CHAPTER XXIII.

THE FIRST STROKE OF DOOM

They brought me word. It was Laurence who came. James had sent him--not, I think, knowing--or perhaps, in his insolence of security, not caring. And what it was, I must strive to tell drily and plainly, if at all.

My husband, William Douglas, had ridden forth that night by the Three Thorns to have speech with Malise, and to ask that some of the lads should accompany him to Sweetheart.

But the ancient armourer of the Douglas house, having had his own way ever since he came into the world (or having taken it), bade saddle his own beast, saying that he alone could and would guide his lord to the abbey of Sweetheart. So to Dulce Cor they had gone both of them together, through the deadliest hurl of the storm, taking the coast road, which, though more difficult, was less likely to be blocked, because in these parts the wind blows the snow behind the boulders and out into the sea. Strange, but so it is in our Galloway.

Thence, after some secret speech with Laurence, and a rest of several hours, Will Douglas had ridden away northward to meet the king at Stirling, Malise accompanying him as far as Clyde Water, having refused to be sooner parted from his master.

And after ten days, in which I heard nothing, this was the tale which Laurence had come to tell.

“I speak in the proper name of the Lord James,” he said. “For, being little better than a monk, I am counted a safe go-between in these matters.”

Then, drily enough, as is common at such times, he told his tale.

“The Earl William rode to Stirling under the king’s safe-conduct,” so he began. “He was received with joy and feasting. After dinner, in a little private chamber apart, it chanced that there was no one with the Lord William save the king, when suddenly James Stewart drew a dagger, and having still one hand round William Douglas’s shoulder in loving fashion, struck--struck his friend to the heart, calling on his hired butchers to assist. Among them they killed him, striking long after he was dead. Sixty-seven wounds there were on the body of our dear master and lord!”

Then there seemed to rise up before me the image, erect and noble, of the husband whom I had lost. The man who was to claim me, the first being dead, had been long away. I felt his power only in presence.

But Will was dead--my dear Cousin Will. I thought of him as no other. Never would life be the same. Yet somehow I was noways surprised. It seemed now as if he had been doomed from the first. Even at Cour Cheverney and Amboise I had seen the line of death trench his brow. He had said it of himself. He was not made for life and love and pleasure--it bode that he should die young.

But to die by the hand of his king, his friend. It seemed a thing marvellous, save that I knew all the Bruces to be murderers, and all the Stewarts traitors to their own best friends. It was some time before strength was given me to ask how it happened.

“Little is known,” said Laurence, “and that only from the report of the royal spick-and-span favourites and bully butchermen of the palace. But as the story goes, the king asked the Earl William (being alone with him after dinner) to break his treaty with my Lord of Ross. Then when he would not,

[Illustration: “SIXTY-SEVEN WOUNDS THERE WERE ON THE BODY OF OUR DEAR MASTER AND LORD!”]

showing cause, he struck at him suddenly with his dagger. This much only is vouched for. But those who speak are all the very hangman’s company, and there is no truth in them. Black and ever blacker are the lies they tell!”

“And is our lord the earl--my Cousin William--surely dead?”

“Ay, truly,” Laurence answered softly. “The Lord James sent me to tell you!”

“Had he no message?”

“None, save that after vengeance taken, he would come himself to you!”

* * * * * * *

“And now,” continued Laurence, “since my errand is done, permit me to take my leave. It is not yet the time appointed. But one day there may befall the need of a refuge for you. And then--why, the door of Sweetheart will open, and the women of God, with their sweet, pale faces, be ready to welcome you in!”

“And you, Laurence?”

“I shall not see you,” he said, almost in a whisper, “but I shall know you are there. And that will be more to me than the New Jerusalem and all the stones of its Twelve Foundations!”

Then, indeed, there were threads to draw together. Sholto came back to put the castle in its final state of defence in case of need, and to raise the folk of Galloway--also, doubtless, to be near Maud and the babes. Nor did I blame him for that.

As to what James and the Douglas brothers did in and about Stirling, that needs a page to itself. And through all Scotland ever as the bruit spread, so did also the horror! The murder of a friend by a friend--both young men--the royal safe-conduct stained with innocent blood--the unarmed guest slain by the hand of his host and despatched by his myrmidons--never was such a thing heard tell of in Scotland, or indeed scarce in the world.

And as for the things which in these latter days the king’s chronicle-makers assert against our Lord William--as anent the death of the Tutor of Bombie and the rest--I can refute all these in a word. They are but Highland lies, sired by the Stewarts and damed by their lick-spittle clerks--nothing more.

The Tutor of Bombie (hear the truth!) would have taken that poor heritage and crumbling fortalice on the sea-edge from his brother’s son, its rightful heir, a lad of ten. William Douglas being the feudal lord of both, saw that right was done and wrong put under. That is the fact, which is known to all south of St. Mary’s Loch, whose mind upon the matter was that a month in the cell of Archibald the Grim, and afterwards a stall in the abbey of Dulce Cor, were all too good for a despoiler of the widow and the orphan, like the well-served Tutor of Bombie.

And as to the gallow knob of Thrieve never wanting its tassel for fifty years, did ever mortal hear or speak such arrant lies?

Were not the Douglases noble gentlemen, dukes of the realm of France, as well as the greatest lords in Scotland? Had they not been ambassadors to Paris, to London, to Rome? Would they, then, think you, have come home to set so much carrion swinging under their own nostrils and those of their ladies in their mansion of Thrieve?

Assuredly no! The Douglas did justice; yea, and verily. But it was at the gallows’ slot of the Furbar that the scaffold was set up and the pit digged. Not within sight or sound of Thrieve, where Will Douglas conserved me like a rare Provençal rose. Only madmen and king’s witlings could conceive and pen such manifest lies. But the time came, and that soon, when to speak evil (or to invent it for others to speak) concerning a Douglas of the Black was the surest passport to the king’s favour.

But these things assuredly did William Douglas neither ill nor good, though in after time they have caused many, perhaps unwittingly, both to speak and to write the thing that was not. In the beginning, however, the story was set a-going by evil-contriving men, anxious to buy that unstable and unsatisfying mess of pottage, a king’s goodwill, with falsehoods and jealousies.

But of this, no more! All the world, which knew him, knows the man William Douglas was--the one lion among a pack of manged and verminous curs.

And in the things which befell at this time also, James Douglas bore himself stoutly and like the head of his family--though perhaps with some little of the levity which continually showed itself on grave occasions.

Instead of gathering the forces of the Douglas, as Sholto had done on a former day of trouble, and marching directly upon the traitor-king and his councillors, he must needs, with his younger brothers, spend time in taking the town of Stirling by escalade--whence, however, the King of the Bloody Hand had fled to shelter himself more safely in the castle of Edinburgh. Once established in Stirling, James Douglas extricated the hangman’s garron, the worst and most unseemly piece of living horse-flesh in the town-royal, out of its tumble-down hovel, and tying the king’s safe-conduct to its tail, dragged the seals and the royal signature of the Stewart through the mud of the streets, to be trodden on and bemired of men and beasts.

And ever as they marched, James called aloud, “Burgesses and lieges of Stirling, behold the sworn promise of your king! Who will come forth and defend it? It is the word of a liar, the word of a traitor, the word of a murderer! I, James Douglas, proclaim it so, and give the lie and defiance to every man among you!”

But instead, the wise burghers either stayed indoors, seeing as many fierce and well-armed Douglases in and about their town as there were stones in the causeway; or some (the wilder rabble of them) came forth, hooting, and voiding of _gardyloo_ vessels upon the promise of their forsworn king, written, signed, and sealed by his own hand. Such shame was never seen in a royal city!

Yet, nevertheless, it came to pass that the weeks went by, and, though there was great indignation and many thousands of true Douglases asked no better than to be led to battle against the traitorous Stewart and his low-born crew of Crichtons and Livingstons, there was none to be a head to them. The lads, Archibald and Hugh and little John, were sent to their earldoms and dependencies in the north, thus dividing the name and clan, at a time when every Douglas should have been clambering at the feeble defences of Edinburgh town, and breaking down that castle wa’, wherein so mickle ill had been contrived and wrought upon the Douglases of the Black.

William, had he been alive, would have had the topmost tower of the foul nest about their ears in a week. Indeed, not so long before, he had taken the castle with the Crichton in it. But James, though as to his courage personal no man could doubt (for, indeed, he was ever ready and eager to prove it at all times upon any that would cross weapons with him), had yet a calculating and selfish province within his heart, though well hidden and undreamed of even by me at that time.

Nay, so much so that, mewed up in Thrieve, I longed for him to come and give me liberty. I had been a cage-bird so long--yes, let the cage be as sweetly gilded as Thrieve, and though I had with me Maud and the children, yet being born to sway the hearts of men, I longed to take again my power to me. I had proven my weapons at Cour Cheverney. I had walked unshamed at Amboise, by the side of the Dame de Beauté herself. Yet here, at Thrieve, somehow, with Maud and Sholto, and with the sight of their happiness ever before my eyes, there grew up within me a need. At first it was no more than an ache, vague, dull, and seldom-coming. Then as time went on, it grew more frequent and more acute. There was sometimes in my heart of hearts an anger and almost a malice against these wedded lovers. I grew to hate the little bairns that played upon the green (so wicked I was!)--because they were not mine. For though I pulled flowers and wove rush-baskets for them all day long, they would run like hares at the first clatter of their father’s armour or the faintest flutter of Maud’s sun-bonnet coming towards us through the trees of the wood.

I wanted--well, something I wanted. I knew not what. Perhaps to be all that to someone--to have no rival near my throne, not even a young child. To know the love of men as it is when man loves once and for all--to hear (after a time) the sweet noise of children’s voices far off, cool and pleasant in the summer silences as the sound of waters falling--to hear and to know them mine also--not Maud’s or Sholto’s, but mine. God has put these desires deep in the heart of a woman, and in comparison with such things princessdoms and dignities and successes and triumphings and the queening of it as Damosels of Beauty and chiefest among the Fair--all are as nothing. That is, for a woman who is a woman. She may learn it late, or she may learn it never. But if, unhappily, the last--then there is an ache and a pain. Something unassuaged, abiding hungry and unsatisfied in her heart, which she will carry to her grave.

Was that to be my fate? I feared it. I believed it. William Douglas was dead. Sincerely I mourned him. A friend of the graver sort, he had been to me--a councillor, faithful, just, fearless, truth-speaking even at the cost of pain, my cousin, a staff of staunchness upon my way of life--as all these I mourned him, but not as my husband. A husband--I never had a husband. I never would have one.

The ache redoubled, grew more eager, mordant, angry against all the world. I was scarce to be spoken to. And Maud, dear, sweet soul, left me to myself, dreaming that it was because of the death of my husband, and perchance some remorse that I had loved him so little. The truth was, I was wearied out. I could not be sorry any more. I longed for change--anything to take me out of myself.

It was his hour, and prompt at the hour which was his, James Douglas rode in through the gate of Thrieve.