CHAPTER VI.

WILLIAM DOUGLAS SPEAKS

Until one day by the little brook which they call the river of Cheverney, William Douglas had never spoken to me of our marriage. But ere we were set out from the castle I knew it was coming. There had been breakfast as usual in the great hall, and much chatter among the ambassador’s suite of the wonders they had seen at Rome--Laurence alone brooding apart in silence or only responding in monosyllables when I spoke to him.

But that I wondered not at. For I had a sense of the stage at which the young man found himself. And (it is not a shameful confession for an old woman to make, who has gotten through the world with perhaps more credit than she has deserved) I was glad of it, and in my heart I laughed at his sulks. Of James, who sat and watched me (like a hungry cat, as I told him), I was not so sure. One was never quite sure what James might not do where a woman was concerned. I think, even then, I was more than a little afraid of his power over me. I liked the days when he went a-hunting, and yet they were lonely days too.

As for William, he had sat talking with the Dauphin, whose shifty eyes, webbed with a spider’s criss-cross of fire, like hot metal caked and cracking in the cooling, dwelt ever and anon upon me. How I hated snakes and Dauphins! Ugh! And still do hate!

Nevertheless, through all the hither and thither of their talk concerning Absolute Right, and the Supremacy of one man--the Strong Man, the man with mind, the man who could use all weapons and was ready to employ them--there came to me in wafts and glimpses, through I know not what senses (for a woman has at least a dozen, as compared with men’s ordinary five), the knowledge, net and fixed, that to-day, before it should be the stroke of noon, ere the earliest flowers should droop and close, I should see through a glass darkly into the soul of William Douglas, the man who was to be my husband.

And, indeed, that was all I succeeded in obtaining--then, or for many years after. I see more clearly now. But such seeing comes to women, for the most part, when it is too late.

It was in this fashion that he asked me to walk with him. How differently would James have done it! Even Laurence, poor fellow!

“Dear Cousin Margaret,” he began, coming over to me before all the others (figure what his upbringing must have been when, at four-and-twenty--and to all appearance of mind and body ten years older--William Douglas could yet show himself so inept!). Why, a scholar from a priests’ day-school had done better--that is, if it had been a French school. I remember--but no, I had begun to tell of my going out to walk in the fields with my Cousin William.

August in Galloway, May in Touraine. These are to me the height of earthly beauty, and whatever bliss can proceed from flowers and woods, from sun-speckled riverine paths and breadths of heather lands, across which great whale-backed cloud-shadows drift, lumberingly yet silently, as if they too were labouring wains drawn by the white celestial oxen.

It was Laurence, I think, and partly, also, my own liking, which taught me to observe things like that, but mostly--honour to whom honour!--it was Laurence. Not in the least Maud Lindsay, who, indeed, cared more to lift her eyelashes at a well-favoured man than to look upon all the sunsets which had ever been painted athwart the west. Nor yet did I learn the trick from Sholto, who never had a thought except for Maud Lindsay--that is, till the children came, when he became a nursery packhorse, and went on all fours. James Douglas only admired such things because I did, and William not at all, whether or no.

Nevertheless, we went our way, he and I--I, at least, in no wise keen, nor expecting much pleasure therefrom. So we went by a pretty woodland path within the enclosure of the Sieur Paul, which I had discovered (and in part trodden) during the days I had already spent in Cour Cheverney. Sometimes I took with me Larry, in guise of adviser spiritual, but more often James, my younger cousin. For you see, William was always too busy talking politics with the Dauphin. Indeed, Louis de Valois seemed to have come hither from Loches for no other purpose.

But this day, as I walked by Will’s side, I glanced up at his grave, dark-bearded face--the face of a man of forty at the least--and the weight of care that I saw there seemed to communicate itself at once to my heart and my heels. I had on pretty shoes, the same which James, with a forethought beyond most young men, had brought me from Paris. He told me how he had kept one of my old ones all the while as a gage, wearing it on his helm in time of fighting, and in his breast at other seasons. Whereat! retorted upon him that it was well these French shoes had no heels like those of Scotland. Nevertheless, in spite of his sentiment, I suspect some hidden troking with a handmaiden or servant at the convent. For why--otherwise he could never have hit on the right size and shape. But he did, and I loved him for it--or, at the least, I felt it was one of the little things that most of all touch a girl’s heart, and which not even the bravest, or the wisest, or the best of lovers can afford to mislippen. And he who walked by my side was all three. Yet for all that I longed to kilt my coats and run for it, just because he would not look at me and had brought me naught from Paris.

But I can tell you Will Douglas’s first words took me by surprise.

“Margaret,” he said, “I am to marry you. It is arranged. The family comes first. Neither of us can help it, yet, true it is, in this you have greatly the advantage of me.”

“How so?” said I, thinking it to be some matter of my principality, for which I care nothing, all Galloway and Ettrick thereto never having done me as much good as an orange of Italy!

“_Because you do not love me, and--I, William Douglas, have the ill-fortune to love you._”

If he had struck me I could not have started back from him in greater amazement.

Surely it was not William Douglas who spoke thus. But even then he did not look once at me. Faith of my heart, what fools these wise men be!

Here was I, a young girl, ready to be loved--nay, plainly eager--and had this solemn dolt only possessed a tithe of James’s readiness, all might have been different. We had stopped at the place I had chosen beforehand--yes, and tested. It was a certain sweet privacy of leaves, with a stream running by over clean-shining pebbles, and a green bank to sit upon. I was certainly giving the man all the chances. But poor Will, though such a don at statecraft, had no more craft in the matter of women than the armour of Archibald the Grim set up in the entrance hall of Thrieve.

Now the place had a hundred advantages. Bees of all sorts were humming about. Glossy purple bees, big as hay-wains, blundered and boomed. Business-like honey-bees attended to the matter in hand, like the merchants of St. Giles--furred all over, too, with the golden dust of pollen. Moreover, there were little black bees, which appeared always to fly backward, starting angrily with their weapons out like touchy braggards. Then round woolly bees of the size of acorns, and with the rearward part all a fiery red, hustled the others or got up private quarrels on their own accounts among the flowers.

There were so many things Will could have said in such a place, and I sat near him on purpose.

Laurence would have sung a ballad to touch your heart, and that so delicately, the birds would have stopped to listen, and with so accurate and right an ear that the hum of the bees, the ripple of the water, the hush and tremor of the leaves would all have mingled in a fitting accompaniment.

Others, I doubt not, would have done after their kind, sitting thus alone with a young girl, and, as it were, with the marriage lines in their pocket. Even silence might then (’tis conceivable) have been golden.

But what did William Douglas do? _This!_

_Imprimis_--he betook himself a foot or two farther away from me--I think he meant to give me room to sit at my ease--and began to speak of his hopes and projects. I did not know then that was the greatest compliment he could have paid me.

Yet he never so much as took my hand--though, well, my hand was there for the taking. Of course it was! Since I was to marry him, I thought I might as well make the best of it. Afterwards in Italy I knew a woman who would have had a man knifed for less than Will’s present neglect.

“Margaret,” he said, “I have brought you here” (Oh, but had he?) “to show you what I have planned for my future and yours. You bring me as your dower almost a third part of Scotland. I myself possess another third, with about the same proportion of brave hearts to follow our banner from Galloway in the south on through Douglasdale and Marches, northward to Darnaway and Murray.”

I nodded, saying only, “Have a care, William; my brother had the like, and yet--in the flower of his age--the cruel slew him treacherously in the castle of Edinburgh!”

“I remember well,” he said. “God rest his soul for a good lad! But then he was young, and I am old”--

At that I laughed aloud!

“At twenty-four years! Verily a patriarch among men!”

“Yes,” he answered me, his dark face never once lighting up, “it is true that I am old. I it was who roused the Douglases after my cousin’s--your brother’s--murder. I have lived hard and in haste ever since--not as the young live, but as men do who have one business in life, and know not when death may be let loose upon them.”

“Then you mean to revenge my brother’s death--and little David’s?” I asked eagerly.

“Yes, of a certainty that,” he said; “vengeance is a part of it. It shall be done. I shall square accounts with Crichton and Livingston. But, as it were, on the way.”

“The way to what?”

“To the kingdom,” he said quietly, “the kingdom and the power!”

“You would rebel, and kill the king!” I cried, somewhat affrighted at the sound of the words--as was indeed no marvel, seeing that I had just come from listening to nothing more deadly than the all-day cooing of the doves at St. Brigida’s.

“By no means,” he answered, “though ’tis disputable if I have not at least as good a claim to the throne of Scotland as any Stewart that ever stepped. But let that pass. No, I count not on rebellion. But all the same, rule I must. I shall put down the fox and the sleek poodle--both of them. I will take the king and give him a palace and a garden and (according to his desires) playthings. None of that race is fit to rule. They should have been morris-dancers. God so intended it. No, I will be James Stewart’s chancellor, his tutor, his Mayor of the Palace. And then of that realm of Scotland I will make a new thing. Or, by St. Bride of Douglas, I shall die before my time!”

“And why could not my brother William do all this?” I said. “He also was brave!”

“I told you,” he answered, without hesitation, “your brother was too young. He let himself be entrapped. And besides, he had the misfortune to love a bad woman. _I--love you._”

Then I took his hand of my own accord, for no woman can listen to words like these without a lump in the throat--that is, from a man true and great.

“And I will try to be a good wife,” I said, very softly, but I think he heard.

At that moment he might have done much with me--perhaps all. I might have been his, soul and body. But William Douglas had not, as we say in Scots, “the airt o’t,” which is everything (or almost) in the making of love. And so he went back, like a man reassured, to his weary politics.

“I have talked the matter all over with the Dauphin,” he said, his eyes growing dreamy and opaque to the world. “He is in exactly the other case. There is in his kingdom one great almost as the Douglas in Scotland. The Duke of Burgundy is his Mayor of the Palace, or desires to be. Him he joined for a time, even against his father, that he might learn the secrets of the enemy. For though he has great ideas, that young Louis de Valois, there are lacking to him as much fidelity and constancy as pertain to a tom-cat of the city tiles. But all the same he has more thoughts in his head, this slippery Dauphin, than all the men and women I have met and talked with in any country. He teaches me much--also, perhaps, I him. Each sees in the other what he has to contend against. Both learn from the enemy. For this Dauphin Louis will yet gather to him all the realm of France. See if he does not--and be hated as no man in France has been hated before in the doing of it.

“But, on the other hand, I, William of Douglas, shall do what the Duke of Burgundy might have done with a weaker sovereign. I shall remain a subject, and yet be the king. From the east sea to the west sea I shall stay the robber and the plunderer. The Highland folk will be held in leash. I will make the writ with the king’s name upon it run from Kirkmaiden to Cape Wrath. In truth, and not alone in proverb, the bracken-bush shall keep the cow.”

He paused a while, as if meditating. It was, indeed, strange talk for a young girl to hear, and I remember with a smile that only a few days agone Sister Eulalie had been threatening me with four days’ bread-and-water if I disobeyed her. And now the talk I heard was of the discomfiture of princes, and I sat speaking familiarly with men who felt themselves able to hold nations in the hollow of their hands.

Only I wished William Douglas had been a little more human about it. Faith of my body, I would rather have been listening to that muckle cuif James vaunt himself about the girls who had given him their favours to wear upon his helm.

“Scotland is not a kingdom,” Will went on, “it is not subject to one king, but to many. Every pretty lordling does that which is right in his own eyes--hangs on his own gallows-tree, drowns in his own well, burns on his own wood-pile, and if the king dares to say ‘Yea’ or ‘Nay,’ he will be upon his back in a trice with a pack of old charters as musty and useless as a cadger’s ballants, chattering like a magpie all the time.

“Now, with Galloway mine, and Clydesdale and Annandale and the Borders mine, together with the north from Darnaway to Loch Ness, with the king in my hands and the heads of the traitors where such heads should be, what shall hinder but that I shall say to each lord of a peel-tower, to each chief of clan or sept--Do justice, and, if you can, love mercy. But at least, attend to the first! For if you do not, by St. Bride, your head I will remove instead, and set it with the others.--For be assured, my lords, for once in the land of the Scots you have to do with a man of his word!”

And as I listened to Will, I knew that I was to have a _man_ for my husband, and I daresay many women would have loved him as indeed he deserved. But not I. There is in me, somewhere, a spring, like that of a secret drawer, which if a man touch, I will serve him on bended knee all the days of my life, and go through fire and water for him! But if not--_not_.

And Will, alas for us both! had not the secret. He felt not the need. For even as he went on talking, his voice filled and shook, and--I could see that he had utterly forgotten my existence. His purpose and work were all to him.

It is the last thing a woman can bear. She would rather be crucified.