Part 37 (2/2)

Sholto buckled on his lady's gift with a swelling heart. It was his dead master's armour. And as piece by piece fitted him as a glove fits the hand, the spirit of William Douglas seemed to enter more and more into the lad.

Then Sholto covered this most valuable gift with his own clothing which he had brought from the house of Carlinwark, and presently emerged, a well-looking but still slim squire of decent family.

Then the Countess belted on him the sword of price which went therewith, a blade of matchless Toledan steel, but covered with a plain scabbard of black pigskin.

”Draw and thrust,” commanded the lady, pointing at the rough stone of the wall at the end of the pa.s.sage.

Sholto looked ruefully at the glittering blade which he held in his hand, flas.h.i.+ng blue from point to double guard.

”Thrust and fear not,” said the Countess of Douglas the second time.

Sholto lunged out at the stone with all his might. Fire flew from the smitten blue whinstone where the point, with all the weight of his young body behind it, impinged on the wall. A tingling shock of acutest agony ran up the striker's wrist to the shoulder blade. The sword dropped ringing on the pavement, and Sholto's arm fell numb and useless to his side.

”Lift the sword and look,” commanded the Lady Douglas.

Sholto did as he was bidden, with his left hand, and lo, the point which had bent like a hoop was sharp and straight as if just from the armourer's. ”Can you strike with your left hand?” asked the lady.

”As with my right,” answered the son of Malise the Brawny.

There was a bar at a window in the wall bending outward in shape like the letter U.

”Then strike a cutting stroke with your left hand.”

Sholto took the sword. It seemed to him short-sighted policy that in the hour of his departure on a perilous quest he should disable himself in both arms. But Sholto MacKim was not the youth to question an order. He lifted the sword in his left hand, and with a strong ungraceful motion struck with all his might.

At first he thought that he had missed altogether. There was no tingling in his arm, no jar when the blade should have encountered the iron. But the Countess was examining the centre of the hoop.

”I have missed,” said Sholto.

”Come hither and look,” she said, without turning round.

And when he looked, lo, the thick iron had been cut through almost without bending. The sides of the break were fresh, bright, and true.

”Now look at the edge of your sword,” she said.

There was no slightest dint anywhere upon it, so that Sholto, armourer's son as he was, turned about the blade to see if by any chance he could have smitten with the reverse.

Failing in this, he could only kneel to his lady and say, ”This is a great gift--I am not worthy.”

For in these times of peril jewels and lands were as nothing to the value of such a suit of armour, which kings and princes might well have made war to obtain.

The faintest disembodied ghost of a smile pa.s.sed over the face of the Countess of Douglas.

”It is the best I can do with it now,” she said, ”and at least no one of the Avondales shall ever possess it.”

After the Lady Douglas had armed the young knight and sped him upon his quest, Sholto departed over the bridge where the surly custodian still grumbled at his horse's feet trampling his clean wooden flooring. The young man rode a Spanish jennet of good stock, a plain beast to look upon, neither likely to attract attention nor yet to stir cupidity.

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