy."

For in these times of peril jewels and lands were as nothing to the value of such a suit of armour, which kings and princes might well have made war to obtain.

The faintest disembodied ghost of a smile passed over the face of the Countess of Douglas.

"It is the best I can do with it now," she said, "and at least no one of the Avondales shall ever possess it."

After the Lady Douglas had armed the young knight and sped him upon his quest, Sholto departed over the bridge where the surly custodian still grumbled at his horse's feet trampling his clean wooden flooring. The young man rode a Spanish jennet of good stock, a plain beast to look upon, neither likely to attract attention nor yet to stir cupidity.

His father and Laurence were already on their way. Sholto had arranged that whether they found any trace of the lost ones or no, they were all to meet on the third day at the little town of Kirkcudbright. For Sholto, warned by the Lady Sybilla, even at this time had his idea, which, because of the very horror of it, he had as yet communicated to no one.

It chanced that as the youth rode southward along the banks of the Dee, glancing this way and that for traces of the missing maids, but seeing only the grass trampled by hundreds of feet and the boats in the stream dragging every pool with grapnels and ropes, two horsemen on rough ponies ambled along some distance in front of him. By their robes of decent brown they seemed merchants on a journey, portly of figure, and consequential of bearing.

As Sholto rapidly made up to them, with his better horse and lighter weight, he perceived that the travellers were those two admirable and noteworthy magistrates of Dumfries, Robert Semple and his own uncle Ninian Halliburton of the Vennel.

Hearing the clatter of the jennet's hoofs, they turned about suddenly with mighty serious countenances. For in such times when the wayfarer heard steps behind him, whether of man or beast, it repaid him to give immediate attention thereto.

So at the sound of hoofs Ninian and his friend set their hands to their thighs and looked over their shoulders more quickly than seemed possible to men of their build.

"Ha, nephew Sholto," cried Ninian, exceedingly relieved, "blithe am I to see you, lad. You will tell us the truth of this ill news that has upturned the auld province. By your gloomy face I see that the major part is overtrue. The Earl is dead, and he awes me for twenty-four peck of wheaten meal, forbye ten firlots of malt and other sundries, whilk siller, if these hungry Avondale Douglases come into possession, I am little likely ever to see. Surely I have more cause to mourn him—a fine lad and free with his having. If ye gat not settlement this day, why then ye gat it the neist, with never a word of drawback nor craving for batement."

Sholto told them briefly concerning the tragedy of Edinburgh. He had no will for any waste of words, and as briefly thereafter of the loss of the little maid and her companion.

The Bailie of Dumfries lifted up his hands in consternation.

"'Tis surely a plot o' thae Avondales. Stra'ven folk are never to lippen to. And they hae made a clean sweep. No a Gallowa' Douglas left, if they hae speerited awa' the bonny bit lass. Man, Robert, she was heir general to the province, baith the Lordship o' Gallowa' and the Earldom o' Wigton, for thae twa can gang to a lassie. But as soon as the twa laddies were oot o' the road, Fat Jamie o' Avondale cam' into the Yerldom o' Douglas and a' the Douglasdale estates, forbye the Borders and the land in the Hielands. Wae's me for Ninian Halliburton, merchant and indweller in Dumfries, he'll never see hilt or hair o' his guid siller gin that wee lassie be lost. Man, Sholto, is't no an awfu' peety?"

During this lamentation, to which his nephew paid little attention, looking only from side to side as they three rode among the willows by the waterside, the other merchant, Robert Semple, had been pondering deeply.

"How could she be lost in this country of Galloway?" he said, "a land where there are naught but Douglases and men bound body and soul to the Douglas, from Solway even to the Back Shore o' Leswalt? 'Tis just no possible—I'll wager that it is that Hieland gipsy Mistress Lindesay that has some love ploy on hand, and has gane aff and aiblins ta'en the lass wi' her for company."

At these words Sholto twisted about in his saddle, as if a wasp had stung him suddenly.

"Master Semple," he said, "I would have you speak more carefully. Mistress Lindesay is a baron's daughter and has no love ploys, as you are pleased to call them."

The two burgesses shook with jolly significant laughter, which angered Sholto exceedingly.

"Your mirth, sirs, I take leave to tell you, is most mightily ill timed," he said, "and I shall consider myself well rid of your company."

He was riding away when his uncle set his hand upon the bridle of Sholto's jennet.

"Bide ye, wild laddie," he said, "there is nae service in gaun aff like a fuff o' tow. My freend here meaned to speak nae ill o' the lass. But at least I ken o' ae love ploy that Mistress Lindesay is engaged in, or your birses wadna be so ready to stand on end, my bonny man. But guid luck to ye. Ye hae the mair chance o' finding the flown birdies, that ye maybes think mair o' the bonny norland quey than ye think o' the bit Gallowa' calf. But God speed ye, I say, for gin ye bringna back the wee lass that's heir to the braid lands o' Thrieve, it's an ill chance Ninian Halliburton has ever to fill his loof wi' the bonny gowden 'angels' that (next to high heeven) are a man's best freends in an evil and adulterous generation."



CHAPTER XL

THE MISSION OF JAMES THE GROSS

From all sides the Douglases were marching upon Edinburgh. After the murder of the young lords the city gates had been closed by order of the Chancellor. The castle was put into a thorough state of defence. The camp of the Avondale Douglases, William and James, was already on the Boroughmuir, and the affrighted citizens looked in terror upon the thickening banners with the bloody Douglas heart upon them, and upon the array of stalwart and determined men of the south. Curses both loud and deep were hurled from the besiegers' lines at every head seen above the walls, together with promises to burn Edinburgh, castle and burgh alike, and to slocken the ashes with the blood of every living thing within, all for the cause of the Black Dinner and the Bull's Head set before the brothers of Douglas.

But at midnoon of a glorious day in the late September, a man rode out from the west port of the city, a fat man flaccid of body, pale and tallowy of complexion. A couple of serving-men went behind him, with the Douglas arms broidered on their coats. They looked no little terrified, and shook upon their horses, as indeed well they might. This little cavalcade rode directly out of the city gates towards the pavilion of the young Douglases of Avondale. As they went two running footmen kept them company, one on either side of their leader, and as that unwieldy horseman swayed this way and that in the saddle, first one and then the other applied with his open palm the force requisite to keep the rider erect upon his horse.

It was the new Earl of Douglas, James the Gross, on his way to visit the camp of his sons. As he approached the sentries who stood on guard upon the broomy braes betwixt Merchiston and Bruntsfield, he was challenged in a fierce southland shout by one of the Carsphairn levies who knew him not.

"Stand back there, fat loon, gin ye wantna a quarrel shot intil that swagging tallow-bag ye ca' your wame!"

"Out of my way, hill varlet!" cried the man on horseback.

But the Carsphairn man stood with his cross-bow pointed straight at the leader of the cavalcade, crying at the same time in a loud, far-carrying voice over his shoulder, "Here awa', Anthon—here awa', Bob! Come and help me to argue wi' this fat rogue."

Several other hillmen came hurrying up, and the little company of riders was brought to a standstill. Then ensued this colloquy.

"Who are you that dare stop my way?" demanded the Earl.

"Wha may ye be that comes shuggy-shooin' oot o' the bluidy city o' Edinburgh intil oor camp," retorted him of Carsphairn, "sitting your beast for all the warld like a lump o' potted-head whammelled oot o' a bowl?"

"I am the Earl of Douglas."

"The Yerl o' Dooglas! Then a bonny hand they hae made o' him in Edinburgh. I heard they had only beheaded him."

"I tell you I am Earl of Douglas. I bid you beware. Conduct me to the tent of my sons!"

At this point an aged man of some authority stood forward and gazed intently at James the Gross, looking beneath his hand as at an extensive prospect of which he wished to take in all the details.

"Lads," he said, "hold your hands—it rins i' my head that this craitur' may be Jamie, the fat Yerl o' Avondale. We'll let him gang by in peace. His sons are decent lads."

There came from the hillmen a chorus of "Avondale he may be—there's nae sayin' what they can breed up there by Stra'ven. But we are weel assured that he is nae richt Douglas. Na, nae Douglas like yon man was ever cradled or buried in Gallowa'."

At this moment Lord William Douglas, seeing the commotion on the outposts, came down the brae through the broom. Upon seeing his father he took the plumed bonnet from off his head, and, ordering the Carsphairn men sharply to their places, he set his hand upon the bridle of the gross Earl's horse. So with the two running footmen still preserving some sort of equilibrium in his unsteady bulk, James of Avondale was brought to the door of a tent from which floated the banner of the Douglas house, blue with a bleeding heart upon it.

At the entering in of the pavilion, all stained and trodden into the soil by the feet of passers-by, lay the royal banner of the Stewarts, so placed by headstrong James Douglas the younger, in contempt of both tutor and Chancellor, who, being but cowards and murderers, had usurped the power of the king within the realm.

That sturdy youth came to the door of his pavilion half-dressed as he had lain down, yawning and stretching reluctantly, for he had been on duty all night perfecting the arrangements for besieging the town.

"James—James," cried his father, catching sight of his favourite son rubbing sleepily his mass of crisp hair, "what's this that I hear? That you and William are in rebellion and are defying the power o' the anointed king—?"

At this moment the footman undid the girths of his horse, which, being apparently well used to the operation, stood still with its feet planted wide apart. Then they ran quickly round to the side towards which the swaying bulk threatened to fall, the saddle slipped, and, like a top-heavy forest tree, James the Gross subsided into the arms of his attendants, who, straining and panting, presently set him on his feet upon the blazoned royal foot-cloth at the threshold of the pavilion.

Almost he had fallen backwards when he saw the use to which his daring sons had put the emblem of royal authority.

"Guid save us a', laddies," he cried, staggering across the flag into the tent, "ken ye what ye do? The royal banner o' the King o' Scots—to mak' a floor-clout o'! Sirce, sirce, in three weeks I shall be as childless as the Countess o' Douglas is this day."

"That," said William Douglas, coldly, indicating with his finger the trampled cloth, "is not the banner of Scotland, but only that of the Seneschal Stewarts. The King of Scots is but a puling brat, and they who usurp his name are murderous hounds whose necks I shall presently stretch with the rogue's halter!"

Young James Douglas had set an oaken folding chair for his father at the upper end of the pavilion, and into this James the Gross fell rather than seated himself.

His sons William and James continued to stand before him, as was the dutiful habit of the time. Their father recovered his breath before beginning to speak.

"What's this—what's this I hear?" he exclaimed testily, "is it true that ye are in flat rebellion against the lawful authority of the king? Laddies, laddies, ye maun come in wi' me to his excellence the Chancellor and make instanter your obedience. Ye are young and for my sake he will surely overlook this. I will speak with him."

"Father," said William Douglas, with a cold firmness in his voice, "we are here to punish the murderers of our cousins. We shall indeed enter the guilty city, but it will be with fire and sword."

"Aye," cried rollicking, headstrong James, "and we will roast the Crichton on a spit and hang that smug traitor, Tutor Livingston, over the walls of David's Tower, a bonny ferlie for his leman's wonder!"

There came a cunning look into the small pig's eyes of James the Gross.

"Na, na, foolish laddies, thae things will ye no do. Mind ye not the taunts and scorns that the Earl—the late Earl o' Douglas that is—put upon us a'? Think on his pride and vainglory, whilk Scripture says shall be brocht low. Think in especial how this righteous judgment that has fallen on him and on his brother has cleared our way to the Earldom."

The choleric younger brother leaped forward with an oath on his lips, but his calmer senior kept him back with his hand.

"Silence, James!" he said; "I will answer our father. Sir, we have heard what you say, but our minds are not changed. What cause to associate yourself with traitors and mansworn you may have, we do not know and we do not care."

At his son's first words James the Gross rose with a sudden surprising access of dignity remarkable in one of his figure.

"I bid you remember," he said, speaking southland English, as he was wont to do in moments of excitement, "I bid you remember, sirrah, that I am the Earl of Douglas and Avondale, Justicer of Scotland—and your father."

William Douglas bowed, respectful but unmoved.

"My lord," he said, "I forget nothing. I do not judge you. You are in authority over our house. You shall do what you will with these forces without there, so be you can convince them of your right. Black murder, whether you knew and approved it or no, has made you Earl of Douglas. But, sir, if you take part with my cousins' murderers now, or screen them from our just vengeance and the vengeance of God, I tell you that from this day you are a man without children. For in this matter I speak not only for myself, but for all your sons!" He turned to his brother.

"James," he said, "call in the others." James went to the tent door and called aloud.

"Archibald, Hugh, and John, come hither quickly."

A moment after three young men of noble build, little more than lads indeed, but with the dark Douglas allure stamped plainly upon their countenances, entered, bowed to their father, and stood silent with their hands crossed upon the hilts of their swords.

William Douglas went on with the same determinate and relentless calm.

"My lord," he said, very respectfully, "here stand your five sons, all soldiers and Douglases, waiting to hear your will. Murder has been done upon the chief of our house by two men of cowardly heart and mean consideration, Crichton and Livingston, instigated by the false ambassador of the King of France. We have come hither to punish these slayers of our kin, and we desire to know what you, our father, think concerning the matter."

James the Gross was still standing, steadying himself with his hand on the arm of the oaken chair in which he had been sitting. He spoke with some difficulty, which might proceed either from emotion or from the plethoric habit of the man.

"Have I for this brought children into the world," he said, "that they should lift up their hands against the father that begat them? Ye know that I have ever warned you against the pride and arrogance of your cousins of Galloway."

"You mean, of the late Earl of Douglas and the boy his brother," answered William; "the pride of eighteen and fourteen is surely vastly dangerous."

"I mean those who have been tried and executed in Edinburgh by royal authority for many well-grounded offences against the state," cried the Earl, loudly.

"Will you deign to condescend upon some of them?" said his son, as quietly as before.

"Your cousins' pride and ostentation of riches and retinue, being far beyond those of the King, constituted in themselves an eminent danger to the state. Nay, the turbulence of their followers has more than once come before me in my judicial capacity as Justicer of the realm. What more would you have?"

"Were you, my lord, of those who condemned them to death?"

"Not so, William; it had not been seemly in a near kinsman and the heir to their dignities—that is, save and except Galloway, which by ill chance goes in the female line, if we find not means to break that unfortunate reservation. Your cousins were condemned by my Lords Crichton and Livingston."

"We never heard of either of them," said William, calmly.

"In their judicial aspect they may be styled lords, as is the Scottish custom," said James the Gross, "even as when I was laird of Balvany and a sitter on the bed of justice, it was my right to be so nominated."

"Then our cousins were condemned with your approval, my Lord of Douglas and Avondale?" persisted his son.

James the Gross was visibly perturbed.

"Approval, William, is not the word to use—not a word to use in the circumstances. They were near kinsmen!"

"But upon being consulted you did not openly disapprove—is it not so? And you will not aid us to avenge our cousins' murder now?"

"Hearken, William, it was not possible—I could not openly disapprove when I also was in the Chancellor's hands, and I knew not but that he might include me in the same condemnation. Besides, lads, think of the matter calmly. There is no doubt that the thing happens most conveniently, and the event falls out well for us. Our own barren acres have many burdens upon them. What could I do? I have been a poor man all my life, and after the removal of obstacles I saw my way to become the richest man in Scotland. How could I openly object?"

William Douglas bowed.

"So—" he said, "that is what we desired to know! Have I your permission to speak further?"

His father nodded pleasantly, seating himself again as one that has finished a troublesome business. He rubbed his hands together, and smiled upon his sons.

"Aye, speak gin ye like, William, but sit doon—sit doon, lads. We are all of one family, and it falls out well for you as it does for me. Let us all be pleasant and agreeable together!"

"I thank you, my lord," said his son, "but we will not sit down. We are no longer of one family. We may be your sons in the eye of the law and in natural fact. But from this day no one of us will break bread, speak word, hold intimacy or converse with you. So far as in us lies we will renounce you as our father. We will not, because of the commandment, rise in rebellion against you. You are Earl of Douglas, and while you live must rule your own. But for me and my brothers we will never be your children to honour, your sons to succour, nor your liegemen to fight for you. We go to offer our services to our cousin Margaret, the little Maid of Galloway. We will keep her province with our swords as the last stronghold of the true Douglases of the Black. I have spoken. Fare you well, my lord!"

During his son's speech the countenance of the newly made Earl of Douglas grew white and mottled, tallowy white and dull red in turns showing upon it, like the flesh of a drained ox. He rose unsteadily to his feet, moving one hand deprecatingly before him, like a helpless man unexpectedly stricken. His nether lip quivered, pendulous and piteous, in the midst of his grey beard, and for a moment he strove in vain with his utterance.

His eyes fell abashed from the cold sternness of his eldest son's glance, and he seemed to scan the countenances of the younger four for any token of milder mood.

"James," he said, "ye hear William. Surely ye do not hold with him? Remember I am your father, and I was aye particular fond o' you, Jamie. I mind when ye wad rin to sit astride my shoulder. And ye used to like that fine!"

There were tears in the eyes of the weak, cunning, treacherous-hearted man. The lips of James Douglas quivered a little, and his voice failed him, as he strove to answer his father. What he would have said none knows, but ere he could voice a word, the eyes of his brother, stern as the law given to Moses on the mount, were bent upon him. He straightened himself up, and, with a look carefully averted from the palsied man before him, he said, in a steady tone, "What my brother William says, I say."

His father looked at him again, as if still hoping against hope for some kinder word. Then he turned to his younger sons.

"Archie, Hugh, little Jockie, ye willna take part against your ain faither?"

"We hold with our brothers!" said the three, speaking at once.

At this moment there came running in at the door of the tent a lad of ten—Henry, the youngest of the Avondale brothers. He stopped short in the midst, glancing wonderingly from one to the other. His little sword with which he had been playing dropped from his hand. James the Gross looked at him.

"Harry," he said, "thy brothers are a' for leavin' me. Will ye gang wi' them, or bide wi' your faither?"

"Father," said the boy, "I will go with you, if ye will let me help to kill Livingston and the Chancellor!"

"Come, laddie," said the Earl, "ye understand not these matters. I will explain to you when we gang back to the braw things in Edinbra' toon!"

"No, no," cried the boy, stooping to pick up his sword, "I will bide with my brothers, and help to kill the murderers of my cousins. What William says, I say."

Then the five young men went out and called for their horses, their youngest brother following them. And as the flap of the tent fell, and he was left alone, James the Gross sank his head between his soft, moist palms, and sobbed aloud.

For he was a weak, shifty, unstable man, loving approval, and a burden to himself in soul and body when left to bear the consequences of his acts.

"Oh, my bairns," he cried over and over, "why was I born? I am not sufficient for these things!"

And even as he sobbed and mourned, the hoofs of his sons' horses rang down the wind as they rode through the camp towards Galloway. And little Henry rode betwixt William and James.



CHAPTER XLI

THE WITHERED GARLAND

Meanwhile Sholto fared onwards down the side of the sullen water of Dee. The dwellers along the bank were all on the alert, and cried many questions to him about the death of the Earl, most thinking him a merchant travelling from Edinburgh to take ship at Kirkcudbright. Sholto answered shortly but civilly, for the inquirers were mostly decent folk well on in years, whose lads had gone to the levy, and who naturally desired to know wherefore their sons had been summoned.

In return he asked everywhere for news of any cavalcade which might have passed that way, but neither from the country folk, nor yet from hoof-marks upon the grassy banks, could he glean the least information pertinent to the purpose of his quest.

Not till he came within a few miles of the town did he meet with man or woman who could give him any material assistance. It was by the Fords of Tongland that he first met with one Tib MacLellan, who with much volubility and some sagacity retailed fresh fish to the burghers of Kirkcudbright and the whole countryside, giving a day to each district so long as the supply of her staple did not fail.

"Fair good day to ye, mistress!" said Sholto, taking off his bonnet to the sonsy upstanding fishwife.

"And to you, bonny lad," replied the complimented dame, dropping a courtesy, "may the corbie never cry at ye nor ill-faured pie juik at your left elbow. May candle creesh never fa' on ye, red fire burn ye, nor water scald ye."

Tib was reeling off her catalogue of blessings when Sholto cut her short.

"Can you tell me, good lady," he asked, in his most insinuating tones, "if there has been any vessel cleared from the port during these last weeks?"

"'Deed, sir, that I should ken, for is no my ain sister marriet on Jock Wabster, wha's cousin by marriage twice removed is the bailie officer o' the port? So I can advise ye that there was a boat frae the Isle o' Man wi' herrin's for the great houses, though never a fin o' them like the halesome fish I carry here in my creel. Wad ye like to see them, to buy a dozen for the bonny lass that's waiting for ye? That were a present to recommend ye, indeed—far mair than your gaudy flowers, fule ballads, and sic like trash!"

"You cannot remember any other ship of larger size than the Manx fishing-boat?" continued Sholto.

"Weel, no to ca' cleared frae the port," Tib went on, "but there was a pair o' uncanny-looking foreign ships that lay oot there by the Manxman's Lake for eight days, and the nicht afore yestreen they gaed oot with the tide. They were saying aboot the foreshore that they gaed west to some other port to tak' on board the French monzie that cam' to the Thrieve at the great tournaying! But I kenna what wad tak' him awa' to the Fleet or the Ferry Toon o' Cree, and leave a' the pleasures o' Kirkcudbright ahint him. Forbye sic herrin's as are supplied by me, Tib MacLellan, at less than cost price—as I houp your honour will no forget, when in the course o' natur' and the providence o' God you and her comes to hae a family atween ye."

Sholto promised that he would not forget when the time alluded to arrived. Then, turning his jennet off the direct road to Kirkcudbright town, and betaking him through the Ardendee fords, he made all speed towards a little port upon the water of Fleet, at the point where that fair moorland stream winds lazily through the water-meadows for a mile or two, after its brawling passage down from the hills of heather and before it commits itself to the mother sea.

But it was not until he had long crossed it and reached the lonely Cassencary shore that Sholto found his first trace of the lost maidens. For as he rode along the cliffs his keen eye noted a well-marked trail through the heather approaching the shore at right angles to his own line of march. The tracks, still perfectly evident in the grassy places, showed that as many as twenty horses had passed that way within the last two or three days. He stood awhile examining the marks, and then, leading his beast slowly by the bridle, he continued to follow them westward till they became confused and lost near a little jetty erected by the lairds of Cree and Cassencary for convenience of traffic with Cumberland and the Isle of Man. Here on the very edge of the foreshore, blown by some chance wind behind a stone and wonderfully preserved there, Sholto found a child's chain of woodbine entwined with daisies and autumnal pheasant's eye. He took it up and examined it. Some of the flowers were not yet withered. The inter-weaving was done after a fashion he had taught the little Maid of Galloway himself, one happy day when he had walked on air with the glamour of Maud Lindesay's smiles uplifting his heart. For that tricksome grace had asked him to teach her also, and he remembered the lingering touch of her fingers ere she could compass the quaint device of the pheasant's eye peeping out from the midst of each white festoon.

Then a deep despair settled down on Sholto's spirit. He knew that Maud Lindesay and the fair Maid of Galloway had undoubtedly fallen into the power of the terrible Marshal de Retz, Sieur of Machecoul, ambassador of the King of France, and also many things else which need not in this place be put on record.



CHAPTER XLII

ASTARTE THE SHE-WOLF

In a dark wainscoted room overlooking that branch of the Seine which divides the northern part of Paris from the Isle of the City, Gilles de Retz, lately Chamberlain of the King of France, sat writing. The hotel had recently been redecorated after the sojourn of the English. Wooden pavements had again been placed in the rooms where the barbarians had strewed their rushes and trampled upon their rotting fishbones. Noble furniture from the lathes of Poitiers, decorated with the royal ermines of Brittany, stood about the many alcoves. The table itself whereon the famous soldier wrote was closed in with drawers and shelves which descended to the floor and seemed to surround the occupant like a cell.

Before de Retz stood a curious inkstand, made by some cunning jeweller out of the upper half of a human skull of small size, cut across at the eye-holes, inverted, and set in silver with a rim of large rubies. This was filled with ink of a startling vermilion colour.

The document which Gilles de Retz was busy transcribing upon sheets of noble vellum in this strange ink was of an equally mysterious character. The upper part had the appearance of a charter engrossed by the hand of some deft legal scribe, but the words which followed were as startling as the vehicle by means of which they were made to stand out from the vellum.

"Unto Barran-Sathanas; Lord most glorious and puissant in hell beneath and in the earth above, I, his unworthy servitor Gilles de Retz, make my vows, hereby forever renouncing God, Christ, and the Blessed Saints."

To this appalling introduction succeeded many lines of close and delicate script, interspersed with curious cabalistic signs, in which that of the cross reversed could frequently be detected. Gilles de Retz wrote rapidly, rising only at intervals to throw a fresh log of wood across the vast iron dogs on either side of the wide fireplace, as the rain from the northwest beat more and more fiercely upon the small glazed panes of the window and howled among the innumerable gargoyles and twisted roof-stacks of the Hotel de Pornic.

Within the chamber itself, in the intervals of the storm, a low continuous growling made itself evident. At first it was disregarded by the writer, but presently, by its sheer pertinacity, the sound so irritated him that he rose from his seat, and, striding to a narrow door covered with a heavy curtain, he threw it wide open to the wall. Then through the black oblong so made, a huge and shaggy she-wolf slouched slowly into the room.

The marshal kicked the brute impatiently with his slippered foot as she entered, and, strange to relate, the wolf slunk past him with the cowed air of a dog conscious of having deserved punishment.

"Astarte, vilest beast," he cried, "have I not a thousand times warned you to be silent and wait outside when I am at work within my chamber?"

The she-wolf eyed her master as he went back towards his table. Then, seeing him lift his pen, with a sigh of content she dropped down upon the warm hearthstone, lying with her haunches towards the blazing logs and her bristling head couched upon her paws. Her yellow shining eyes blinked sleepily and approvingly at him, while with her tongue she rasped the soft pads of her feet one by one, biting away the fur from between the toes with her long and gleaming teeth. Presently Astarte appeared to doze off. Her eyes were shut, her attitude relaxed. But so soon as ever her master moved even an inch to consult a marked list of dates which hung on a hook beside him, or leaned over to dip a quill in his scarlet ink, the flashing yellow eye and the gleam of white teeth underneath told that Astarte was awake and intently watching every movement of the worker.

Through the heavy boom of the storm without, the thresh of the rain upon the lattice casement, and the irregular whipping gusts which shook the house, the soft wheeze of the engrossing quill could be heard, the crackle of the burning logs and the heavy regular breathing of the couchant she-wolf being the only other sounds audible within the apartment.

Gilles de Retz wrote on, smiling to himself as he added line after line to his manuscript. His beard shone with a truculent blue-black lustre. For the moment the aged look had quite gone out of his face. His cheek appeared flushed with the hues of youth and reinvigorated hope, yet withal of a youth without innocence or charm. Rather it seemed as if fresh blood had been injected into the veins of some aged demon, moribund and cruel, giving, instead of health or grace, only a new lease of cruelty and lust.

Presently another door opened, the main entrance of the apartment this time, not the small private portal through which Astarte the wolf had been admitted. A girl came in, thrusting aside the curtain, and, for the space of a moment, holding it outstretched with an arm gowned in pure white before dropping it with a rustle of heavy silken fabric upon the ground.

The Marshal de Retz wrote on without appearing to be conscious of any new presence in his private chamber. The girl stood regarding him, with eyes that blazed with an intent so deadly and a hate so all-possessing that the yellow treachery in those of Astarte the she-wolf appeared kind and affectionate by contrast.

At the girl's entrance that shaggy beast had raised herself upon her fore paws, and presently she gave vent to a low growl, half of distrust and half of warning, which at once reached the ears of the busy worker.

Gilles de Retz looked up quickly, and, catching sight of the Lady Sybilla, with a sweep of his hand he thrust his manuscript into an open drawer of the escritoire.

"Ah, Sybilla," he said, leaning back in his chair with an air of easy familiarity, "you are more sparing of your visits to me than of yore. To what do I owe the pleasure and honour of this one?"

The girl eyed him long before answering. She stood statue-still by the curtain at the entrance of the apartment, ignoring the chair which the marshal had offered her with a bow and a courteous wave of his hand.

"I have come," she made answer at last, in the deep even tones which she had used before the council of the traitors at Stirling, "to demand from you, Messire Gilles de Retz, what you mean to do with the little Margaret Douglas and her companion, whom you wickedly kidnapped from their own country and have brought with you in your train to France?"

"I have satisfaction in informing you," replied the marshal, suavely, "that it is my purpose to dispose of both these agreeable young ladies entirely according to my own pleasure."

The girl caught at her breast with her hand, as if to stay a sudden spasm of pain.

"Not at Tiffauges—" she gasped, "not at Champtoce?"

The marshal leaned back, enjoying her terror, as one tastes in slow sips a rare brand of wine. He found the flavour of her fears delicious.

"No, Sybilla," he replied at last, "neither at Champtoce nor yet at Tiffauges—for the present, that is, unless some of your Scottish friends come over to rescue them out of my hands."

"How, then, do you intend to dispose of them?" she urged.

"I shall send them to your puking sister and her child, hiding their heads and sewing their samplers at Machecoul. What more can you ask? Surely the young and fair are safe in such worthy society, even if they may chance to find it a little dull."

"How can I believe him, or know that for once he will forego his purposes of hell?" Sybilla murmured, half to herself.

The Marshal de Retz smiled, if indeed the contraction of muscles which revealed a line of white teeth can be called by that name. In the sense in which Astarte would have smiled upon a defenceless sheepfold, so Gilles de Retz might have been said to smile at his visitor.

"You may believe me, sweet Lady Sybilla," said the marshal, "because there is one vice which it is needless for me to practise in your presence, that of uncandour. I give you my word that unless your friends come worrying me from the land of Scots, the maids shall not die. Perhaps it were better to warn any visitors that even at Machecoul we are accustomed to deal with such cases. Is it not so, Astarte?"

At the sound of her name the huge wolf rose slowly, and, walking to her master's knee, she nosed upon him like a favourite hound.

"And if your intent be not that which causes fear to haunt the precincts of your palaces like a night-devouring beast, and makes your name an execration throughout Brittany and the Vendee, why have you carried the little child and the other pretty fool forth from their country? Was it not enough that you should slay the brothers? Wherefore was it necessary utterly to cut off the race of the Douglases?"

"Sybilla, dear sister of my sainted Catherine," purred the marshal, "it is your privilege that you should speak freely. When it is pleasing to me I may even answer you. It pleases me now, listen—you know of my devotion to science. You are not ignorant at what cost, at what vast sacrifices, I have in secret pushed my researches beyond the very confines of knowledge. The powers of the underworlds are revealing themselves to me, and to me alone. Evil and good alike shall be mine. I alone will pluck the blossom of fire, and tear from hell and hell's master their cherished mystery."

He paused as if mentally to recount his triumphs, and then continued.

"But at the moment of success I am crossed by a prejudice. The ignorant people clamour against my life—canaille! I regard them not. But nevertheless their foolish prejudices reach other ears. Hearken!"

And like a showman he beckoned Sybilla to the window. A low roar of human voices, fitful yet sustained, made itself distinctly audible above the shriller hooting of the tempest.

"Open the window!" he commanded, standing behind the curtain.

The girl unhasped the brazen hook and looked out. Beneath her a little crowd of poor people had collected about a woman who was beating with bleeding hands upon the shut door of the Hotel de Pornic.

"Justice! justice!" cried the woman, her hands clasped and her long black hair streaming down her shoulders, "give me my child, my little Pierre. Yester-eve he was enticed into the monster's den by his servant Poitou, and I shall never see him more! Give me my boy, murderer! Restore me my son!"

And the answering roar of the people's voices rose through the open window to the ears of the marshal. "Give the woman her son, Gilles de Retz!"

At that moment the woman caught sight of Sybilla. Instantly she changed her tone from entreaty to fierce denunciation.

"Behold the witch, friends, let us tear her to pieces. She is kept young and beautiful by drinking the blood of children. Throw thyself down, Jezebel, that the dogs may eat thee in the streets."

And a shout went up from the populace as Sybilla shut to the window, shuddering at the horrors which surrounded her.

The Marshal de Retz had not moved, watching her face without regarding the noise outside. Now he went back to his chair, and bending his slender white fingers together, he looked up at her.

Presently he struck a silver bell by his side three times, and the mellow sound pervaded the house.

Poitou appeared instantly at the inner door through which the she-wolf had entered.

"How does it go?" asked the marshal, with his usual careless easy grace.

"Not well," said Poitou, shaking his head; "that is, rightly up to a point, and then—all wrong!"

For the first time the countenance of the marshal appeared troubled.

"And I was sure of success this time. We must try them younger. It is all so near, yet, strangely it escapes us. Well, Poitou, I shall come in a little when I have finished with this lady. Tell De Sille to expect me."

Poitou bowed respectfully and was withdrawing, too well trained to smile or even lift his eyes to where Sybilla stood by the window.

His master appeared to recollect himself.

"A moment, Poitou—there are some troublesome people of the city rabble at the door. Bid the guard turn out, and thrust them away. Tell them to strike not too gently with the flats of their swords and the butts of their spears."

Gilles de Retz listened for some time after the disappearance of his familiar. Presently the low droning note of popular execration changed into sharper exclamations of hatred, mingled with cries of pain.

Then the marshal smiled, and rubbed his hands lightly one over the other.

"That's my good lads," he said; "hear the rattle of the spear-hilts upon the paving-stones? They are bringing the butts into close acquaintance with certain very ill-shod feet. Ah, now they are gone!"

The marshal took a long breath and went on, half to himself and half to Sybilla.

"But I own it is all most inconvenient," he said, thoughtfully. "Here in Paris, in King Charles's country, it does not so greatly matter. For the affair in Scotland has set me right with the King and in especial with the Dauphin. By the death of the Douglases I have given back the duchy of Touraine to the kings of France after three generations. I have therefore well earned the right to be allowed to seek knowledge in mine own way."

"The service of the devil is a poor way to knowledge," said the girl.

"Ah, there it is," said the marshal, raising his hand with gentle deprecation, "even you, who are so highly privileged, are not wholly superior to vulgar prejudice. I keep a college of priests for the service of God and the Virgin. They have done me but little good. Surely therefore I may be allowed a little service of That Other, who has afforded me such exquisite pleasure and aided me so much. The Master of Evil knows all things, and he can help whom he will to the secrets of wealth, of power, and of eternal youth."

"Have you gained any of these by the aid of that Master whom you serve?" asked the Lady Sybilla, with great quiet in her voice.

"Nay, not yet," cried the marshal, moved for the first time, "not yet—perhaps because I have sought too eagerly and hotly. But I am now at least within sight of the wondrous goal. See," he added, with genuine excitement labouring in his voice, "see—I am still a young man, yet though I, Gilles de Retz, was born to the princeliest fortune in France, and by marriage added another, they have both been spent well nigh to the last stiver in learning the hidden secrets of the universe. I am still a young man, I say, but look at my whitening hair, count the deep wrinkles on my forehead, consider my withered cheek. Have I not tasted all agonies, renounced all delights, and cast aside all scruples that I might win back my youth, and with it the knowledge of good and evil?"

Sybilla went to the door and stood again by the curtain.

"Then you swear by your own God that you will let no evil befall the Scottish maids?" she said.

"I have told you already—let that suffice!" he replied with sudden coldness; "you know that, like the Master whom I serve, I can keep my word. I will not harm them, so long as their Scottish kinsfolk come not hither meddling with my purposes. I have enough of meddlers in France without adding outlanders thereto! I cannot keep a new and permanent danger at grass within my gates."

The Lady Sybilla passed through the portal by which she had entered, without adieu or leave-taking of any kind. Gilles de Retz rose as soon as the curtain had fallen, and shook himself with a yawn, like one who has got through a troublesome necessary duty. Then he walked to the window and looked out. The woman had come back and was kneeling before the Hotel de Pornic.



At sight of him she cried with sudden shrillness, "My lord, my great lord, give me back my child—my little Pierre. He is my heart's heart. My lord, he never did you any harm in all his innocent life!"

The Marshal de Retz shut the window with a shrug of protest against the vulgarity of prejudice. He did not notice four men in the garb of pilgrims who stood in the dark of a doorway opposite.

"This is both unnecessary and excessively discomposing," he muttered; "I fear Poitou has not been judicious enough in his selections."

He turned towards the private door, and as he did so Astarte the she-wolf rose and silently followed him with her head drooped forward. He went along a dark passage and pushed open a little iron door. A bright light as of a furnace burnt up before him, and the heat was overpowering as it rushed like a ruddy tide-race against his face.

"Well, Poitou, does it go better?" he said cheerfully, "or must we try them of the other sex and somewhat younger, as I at first proposed?"

He let the door slip back, and the action of a powerful spring shut out Astarte. Whereat she sat down on her haunches in the dark of the passage, and showed her gleaming teeth in a grin, as, with cocked ears, she listened to the sounds from within the secret laboratory of the Marshal de Retz.



CHAPTER XLIII

MALISE FETCHES A CLOUT

The four men whom the Messire Gilles, by good fortune, failed to see standing in the doorway opposite the Hotel de Pornic were attired in the habit of pilgrims to the shrine of Saint James of Compostella. Upon their heads they wore broad corded hats of brown. Long brown robes covered them from head to foot. Their heads were tonsured, and as they went along they fumbled at their beads and gave their benediction to the people that passed by, whether they returned them an alms or not. This they did by spreading abroad the fingers of both hands and inclining their heads, at the same time muttering to themselves in a tongue which, if not Latin, was at least equally unknown to the good folk of Paris.

"It is the house," said the tallest of the four, "stand well back within the shade!"

"Nay, Sholto, what need?" grumbled another, a very thickset palmer he; "if the maids be within, let us burst the gates, and go and take them out!"

"Be silent, Malise," put in the third pilgrim, whose dress of richer stuff than that of his companions, added to an air of natural command, betrayed the man of superior rank, "remember, great jolterhead, that we are not at the gates of Edinburgh with all the south country at our backs."

The fourth, a slender youth and fresh of countenance, stood somewhat behind the first three, without speaking, and wore an air of profound meditation and abstraction.

It is not difficult to identify three out of the four. Sholto's quest for his sweetheart was a thing fixed and settled. That his father and his brother Laurence should accompany him was also to be expected. But the other and more richly attired was somewhat less easy to be certified. The Lord James of Douglas it was, who spoke French with the idiomatic use and easy accentuation of a native, albeit of those central provinces which had longest owned the sway of the King of France. The brothers MacKim also spoke the language of the country after a fashion. For many Frenchmen had come over to Galloway in the trains of the first two Dukes of Touraine, so that the Gallic speech was a common accomplishment among the youths who sighed to adventure where so many poor Scots had won fortune, in the armies of the Kings of France.

Indeed, throughout the centuries Paris cannot be other than Paris. And Paris was more than ever Paris in the reign of Charles the Seventh. Her populace, gay, fickle, brave, had just cast off the yoke of the English, and were now venting their freedom from stern Saxon policing according to their own fashion. Not the King of France, but the Lord of Misrule held the sceptre in the capital.

It was not long therefore before a band of rufflers swung round a corner arm-in-arm, taking the whole breadth of the narrow causeway with them as they came. It chanced that their leader espied the four Scots standing in the wide doorway of the house opposite the Hotel de Pornic.

"Hey, game lads," he cried, in that roistering shriek which then passed for dashing hardihood among the youth of Paris, "here be some holy men, pilgrims to the shrine of Saint Denis, I warrant. I, too, am a clerk of a sort, for Henriet tonsured me on Wednesday sennight. Let us see if these men of good works carry any of the deceitful vanities of earth about with them in their purses. Sometimes such are not ill lined!"

The youths accepted the proposal of their leader with alacrity.

"Let us have the blessing of the holy palmers," they cried, "and eke the contents of their pockets!"

So with a gay shout, and in an evil hour for themselves, they bore down upon the four Scots.

"Good four evangelists," cried the youth who had spoken first—a tall, ill-favoured, and sallow young man in a cloak of blue lined with scarlet, swaggering it with long strides before the others, "tell us which of you four is Messire Matthew. For, being a tax-gatherer, he will assuredly have money of his own, and besides, since the sad death of your worthy friend Judas, he must have succeeded him as your treasurer."

"This is the keeper of our humble store, noble sir," answered the Lord James Douglas, quietly, indicating the giant Malise with his left hand, "but spare him and us, I pray you courteously!"

"Ha, so," mocked the tall youth, turning to Malise, "then the gentleman of the receipt of custom hath grown strangely about the chest since he went a-wandering from Galilee!"

And he reached forward his hand to pull away the cloak which hung round the great frame of the master armourer.

Malise MacKim understood nothing of his words or of his intent, but without looking at his tormentor or any of the company, he asked of James Douglas, in a voice like the first distant mutterings of a thunder-storm, "Shall I clout him?"

"Nay, be patient, Malise, I bid you. This is an ill town in which to get rid of a quarrel once begun. Be patient!" commanded James Douglas under his breath.

"We are clerks ourselves," the swarthy youth went on, "and we have come to the conclusion that such holy palmers as you be, men from Burgundy or the Midi, as I guess by your speech, Spaniards by your cloaks and this good tax-gatherer's beard, ought long ago to have taken the vows of poverty. If not, you shall take them now. For, most worthy evangelistic four, be it known unto you that I am Saint Peter and can loose or bind. So turn out your money-bags. Draw your blades, limber lads!"

Whereupon his companions with one accord drew their swords and advanced upon the Scots. These stood still without moving as if they had been taken wholly unarmed.

"Shall I clout them now?" rumbled Malise the second time, with an anxious desire in his voice.

"Bide a wee yet," whispered the Lord James; "we will try the soft answer once more, and if that fail, why then, old Samson, you may clout your fill."

"His fill!" corrected Malise, grimly.

"Your pardon, good gentlemen," said James of Douglas aloud to the spokesman, "we are poor men and travel with nothing but the merest necessities—of which surely you would not rob us."

"Nay, holy St. Luke," mocked the swarthy one, "not rob. That is an evil word—rather we would relieve you of temptation for your own souls' good. You are come for your sins to Paris. You know that the love of money is the root of all evil. So in giving to us who are clerks of Paris you will not lose your ducats, but only contribute of your abundance to Holy Mother Church. I am a clerk, see—I do not deceive you! I will both shrive and absolve you in return for the filthy lucre!"

And, commanding one of his rabble to hold a torch close to his head, he uncovered and showed a tonsured crown.

"And if we refuse?" said Lord James, quietly.

"Then, good Doctor Luke," answered the youth, "we are ten to four—and it would be our sad duty to send you all to heaven and then ease your pockets, lest, being dead, some unsanctified passer-by might be tempted to steal your money."

"Surely I may clout him now?" came again like the nearer growl of a lion from Malise the smith.

Seeing the four men apparently intimidated and without means of defence, the ten youths advanced boldly, some with swords in their right hands and torches in their left, the rest with swords and daggers both. The Scots stood silent and firm. Not a weapon showed from beneath a cloak.

"Down on your knees!" cried the leader of the young roisterers, and with his left hand he thrust a blazing torch into the grey beard of Malise.

There was a quick snort of anger. Then, with a burst of relief and pleasure, came the words, "By God, I'll clout him now!" The sound of a mighty buffet succeeded, something cracked like a broken egg, and the clever-tongued young clerk went down on the paving-stones with a clatter, as his torch extinguished itself in the gutter and his sword flew ringing across the street.

"Come on, lads—they have struck the first blow. We are safe from the law. Kill them every one!" cried his companions, advancing to the attack with a confidence born of numbers and the consciousness of fighting on their own ground.

But ere they reached the four men who had waited so quietly, the Scots had gathered their cloaks about their left arms in the fashion of shields, and a blade, long and stout, gleamed in every right hand. Still no armour was to be seen, and, though somewhat disconcerted, the assailants were by no means dismayed.

"Come on—let us revenge De Sille!" they cried.

"Lord, Lord, this is gaun to be a sair waste o' guid steel," grumbled Malise; "would that I had in my fist a stieve oaken staff out of Halmyre wood. Then I could crack their puir bit windlestaes o' swords, without doing them muckle hurt! Laddies, laddies, be warned and gang decently hame to your mithers before a worse thing befall. James, ye hae their ill-contrived lingo, tell them to gang awa' peaceably to their naked beds!"

For, having vented his anger in the first buffet, Malise was now somewhat remorseful. There was no honour in such fighting. But all unwarned the youthful roisterers of Paris advanced. This was a nightly business with them, and indeed on such street robberies of strangers and shopkeepers the means of continuing their carousings depended.

It chanced that at the first brunt of the attack Sholto, who was at the other end of the line from his father, had to meet three opponents at once. He kept them at bay for a minute by the quickness of his defence, but being compelled to give back he was parrying a couple of their blades in front, when the third got in a thrust beneath his arm. It was as if the hostile sword had stricken a stone wall. The flimsy and treacherous blade went to flinders, and the would-be robber was left staring at the guard suddenly grown light in his hand.

With a quick backward step, Sholto slashed his last assailant across the upper arm, effectually disabling him. Then, catching his heel in a rut, he fell backward, and it would have gone ill with him but for the action of his father. The brawny one was profoundly disgusted at having to waste his strength and science upon such a rabble, and now, at the moment of his son's fall, he suddenly dropped his sword and seized a couple of torches which had fallen upon the pavement. With these primitive weapons he fell like a whirlwind upon the foe, taking them unexpectedly in flank. A sweep of his mighty arms right and left sent two of the assailants down, one with the whole side of his face scarified from brow to jaw, and the other with his mouth at once widened by the blow and hermetically closed by the blazing tar.

Next, Sholto's pair of assailants received each a mighty buffet and went down with cracked sconces. The rest, seeing this revolving and decimating fire-mill rushing upon them as Malise waved the torches round his head, turned tail and fled incontinently into the narrow alleys which radiated in all directions from the Hotel de Pornic.



CHAPTER XLIV

LAURENCE TAKES NEW SERVICE

"Look to them well, Malise," said the Lord James; "'twas you who did the skull-cracking at any rate. See if your leechcraft can tell us if any of these young rogues are likely to die. I would not have their deaths on my conscience if I can avoid it."

First picking up and sheathing his sword, then bidding Sholto hold a torch, Malise turned the youths over on their backs. Four of them grunted and complained of the flare of the light in their eyes, like men imperfectly roused from sleep.

"Thae loons will be round in half an hour," said Malise, confidently. "But they will hae richt sair heads the morn, I'se warrant, and some o' them may be marked aboot the chafts for a Sabbath or twa!"

But the swarthy youth whom the others called De Sille, he who had been spokesman and who had fallen first, was more seriously injured. He had worn a thin steel cap on his head, which had been cracked by the buffet he had received from the mighty fist of the master armourer. The broken pieces had made a wound in the skull, from which blood flowed freely. And in the uncertain light of the torch Malise could not make any prolonged examination.

"Let us tak' the callant up to the tap o' the hoose," he said at last; "we can put him in the far ben garret till we see if he is gaun to turn up his braw silver-taed shoon."

Without waiting for any permission or dissent, the smith of Carlinwark tucked his late opponent under his arm as easily as an ordinary man might carry a puppy. Then, sheathing their swords, the other three Scots made haste to leave the place, for the gleaming of lanthorns could already be seen down the street, which might either mark the advent of the city watch or the return of the enemy with reinforcements.

It was to a towering house with barred windows and great doors that the four Scots retreated. Entering cautiously by a side portal, Malise led the way with his burden. This mansion had been the town residence of the first Duke of Touraine, Archibald the Tineman. It had been occupied by the English for military purposes during their tenancy of the city, and now that they were gone, it had escaped by its very dilapidation the fate of the other possessions of the house of Douglas in France.

James Douglas had obtained the keys from Gervais Bonpoint, the trusty agent of the Avondales in Paris, who also attended to the foreign concerns of most others of the Scottish nobility. So the four men had taken possession, none saying them nay, and, indeed, in the disordered state of the government, but few being aware of their presence.

Upon an old bedstead hastily covered with plaids, Malise proceeded to make his prisoner comfortable. Then, having washed the wound and carefully examined it by candlelight, he pronounced his verdict:

"The young cheat-the-wuddie will do yet, and live to swing by the lang cord about his craig!"

Which, when interpreted in the vulgar, conveyed at once an expectation of a life to be presently prolonged to the swarthy de Sille, but after a time to be cut suddenly short by the hangman.

Every day James Douglas and Sholto haunted the precincts of the Hotel de Pornic and made certain that its terrible master had not departed. Malise wished to leave Paris and proceed at once to the De Retz country, there to attempt in succession the marshal's great castles of Machecoul, Tiffauges, and Champtoce, in some one of which he was sure that the stolen maids must be immured.