CHAPTER XIV.

AVE, AMOR--ATQUE VALE!

The days went by all too quickly. The preparations for the wedding itself were begun. Pavilions with silken cords and rich broideries of cloth of gold, brought from France, were set up on the green. The old grey castle itself became gay and parti-coloured.

All too fast the end was coming, like the last grains making a dimpling whirlpool in the sand-glass.

Day and night James had pled with me to meet him once more--only to say farewell; but since my first weakness of the Lady’s Bower, I was afraid. I would see him no more save in company of Maud or the children; for by this time we had made friends, and they were climbing all about me. And at these hard words James moved about sad and disconsolate, his eyes on the ground and his fine curled locks, lint-white like a schoolboy’s, all dishevelled and storm-tossed.

So after a time my heart had a little pity on him, and one day--it was the very afternoon before my marriage day (so little time was left me)--I set out without saying a word to any, going slowly through the meadows to the northward of the isle, plucking here a flower and there a broad leaf of bracken. I was assured that James would observe my way-going. I knew, too, that Maud would see James if he followed me. For it was the mid-afternoon, when, according to her custom, she rested in her chamber, and the window looked towards the Lady’s Bower.

At that time I had no clear knowledge what Maud’s thoughts were with regard to me, save that she meant me well. And indeed, if all had turned out as Maud meant them to do, and the man had proved as worthy as he seemed--well--who knows? At least I need not anticipate. I went my way. James followed; and there, in the north-looking chamber above (as I knew, but as James did not) was Maud Lindsay planning for my good.

Will, like the best and least exigent of bridegrooms, had gone a-hunting that there might be a sufficiency of game for his guests on the morrow. The sun overhead was munificently hot. The bower was green below. Dee ran brown over the pebbles, or sulked black in the pools.

In the bower I sat a long while--alone, breathing the summer air, warm-scented off the flowers, and cool off the water, as it came to me in alternate whiffs and little uncertain breezes from every quarter. I could hear the far-off clatter of the men arranging the tents, hauling at ropes, and singing catches as they pulled. Opposite, in the meadows of the Lochar, scythes flashed in rhythm; and once, keen as a bird’s cry, a mower sharpened his scythe with his white “strake.” The note set me on edge, and when James suddenly pushed aside the green branches, I leaped to my feet with a cry and my hand hard set against my heart.

He ran to me and clasped me to him.

“I have affrighted you, little dove,” he said. “I can see your heart beat. There, on your white throat, it flutters like a bird.”

But I put out my hand, firmly resolved to keep him at a distance. “Bide where you are, James, good cousin,” I said; “these are privileges neither cousinly nor yet fraternal!”

“Margaret, I love you,” he cried, and this time (I do him the justice) he was pale to the lips. “You will never love Will; you do love me. Even yet, say but the word, and I will carry you off and maintain you in France--ay, with the strong hand! The king offered me service there. He will not deliver the duchy of Touraine to Will. First, because he is in the favour of the Dauphin, and, moreover, he is like to grow too powerful. Second, neither Charles of France nor Louis his son desires another Duke of the Orient on their hands. Burgundy is thorn enough in their sides without a Will Douglas in Touraine.”

“And what has that to do with us?” I asked him.

“This,” he went on, speaking hot and fast: “the queen talked long with me that day when Dame Sorel and you went off together. On the part of the king she offered me high command and good service. ‘You could lead men,’ she said. ‘You can drive a good lance--I know.’ Let us take the queen at her word, little Margaret, you and I! Let us go to France. There is a sea-captain at the Ross of Kirkcudbright waiting for a word to transport us to Nantes. And Will hath it not in him to pursue. He will take your provinces and be content.”

“But, James,” said I, to try him--not in the least that I thought of agreeing to go--“no priest would marry us, if we were ten times in France.”

“Why, am I not your cousin even as Will was?” he said. “I’ faith, be not afraid; the King of the Scots would help along anything that would keep Will’s estates and yours apart, and for that matter so too would the King of France. Fear you nothing at all, little one! Come with me to the queen at Amboise. She will care for you, and I swear by sacred honour that I will wait faithfully till we have the same permission from Rome to marry that Will hath now in his pouch.”

As he was speaking his face was perfectly white, and that indeed was the best thing I had yet known about James Douglas. I saw of a truth that he loved me greatly. This time it was not an affair of a moment with him. And I was sorry for James--yes, and a little sorry for myself as well, being so hemmed in on every side.

Yet somehow now he did not stir my heart--not as he had done before in the Lady’s Bower. It was not, as formerly, the hour of my weakness. I saw that a woman may not do as a man. She cannot slip aside from duty for the sake of pleasure as a man may--and often does--yet suffer no shame. She must follow--because she is a woman--the higher things. It is her weird, and was laid upon her along with the Eden pain. Her path is narrow and the thorns hedge it about.

“James,” I said, gently laying my hand upon his shoulder, “it is my turn to be strong. This that you propose would ruin more than you and me. It would bring to the ground that great house whose blood is in our veins, in yours as in mine.

“You are a Douglas of the younger line, I the last of the elder branch. The traitor’s axe cut off both my brothers. The Stewarts desire to come between, to divide the inheritance of the Douglases. They thought that their work was done when the blade, already red, fell on the neck of the earl, my brother, in the accursed castle of Edinburgh. To me, a girl, and at that time a babe, the half would go, and that half the richer and stronger. Your father, a slack man and old (I speak it not unkindly), would take the remainder.

“But this they did, they and their lick-platter, knavish councillors, without at all counting on what hath been the Douglas strength. ‘_Douglas, Douglas, haud thegither!_’ That has been the gathering word of our folk, and so it shall be yet, dear James. I was but a lass when this heritage came to me, but, by the Lord and the Virgin, I also will ‘haud it thegither’!”

“But you do not love Will?” said James, looking up with a face still white and working.

“No,” said I, “I do not love him. What chance has he given me to love him? I am to him even as a new province or a few thousand hackbutmen. No, I do not love him. But that is nothing to the point. You too are a Douglas, and if the Stewarts pressed us, would not you close your helmet-bars, and, drawing the great two-handed sword that Malise made you, lay on for the honour of the house? Or, spear in rest, would you not charge in the great and bloody day so long as strength and life remained to you? You know that you would. Why, then, may not a weak girl do what she can--give the thing she has? Are there no battles for her to fight, alone, with none to help or hear--the heavens deaf, the earth iron, the night about black, with a darkness that may be felt?”

I could hear James Douglas sobbing. I know not that he understood my words; they were above him. He was not of great subtlety, being, as it were, built of rough, gross elements, strong and salt of flavour in word and deed. Nevertheless, something moved him, perhaps no more than that he knew at last that in no case would I marry him, but would carry out my promise to Will, whatever might be the cost to myself.

So hearing that, by what upturning of the heart of a woman I cannot tell, a wave of pity for this man swept over me. It was not that my purpose weakened. Only--it seemed that somehow I must needs comfort my ancient friend. How vain my thought was I know now. Men compacted like James Douglas need comfortings rough-rasping to the senses. Baked meats and dainties are thrown away upon them. Of honey comfits and conserve of rose leaves, sugar wafers filled with quince, seeded pomegranate jelly and stoned black cherries of Gascony--bah, they say, is this meat for men?

But these things I knew not then. I learned his taste later. This it was:

Salt beef biting with cabbage-wort and onions, cold pork and garlic thereto, a horn spoon and a potful of bone broth or cockyleekie hot off the fire, even a great platter of oat porridge with ale in a bicker--suchlike made our James’s concept of pleasant things. And his taste in eating is an allegory of his taste in other things. A big, lordly, overlording man that loved his bellyful of lustihood--to eat when he was hungry, drink when thirst nipped him, carry off on his saddle-bow the woman who pleased him, to swagger before all men as Saul among the people, haler, heartier, stronger, taller by a head than any there--these things made life for James Douglas, and for the many James Douglases of the world.

This being so, I wasted delicate words on him.

“James,” I said, “were I free to choose--I do not know--I might”--

Then in a moment I knew that I had done wrong, and that, though I might love James Douglas, he would never understand me.

For he took me in his great arms like a child and kissed me--just because I had said that--and hesitated. A man will never learn--at least, not such men as James. They are the bandits of love, and take silly women by brigandage. Strangely enough, some of us like it.

But not I--not I. That I did--in the end--come to think otherwise of this marauder was for altogether another reason. I do not know exactly what, but that it was another reason--of that I am sure.

So being held fast and kissed often, it was natural that I should struggle to be free--to cry out. But I might as well have rebelled against pillory on the Villeins’ Hill, had I been set there. And my most touching protestations had as much effect on James Douglas as upon the headsmen of Thrieve the appeals of some suffering wretch hard gripped by the law.

“Say you love me, then!” he said, smiling at me; “you said that if you had a choice, you would”--

“_Would hate you_,” I cried furiously, “and I do.”

“Ay, you would hate me if you had a choice,” he said, with unexpected subtlety, “but you have not. You love me therefore. Say it!”

“I will not say it! I love you not. I would die first!”

“Then you shall stay here till you do!”

For that I do not think I hated him so very much as I ought. His arms were so strong, and yet he held me gently. He had somehow “the airt o’t.”

There are worse things in the world. And besides, he was my cousin and playmate.

So I said that which he wished me to say--only, of course, to get away. But, all the same, I said it. At that he kissed me greatly, fiercely--so that my head swam. There came a singing in my ears that was not the murmur of the Dee Water. For a moment I seemed almost to lose consciousness. For there are times when James does not know how strong he is.

Then when I came to myself, being still held in his arms, there before us stood William Douglas, within two yards, his hand upon his sword-hilt and his face like to the face of the dead.