The Black Douglas, Samuel Rutherford Crockett [best books under 200 pages .TXT] 📗

not so!"
"It is true I betrayed him," she answered calmly.
"You whom he loved--God knows how unworthily--"
"God knows," she said simply and calmly.
"You betrayed him to his death. Why then should not I kill you?"
Again she smiled upon him that disarming, hopeless, dreadful smile.
"Because you cannot kill me. Because it were too crowning a mercy to kill me. Because, for three inches of that blade in my heart, I would bless you through the eternities. Because I must do the work that remains--"
"And that work is--?"
"Vengeance!!"
Sholto was silent, trying to piece things together. He found it hard to think. He was but a boy, and experience so strange as that of the Lady Sybilla was outside him. Yet vaguely he felt that her emotion was real, more real perhaps than his own instinct of crude slaying--the desire of the wasp whose nest has been harried to sting the first comer. This woman's hatred was something deadlier, surer, more persistent.
"Vengeance--" he said at last, scarce knowing what he said, "why should you, who betrayed him, speak of avenging him?"
"Because," said the Lady Sybilla, "I loved him as I never thought to love man born of woman. Because when the fiends of the pit tie me limb to limb, lip to lip, with Judas who sold his master with a kiss, when they burn me in the seventh hell, I shall remember and rejoice that to the last he loved me, believed in me, gloried in his love for me. And God who has been cruel to me in all else, will yet do this thing for me. He will not let William Douglas know that I deceived him or that he trusted me in vain."
"But the Vengeance that you spoke of--what of that?" said Sholto, dwelling upon that which was uppermost in his own thought.
"Aye," said the Lady Sybilla, "that alone can be compassed by me. For I am bound by a chain, the snapping of which is my death. To him who, in a far land, devised all these things, to the man who plotted the fall of the Douglas house--to Gilles de Retz, Marshal of France, I am bound. But--I shall not die--even you cannot kill me, till I have brought that head that is so high to the hempen cord, and delivered the foul fiend's body to the fires of both earth and hell."
"And the Chancellor Crichton--the tutor Livingston--what of them?" urged Sholto, like a Scot thinking of his native traitors.
The Lady Sybilla waved a contemptuous hand.
"These are but lesser rascals--they had been nothing without their master and mine. You of the Douglas house must settle with them."
"And why have you returned to this country of Galloway?" said Sholto. "And why are you thus alone?"
"I am here," said the Lady Sybilla, "because none can harm me with my work undone. I travel alone because it suits my mood to be alone, because my master bade me join him at your town of Kirkcudbright, whence, this very night, he takes ship for his own country of Brittany."
"And why do you, if as you say you hate him so, continue to follow him?"
"Ah, you are simple," she said; "I follow him because it is my fate, and who can escape his doom? Also, because, as I have said, my work is not yet done."
She relapsed into her former listless, forth-looking, unconscious regard, gazing through him as if the young man had no existence. He dropped the rein and the point of his sword with one movement. The white palfrey started forward with the reins loose on its neck. And as she went the eyes of the Lady Sybilla were fixed on the distant hills which hid the sea.
So, leaving Sholto standing by the lakeside with bowed head and abased sword, the strange woman went her way to work out her appointed task.
But ere the Lady Sybilla disappeared among the trees, she turned and spoke once more.
"I have but one counsel, Sir Knight. Think no more of your master. Let the dead bury their dead. Ride to Thrieve and never once lose sight of her whom you call your sweetheart, nor yet of her charge, Margaret Douglas, the Maid of Galloway, till the snow falls and winter comes upon the land."


CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE MACKIMS COME TO THRIEVE
Sholto MacKim stood watching awhile as the white palfrey disappeared with its rider into the purple twilight of the woods which barred the way to the Solway. Then with a violent effort of will he recalled himself and looked about for his horse. The tired beast was gently cropping the lush dewy herbage on the green slope which led downwards to his native cottage. Sholto took the grey by the bridle and walked towards his mother's door, pondering on the last words of the Lady Sybilla. A voice at once strenuous and familiar broke upon his ear.
"Shoo wi' you, impident randies that ye are, shoo! Saw I ever the like aboot ony decent hoose? Thae hens will drive me oot o' my mind! Sholto, lad, what's wrang? Is't your faither? Dinna tell me it's your faither."
"It is more bitter than that, mither mine."
"No the Earl--surely no the Earl himsel'--the laddie that I hae nursed--the laddie that was to Barbara Halliburton as her ain dear son!"
"Mother, it is the Earl and young David too. They are dead, betrayed into the hands of their enemies, cruelly and treacherously slain!"
Then the keening cry smote the air as Barbara MacKim sank on her knees and lifted up her hands to heaven.
"Oh, the bonny laddies--the twa bonny, bonny laddies! Mair than my ain bairns I loved them. When their ain mother wasna able for mortal weakness to rear him, William Douglas drew his life frae me. What for, Sholto, are ye standin' there to tell the tale? What for couldna ye have died wi' him? Ae mither's milk slockened ye baith. The same arms cradled ye. I bade ye keep your lord safe wi' your body and your soul. And there ye daur to stand, skin-hale and bane unbroken, before your mither. Get hence--ye are nae son o' Barbara MacKim. Let me never look on your face again, gin ye bringna back the pride o' the warld, the gladness o' the auld withered heart o' her ye ca' your mither!"
"Mother," said Sholto, "my lord was not dead when I left him--he sent me to raise the country to his rescue."
"And what for then are ye standin' there clavering, and your lord in danger among his foes?" cried his mother, angrily.
"Dear mother, I have something more to tell ye--"
"Aye, I ken, ye needna break the news. It is that Malise, my man, is dead--that Laurence, wha ran frae the Abbey to gang wi' him to the wars, is nae mair. Aweel they are worthily spent, since they died for their chief! Ye say that ye were sent to raise the clan--then what seek ye at the Carlinwark? To Thrieve, man, to Thrieve; as hard as ye can ride! To Castle Thrieve!"
"Mother," said Sholto, still more gently, "hearken but a moment. Thirty thousand men are on their way to Edinburgh. Three days and nights have I ridden without sleep. Douglasdale is awake. The Upper Ward is already at the gates of the city. To a man, Galloway is on the march. The border is aflame. But it is all too late already, I have had news of the end. Before ever a man could reach within miles, the fatal axe had fallen, and my lords, for whom each one of us would gladly have died with smiles upon our faces, lay headless in the courtyard of Edinburgh Castle."
"And if the laddies were alive when ye rode awa', wha brocht the news faster than my Sholto could ride--tell me that?"
"I came not directly to Galloway, mother. First I raised the west from Strathaven to Ayr. Thence I carried the news to Dumfries and along the border side. But to-day I have seen the Lady Sybilla on her way to take ship for France. From her I heard the news that all I had done was too late."
"That foreigneerin' randy! Wad ye believe the like o' her? Yon woman that they named 'Queen o' Beauty' at the tournay by the Fords o' Lochar!--Certes, I wadna believe her on oath, no if she swore on the blessed banes o' Saint Andro himsel'. To the castle, man, or I'll kilt my coats and be there afore you to shame ye!"
"I go, mother," said Sholto, trying vainly to stem the torrent of denunciation which poured upon him; "I came only to see that all was well with you."
"And what for should a' be weel wi' me? What can be ill wi' me, if it be not to gang on leevin' when the noblest young men in the warld--the lad that was suckled at my bosom, lies cauld in the clay. Awa wi' ye, Sholto MacKim, and come na back till ye hae rowed every traitor in the same bloody windin' sheet!"
The foster mother of the Douglases sank on the ground in the dusk, leaning against the wall of her house. She held her face in her hands and sobbed aloud, "O Willie, Willie Douglas, mair than ony o' my ain I loed ye. Bonny were ye as a bairn. Bonny were ye as a laddie. Bonny abune a' as a noble young man and the desire o' maidens' e'en. But nane o' them a' loed ye like poor auld Barbara, that wad hae gien her life to pleasure ye. And noo she canna even steek thae black, black e'en, nor wind the corpse-claith aboot yon comely limbs--sae straight and bonny as they were--I hae straiked and kissed sae oft and oft. O wae's me--wae's me! What will I do withoot my bonny laddies!"
It was with the sound of his mother's lament still in his ears that Sholto rode sadly over the hill to Thrieve. The way is short and easy, and it was not long before the captain of the guard looked down upon the lights of the castle gleaming through the gathering gloom. But instead of being, as was its wont, lighted from highest battlement to flanking tower, only one or two lamps could be discerned shining out of that vast cliff of masonry.
But, on the other hand, lights were to be seen wandering this way and that over the long Isle of Thrieve, following the outlines of its winding shores, shining from the sterns of boats upon the pools of the Dee water, weaving intricately among the broomy braes on either side of the ford, and even streaming out across the water meadows of Balmaghie.
Sholto was so full of his own sorrow and the certain truth of the terrible news he must bring home to the Lady of Douglas and those two whom he loved, Maud Lindesay and her fair maid, that he paid little heed to these wandering lanterns and distant flaring torches.
He was pausing at the bridge head to wait the lowering of the draw-chains, when out of the covert above him there dashed a desperate horseman, who stayed neither for bridge nor ford, but rode straight at the eastern castle pool where it was deepest. To the stirrup clung another figure strange and terrible, seen in the uncertain light from the gate-house and in the pale beams of the rising moon.
The drawbridge clattered down, and sending his spurs home into the flanks of his tired steed, in a moment more Sholto was hard on the track of the first headlong horseman. Scarce a length separated them as they reached the outer guard of the castle. Abreast they reined their horses in the quadrangle,