CHAPTER III.

FATHER, MOTHER, AND SON.

Sir Brian rode north and west, crossing a small river, where he stopped to bathe his wounds, and then forward again for six or seven miles, until he came to the sea-coast and to the Kildhurm estates. It was already dusk when he dismounted in the courtyard of his castle. He had been absent for some weeks, and he had not been expected home so soon; nevertheless he was welcomed back most respectfully. He made no allusion to his late encounter at Ennerdale, but put on a gracious demeanour, and seemed altogether in unusually good spirits. When his wife came out to meet him, holding their little son by the hand, he greeted her with more than his customary urbanity; and stooped to kiss the boy, who, however, shrank away from him with an odd cry of aversion, as if he had smelt the death-scent in his breath.

'He should be trained to better manners,' said the knight, with a smile.

'He should see the world, then,' answered the wife.

'Are we so wholly apart from the world,' returned Sir Brian, fixing his eyes upon her, 'that no guests, bidden or unbidden, ever pass our gates?'

'Who should visit us in a spot so remote as this?' exclaimed Lady Kildhurm. 'It is much if now and then we catch sight of some clownish tenant of ours, riding by on the road beyond the park.'

'You love London better--is it not so?'

'I was bred in London, Brian, and would gladly see it again. When we married, thou didst promise me sometimes to return thither. But now for three years I have not been a day's ride from the castle.'

'Indeed, I have been remiss, Ursula; but thou knowest how vexed the country hath been of late, and I ever commanded hither and thither by our gracious monarch. But I had hoped thou wouldst have found some company in thy solitude.'

'Last night we had a visitor,' spoke up the boy, looking up in his mother's face. 'I saw him--the big man with the red beard----'

'Silence, sirrah!' interrupted the knight, with a stern voice and frown. 'What art thou, to contradict thy mother to her face! Look how thy impudence hath made her blush! Off to thy nurse, and let me hear thy babble no more to-day. Would a big red-bearded man have been here, and thy mother not have told me of it?' And hereupon Sir Brian laughed.

After the boy had been taken away, he sat down in his high-backed chair beside the hearth, and motioned with his hand to Lady Kildhurm to seat herself opposite him.

'This is a lonely spot indeed,' he said, 'and withal none too safe for an unarmed man to ride abroad. Even this very afternoon, Ursula, as I was spurring along the road by Ennerdale Water, thinking of the loving and wifely welcome thou wouldst give me on my arrival here, I was set upon by a brawny ruffian, a huge, bearded varlet, with a sword a cloth-yard and a half long. We fought beneath the Great Oak; and he would have cloven me to the chine, save that, as good luck would have it, he caught his blade against a branch, so that he lost his hold upon the hilt. But my peril was great. See, I have brought away a twig of the tree for remembrance of my escape.'

So saying he drew forth from his breast the cluster of acorns, and held it towards his wife.

'There is blood upon it!' cried Lady Kildhurm, snatching back her half-extended hand. 'Brian--what man was this?'

'What man?' he repeated with a short laugh. 'What but a robber, Ursula, who would rob me of what I hold most precious? But methinks his ill deeds are at an end now!'

'What hast thou done to him?' she asked, trembling very much.

'Nay, I did but pass my rapier through his weazand,' replied the knight, keeping his black eyes on her face. 'Indeed, he was not worthy to die by the hand of a true man, but should rather have been hanged on the tree beneath which he fell, as a warning to all such vermin. But in the hurry of the moment I stood not upon ceremony.... Do not turn so pale, Ursula! Comfort thyself, dear wife--I got but a scratch or so, which will be healed long ere the crows have made a meal of his carcase.'

'This afternoon--by the Oak of Ennerdale?' said Lady Kildhurm in a dull voice, her eyes wide open and fixed.

'And, by the bye, I took a trophy from him--a pretty trinket enough--and have brought it to hang about thy neck as a keepsake. See--pure gold it is, and in its shape strangely like the one I gave thee years ago, and which thou hast doubtless kept so religiously ever since. But this has in it, not my hair, but a braid cut from some woman's head--his light-o'-love's, I take it. Throw that away as unworthy thy chaste ownership: but accept the gold from thy loving husband, Ursula!'

When Lady Kildhurm beheld this sure evidence that what she had perhaps foreboded had come to pass, her trembling ceased, and she became strangely composed. She held out her hand for the locket.

'Give it me,' she said. 'Ay, it is pretty, indeed; and I thank thee for it more than for any other gift of thine. Why, this too is smeared with blood; but my lips shall cleanse it--I will kiss it, kiss it, till all is kissed away. And I will wear it in my bosom, Brian, and it shall never come forth thence--never while I live, I promise thee. Thou canst not say I did not prize this gift! The cluster of acorns--give me them also. Hast thou anything else for me?'

'Here is his dagger,' returned the knight with an attempt at a sneer. 'Thou mayest find a use for that, perhaps!'

She took the dagger, and then, standing erect before her husband, she met his glance unflinchingly. 'Farewell, Brian,' said she. 'Thou hast been a hard and unloving husband to me. Often, when I would have clung to thee, thou hast put me aside with cold and sneering words, and hast shut me out from that confidence and fair entertainment which a wife should have. For years thou hast confined me to this solitude! travelling abroad thyself, and leaving me here, your wife only in name, and as yielding meek obedience to your tyrannous will. Thou hast neither loved, honoured nor cherished me, and since these two years I have known that thou hast held me in suspicion. God alone knows, or ever shall know, whether the suspicion was just. This is my revenge--that I will leave thee in doubt! But hadst thou been kinder to me, Brian--hadst thou answered the craving of my overwrought heart--hadst thou been true to thy duty as a husband, thou wouldst not have thought me failing in mine as a wife. But I do not ask forgiveness: be God judge between us, which has most wronged the other!'

'You have much to say about God, madam,' broke in Sir Brian: 'but my fear is, your deeds are less heavenly than your words.'

'Look to thy own deeds! for they shall condemn thee for ever!' exclaimed Lady Kildhurm, raising both her hands, one holding the dagger, and the other the cluster of acorns, and then letting them droop slowly towards him. 'Thou hast slain a good and holy man, whose shoe's latchet thou wast not worthy to unlace. Evil shall be thy portion in this world: and if ever thou turnest thy steps heavenward, may the blood which thou hast this day shed cause thee to slip and stumble in the way!'

Having thus spoken, Lady Kildhurm retired to her chamber. Sir Brian sat alone in his high-backed chair by the fire-place, resting his lean cheek upon his hand, and staring at the embers. When a servant came to bring him supper, he gave the man so black a look as to send him frightened back; and during the rest of the night, no one ventured to approach the room. As the hours passed away, every sound was hushed, except the heavy thundering of the surf against the shore, and the whipping of the wind-driven foam against the windows. Once Sir Brian fancied he heard an outcry and a sobbing, as of a child in distress,--the voice of his little son; but by degrees the sobbing died away.

In the early morning, as Sir Brian stood at the window, he saw the grey sea hurling itself at the bare coast, and the sea-gulls skimming and eddying amidst the bitter foam of the great breakers. The grey walls of Kildhurm Tower, which stood scarce a hundred paces from the shore, were hoary with clinging flakes of froth. Directly opposite the window where Sir Brian was standing, on the verge of the low headland, lay a heap of something that had not been there the evening before. Was it a mass of sea-wrack, cast up by the waves during the night? Sir Brian could not see clearly; the window-pane was dim with salt, and his eyes were heavy. He stealthily left the room, descended the staircase, and, bareheaded as he was, crossed the wind-swept breadth of turf that intervened between the tower and the headland.

There lay the body of his wife, face downwards, with arms outstretched, and hands that clutched the turf. It was a spot to which she had often come to sit, and to gaze for hours westward across the waves towards Mona, where she was born. Sir Brian stood looking down at her, as he had stood by that other dead body the day before. He had been the death of them both. At first, indeed, he did not quite believe that she was dead. He watched for some movement of those fingers which clutched so sharply into the turf, those soft white fingers that yesterday had been so tremulous. But there was no tremor in them now; they were rigid as iron: the wind that fluttered her garments could not stir them. Poor little hands! Perhaps, after all, Sir Brian had not pressed them so lovingly, or so often as he might have done. He remembered how, sometimes when they had touched his hair or his cheek, he had moodily disregarded their touch, or had brushed them impatiently away. What hands would caress him now? 'Hadst thou not failed in thy duty as a husband;' and again: 'Mayst thou slip and stumble in the blood which thou hast this day shed!' Those were words which could never be unspoken. And yet Sir Brian waited beside the body, as if he expected it to arise and speak to him.

But at length, setting his teeth together, he laid hold of the body, and placed it face upwards across his knee. As he did so, the cause of death was revealed. She had planted the dagger point upwards in the earth, and had fallen upon it. Something else she had planted there, though at the time Sir Brian did not know it--the acorns from the fatal oak of Ennerdale; and she had fertilised them with her very heart's blood.

Some of the servants, who had been peeping out from the castle windows, aghast at so grim a spectacle, now made bold to approach and offer their assistance. Sir Brian, however, as if he had not seen them, rose, lifting the corpse in his arms, and stalked in silence up the ascent to the castle gate, neither staggering nor pausing by the way. The servants followed in a group after him.

When he got to the gate, he was met by his little son, who had his father's black hair and eyes, and his mother's tremulous indignant mouth. The child's nurse had in vain striven to keep him out of the way, and from a knowledge of what had happened. He seemed, indeed, to know more about it than anyone else.

'My dear mamma is dead!' quoth the infant heir of Kildhurm, his cheeks flushing scarlet and his childish voice vibrating. 'You have killed her, you wicked father, and I will never, never forgive you.'

Sir Brian stopped short, and his teeth began to chatter.

'Take the brat away!' he cried out.

But at the same moment his strength forsook him, and he would have fallen on his own threshold, had not those behind upheld him, and carried him and the dead woman into the castle. The stark warrior never fully recovered from the effects of this adventure.