CHAPTER XXVII.

THE WHITE FACE OF FATE

And I was not mistaken.

Sholto stood with his hand on the old man’s arm. Maud sat still-stricken in the window corner. The younger lads read their father’s face with a kind of awe. Only Sholto was master of himself, and, by consequence, of all within the house. Even his mother had been subdued from her torment of mourning by the young man’s steady quiet.

“What is it? Tell me!” I cried. “Tell me quickly--all that has happened!”

Though indeed, as I have said, I knew before any had time to speak.

Then Maud, seeing it was for the best that Sholto should be left with his father and mother, wordlessly beckoned me to follow her out upon the green. So forth from this dark House of Doom we stepped at once into the great blue sunshiny day, with the whaups and water-birds crying aloft, and the airs blowing brisk and caller from the braes of Cuill and Castle Gower. But what struck me most was the sound of the bairns playing innocently together. They were singing as of yore the refrain--

“What will the robbers do to you, do to you, do to you? What will the robbers do to you, My Fair Lady?”

And it was wondrous wae to see the young things thus sporting on the grass, joining hands, advancing and retiring, bowing, and waving hands, according as their dance led them, and yet know that within that house there was not one, old or young, who had not a broken heart.

To escape their importunities Maud and I walked a little apart into the glades of the wood, without looking the one at the other. Then, all suddenly, she spoke.

“_The Earl James hath taken away our little Magdalen!_”

Yes, I had known it. As I said before, I understood at once, as soon as I had looked at those poor folk gathered in the cottage of the Three Thorns. But to hear it spoken for truth and fact was another matter. The words turned me sick, not perhaps with anger, or even sorrow, as it ought, but first of all, and before I thought of the M‘Kims, with the ignominy of it.

To Maud I made no answer; words failed me. I felt as if I must drop down and die. But to die thus is not given to women when they will, not even when they pray hardest for it. There were the playing babes, there the green lakeside strath, yonder the birds, the red-painted heather, the blue sky: all as it had been. Yet to be shamed every day and all the days, till I died; that was the difference.

God help us all! We are weak creatures. Oftentimes it is the surroundings of misfortune, the pattern of the cup from which we drink, that make the draught most bitter! That another should know, that nature should be so cruelly careless and indifferent--these things pique us with sharper agony than even the friend’s knife in the heart. One is never betrayed but by one’s own, they say; and so I was slain by James--James, who had brought me new life, the very beginnings of life, indeed, after those ten years of slow death at Thrieve, when I was a woman, and did not know it until he showed me. And now, now he had taken the life he gave--taken it, and rendered it vile.

Such a short time ago it seemed since he came riding in that first time with his retinue through the great archway of Thrieve! And yet, walking there by the side of the water, I never once thought of questioning the truth of the accuser’s word. Besides, I had known Maud Lindsay all my life; I had known Sholto; I had known Dame Barbara--Malise; they did not lie.

Yet I made no protestations; scarce had I care or interest sufficient to ask how the thing had become known. But at last I found the words.

“Tell me, Maud,” I said, with that curious chill calm which comes at such times, as if some other than I were speaking, “who hath brought this story to the Three Thorns?”

She took from her pocket a little crumpled scrap of paper. It was written in Magdalen’s hand-of-write. Laurence himself had taught her, and she wrote clearly and like a clerk, forming her letters one by one without running them together as the manner of some is.

“Read it!” she said. “God in His heaven, surely you have the right!”

At first the words refused to form themselves before my eyes. I gat no sort of meaning out of the written characters, but after a while they seemed to swim up to me out of a glancing mist.

“My Father,”--wrote Magdalen M‘Kim,--“This will bring you pain--to you and all, to my mother--but most (and most bitterly I grieve for that) to the gracious lady of Castle Thrieve. But till he came into my life, I had never loved any man. And I stood out long--long against his will--till the thing grew too strong for me. I can do no more. I love the Earl James, as a woman loves a man when she will gladly give her life for him. He is great--I less than nothing. Let him do with me whatsoever he will. Be not sorry overmuch or overlong for the pain I have left behind me. Be sorry rather in that God hath made such a thing as I am desirable in the eyes of any man! But be never sorry for her who, till this day, had the right to sign herself,

“Your Daughter Magdalen, “Little and Only.”

Slowly the truth entered in--sharp as the knife of a surgeon, or, perchance, more like a probe moved cunningly to find the root of some hidden disease. Through the unchanged brightness of the glad high day came slowly the intolerable certainty that this thing was mine--_my_ shame, _my_ sorrow, _my_ cross that I must carry till I died.

And James had done this to me. Well, even at the first I found the thing not inexplicable--so far, that is, as he was concerned. But Magdalen M‘Kim, the girl who wandered far from her home to be alone with the wild things of the hills and the woods, what had she found in James Douglas? Ah, that question was more difficult; yet for the present it did not greatly concern or even interest me.

“What will they do?” I asked of Maud, as she sat with her face firm, fixed, and pale as wax, looking across the loch to the sapphire ridge of Ben Gairn solid against the southern horizon.

“God help us all, I know not!” she answered; “the M‘Kims have made an oath to find her first and kill the Lord James afterwards--that is, all but Sholto! Malise the smith it was laid it upon the lads. He swears he will hunt the traitor as he hunted De Retz. They have sworn a bond of vengeance, each pricking himself and signing with his blood.”

“But Sholto,” I said, “will he leave me alone in my time of need? Will he hold as naught the love of a lifetime? And you, Maud, what will you do?”

She shook her head, very sadly and slowly. The tears flowed silently down her cheeks. She did not weep. Only when one glanced at her, lo! there was the water running down her face. But not looking closely, one might have noticed nothing.

“Ah, Margaret,” she made answer at last, “that I know not. I am your friend always, but a wife must go with her husband!”

I could not restrain a sharp intake of the breath as she spoke the words. They fell hard on me, remembering those things which I had just listened to. But Maud, for once not wholly enwrapt in her husband and her babes, turned and caught me.

“I meant it not,” she said; “forgive me! But believe me also--Sholto will never be less your friend. I know him. Ten times for one it is I who bid him do this or that. But when there comes a look--a certain look I know well on his face, I am glad--yes, very glad to be silent and obey! Thus it is with women!”

Then I had a kind of access of foolish tears--the first. And perhaps, I have since thought, it was that weeping which saved me.

“Maud,” I cried, “is it not strange that I am like the woman in the Scripture--she who had so many husbands--and he whom she now hath is not her husband?”

“Hush!” commanded Maud; “it is not good that one in grief should speak of such things. The sorrow comes from God!”

“And James Douglas?” I queried; “perhaps he and his sin also come from God?”

But seeing my mood, she would not answer, but held her peace, and that wisely.

“This becomes you not, Margaret,” she said, gently holding me with her strong young arms laid motherly about my shoulders; “you can do nothing here. Get you back to Thrieve. Sholto shall go with you. As soon as may be I will follow with the children. This is to-day no fit place for babes. Come--let me find you Haifa. Nay, do not go in again. The old man is mad. He sees red. There is the lust of blood in his eyes! Hasten!”

And as we went round the little cottage of the Three Thorns there came from the interior, hoarse and terrible to hear, the cursing of the smith--

“Man and boy, threescore years and three have I, Malise M‘Kim, served the Douglases, but I will serve them no more! They have taken all from me that I gave them--all--self and sons and years a-many. One little ewe lamb was for myself. I kept her. She was as the children of Mary the Virgin, as the little ones who scattered the palm branches in the way for Mary’s Son, sweet and lovely and innocent. She was unto me--to me alone. Freely I gave my sons to the Douglas. I gave them to the death. But this white lamb, sole of the fold, born out of her due time, I held nestled safe--as I thought--within these old arms! And now, by the God that put strength in these wrists and anger in this heart, I will hate even as I have loved. Honey is turned to gall! Service to a hunting with dogs! I will bring down this dark house--I will level it with the ground for what it hath wrought--God be my witness!”

At this point I could hear Sholto’s voice say something, but the words I could not hear.

“Come away, Margaret,” said Maud, striving to draw me out of the reach of that terrible malediction; “this is not fit for you to hear!”

“Nay,” I answered, “let me stay. Part is for me, is it not? Am not I a Douglas? Did not you yourself say that a woman must go with her husband?--_ah, her husband!_”

At this moment I could hear Malise break away from his eldest son with a kind of roar like that of a wild beast.

“No, by Him and His hosts, I will not!” he shouted, in answer to some appeal. “Stand away from me, boy, or you shall die by the hand of the father that begat you! I care not though I have served six Douglases, all of them good men. They are dead, and gone to their own place. But this--this coward--nay, even now I will give him his dues. James of Douglas is no coward with his hands, but only with his heart and with his soul! Yet he--my master--that I thought to serve and to die serving, hath done this shame unto me! Out of the way, boy! I will go to the king--ay, Stewart though he be! I will go to Crichton. I will go to my Lord Angus. He at least is a Douglas, if he hath not the pith of a peeled willow wand. But I swear it, though James Douglas were as strong as Thrieve, and carried in his veins all the blood of all the thirty lords of the Black House, I would bring him down. I would slay him. The curse of Malise the smith be on every Douglas, small and great, that hath in their veins a drop of the blood of Avondale. Nay, you mistake. I said ‘of Avondale.’ The poor Maid of Galloway, little Margaret--no, I do not curse her. She, at least, hath done nothing amiss, and the blow falls heavy also upon her. It was an ill-done thing to fear her, being as she is. But, if I know the Douglas blood--if I know the sister of William and David, who died in Edinburgh, she will hold still to the man who hath done the wrong--because he is her husband, because he also is a Douglas. So shall the curse of Malise also fall slantwise upon her--the curse of the old man left daughterless, the curse of him that had but one ewe lamb, and now--_hath her not!_”

Sholto had come out, knowing by some instinct the nearness of Maud, or perhaps our need of him.

“For the present I can do nothing with my father,” he said. “It is useless. There is indeed no need for me there. Gladly will I ride with our dear lady, and do you follow after, Maud, my wife!”

So, ever gentle and kind, and of a nature at all times to be depended on, was Sholto M‘Kim--like him there was none among the knights in any hall of king or prince the world over.

So as he and I went gently up the green brae, we could see Maud gathering the babes about her. They came coursing to her knee like greyhounds to the call, leaping upon her, shrieking in their joy. But when we paused at the top, lo! she had gotten them calmed by some grave word. Doubtless they were already making their preparations for returning to Thrieve. A sedate little company they made, walking cottagewards--Maud in the midst, a bairn clinging to either hand, the twins holding her gown, and the tall Marcelle, walking discreet and downcast, a little to one side.

Ah, it would have been easier for Maud--that which I had to endure. She had so much--so many, rather. She was buttressed against fate. These babes were all hers. But I had--_what?_

It turned me cold to think what.

And there, looking back from the top of the hill, the little white cottage with the flowers showed white as ever in the sun. Who could have guessed that the folk therein, old and young, would never again be glad with the ancient gladness, never loyal with the old loyalty--never the same as the day before, separated for ever from those who had been to them at once masters and friends. Even when Death had set his foot on the anthill, and all these human creatures had been stamped back into clay, the blue above would never again be as innocent and clear, nor the white clouds as pure and glad and billowy as they had been--yesterday! Hardly even then would these human hates and human pains have an end. For what is the hell the priests speak of, save the Evil growing ever more evil, from everlasting to everlasting--even as the good and the godlike and the unselfish shall flourish for aye in the paradise, the Garden Inclosed of God.

* * * * * * *

Of that ride with Sholto I remember scarcely anything. Haifa had been chafing, as was her custom, and when we left the Carlinwark and turned our faces towards the tall tower which was Thrieve, I had a difficulty in holding her in--which perhaps was as good for me as anything else.

“We shall soon be home!” said Sholto, for once making a mistake which a woman would not have made--at least, I know Maud would not.

An _éclat_ of laughter took hold of me--scornful, bitter as one that awakes with the taste of gall in his mouth.

“Home!” I cried; “home! Ah, you have said it, Sholto lad! Yonder is my dear home! I will hasten thither. My husband will be waiting for me!”

It was cruel, too cruel to speak thus. But, before God, I could not help it; and that which followed is my complete excuse. I leave it to women to judge, to men also. Half mad, I set my white Arabian to the gallop, and, nothing loth, he took the fenland and the knowes of heather, the deep matted ditches, and soft peaty common lands in his stride. He dashed through the ford of Dee without waiting for the drawbridge, and I laughed at young A’Cormick, who came to the door of his guard-hut in amaze. Yes, I laughed, and tossed my hand at him mockingly. I was not in my right mind.

Then, as Haifa stopped, all foaming and breathless, at the great gate of Thrieve, I slipped down to the ground in a dead faint. I remember no more; but I know that I lay there till Sholto--who, to keep me in sight, had almost killed his heavier charger in the bogs and marl-pits betwixt Carlinwark and the castle--lifted me up and bore me in. For my poor Haifa--she at least faithful--had stood quite still beside me, doing me no harm, only snuffing, and blowing her white foam upon me in a kind of dumb protest and wonderment.

* * * * * * *

And when I awoke it was as from death. Ah, that I had been indeed dead! All the pleasure I have known since cannot make up for the pain of that moment.

Maud was sitting beside me. The race of the Douglases of the Black was of a truth extinct. But at least I was free from James Douglas. His babe and mine was dead--dead, as if slain by his hand. I read it in Maud’s eyes.

I think I sighed a long sigh, and shut mine eyes again.

“_Better so!_”

That was the thought which arose within me.