Part 5 (1/2)
The lady seemed to change colour. For at that moment a gust of wind caused the lamps to flicker, and the outlines of her white-robed figure appeared to waver like an image cast in water.
”I adjure and command you, in the name of G.o.d the One and Omnipotent, to depart to your own place, spirit or devil or whatever you may be!”
The voice of the Abbot rose high above the roaring of the bursting storm without. The lady seemed to reach an arm across the circle as if even yet to take hold of the young man. The Abbot thrust forward his crucifix.
And then the bolt of G.o.d fell. The whole pavilion was illuminated with a flash of light so intense and white that it appeared to blind and burn up all about. The lady was seen no more. The silken covering blazed up. Malise plunged outward into the darkness of the storm, carrying his young master lightly as a child in his arms, while the Abbot kept his feet behind him like a boat in a s.h.i.+p's wake. The thunder roared overhead like the sea bellowing in a cave's mouth, and the great pines bent their heads away from the mighty wind, straining and creaking and las.h.i.+ng each other in their blind fury.
Malise and the Abbot seemed to hear about them the plunging of riderless horses as they stumbled downwards through the night, their path lit by lightning flashes, green and lilac and keenest blue, and bearing between them the senseless form of William Earl of Douglas.
CHAPTER VI
THE PRISONING OF MALISE THE SMITH
[Now these things, material to the life and history of William, sixth Earl of Douglas, are not written from hearsay, but were chronicled within his lifetime by one who saw them and had part therein, though the part was but a boy's one. His ma.n.u.script has come down to us and lies before the transcriber. Sholto MacKim, the son of Malise the Smith, testifies to these things in his own clerkly script. He adds particularly that his brother Laurence, being at the time but a boy, had little knowledge of many of the actual facts, and is not to be believed if at any time he should controvert anything which he (Sholto) has written. So far, however, as the present collector and editor can find out, Laurence MacKim appears to have been entirely silent on the subject, at least with his pen, so that his brother's caveat was superfluous.]
The instant Lord William entered his own castle of Thrieve over the drawbridge, and without even returning the salutations of his guard, he turned about to the two men who had so masterfully compelled his return.
”Ho, guard, there!” he cried, ”seize me this instant the Abbot of the New Abbey and Malise MacKim.”
And so much surprised but wholly obedient, twenty archers of the Earl's guard, commanded by old John of Abernethy, called Landless Jock, fell in at back and front.
Malise, the master armourer, stood silent, taking the matter with his usual phlegm, but the Abbot was voluble.
”William,” he said, holding out his hands with an appealing gesture, ”I have laboured with you, striven with, prayed for you. To-night I came forth through the storm, though an old man, to deliver you from the manifest snares of the devil--”
But the Earl interrupted his recital without compunction.
”Set Malise MacKim in the inner dungeon,” he cried. ”Thrust his feet into the great stocks, and let my lord Abbot be warded safely in the castle chapel. He is little likely to be disturbed there at his devotions.”
”Aye, my lord, it shall be done!” said Landless Jock, shaking his head, however, with gloomy foreboding, as the haughty young Earl in his wet and torn disarray flashed past him without further notice of the two men whom the might of his bare word had committed to prison.
The Earl sprang up the narrow turret stairs, pa.s.sing as he did so through the vaulted hall of the men-at-arms, where more than a hundred stout archers and spearmen sat carousing and singing, even at that advanced hour of the night, while as many more lay about the corridors or on the wooden shelves which they used for sleeping upon, and which folded back against the wall during the day. At the first glimpse of their young master, every man left awake among them struggled to his feet, and stood stiffly propped, drunk or sober according to his condition, with his eyes turned towards the door which gave upon the turnpike stair. But with a slight wave of his hand the Earl pa.s.sed on to his own apartment.
Here he found his faithful body-servant, Rene le Blesois, stretched across the threshold. The staunch Frenchman rose mechanically at the noise of his master's footsteps, and, though still soundly asleep, stood with the latch of the door in his hand, and the other held stiffly to his brow in salutation.
Left to his own devices, Lord William Douglas would doubtless have cast himself, wet as he was, upon his bed had not Le Blesois, observing his lord's plight even in his own sleep-dulled condition, entered the chamber after his master and, without question or speech, silently begun to relieve him of his wet hunting dress. A loose chamber gown of rich red cloth, lined with silk and furred with ”cristy” grey, hung over the back of an oaken chair, and into this the young Earl flung himself in black and sullen anger.
Le Blesois, still without a word spoken, left the room with the wet clothes over his arm. As he did so a small object rolled from some fold or crevice of the doublet, where it had been safely lodged till displaced by the loosening of the belt, or the removing of the banderole of his master's hunting horn.
Le Blesois turned at the tinkling sound, and would have stopped to lift it up after the manner of a careful servitor. But the eye of his lord was upon the fallen object, and with an abrupt wave of his hand towards the door, and the single word ”Go!” the Earl dismissed his body-servant from the room.
Then rising hastily from his chair, he took the trinket in his hand and carried it to the well-trimmed lamp which stood in a niche that held a golden crucifix.
The Lord Douglas saw lying in his palm a ring of singular design. The main portion was formed of the twisting bodies of a pair of snakes, the jewel work being very cunningly interlaced and perfectly finished.
Their eyes were set with rubies, and between their open mouths they carried an opal, shaped like a heart. The stone was translucent and faintly luminous like a moonstone, but held in its heart one fleck of ruby red, in appearance like a drop of blood. By some curious trick of light, in whatever position the ring was held, this drop still appeared to be on the point of detaching itself and falling to the ground.
Earl William examined it in the flicker of the lamp. He turned it every way, narrowly searching inside the golden band for a posy, but not a word of any language could he find engraved upon it.
”I saw the ring upon her hand--I am certain I saw it on her hand!” He said these words over and over to himself. ”It is then no dream that I have dreamed.”