Read Ebook: The Black Douglas by Crockett S R Samuel Rutherford Richards Frank Illustrator

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Ebook has 2738 lines and 124533 words, and 55 pages

And he sat still listening, patting Black Darnaway meanwhile on the neck.

The first two lines rang out bold and clear. Then again the wistfulness of the refrain played upon his heart as if it had been an instrument of strings, till the tears came into his eyes at the wondrous sorrow and yearning with which one voice, the sweetest and purest of all, replied, singing quite alone:

The tears brimmed over in the eyes of William Douglas, and a deep foreboding of the mysteries of fate fell upon his heart and abode there heavy as doom.

He turned his head as though he felt a presence near him, and lo! sudden and silent as the appearing of a phantom, another horse was alongside of Black Darnaway, and upon a white palfrey a maiden dressed also in white sat, smiling upon the young man, fair to look upon as an angel from heaven.

Earl William's lips parted, but he was too surprised to speak. Nevertheless, he moved his hand to his head in instinctive salutation; but, finding his bonnet already off, he could only stare at the vision which had so suddenly sprung out of the ground.

The lady slowly waved her hand in the direction of the children, whose young voices still rang clear as cloister bells tolling out the Angelus, and whose white dresses waved in the light wind as they danced back and forth with a slow and graceful motion.

"You hear, Earl William," she said, in a low, thrilling voice, speaking with a foreign accent, "you hear? You are a good Christian, doubtless, and you have heard from your uncle, the Abbot, how praise is made perfect 'out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.' Hark to them; they sing of their own destinies--and it may be also of yours and mine."

And so fascinated and moved at heart at once by her beauty and by her strange words, the Douglas listened.

The lady on the delicately pacing palfrey turned the darkness of her eyes from the white-robed choristers to the face of the young man. Then, with an impetuous motion of her hand, she urged him to listen for the next words, which swept over Earl William's heart with a cadence of unutterable pain and inexplicable melancholy.

He turned upon his companion with a quick energy, as if he were afraid of losing himself again.

"Who are you, lady, and what do you here?"

The girl smiled and reined her steed a little back from him with an air at once prettily petulant and teasing.

"Is that spoken as William Douglas or as the Justicer of Galloway--a country where, as I understand, there is no trial by jury?"

The light of a radiant smile passed from her lips into his soul.

"It is spoken as a man speaks to a woman beautiful and queenly," he said, not removing his eyes from her face.

"I fear I may have startled you," she said, without continuing the subject. "Even as I came I saw you were wrapped in meditation, and my palfrey going lightly made no sound on the grass and leaves."

Her voice was so sweet and low that William Douglas, listening to it, wished that she would speak on for ever.

"Alas," she answered, smiling yet more subtly, "I have no home near by. My home is very far and over many turbulent seas. I have but a maiden's pavilion in which to rest my head. Yet since I and my company must needs travel through your domains, Earl William, I trust you will not be so cruel as to forbid us?"

"Yes,"--he was smiling now in turn, and catching somewhat of the gay spirit of the lady,--"as overlord of all this province I do forbid you to pass through these lands of Galloway without first visiting me in my house of Thrieve!"

The lady clapped her hands and laughed, letting her palfrey pace onwards through the woodland glades bridle free, while Black Darnaway, compelled by his master's hand, followed, tossing his head indignantly because it had been turned from the direction of his nightly stable on the Castle Isle.

TWO RIDING TOGETHER

"Joyous," she cried, as they went, "Oh, most joyous would it be to see the noble castle and to have all the famous two thousand knights to make love to me at once! To capture two thousand hearts at one sweep of the net! What would Margaret of France herself say to that?"

"Is there no single heart sufficient to satisfy you, fair maid?" said the young man, in a low voice; "none loyal enough nor large enough for you that you desire so many?"

"And what would I do with one if it were in my hands," she said wistfully; "that is, if it were a worthy heart and one worth the taking. Ever since I was a child I have always broken my toys when I tired of them."

The voices of the singing children on the green came more faintly to their ears, but the words were still clear to be understood.

"You hear? It is my fate!" she said.

"Nay," answered the Earl, passionately, still looking in her eyes. "Mine, mine--not yours! Gladly I would go to prison or to death for the love of one so fair!"

"My lord, my lord," she laughed, with a tolerant protest in her voice, "you keep up the credit of your house right nobly. How goes the distich? My mother taught it me upon the bridge of Avignon, where also as here in Scotland the children dance and sing."

"First in the love of Woman, First in the field of fight, First in the death that men must die, Such is the Douglas' right!"

"Here and now," he said, still looking at her, "'tis only the first I crave."

"A Court," cried Earl William, scornfully, "to the Seneschal's court! Nay, truly. Could a Stewart ever keep his faith or pay his debts? Never, since the first of them licked his way into a lady's favour."

"Oh," she answered lightly, "I meant not the Court of Stirling nor yet the Chancellor's Castle of Edinburgh. I meant the only great Court--the Court of France, the Court of Charles the Seventh, the Court which already owns the sway of its rarest ornament, your own Scottish Princess Margaret."

"Thither I cannot go unless the King of France grants me my father's rights and estates!" he said, with a certain sternness in his tone.

"Let me look at your hand," she answered, with a gentle inclination of her fair head, from which the lace that had shrouded it now streamed back in the cool wind of evening.

Stopping Darnaway, the young Earl gave the girl his hand, and the white palfrey came to rest close beneath the shoulder of the black war charger.

"To-morrow," she said, looking at his palm, "to-morrow you will be Duke of Touraine. I promise it to you by my power of divination. Does that satisfy you?"

"I fear you are a witch, or else a being compound of rarer elements than mere flesh and blood," said the Earl.

"Is that a spirit's hand," she said, laughing lightly and giving her own rosy fingers into his, "or could even the Justicer of Galloway find it in his heart to burn these as part of the body of a witch?"

She shuddered and pretended to gaze piteously up at him from under the long lashes which hardly raised themselves from her cheek.

"Spirit-slender, spirit-white they are," he replied, "and as for being the fingers of a witch--doubtless you are a witch indeed. But I will not burn so fair things as these, save as it might be with the fervours of my lips."

And he stooped and pressed kiss after kiss upon her hand.

Gently she withdrew her fingers from his grasp and rode further apart, yet not without one backward glance of perfectest witchery.

"I doubt you have been overmuch at Court already," she said. "I did not well to ask you to go thither."

"Why must I not go thither?" he asked.

"Because I shall be there," she replied softly, courting him yet again with her eyes.

As they rode on together through the rich twilight dusk, the young man observed her narrowly as often as he could.

Her skin was fair with a dazzling clearness, which even the gathering gloom only caused to shine with a more perfect brilliance, as if a halo of light dwelt permanently beneath its surface. Faint responsive roses bloomed on either cheek and, as it seemed, cast a shadow of their colour down her graceful neck. Dark eyes shone above, fresh and dewy with love and youth, and smiled out with all ancientest witcheries and allurements in their depths. Her lithe, slender body was simply clad in a fair white cloth of some foreign fabric, and her waist, of perfectest symmetry, was cinctured by a broad ring of solid silver, which, to the young man, looked so slender that he could have clasped it about with both his hands.

So they rode on, through the woods mostly, until they reached a region which to the Earl appeared unfamiliar. The glades were greener and denser. The trees seemed more primeval, the foliage thicker overhead, the interspaces of the golden evening sky darker and less frequent.

"In what place may your company be assembled?" he asked. "Strange it is that I know not this spot. Yet I should recognise each tree by conning it, and of every rivulet in Galloway I should be able to tell the name. Yet with shame do I confess that I know not where I am."

"Ah," said the girl, her face growing luminous through the gloom, "you called me a witch, and now you shall see. I wave my hands, so--and you are no more in Galloway. You are in the land of fa?ry. I blow you a kiss, so--and lo! you are no more William, sixth Earl of Douglas and proximate Duke of Touraine, but you are even as True Thomas, the Beloved of the Queen of the Fairies, and the slave of her spell!"

"I am indeed well content to be Thomas Rhymer," he answered, submitting himself to the wooing glamour of her eyes, "so be that you are the Lady of the milk-white hind!"

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