CHAPTER XIII.

THE LAST GRAINS IN THE SAND-GLASS

That month fled all too fast away. Never had there been known a more perfect July. The scarlet poppies overleaped the corn already yellowing on the sandier knowes. Deep and lush grew the meadow-grass in which the Thrieve mowers, seeking far and near winter forage for the horses of Sholto’s guard, found (sometimes to their cost) the wild bees’ honey.

The hills in the mid distance began to turn a ruddier purple, as the heather flushed for that more glorious harvest of the eye, which usually in Galloway comes rather with the oats than with the meadow hay. And the days when I waited the outcome of my talk with Maud Lindsay fled also too fast away, without, as it appeared to me, anything being accomplished.

Moreover, Laurence had forsaken me. Whether it was the near approach of my marriage day, or the need (which he asserted) for his presence upon his domain abbatical of Sweetheart, I cannot tell. But certain it is that he left Thrieve the emptier for the want of his boyish face and bright smile.

But James remained. And the fates of the life of woman--or some other organising power, at that time unseen by me--drew us more and more together. And, indeed, there is little to do for such a man as James Douglas about a castle, save to tilt at the ring and try his strength at the crossbars above the dungeon mouth. But since he could lift up two stalwart guardsmen by sheer muscle, the one clinging to the other’s feet out of the deeps of the old cell

[Illustration: I CANNOT THINK HOW IT WAS THAT JAMES AND I GAT INTO THE HABIT OF GOING TO THE LITTLE BUSHY “BOUROCH” (CALLED THE LADY’S BOWER) AT THE NORTHERLY END OF THE ISLAND.]

built in the north-west corner of the guards’ hall, there were few that cared to compete with him. All the same, he would bring me down to see him do it.

On the other hand, Will coursed everywhere, like a questing hound--to Douglas Castle, to Annandale, across the West and Middle Marches, athwart the brown barren moors to visit his earldom of Wigton--or, rather, that which would be his when he married me. The most feck of the days he would be up and away while the light was still pearly and pink in the east.

Often I would wake in the dawn to the clink of horses’ hoofs far down in the court. I would hear the men of the escort standing to their arms ready to mount. A word of command--that of Sholto, who rode ever at the earl’s right hand--and then, with a creak and a clang, down the drawbridge would go. To that succeeded a hollow rumble, which was the feet of the horses passing over, a neigh of some charger left lonesome in stall, and then for another day silence settled down upon all the precincts of the great old castle of Archibald the Grim.

I cannot think how it was that James and I gat into the habit of going to the little bushy “bouroch” (called the Lady’s Bower) at the northerly end of the island. It came about first, I think, that he might show me the damage wrought by the great flood of a year agone, which happened when I was still in France. He pointed out, too, how, by embanking with solid stone and lime, like that which is to be seen in Holland, William had strengthened not only the island but also all the defences on that side.

Now all the trees had been cut in the vicinity of the castle, for the sake of security in case of siege. But at the northern end of the island there were many--though, alas! sadly thinned in the late troubles.

But there was our bower in the midst of them, where, with the river blue and steady before us, wide almost as an arm of the sea, and scarce touched all that high summer-time by a single purl of wind, we two would sit on a rough seat which James had knocked together with driftwood and chance roofing beams floated down for the new stabling.

Now Maud Lindsay was much with me in the afternoons, but in the mornings she had the housewifery of the castle to attend to--napery and suchlike--while in the evening she used to sing her babies to sleep as her good way was. So it was chiefly in the forenoons and in the evenings that James and I strolled to the Lady’s Bower.

Indeed, we had no great distance to traverse, for the whole island does not extend more than half a mile from stem to stern, being, as one might say, a long, narrow vessel anchored in the mid-stream of the Water of Dee, the castle-keep set on the western bulwarks and somewhat towards the stern. So Thrieve was, and so, indeed, it is to this day.

Only James is no longer there, William devises no new defences, and the king’s bullocks profane my Lady’s Bower, which in the countryside clatter is now said to have been named after me. But it was not, taking its name from that Lady Sybilla who came from France and drew into her toils my brother William, as hath aforetime been told. But I have my own tale to tell, and it waits my pen.

Now it is always ill giving a reason why a woman loves this man and not that. For the most part, indeed, she would be hard pushed to tell herself. And so it was with my feeling for James Douglas. Sometimes I liked him, and again at others I could not abide that he should come near me.

But it was all the same to James whether I sulked or smiled. He had his answer ready, his excuse to his hand. He could be respectful and grave, quick-witted and carelessly gay, or simply companionable and full of gossip as an ale-wife, all in the space of an hour. He had the natural gift of taking a woman’s humour and making it his. Will knew no humour but his own, and if it chanced you were not of it, then you passed out of the world so far as he was concerned.

Did James Douglas make love to me wittingly? Curious and still unanswered the query! Did Maud know or suspect? And in any case, what did she mean by encouraging me to hope for a love which the future would bring me? She herself had no great liking, even then, for James Douglas; yet at Castle Machecoul he had saved her, as he had saved me. But women’s likings (I say it again) go not by these things.

Yes, I liked James--first of all, I think, because I knew that I ought not. Then he was a great, blond, towsy-haired giant, with the arm of Samson and the short thick beard of the statues on the king’s new house at Striveling. When, for sport, one struck his breast, it was like beating a drum, and when he struck back, the stricken was carried out and had water poured over him.

Then, he was fair, like his father and most of the Avondales--I, black of the black, a right Galloway Douglas. But mostly these things go by contraries--the fair young Davids mating with the maids, dark but comely, out of the patched tents of Kedar and the tans of dusky Sepharvaim.

Yet I never felt that James Douglas really mastered me. Will could have done it, if he had chosen, mayhap. But James rather herded me with the silent discretion of a well-trained sheep-dog, which meets and holds but never chases or frightens a refractory charge.

Never absent, never late, with a smile on his lips, a twinkle in his blue eyes, and such a sunny helpfulness in his every action, small wonder that James Douglas had been fortunate all his life. He was a twin of the one birth with his brother Archibald, and only the favour of his mother and the indulgence of his father had given him, by solemn declarator, the position of elder brother and heir male to the title and estates.

Of his weaknesses and sins I need not speak here. They have entered into judgment with him while yet he breathes the upper air. But, nevertheless, there was much lovable, much gracious, much heartful and hope-inspiring about James Douglas, and though I have suffered many things, God be witness, I say no different even unto this day.

Above all men generous, ready to go out of his way to do a service to any, great or small, he yet loved the praise of men as a girl watches for admiration. So much I could see--and--I know not that I liked him the worse for it.

This James of ours would go into a tavern and ruffle it with the best--tossing tankards of ale with Hob and Dob, the Selkirk “souters.” He would drink down the Bordeaux and the vintages of parched champagne with kings and princes, giving them toast for toast, bumper for bumper. And if midway the first carouse, Hob of the Elsin chanced to grow ill-haired and cantankerous, who so ready as James of Douglas to take to quarterstaff and break a “souter’s” head, or, in default of ready timber, with the sounder weapons of his clenched ten fingers.

Or if, again, my Lord of Bracieux, or His Highness the Prince of Albany, came to words with him as to the colour of a maid’s eyes, the degree of her beauty, or the immaculate perfection of her virtue, who so quick with sword and dagger to defend his opinion as James Douglas, or who, after all was done, more chivalrously willing to shake the hand of a fallen adversary, or assuage his wound with the ointment of marshmallows he kept in his spare helmet?

Besides which, there was something else about him which only a woman can feel, and even she cannot express. James Douglas was so made that no woman could be very angry with him, whatever he might do--that is, she could not keep up her anger for long.

So we walked together and talked, and it made me glad to know that the sword by his side had laid on the bent many an adversary, and that the strong arm which swung me so easily over the burns and hurled trunks of trees from near and far, so that we could cross the ditches and stagnant hags of the morass, was ready to protect me as none other in all Scotland could.

At any rate (I deny it not) it grew perilously pleasant to hear the clink of the departing steeds which carried Will and Sholto to the four winds of heaven, and to know that we had, James and I, one other great high-arched day of summer all to ourselves, in which to wander at our wayward wills, to watch the moor-birds and the sea-fowl blown up from Solway, or late-nesting about the marshes of Carlinwark.

Then, too, James would take my hand--not freely and of one consent and accord like as Laurence was wont to do, but whether I would or no. Yet ever laughingly, so that it would have seemed ill-tempered and dairy-maidish to make an objection about so light a thing.

“Cousins we are,” he would say, “and brother and sister soon to be!”

Then he would sigh and look upon the ground for some while, as we went farther and farther from the castle barrier down through the green pleasances of the wood.

“I would that I had been the elder brother,” he would bemoan himself. “’Tis hard to love as I love, and yet”--

At the thought he grew more sober, and once for a moment I thought of a surety he was about to cry. So, because that seemed more terrible than all in a man, I took him hastily by the hand, saying, “You do not really love me, James! You know well you have loved a dozen before--ay, and more, if all tales be true.”

“Lies! lies!” he would cry; “they are not true! I swear it by the bones of St. Bride. It is only a thing said by the common folk--the clash of the country! They fix on me--because Will is--as he is!”

“And how is he?” I asked, not too wisely, perhaps.

James laughed, yet not scornfully. For James Douglas was a gentleman, and true to his own. Not, however, a very great gentleman, like my brother William, whom they slew at Edinburgh--or another whom I came to know later. So he did not mock his brother even when in act, perhaps without intent, to win away from him the love of his promised wife.

But at least he could not do that, for I had never given it to Will of Avondale. No, nor even counted him playmate and “little lover,” as in the old childish days I had called Larry, when Maud and Sholto strolled afield picking forget-me-nots or star-gazing at the constellations, as if the sky of one night were different from that of another.[3]

James Douglas laughed, good-naturedly, carelessly, even affectionately, but at the same time like a man who feels himself armed _cap-à-pie_ when there is talk of love-making.

“Ah, our Will,” he murmured, “he will be a new William the Lion or Robert the Bruce, so be his head does not fall too soon under the axe. But he will never know what it is to live.”

“And what,” said I, drolling with him, “in your well-informed younger-brotherly wisdom may it be to live? To eat and drink, to ride and sleep, to marry or to give in marriage. That hath been the general opinion. Is Will shut off from these, Sir Wiseacre? I judge not the last--to my cost.”

“The sap is in the trees, the honey in the flower, and the blood in men,” James answered enigmatically. “Our good Will’s veins are filled with the ink wherewithal to write State papers--a valuable fluid, doubtless, but not one from which to distil either life for oneself or happiness for others!”

“And how would _you_ proceed, most learned St. James of Avondale, high master of the mysteries?”

“Even thus,” he said, slipping a hand about my waist. “If I had Will’s chances, I would not ride off every day at the crowing of the cock--to the north, to see whether Douglas Castle sits still on its knowe; anon to the west, to stir up the Agnew to hang a few more scores of Irelanders; then to the south, to hector the Tutor of Bombie; and (last of all) to the west, to see a new rigging put upon the pig-styes of Caerlaverock!”

I felt in my heart there was both meat and matter in what he said, and--I did not (to my shame) order him to take away his arm from about my waist. There was no barrier about the Lady’s Bower to rest the back. His arm was strong and good to lean upon--just as Maud had said of Sholto’s. I was curious to see if the thing were indeed true. And it was. It is useful to be told a thing, but after all that is only the hundredth part of knowledge.

“No,” he went on, “I would be--where I am now. But with more right--not doing another man’s work--tilling his ground that he may sow, planting that he may reap. Bah!” (here he broke off angrily) “Will has manhood, but it is that of a mechanism of iron, that drives onward to its purpose. You and I, little Margaret, are but puppets in his game, quintains to be strewn hither and thither as he birses yont, so that the house of Douglas may put the Stewarts in the dust, or of all these castles not one stone be left upon another!”

I had never seen him so moved.

“James,” I said, gently enough, for there was that which tightened in my throat--I knew not why, “it is not for you of all men to speak thus--least of all to me, who in a handful of days am to be your brother’s wife!”

“No,” he said, more quietly, “you say truth, Margaret. But I have loved you, do not forget, ever since we played together on the Hill of Daisies up yonder where through a gap in the cloud-drift the corn-stooks wink yellow in the sun. I have gone farther, taken greater risks, laid my life in pawn more often--yea, upon the turning of a hair for you--as did never Will! If I speak wrong--do wrong--lay these things in the other scale.”

And suddenly turning, he took me in his arms.

“After all you are mine,” he cried fiercely. “I love you better than the other, if he is my brother! Do not forget it. I will wait for you--if it be a thousand years!”