S. R. Crockett - The Black Douglas

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Then, covering their lanterns, the three Scots, with Duke John, Pierre
de l'Hopital, and a score of officers, stole silently towards the
tower by which the Lady Sybilla had promised that an entrance should
be gained to the Castle of Machecoul.

It was situated at the western corner towards the south, and was
joined to its fellows at the corresponding angles of the fortress by
galleried walls of great height. Ten feet above the ground was a
little door of embossed iron, but ordinarily no steps led to it when
the castle was in a state of defence. Yet when Sholto adventured into
the angle of the wall, he stumbled upon a ladder that leaned against
the little landing-ledge, above which was the entrance denoted on the
plan.

Sholto ascended first, being the lightest and most agile of all. As he
had expected, he found the door unlocked and a narrow passage leading
within the tower. He lay a moment and listened, and then, being
certain there was a light and the sounds of labour within, he crawled
back to the ladder head, and whispered to the Lord James an order for
total silence.

Whereupon, Sholto holding the ladder at the top, Duke John and his
Councillor mounted like shadows, and with Malise and James Douglas to
guard them they were presently crouched in the passage with the door
shut behind them, and the officers keeping watch at the foot of the
tower without.

These five listened to the sounds of busy picks within the tower. They
could hear the ring of iron on stones and the panting of men engaged
in severe toil.

"The marshal is preparing for flight," whispered the Duke, exultantly.
"He is interring his treasures. He has been warned. But we will be
overspeedy for him."

And he chuckled in his satisfaction so loudly that Malise, using no
ceremony with Duke or varlet at such a season, put his hand over his
mouth.

Then one by one they crawled along the narrow passage on their hands
and knees, and presently from a little balcony, plastered like a
swallow's nest on the inner wall of the tower, they found themselves
looking down upon a strange scene.

A flight of steps led slantwise to the bottom, and at the foot of the
tower, stripped to the waist, they beheld two men busily filling great
sacks with a curious cargo.

The turret had never been finished. It contained nothing whatever
except the staircase. So far as Sholto could see there was not even a
window anywhere. The door by which they had entered and another which
evidently led into the interior of the castle were its only outlets.
The earth at the bottom had remained as it had been left by the
builders, who surely must have thought that no madder architectural
freak was ever planned than this shut tower of the Castle of Machecoul
with its blank walls and sordid accoutrement.

But most strange of all, the original earth had been covered to the
depth of a foot or more with dark objects, the true significance of
which did not appear from the distance of the little gallery where the
party of five had stationed themselves.

The two men at work below had brought torches with them, which were
fastened to the walls by iron spikes. The smoke from these hung in
heavy masses about the tower, still further diminishing the clearness
with which the watchers aloft could observe what went on below.

One of the workmen was tall and spare, with the forward thrust of head
and neck seen in vultures and other unclean birds. The other, who held
the sacks while his companion shovelled, was on the contrary stout and
short, of a notably jovial, rubicund countenance, in habit like the
hostler of an inn, or perhaps a well-to-do carrier upon the roads.

The two worked without speaking, as if the task were distasteful. When
one sack was full, both would seize their picks and dig furiously at
the floor of the tower. Then when they had enough loosened, they
would fall to shovelling the curiously shaped objects into the sacks
again.

As Sholto looked down he heard a hissing whisper at his ear.

"These be Blanchet the sorcerer and Robin Romulart. But last week they
took notice of my little Jean and praised him for a noble boy."

Sholto turned round, and there at his elbow, having followed them in
spite of all orders and precautions, he discerned the woodman Louis
Verger, whose little son had been carried off by the grey she-wolf.

Sholto motioned him back, and at a sign from the Duke, his father and
he began to descend. So silently did they make their way down the
stone steps, and so intent were the men upon their work, that in a
minute after leaving the little gallery Malise stood behind the taller
and Sholto stole like a shadow along the wall nearer to the little
rotund man who had been called Robin Romulart.

The Duke held up his hand. Sholto and Malise each took their man about
the throat with their left arms and pulled them backward, at the same
time covering their mouths with their right hands. Blanchet never
moved in the strong arms of Malise. But Robin, whose rotund figure
concealed his great muscular development, might have escaped from
Sholto had not the woodman Verger flung himself at the little man's
throat and brought him to the ground. Then the Duke and the others
descended, and as they did so they became conscious of a choking
mephitic vapour which clung dank and heavy to the lower courses of the
tower.

Suddenly a wild cry made all shiver. It came from Louis Verger, who
had sprung upon something that lay tossed aside in a corner.

"Silence, man--on your life! Silence!" hissed Pierre de l'Hopital.
"Whatever you have found, think only of revenge and help us to it!"

"I have found him. He is dead! The fiends! The fiends!" sobbed Louis
Verger, covering a small partially charred object with the curtmantle
of which he had rapidly divested himself for the purpose.

Then it came upon those who stood on the floor of the tower that they
were in the marshal's main charnel-house. These vague forms, mostly
charred like half-burned wood, these scraps of white bone, these
little crushed skulls, were all that remained of the innocent children
who, in the freshness of their youth and beauty, had been seduced into
the fatal Castle of Machecoul.

And what wonder that an appalling terror sat on the heart and mastered
the soul of Sholto MacKim. For how did he know that he was not
treading under foot at each step the calcined fragments of the fair
body of Maud Lindesay?

Twenty sacks had been filled ready for transport, and as many more lay
folded and empty in a heap in a corner. The marshal, uneasy perhaps as
to the suspicions against him, and anxious to remove evidence from the
precincts of his castle, had ordered this Tower of Death to be
cleared. But truly his devil had once more forsaken him. The order had
been given a day too late.

"God's grace, I stifle. Let us get out of this, and seize the
murderer," quoth Duke John, making his way towards the door.

"Wait a moment," said Pierre de l'Hopital, "we must consider. We
cannot let the commons see this or they will sack the castle from
foundation to roof tree, and slay the innocent with the guilty. We
must seize and hold for fair trial all who are found within. _And I,
Pierre de l'Hopital, will try them!_"

"What then do you propose?" said the Duke, getting as near the door as
possible.

"Let us bring in hither the officers and what soldiers you can
trust--that is not my business," answered the President. "Then we will
go through the castle, and after we have secured the prisoners and
made sure of sufficient pieces of justificative evidence, of which we
have infinite supply in these sacks, we may e'en permit the people to
work their will."

As it was Sholto who had first entered, so it was Sholto who first
left the Tower of Death. He it was also who, at the head of a strong
band, surprised the marshal's sleepy inner guard, and helped to bind
them with his own hands. It was Sholto who, at the foot of the stairs
of the great keep, stood listening that he might know the right moment
to lead the besiegers upward.

But even as he stood thus, down the stairway there came pealing a
terrible cry, the shriek of a woman in the final agony, shrill,
desperate, unavailing.

And at the sound Sholto flew up the stone steps in the direction of
the cry, not knowing what he did, save that he went to kill.

And scarce a foot behind him followed the woodman, Louis Verger, and
as they fled upward the red gloom grew brighter till they seemed to be
rushing headlong into a furnace mouth.

CHAPTER LVIII

THE WHITE TOWER OF MACHECOUL

So at the command of the Marshal de Retz they sent to bring forth
Margaret of Douglas and Maud Lindesay out of the White Tower, where
they had been abiding. Margaret had gone to bed, and, as was her
custom, Maud Lindesay sat awhile by her side. For so far as they could
they kept to the good and kindly traditions of Castle Thrieve. It
seemed somehow to bring them nearer home in that horrible place where
they were doomed to abide.

"Give me your hand, Maud, and tell on," said little Margaret, nestling
closer to her friend, and laying her head against her arm as she
leaned on the low bedstead beside her.

Margaret was gowned in a white linen night-rail, made long ago for the
marshal's daughter, little Marie de Retz, in the brighter days before
the setting up of the iron altar. Catherine, his deserted wife, had
been kind to the girls at Pouzages, and had given to both of them such
articles of garmenture as they were sorely in need of.

"Tell on--haste you," commanded little Margaret, with the
imperiousness of loving childhood, nestling yet closer as she spoke.
"It helps me to forget. I can almost think when you are speaking that
we are again at Thrieve, and that if we looked out at the window we
should see the Dee running by and Screet and Ben Gairn--and hear
Sholto MacKim drilling his men out in the courtyard. Why, Maudie, what
is the matter? I did not mean to make you cry. But it is all so sweet
to think upon in this place. Oh, Maudie, Maudie, what would you give
to hear a whaup whistle?"

Then drawing herself into a sitting posture, with her hands about
Maud's neck, she took a kerchief from under the pillow and dried her
friend's tears, murmuring the while, "Ah, do not cry, Maud, my vision
will yet come true, and you shall indeed see Ben Gairn and
Thrieve--and everything. I was dreaming about it last night. Shall I
tell you about it, sweet Maud?"

Maud Lindesay did not reply, not having recovered power over her
voice. So the little Maid of Galloway went on unbidden.

"Yes, I dreamed a glad dream yester-even. Shall I tell it you all and
all? I will--though you can tell stories far better than I.

"Methought that I and you--I mean, dear Maud, you and I, were sitting
together in the gloaming at the door of a little house up on the edges
of the moorland, where the heather is prettiest, and reddest, and
longest. And we were happy. We were waiting for some one. I shall not
tell you who, Maudie, but if you are good, and stop crying, you can
guess. And there was a ring on your finger, Maud. No, not like the old
ones--not a pretty ring like those in your box, yet you loved it more
than them all, and never stopped turning it about between your finger
and thumb.

"They had let me come up to stay with you, and the men who had
accompanied me were drinking in the clachan. As we sat I seemed to
hear their loud chorus, sounding up from the change-house.

"And you listened and said: 'I wish he would come. He is very long. It
is always long when he is away.' But you never said who it was that
was long away. And I shall not tell you, though I know. Perhaps it was
old Jock Lacklands, who used to be captain of the guard, and perhaps
grouting Peter, from the gate-house by the ford. But somehow I do not
think so. Ah, that is better! Now do not cry again. But listen, else I
will not tell you any more, but go off to sleep instead.

"Perhaps you do not want to hear the rest. Yet--it was such a pretty
dream, and of good omen.

"You _do_ want to hear? Well, then, be good!

"As we sat there we could hear the bumblebees scurrying home, and
every now and then one of the big boom-beetles would sail whirring
past us. We could hear the sheep crying below in the little green
meadows so lonesomely, and the snipe bleating an answer away up in the
sky above their heads, and you said, '_It is all so empty, wanting
him!_'

"Then the maids brought in the cows, and milked them standing at the
gable end, and we could smell the smell of their breath, sweet like
the scent of the flowers they had been eating all day long. Then,
after a while, they were driven out of the yard again, and went in a
string, one after the other, back to their pastures, doucely and
sedately, just like folk going to holy kirk on Sabbath days when it is
summer time in Galloway.

"Then you said, 'I am weary of waiting for him!' And I answered,
'Why,--he has not been gone more than a day. Sometimes I do not see
him for weeks, and _I_ never fret like that!'

"Then you answered (it has all come so clear into my mind), 'Some day
you will know, little one!' And you patted me on the head, and went to
the house end to look into the sunset. You looked many minutes under
your hand, and when you came back you said, as if you had never said
it before, 'He is long a-coming! I wonder what can be keeping him.'

"Then the maidens told us that the supper was ready to put on the
table, whereat you scolded them, telling them that it was too early,
and that they must keep it hot against their master's coming. And to
me you said, 'You are not hungry, are you?' And I answered, 'No,'
though I was indeed very hungry--(in my dream, that is). Then you said
again, sighing: 'It is strange that he should not come home! I cannot
eat till he comes! Perhaps he has fallen into a ditch, or some eagle
may have pecked out his eyes!'

"Then all the while it grew darker, and still no one came. Whereat you
cried a little softly, and said: 'He might have come--I know right
well he could have been here by this time if he had tried. But he does
not love me any more.' And you were patting the ground with your foot
as you used to do when--well, when he went away from Thrieve without
coming out upon the leads to say 'Good-night.' Then, all at once,
there was a noise of quick feet brushing eagerly through the heather,
and some one (no, not Landless Jock) leaped the wall and caught
me--_me_--in his arms."

"No, it was not you whom he caught in his arms!" cried Maud Lindesay,
indignantly, and then stopped, abashed at her own folly. But the
little maid laughed merrily.

"Aha!" she said, "_I_ caught you that time in my trap. You know who it
was in my dream, though I have never told you, nor so much as hinted.

"And he asked if you had missed him, and you made a sign for me not to
speak, just as you used to do at Castle Thrieve, and answered, 'No,
not a little bit! Margaret and I were quite happy. We hoped you would
not come back at all this night, for then we could have slept
together.'"

Maud Lindesay drew a long, soft breath, and looked out of the window
of the White Tower into the dark.

"That is a sweet dream," she murmured. "Ah, would that it were true,
and that Sholto--!"

She broke off short again, for the maid clapped her hands gleefully.
"You said it! You said it!" she cried. "You called him Sholto. Now I
know; and I am so glad, for he is nearly as good to play with as you.
And I shall not mind him a bit."

Little Margaret stopped short in her turn, seeing something in her
friend's face.

"Why are you suddenly grown so sad, Maudie?" she asked.

"It came upon me, dear Margaret," said Maud, "how that we are but two
helpless maids in a dreadful place without a friend. Let us say a
prayer to God to keep us!"

Then Margaret Douglas turned and knelt with her face to the pillow and
her small hands clasped in front of her.

"Give me your silver cross," she said, "I lent the little gold one
that was William's to the Lady Sybilla, and she hath not returned it
me again."

Maud gave her the cross and she took it and held it in the palm of her
hand looking long at it. Then she repeated one by one the children's
orisons she had been taught, and after that she made a little prayer
of her own. This is the prayer.

"Lord of mercy, be good to two maids who are lonely and weak, and shut
up in this place of evil men. Keep our lives and our souls, and also
our bodies from harm. Make us not afraid of the dark or of the devil.
For Thou art the stronger. And do not forget to be near us this night,
for we have no other friend and sorely do we need one to love and
deliver us. Amen."

It was true. More bitterly than any two in the whole world, these
maidens needed a friend at that moment. For scarcely had the childish
accents been lost in the night silence, when the outer door of the
White Tower was thrown open to the wall, and on the steps of the
turret stair they heard the noise of men coming upwards to their
prison-room.

But first, though the inner door of their chamber was locked within,
the bolts glided back apparently of their own accord. It opened, and
the hideous face of La Meffraye looked in upon them with a cackle of
fiendish laughter.

"Come, sweet maidens," she cried gleefully, as the frightened girls
clasped each other closer upon the bed, "come away. The Marshal de
Retz calls for you. He hath need of your beauty to grace his feast.
The lights of the banquet burn in his hall. See the fire of burning
shine out upon the night. The very trees are red with it. The skies
are red. All is red. Come--up--make yourselves fair for the eyes of
the great lord to behold!"

Then behind La Meffraye entered Gilles de Sille and Poitou, the
marshal's servants.

"Make ready in haste--you are both to go instantly before my lord, who
abides your coming!" said Gilles de Sille. "Poitou and I will abide
without the door, and La Meffraye here shall be your tirewoman and see
that you have that which you need. But hasten, for my lord is instant
and cannot be kept waiting!"

* * * * *

So they brought the Scottish maidens down from the White Tower into
the night. They walked hand in hand. Their steps did not falter, and,
as they went, they prayed to God to keep them from the dangers of the
place. Astarte, the she-wolf, who must have kept guard beneath,
stalked before them, and behind them they seemed to hear the hobbling
crutch and cackling laughter of La Meffraye.

Across the wide courtyard of Machecoul they went. It also was filled
with the reflection of the red tide of light which ebbed and flowed,
waxing and waning above. Saving for that window the whole castle was
wrapped in gloom and silence, and if there were any awake within the
precincts they knew better than to spy upon the midnight doings of
their dread lord.

The little party passed up the great staircase of the keep and
presently halted before the inscribed wooden door by which Laurence
had entered the Temple of Evil.

As Gilles de Sille opened it for the maids to precede him, the skirt
of Maud Lindesay's robe, blown back by the draught of the chamber,
fluttered against the cheek of Laurence MacKim as he lay on his face
in the niche of the wall. At the light touch he came to himself, and
looked about with a strange and instant change in all the affections
and movements of his heart.

With the coming in of the maidens, fear seemed utterly to forsake him.
A clarity of purpose, an alertness of brain, a strength of heart
unknown before, took the place of the trembling bath of horror in
which he had swooned away.

It was like the sudden appearance of two white angels walking fearless
and unscathed through the grim dominions of the Lords of Hell.

Incarnate Good had somehow entered the house of the Demon, though it
was in the slender periphery of two maidens' bodies, and evil, strong
and resistless before, seemed in the moment to lose half its power.

[Illustration: IT WAS LIKE THE SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF TWO WHITE ANGELS
WALKING FEARLESS AND UNSCATHED THROUGH THE GRIM DOMINIONS OF THE LORDS
OF HELL.]

CHAPTER LIX

THE LAST SACRIFICE TO BARRAN-SATHANAS

And as Laurence MacKim, crouched in the dim obscurity of the curtained
doorway, looked forth, this is what he saw.

Maud Lindesay and Margaret Douglas advanced into the centre of the
temple where was a slab of white marble let into the floor. As if by
instinct the two maids stopped upon it, standing hand in hand before
the iron altar and the vast shadowy image which gloomed above and
appeared to reach forward in act to clutch them. After the first check
in his hideous incantations, Gilles de Retz had returned to his own
chamber, in which, after his entrance, the light gleamed brighter and
more fiercely red than ever. As the maidens stood on the marble square
La Meffraye went to the door and called certain words within,
conveying some message which Laurence could not hear.

Then with an assured carriage and haughty stride came forth the
marshal, his grey hair and blue-black beard in strong contrast with
his haggard corpse-pale face, from which the momentary glow of youth
half-restored had already faded, as fades a footprint upon wet sand.

Gilles de Sille and Poitou bowed silently before him as men who have
done their commission, and who retire to await further orders. But La
Meffraye, once more apparent, stood her ground.

"Here are the dainty maids from the far land; no beggars' brats are
they. No strays and pickings from the streets. No, nor yet silly
village innocents who follow La Meffraye from the play-fields through
the woodlands to the Paradise of our Lord Gilles! Hasten not the joy!
Let these pearls of youth and beauteousness die indeed, but let them
die slowly and deliciously. And in the last blood of an ancient race
let our master bathe and find the new life he seeks. Hear us, O
Barran-Sathanas, and grant our prayer!"

Then La Meffraye approached the maids and would have touched the dress
of the little Margaret, as if to order it more daintily for the
pleasing of her master's eye. But Maud Lindesay thrust her aside like
an unclean thing.

Whereat La Meffraye laughed till her rusty black cloak quivered and
rustled from hood to hem.

"Ah, my proud lady," she croaked, "in a little, in a very little, you
too will be calling upon La Meffraye to save you, to pity you. But I,
La Meffraye, will gloat over each drop of blood that distils from your
fair neck. Aha, you shall change your tone when at the white
throat-apple which your sweetheart would have loved to kiss, you feel
the bite of the sharp slow knife. Then you will not thrust aside La
Meffraye. Then you shall cry and none shall pity. Then she will spurn
you from her knees."

"Out!" said Gilles de Retz, briefly, and like some inferior imping
devilkin before the great Master of Evil, La Meffraye retreated
hobbling to the doorway of the marshal's chamber, where she crouched
nodding and chuckling, mumbling inaudible words, and mingling them
ever with her dry cackling laughter.

Gilles de Retz stopped at the corner of the platform and looked long
at Maud and Margaret where they stood on the great central square of
marble. It was the Maid who spoke first.

"Dear Messire," she said sweetly and almost confidently, "you have a
little girl of your own. I know, for I have played with her. I love
her. Therefore you will not hurt us. I am sure you will not hurt us.
You are going to send us back in a ship to our own country, because it
is lonely here where Maud and I know no one!"

The marshal smiled upon her his inhuman inscrutable smile. He leaned
against a pillar of strangely twisted design, and contemplated the two
victims at his ease.

"Life is sweet to you, is it not?" he said at last; "you are truly
happy, being young, and so have no need to be made young again."

"Oh, but I am very old," cried the Maid, gaining some confidence from
the quiet of his voice, "I am nearly eight years old. And our Maudie
here, she is--oh, a dreadful age! She is very, very old!"

"You would not like to die?" suggested Gilles de Retz, with a certain
soft insinuation.

"Oh, no," said Margaret Douglas, "I am going to live long and
long--till every one in the world loves me. I am going to help every
one to get what he most desires. And you know I can, for I shall be
very rich. And if what they say is true, and I am Princess of
Galloway, I shall marry and be a very great lady. But I shall never
marry any one who is not a Douglas."

The marshal nodded.

"I do not think that you shall marry any one who is not a Douglas!" he
said, with a certain grave and not discourteous irony in his tones.

"Yes," the little Maid went on. She had lost all fear in the very act
of speech. "Yes, and Maud, she is going to marry Sholto--and they will
be very happy, for they love each other so. I know it, for she told me
to-night just before you sent for us to come to your feast. That was
kind of you to remember us, though it was past bed-time. But now, good
marshal, you will send us back, will you not? Now, look kind to-night.
You will be glad afterwards that you were good to two maids who never
harmed you, but are ready to love you if you prove kind to them."

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