CHAPTER XLVII.
A RARE SALT FELLOW
Well, after a time and a time Laurence and I went back to the Larg together, for the present determined to say naught about the matter, till I should have gone with my letter and petition to the king and the archbishop. For though divorce was not at any time the canon law of Holy Church, yet in these outland realms of Scotland and England men heeded that but little when interest or inclination drove them. Moreover, the pope, his cardinals and bishops, were ready enough to give absolution. For, be he priest or cardinal, ’twixt Caithness and Kirkmaiden all were in the king’s hands, or, worse yet, in those of the great houses. And, mostly, a cardinal ettled at the saving of his life just like another man, save Thomas à Becket only. But in my time, at least, there was never another like him in any kirk that I heard tell of. So that which lay before me to perform was just this--that I should go to the king and ask his leave to marry Laurence, and live retired and peaceably thereafter: the which permission I was certain of obtaining--that is, for a price.
So Laurence and I went in together, and I showed Sholto and Maud the letter. I gave it to them laughing, though there was a kind of shame in my heart, too, that ever I should have shared bed and board with such a man. Yet for all--I own it--I could not hate or even greatly dislike James Douglas. As he said, he had always done his best for the “poor Jack Neville’s Anne” of the moment. Pity was that his best proved never very good, and never very lasting.
But when Sholto M‘Kim read the letter, his countenance changed. He had never any great sense of the humours of life. And such an one as James Douglas was clean out of his ken.
“If I had but known in time that I was serving such a man,” he said slowly with darkened brows, “I had slain him with my hand!”
Then I took his wounded right hand and kissed it tenderly, so that his face flushed with pleasure. For even now--nay more than ever now I was to him his liege lady.
“You did better work with this your hand,” I said, “when you kept the breach of Thrieve with naught but the edge of your broadaxe.”
And as for Maud, she also came and stood beside me, glancing from one to the other of us, but not laughing as I expected. Then I saw a strange thing.
Maud cared nothing for that which made me laugh, not for that which made her husband hot with anger--in itself naught for the letter of James Douglas, save--that it made me a free woman.
She kept looking from one to the other of us--troubled and uncertain. Under her summer gown I could see her bosom heave.
Then Maud went to the door, and turning made a sign to me.
“Shall we go look for the children?” she said. But I knew she had other things to say to me than that. We were silent till we had put the house of Larg a hundred feet or so beneath our feet and were out on the open fell.
Then she spoke.
“Why will you not tell your Maud?” she said sadly.
“What am I to tell?” I answered, fencing with words.
“My Lady Margaret,” she said with dignity, “if you do not deign to tell me, I will ask no more. But I think--I think--that after these many years I had not deserved this from you!”
And she began to sob.
“Maud--my Maud!” I cried with sudden contriteness, “I will tell you all that you wish to know--all there is to tell. You gave me a home with you when I had none other friends. You have loved me all my life! What is there I would not tell you?”
“And now you hide from me--you will not tell me”--
“Tell you what, dear Maud?”
“What Laurence hath said to you!”
At this I laughed outright. For somehow I seemed in a mood to laugh that day. The air was lighter, rarer, of a more intoxicating charm. It scented of the spring, and I seemed sharply to regain my youth again--the youth that had never been mine. Nay, I seemed to win it rather for the first time, savouring its sweetness in the very wind that blew off the hills of heather.
“Laurence say aught to me, dear innocent!” I cried to her laughing. “Ah, but it is our own dear Maud Lindsay who is the matchmaker! Would Laurence ever have had the assurance to speak of love to Margaret Douglas?”
Then Maud jerked her Highland head in the air.
“I know not,” she said. “His brother had a Lindsay for the asking!”
“Ah, yes,” said I, “the third time of asking, but Laurence would never have had the courage to ask even once!”
“Do not tell me,” she said, turning suddenly upon me as she used to do at Thrieve when I was a little girl and had been misbehaving, “I see wickedness and deceit in your eye--in that of Laurence too. There is something between you two. You need not deny it--not to me. You never could deceive me, even when you were a little kilted hempie that had been in the orchard stealing of the sugar plums. What is it?”
“Well”--I began, pouting and hesitating.
Then I believe verily that in another moment Maud Lindsay might have done even as she was used to do in those ancientest days I can remember--when on one occasion she greatly surprised a certain spoilt child the morning after she came out of the north to be her tutrix and companion.
“Nay,” I said hastily, “Laurence said naught to me. But--_I had something to say to him_.”
“What was it?” she demanded fiercely. “Tell me all!”
“I know--but I promised not to tell! Ask himself!” I cried over my shoulder and ran back quickly into the house.
She called one sentence after me.
“I might have thought!” she said, “I knew all the time why he stayed away from Thrieve!”
* * * * * * *
So I went to see the king, Laurence and Herries going with me to be my squires in time of need. We rode poorly and unattended, both because that would be better pleasing to the king, who loved not arrays of folk riding hither and thither athwart his kingdom, and also because unless we had taken the herds from the hills, there were no other retinue about the Larg of Kenmore save only Sholto hirpling on his crutch.
First we went to Stirling, and the King of Scots was not there. He had gone to Carron. We would find him on the straths, they said, watching the forging of the great cannon. Quoth another, “The king hath gone to Edinburgh to make him ready for the siege of Roxburgh Castle--the sole strength still held by the English north of Berwick bound. He cannot abide it, and is making ready to batter it down.”
From Carron to Edinburgh we followed on, and there at last we found the king marshalling his forces upon the Borough Muir.
“Ah,” he cried, catching sight of me first, “what do you here, my little lady of Galloway? Is this biding within your bounds? Are you come to fight for us or against us? Or aiblins, would you lead a partizan revolt in your own pretty person? And what doth my bold Sir Laurence of the Black Plaid in your company, and this young M‘Kim? Wherefore are not you two at Carron with the engines of war?”
Then I smiled at him and said, “These be too many questions for one to answer all at once even to pleasure a king. But as for me, I have come to show your Majesty this! And not for that alone!”
So with that I drew from my pocket the letter of James Douglas.
And then and there before all his men the king read the letter aloud, from “Dear Cozin Margaret,” all the way through to “Written at our lodging in Southwark!”
Then he laughed very loud, as was his custom, slapping his hand upon his thigh hard and often.
“Faith, I was wrong,” he cried, “I should have kept such a man within my kingdom. I shall never find another! He is salt enough, this husband of yours, to keep all the butchers meat in Scotland fresh through the dog days. He puts off and on a wife as I would a glove--then eke writes to the last to send him the plenishing siller for the new. And a good lance too he was! None drave a better. And, Lord! he had need--he had need! Ho! Ho! A rare salt fellow, brined through and through like a barrel-kept herring--this James of Douglas! I take pleasure in him. I take great pleasure in him--now that it is too late!”
For after his kind he was a hearty man--this king who could murder a friend with a dagger-stroke, who found his way about among the Commandments Ten, much as Alexander solved the Gordian knot. A hot-headed, fiery-faced butcher-man, by nature a fighter, was this Stewart king--in some ways not unlike our own James, though his iniquities were rather those of the red hand and the blow struck in anger than the good-natured cavalier wantonnesses of my “Dear Cozin.”
Then with the letter still between his fingers, the king cast the slantwise Stewart eye upon me sometime before he spoke.
“And now I suppose ye will consider yourself a free woman and a wanter,” he said, “so ye’ll e’en be comin’ to me to seek ye a man!”
“Nay, King James,” I made him answer, “_that_ I have already done for myself. Two I have had chosen for me--I will e’en be content to pick the other without the royal bounty! Beside, the king has mickle on his mind, and God forbid I should set him a task so thankless!”
“And wha is the lad? Tell us,” cried the king; “mind this though--he gets neither a foot o’ Gallowa’ nor o’ Ettrick, never an inch south o’ the Forth. But I willna say that gin he be a decent lad, I will not maybe gie ye a park or twa to sow your oats somewhere at the back of beyont!”
Then all at once he seemed to forget, returning to James Douglas’s letter, which he rolled like a morsel under his tongue, savoury and sweet.
“‘Poor Jack Neville’s Anne!’” he cried, blattering again on his thigh; “I must e’en tell that to the bishop! Yes, by the saints, Kennedy will taste that, I warrant him! Sly old dog that he is!”
I stood before him waiting his reply.
“Your Majesty has not yet heard the name of the man I ask your permission to marry!” I said quietly.
“Well,” he laughed, “’tis somewhat early days yet to be thinking o’ that, when ye hae gotten never a line frae holy kirk nor ony permit ecclesiastical to stand afore the altar. But you Douglases were aye forehandit. Wha is the loon?”
“He is of your Majesty’s name,” said I, “and like all the Stewarts, blate to speak for themselves in such a matter. So I am sent to do it. This is he!”
“What?” cried King James, “the Lad in Black, the Nameless Master of Enginery, the Deevil-Bishop, the Armourer-Clerk--doubtless some Douglas loon in disguise? Him that made the plans for the cannon! Why, I have already given him the barony of Balveny. I ken not how that will do, little lady. That was yince Douglas ground, and if you set up your banner there you might trench upon my Majesty even yet!”
Seeing I did not answer, he went on, getting rid of his surprise in a cloud of words.
“Na, na--let him stick to his cannon-making and his fortifying! That will be better than taking to himself a little rebel wife like yoursel’, wha will keep him in het water all the days o’ his life! Let him choose again and choose better!”
“Better he could not choose,” said I, “as, if he hath eyes in his head, his Majesty must see for himself! Moreover, if Laurence gets me not, he will go to France to the service of Louis the king, from whom already he has had great offers!”
“Ah, will he--will he? We will see to that,” cried King James. “We may be poor, but we know how to recompense our lieges as well as how to punish our enemies. There is old Malise now, the master armourer. He will not last long. At times madness looks out of the eye of him. But, Lord! what a hammerman! What a mighty smith! None like him since Tubal. If only he were younger and had the head--faith, I would sit on the throne of Westminster with the Two Roses, red and white, doing homage to me.”
He stopped suddenly as if thinking deeply.
“But there, lass,” he cried, “I have wearied enough of my good time on your fule marrying and gie’in’ in marriage. Go ye forthwith to Bishop Kennedy, and he will put ye in the way of being even with ‘Poor Jack Neville’s Anne!’ But I trust that your chances of keeping your clerk-lad to yourself are better than poor Anne’s. Ah, the rogue--what a villain! Troth, I would give him the Cross of St. Andrew to come back to be my court-jester!”
“My lord,” I made the king answer with some dignity, “I pray recall it to yourself that there was a time when a certain jest of James Douglas’s well-nigh made your Majesty smile on the wry side of your face. The chance of those few hours at Stirling when Ormond and Murray and this same Lord James entered it with a thousand Douglases--I trow such a man is no safe court-fool!”
“I ken, I ken,” he cried, waving me down with his hand, “James Stewart is no unfriend to plain speech, and takes no offence at what you say. But for all that thou art a little rebel, and if this your Lad in Black is to keep the upper hand of you, he must be of good council and have the ready hand. I will take him with me to the siege of Roxburgh to teach him his A, B--Buff! Meantime, go thou to the bishop. Get a warranty from him. Here, Morton, my seal! I will write a line on the back of Jamie Douglas’s letter. ‘_On the day that Roxburgh is taken, this Laurence of the king’s name is to have Margaret Douglas in wedlock!_’ There!”
Whereupon he signed, sealing the missive with the signet royal, which Morton carried for him in a little silver box. Ere he gave it back to me, he turned over the letter, laughing afresh at every line. It seemed to have taken him greatly.
“Salt as the sea!” he shouted, “a rare one, by Saint Andrew! Let him have his two hundred pounds in rose nobles sent to John Tweedie, that eident leather-seller in the Carlisle watergate. See to it, Morton. He deserves the like and more. I warrant him--he will of a surety buy woman’s falderals with it in the Chepe--_if he can_ for poor Jack Neville’s Anne--if not, at least, for some other Anne!”