CHAPTER V.

FURRY EARS

Ah, these days at Cour Cheverney! How I loved the valley of the Loire and the little feeding rivers which would have been great ones anywhere else, but which shrank to brooklets in the presence of that mighty water going shining down the valley like a procession.

And then, seeing that she could do no more, and, it may be, jealous for the good name of her convent--fearful also of what the kittenish _minettes_ of whom she had been put in charge might have done in her absence--the Lady Superior took her departure.

I could have danced! Indeed, I did--borrowing a pike from a yeoman of the Sieur Paul’s guard, sticking it in the ground and tying ribbons to it as for a May-pole, till the very men in the lodge ’neath the portcullis laughed, and even William Douglas deigned to smile from the window of the library.

But I must tell about the shabby little man with the ill-brushed clothes and the side-dagger, or _coupe-gorge_, in his belt. I hated him at first, yet withal there was a curious fascination about him.

Not that, indeed, which a man may have for a woman, but something disgustful and hardly full human. I think, if I had been married to such a thing, I should have been tempted to use his _coupe-gorge_ upon himself--when he was asleep. Then the very way he had of looking at me made me uncomfortable. And he looked long and often.

One day we sat in the pleasant court. The Judas tree began to throw down its blossoms. A vagrant wind sprang up, making a pleasant birling sound among the leaves above. The little man--“ill-put-on” as we say--was not long in coming across to me. It appeared that he had something particular to say.

“By your leave I will present myself,” he said, “since there is none that will do the work for me. I am called Louis de Valois--concerning whom, from his insignificance, you may not have heard!”

“De Valois,” said I, somewhat astonished; “why, then, you are of the Royal House?”

“His Majesty’s poor relation,” he said carelessly, “some kin to royalty--I forget what--if anyone ever knew!”

“What are you doing here?” I asked him; for it was not my way to beat about the bush. “The king has surely not sent _you_ also on a mission to Rome?”

A bitter smile wreathed his lips at some thought of his own.

“No,” he said slowly, dragging the words as if by force out of him, “nor does he go there himself--though he has much need, ay--all the way upon his knees.”

“You mean”--

“It is not for little girls out of convents to be told what I mean,” he said somewhat rudely, yet as if speaking unwillingly. But I had the word for him.

“You mean because he has so badly brought up his son, the Dauphin--whom all the world speaks ill of? Or because of--?”

“Tell me, does all the world speak ill of the Dauphin?” said the little man with the yellow-brown eyes, looking up sharply at me.

“My faith,” I said, “I am in France. I cannot abuse the king’s son to his own cousin. All cousins, you know, love one another. But, true it is that I have heard in the convent that the Dauphin is a bad man, and that he was right cruel to my kinswoman and countrywoman, Margaret of Scotland.”

“As for me,” he answered, “I do not believe it. I have, indeed, no great opinion of the man myself, but betwixt a man and a woman wedded, who can judge from the outside of the wall?”

“Well,” I answered, “there may be something in that. I myself have heard that she hath a fondness for poets! Now the Dauphin is certainly no poet.”

The yellow eyes glimmered with cat-like streaks, like melting snow on a mountain top. The king’s poor relation made a chuckling, hollow noise in his throat. He had a sense of humour, a thing highly undesirable in poor relations.

“Ah, belike,” he said, “but, at any rate, it is not a predilection which you share, my dear young lady!”

“Oh, poets!” I said to him, “they are doubtless very well in their place”--

“And that place is”--

“Below the salt and in company with the Merry-Andrew!”

He laughed, and then said, half meditatively, “And you are from the land of the Scots. I wish I had known in time, then I should not have married the daughter of a poet!”

“Your father-in-law was one?” I demanded, really careless whether he answered me or no.

“He was,” he answered, “writing English--well or ill I know not. It is a poor trade. Poets die young!”

He thought a while, and then said, “Your father, he was, I judge, no verse-maker, nor any great scholar?”

“He could sign his name if you gave him time,” I said. “He was the Earl of Douglas and Duke of Touraine!”

“Ah, that is better,” he said, his light cat’s eyes glinting rapidly over my face, and taking in the least detail of my dress, almost like a jealous woman who thinks you may prove prettier than she; “you have certainly most just views upon poetry and poets. I trust you think better of priests and religion?”

“Have I not come direct from a convent?” I asked him, smiling as demurely as I could, “and, besides, has not the pope sent a Bull all the way from Rome to enable me to marry a man I have scarce looked upon all my days? Have I not, therefore, cause to think well of holy men?”

“Religion has ever been my safeguard,” he said, shaking his head gravely at my tone, “particularly this part of the blessed goad wherewith St. Joseph pricked the ass on the night of the flight into Egypt. It is a relic beyond price and very efficacious. I had it from the shrine of St. Marthe in Provençe!”

And he took out of his cap a piece of worm-eaten wood, pointed with iron. The cap was certainly curious in itself, having a peak almost like a mountebank’s, with little furry pockets at the sides (though it was summer) exactly as if the wearer had no ears at all! He continued--

“The curé of St. Marthe had it from a pilgrim, who gat it directly from a wanderer on the beach of Askelon;” he went on, “it has averted evil from me more than once and brought great harm to my enemies--being (by a most curious device) made hollow, and so arranged as to contain a precious powder!”

We were talking thus when William Douglas came up and saluted the little man with more deference than I had ever seen him pay to anyone in all my life--which, to tell the truth, was not much. Then came James and bowed himself to the ground. But that also meant little. For such was our brave Jamie’s way, being, as he said, a younger son with his way to make in the world.

But Laurence stood apart and appeared to meditate. There was an awkward pause. Then the furry-eared little man, who had called himself the king’s poor relation, turned sharp upon William Douglas.

“My lord,” he said, “if you have no objections, I will take your bride here and the pope’s Bull along with her. You can have mine in exchange. She is a king’s daughter.”

William Douglas surveyed the speaker with the same gaze, quiet and steady, with which he took in all the world.

“Prince,” he answered, “if this be a jest, it is a poor one, and on a subject upon which, as all the world knows, it is ill jesting with a Douglas. We rude Scots do not understand the game as it is played in the palaces and châteaux of France. An evil might therefore easily befall.”

“Ah,” said the little man sharply, “you should go to Amboise, and my father would teach you right willingly.”

“Is he a poet too?” I asked, wishing to put a better face on the matter, “as you told me your father-in-law was?”

At this I saw them all start, and James gave a sort of gasp of apprehension. I knew I had said something I ought not. But what it was, or why they were aghast, I declare I knew no more than the Bald Cat--who was by this time snoring in her cell at St. Brigida’s.

But the furry-eared man only smiled indulgently, and patted the back of my hand, which I instantly snatched away from him.

“I have had a most interesting conversation with this little lady,” he said. “I have not felt the time go so fast for many a day. Nay truly, dear lady, my father is no poet, any more than was thine. Yet he carries about him rather more of the raw material of poets’ rhymings than is quite convenient for the world and for me!”

And at this the Sieur Paul laughed with much good humour as at a jest which he alone understood. But the little man with the unwashen face turned upon him with his hand on his dagger.

“Sir,” he said, “I am in your house, but had it been elsewhere I should have set this a hand’s-breadth deep in your belly for daring to laugh at the King of France!”

I think I felt much sympathy for the small pottle-shaped man who, from a simple desire to please, had crossed the chance tempers of this little impish moldiwort.

“The Dauphin of France!” I cried aloud. “My faith, and I took you for the king’s cellarman out for the day, and blinking in the sunshine!”

“But I told you,” said he, not at all losing his temper, “that my name was Louis de Valois. Do the maidens of Scotland never put two and two together?”

“Pshaw!” I cried, resolved that at least he should not intimidate me--not if he were the Grand Bashaw of all the Turks--“at home our cat is named Badrons de Douglas, our goat Billy de Douglas. Eight-and-twenty Crummie Douglases come to Thrieve every Martinmas to fill the beef tub for the men-at-arms. There are pecks and pecks of Border Douglases, and Ettrick Douglases, and Highland Douglases, and Angus Douglases, and Dalkeith Douglases. There be Douglases of the Red and of the Black--and surely I may be held excused if I knew not that there might not be another Louis de Valois in the world besides the son of the King of France!”

I had very nearly added, “And such a king’s son!” but I could see James shaping his lips to warn me to have a care, while Will looked on, hard and cold as ever. I thought that he disapproved of my flippancy, and that only made me the more reckless. I would show him that it was somewhat too soon to put on the airs of a husband.

“Will,” said I, “marriage begins with love-making. Love-making begins with writing verses. If I am to marry you--if you expect me to love you--go make me some! James there can turn them off by the barrelful--in French or in Scots--carols, ballads, rhymes royal or sermons in verse--he has them all at his finger-ends!”

But Will, my cousin, only smiled tolerantly.

“There is other work in the world than stringing rhymes!” he said. “The Dauphin and I have two lands to win from the Old to the New.”

There was always something of the preaching friar about William, which I resented. It sounded like the almoner of St. Brigida’s on Holy Thursday.

So I caught him up sharply. “Ay, Will, is it indeed so? Then let me tell you and His Highness the Dauphin one thing--nay, two. There is one thing, very old, that no one of you shall ever win, and that is a woman’s love! Also, one thing, very new, which neither one of you shall ever experience--the love of young children, thrusting their faces into your beards and shouting at your incoming!”

“So?” said William Douglas, his face firm and a little more hard than before; “well, I can but do my duty. But I will try for the other things too.”

And he turned away, leaving me with a question pricking at my heart.

Then came James, in his dark blue velvet and laced doublet, looking like a great blonde god who had strayed out of some old-time temple. He had heard that which had passed; for he leaned over the great black oak settle and touched my hair gently with his fingers. He had all sorts of ways like that, yet so done that one could not take offence.

“Will is wrong,” he said; “but you must forgive him. He is all set on this new-fangled setting of things right in Scotland. He threeps it down our throats that we are all barbarians, and I dare say he speaks truth. He says Scotland--highland, lowland, and borderland--needs one strong man to put down the raiding and rieving and thieving. Furthermore, that James Stewart is not that man. You can guess who is--in my brother Will’s esteem!”

I gazed at him in utter surprise. He nodded softly, and like one who makes an assured confidence.

“_William Douglas would make himself king--king of Scotland!_”

James smiled, and continued to stroke my hair, gently and abstractedly (for the others had gone away, and we were now alone). I did not reprove him; I could not.

“I think so,” he murmured. “And you will forgive him, therefore, if he has small time for love and the light concerns of a woman. These may well be left to a younger brother to console him for his meagre portion. God knows, we have little enough to concern ourselves with, poor fellows--save to be barbarians and crack each other’s crowns.”

But I was not attending to James very much. I was thinking, and with a kind of pride, too--the first I had ever felt in the man who was to be my husband.

“To be king of the Scots,” I thought, and, from James’s consternation, I judge that I spoke aloud, “Cousin Will to make himself the king--to be greater than all! That is to be a man and a true Douglas of the Black. Faith, I would marry him now, without Bull or dispensation, without pope, priest, or marriage-robe--ay, over the tongs if need were!”

After that James was silent for a long time. Above, there was a constant movement of leaves, and the cawing of jackdaws nesting high up in the crevices of the old towers of Cour Cheverney. I could feel my cousin’s breath on my neck. It made me vaguely uneasy, yet somehow I was not able to stir. I did not know I could feel like that. I suppose no woman does till she is tried.

“Yes,” he murmured in my ear, “you will marry him, Margaret. But will you love him? Are you sure of that?”

I tried to turn him off the subject.

“Ah,” I said, smiling up at him over my shoulder, “that is quite another thing. Surely when Will is to be a king, and I am already a princess, love is a superfluity, a work of--what is it the priests call it--supererogation? Indeed, to begin with, rather an impertinence than otherwise. Yet, after all”--

“Well?” said James, erect and waiting for my conclusion.

“Love may come--_after!_” I said. For, indeed, so Sister Eulalie had told me, and the girls at St. Brigida’s swore to me that their mothers loved their fathers, and this last was certainly a matter to give one on the threshold of marriage a certain confidence. Will, at least, after the dark and “fier” Douglas type, was a handsome man.

Then James bent down, and, though I could not see him, I could feel his presence near me--another strange thing.

“Nay, little one,” he murmured in my ear, “I know you. You will love neither the would-be King of Scots, nor yet William, eighth Earl of Douglas, nor yet your Cousin Will. You are both of you too Douglas in the bone. One day you will love--yes--but not my brother.”

“Since when have you put on the robe of prophecy, good Master Jacob?” I asked him sharply. “Is it that you would supplant your brother, or take away his birthright, without even the customary equivalent of a mess of pottage?”

James Douglas laughed.

“They have taught you your Scripture well at the convent, I can see,” he said. “I knew you would misunderstand me. I was prepared for it. But you will see! Behold, I will try my hand at prophecy again. Will intends to bring the realm of Scotland under his hand. King Jamie-of-the-Fiery-Face is a Stewart, and will die the ill death of all that brood; but he is also a Bruce--that is to say, a murderer from the first. In three years, if I took the king’s side in the strife that is bound to come, I, poor despised James Douglas, could be Earl of Douglas in my brother’s place. But, by God’s truth, I am no Jacob, no supplanter, as you have called me. You will see: there shall not one stand to it more staunchly in the Douglas quarrel than your poor stupid Cousin James, who can only sit a horse, drive a spear, and”--(he hesitated a moment before adding)--“make love to the woman he loves with all his heart, without thought or care for peoples, nations, kingships, principalities, or powers, in the heaven above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.”

I think I drew a long breath. I felt, light as a feather, his lips on the nape of my neck, and, looking upward with a start and a shudder, as if someone had trod upon my grave, I saw William Douglas silently pacing the rampart above us, his arms folded on his breast, and a stern expression on his face.

Had he seen, or was he only debating in his mind the chances of his great and final cast--the dicer’s throw which was to make or mar--the project which was to him more than love, more than life, and a thousand times more than Margaret Douglas?

I could not tell.