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S. R. Crockett - The Black Douglas

S >> S. R. Crockett >> The Black Douglas




"Hush, Margaret," said Maud Lindesay. "It is useless to speak such
words to such a man."

The Marshal de Retz turned sharply to her.

"Ah," he said, with a curious bite in his speech, "then, my young
lady, you would not love me, even if I were to let you go!"

"I should hate and abominate you for ever and ever, even if you helped
me into Paradise!" quoth Maud Lindesay, giving him defiance in a full
eye-volley.

"So," he said calmly, "I am indeed likely to help you into Paradise
this very night. That is, unless Saint Peter of the Keys makes up his
mind that so outspoken and tricksome a maid had best take a few
thousand years of purgatory--as it were on her way upwards, _en
passant_."

A sudden lowering passion at this point altered his countenance.

"No," he thundered, standing up erect from the pillar against which
he had been leaning, and his whole voice and bearing changing past
description, "it is enough--listen! I will be brief with you. I have
brought both of you here that you may die. I cannot expect of you that
you will understand or appreciate my motives, which are indeed above
the knowledge of children. This is a temple to a Great God, and he
demands the sacrifice of the noblest and most innocent blood. I do you
the honour to believe that it is here to my hand. Also, your deaths
will cause a number of people both in Scotland and elsewhere to sit
easier in their seats. Lastly, I had sworn that you should die if your
friends from Scotland came to trouble me. They have come, and Gilles
de Retz keeps his word--as doth the Master whom he serveth!"

He bowed in the direction of the vast shadowy figure, which to
Laurence's eye appeared to turn towards his niche with a leer, as if
to say, "Listen to him. What a fool he is!"

The maids stood silent, not comprehending aught save that they were to
die. Then suddenly Gilles de Retz cried out in his loudest military
tones--"Henriet, Poitou, De Sille, bind these maidens upon the iron
altar, that Barran-Sathanas may feed his eyes on their beauty and
rejoice!"

And as they stood motionless upon the square of white marble, the
servitors came forward and led them to the great altar of iron. They
lifted the maidens up and laid their bodies crosswise upon the vast
grid, the bars of which were as thick as a man's arm, arranging them
so that their heads hung without support over the bar next the shadowy
image.

As they bound them rudely hand and foot, the long and beautiful hair
of Maud Lindesay escaped from its fastenings and fell down till it
reached the bath of red porphyry which extended underneath the whole
length of the altar of iron.

Then through all the Temple of Evil there ensued sudden silence. Not a
sob or a moan escaped from the doomed maidens, and the feet of the
assistants fell silent and soft as the paws of wild beasts upon the
ebon floor.

Gilles de Retz waited till his acolytes had retired to their appointed
places, where they stood like carven statues watching what should
happen. Then slowly and deliberately he ascended to the broad platform
from which the iron altar rose, and stood with his arms folded over
his flame-coloured robe, looking gloatingly down, upon his innocent
victims. Maud Lindesay was the nearer to him, and her unbound hair
fell back and touched the peak of his pointed shoe of crimson Cordovan
leather.

With a quick movement he caught up a handful of its rich luxuriance
and allowed it to run through his fingers like sand again and yet
again, with apparent delight in the sensation.

Even as he did so the dim figure of the horned demon above appeared to
lean forward as if to touch him, and with a rushing noise the great
hour-glass set upon a pedestal at the foot of the image turned itself
completely over. Gilles with a startled air turned also, and seeing
what it was he laughed a strange hollow laugh.

"It is indeed the hour, the hour of doom, fair maids," he said,
looking down upon them as deferentially as if he had been paying his
court in the great hall of Thrieve, "but it shall not pass without
taking with it your souls to another, and I trust a higher, sphere!"

He paused, but no complaint or appeal reached his cruel and inexorable
ear. The certain graciousness of Providence to those in extreme peril
seemed to have blunted the edge of fear in the innocent victims. They
lay still and apparently without consciousness upon the iron altar.
The red glow played upon their faces, shining through from the inner
chamber, and the figure of the marshal stood out black against it.

On the floor lay the goblet from which he had drunk the Red Milk.

"Give me the knife!" he cried, sudden as a trumpet that is blown.

And reaching a withered hand within the marshal's chamber as if to
detach something from the wall, La Meffraye hobbled quickly across the
altar platform, bearing in her hand a shining weapon of steel, broad
of blade and curved at the point. She placed the ebony handle in the
marshal's hand, who weighed it lovingly in his grasp.

Then for the first time since the men had bound her, the sweet
childish eyes of little Margaret were unclosed and looked up at Gilles
de Retz with the touching wonder of helplessness and innocence.

At that moment the image appeared to Laurence to beckon to him out of
the gloom. A quick and nervous resolve ran through his veins. His
muscles became like steel within his flesh. He rose to his feet, and,
without pause for thought, rushed across the chapel from the niche
where he had been hidden.

"Murderer! Fiend! I will kill you!" he cried, and with his dagger bare
in his hand he would have thrown himself upon the marshal. But swifter
than the rush of the young man in his strength there came another from
the door of the inner chamber.

With a deep-throated roar of wholly bestial fury, Astarte the she-wolf
sprang upon Laurence, and, though he sank his dagger twice to the hilt
in her hairy chest, she over-bore him and they fell to the ground with
her teeth gripping his shoulder. Laurence felt the hot life-blood of
the beast spurt forth and mingle with his own. Then a flood of
swirling waters seemed to bear him suddenly away into the unknown.

* * * * *

When Laurence MacKim came to himself he emerged into a chill world in
which he felt somehow infinitely lonely and forsaken. Next he grew
slowly conscious that his feet and arms were bound tightly with cords
that cut painfully into the flesh. Then he realised that he, too, had
taken his place beside the maids upon the altar of iron. Strangely
enough he did not feel afraid nor even wish himself elsewhere. He only
wondered what would happen next.

He opened his eyes and lo! they looked directly into the leering
countenance of the monstrous image. Yet there seemed something
curiously encouraging and even beneficent about the aspect of the
demon. But so often as Gilles de Retz passed the triple array of his
victims with his back to the image, the regard of the sculptured devil
followed him, grim and mocking.

Words of angry altercation came to the ears of Laurence MacKim.

"I tell you," cried the voice of Gilles de Retz, "I will not spare
them. Well nigh had I succeeded. Almost I was young again. I was
tasting the first sweetness of knowledge wide as that of the gods. I
felt the new life stirring within me. But I had not enough of the
blood of innocence, which is the only worthy libation to
Barran-Sathanas, who alone can bestow youth and life."

Then the Lady Sybilla answered him. "I pray you, Gilles de Retz, as
you hope for mercy, slay not these maidens and this youth. Take me,
and bind me, instead, for the sacrifice of death. I have wrought
enough of evil! Take of my blood and work out your purpose. Let me
give you the libation you desire. Gilles de Retz, if ever I have aided
you, grant me this boon now. I beseech you, let these innocents go,
and bind me upon the altar in their places."

Long and loud laughed Gilles de Retz, a hard, evil, and relentless
laugh.

"Sybilla de Thouars an innocent maiden's sacrifice! Barran-Sathanas
himself laughs at the jest. He would have no pleasure in your death.
Soul and body you are his already. He desires only the blood and
suffering of the innocent--of those on whom he has never set his mark.
Nay, these three shall surely die, and in that bath of porphyry
hollowed out under his altar I will lave me from head to foot in the
Red Milk of innocence. I have no more need of you, Sybilla mine. You
have done your work, and for your reward you can now depart to your
own place. Out of my way, I say. Henriet, Poitou, quick! Remove this
woman from before the altar!"

Then, struggling strongly in their hands, the servitors carried the
Lady Sybilla to the farther end of the chapel, where they abode on
either side, holding her fast. And as the last grains of sand began to
swirl towards their fall and a little whirlpool to form funnel-wise in
the midst of the hour-glass, the butcher was left alone with his
victims upon the platform of the iron altar.

Gilles de Retz turned towards the image, and, lifting up his hand
solemnly, he cried in a great voice, "O Barran-Sathanas, be pleased to
behold this innocent blood spilled slowly in thine honour. As the red
fount flows and the red fire burns, restore my youth and make me
strong. Faithfully will I serve thee and thee alone, renouncing all
other. O Barran-Sathanas, great and only Lord, receive my sacrifice.
It is the hour!"

And so saying he laid hold of Maud Lindesay by the hair, and raised
the curved knife on high.

Then from the end of the chapel to which the Lady Sybilla had been
taken there came a sound. With a great despairing effort she burst
from her captors' hands and ran forward. She knelt down on the marble
slab whereon the maids had stood at their first entering, and as she
knelt she held aloft a golden crucifix.

"If there be a God in heaven, let him manifest himself now!" she
cried, "by the virtue of this cross of His son Jesus Christ, I call
upon Him!"

Then suddenly all the place was filled with a mighty rushing noise.
The last grains ran low in the hour-glass. It shifted in its stand and
turned over. A tremor like that of an earthquake shook all the castle
to its foundations. The solid keep itself rocked like a vessel in a
stormy sea. The great image overturned, and by its fall Gilles de
Retz was stricken senseless to the earth. The next moment, like
flood-gates burst by a mighty tide, the doors of the temple were
opened with a clang, and through them a crowd of armed men came
rushing in with triumphant shouts and angry cries of vengeance.

Sholto was far ahead of the others, and, as if led by the unerring
instinct of love, he ran to the altar whereon his love lay white as
death, but without a mark upon her fair body.

It was the work of a moment to cut their cords and chafe the numbed
wrists and ankles. James Douglas took the little Margaret. Sholto had
his sweetheart in his arms, while Laurence recovered quickly enough to
aid his father in securing Gilles de Retz and his servants. La
Meffraye they took not, for she lay dead within the inner chamber,
where yet burned the great fire which was used to consume the bodies
of the demon's victims. Two gaping wounds were found in her breast, in
the same place in which the dagger of Laurence MacKim had smitten the
she-wolf as she sprang upon him. But Astarte, woman witch or
were-wolf, was never seen again, neither by starlight, moonlight, nor
yet in the eye of day. Truly of Gilles de Retz was it said, "His demon
hath deserted him."

Beneath in the courts and quadrangles, swarming through the towers and
clambering perilously on the roofs, surged the press of the furious
populace. It was all that Duke John and his officers could do to keep
the prisoners in ward, and to prevent them from being torn limb from
limb (as had perhaps been fittest), and tossed alive into the flaming
funeral pyre of Castle Machecoul, which, lighted by a hundred hands,
presently began to flame like a volcano to the skies.

For the hour that comes to every evil-doer had come to Gilles de Retz.
And in that hour, as it shall ever be, the devil in whom he trusted
had forsaken him.

But the Lady Sybilla stood on the garden tower that in happier days
had been her pleasaunce, and beheld. And as she watched she kissed the
golden crucifix of the child Margaret. And her heart rejoiced because
the lives of the innocent as well as the death of the guilty had been
given her for her portion.

"And now, O Lord, I am ready to pay the price!" she said.




CHAPTER LX

HIS DEMON HATH DESERTED HIM


The soldiers of the Duke of Brittany stood with bared swords and
deadly pikes around the Marshal de Retz and those of his servants who
had been taken--that is to say, round Poitou, Clerk Henriet, Blanquet,
and Robin Romulart. About them surged ever more fiercely the angry
populace, drunk with the hot wine of destruction, having been filled
with inconceivable fury by that which they had seen in the round tower
wherein stood the filled bags of little charred remains.

"Tear the wolves into gobbets! Kill them! Burn them! Send them quick
to Hell!" So ran the cry.

And twice and thrice the villagers of the Pays de Retz charged
desperately as men who fight for their lives.

"Stand to it, men!" cried Pierre de l'Hopital. "Gilles de Retz shall
have fair trial!

"_But I shall try him!_" he added, under his breath.

Never was seen such a sight as the procession which conducted Gilles
de Retz to the city of Nantes. The Duke had sent for his whole band of
soldiers, and these, in ordered companies, marched in front and rear.
A triple file guarded the prisoners, and even their levelled pikes
could scarce beat back the furious rushes of the populace.

It was like a civil war, for the assailants struck fiercely at the
soldiers--as if in protecting him, they became accessory to the crimes
of the hated marshal.

"_Barbe Bleu! Barbe Bleu!_" they cried. "Slay _Barbe Bleu_! Make his
beard blood-red. He hath dipped it often in the life-blood of our
children. Now we will redden it with his own!"

So ran the tumult, surging and gathering and scattering. And ever the
pikes of the guard flashed, and the ordered files shouldered a path
through the press.

"Make way there!" cried the provost marshals. "Make way for the
prisoners of the Duke!"

And as they entered the city, from behind and before, from all the
windows and roofs, rose the hoarse grunting roar of the hatred and
cursing of a whole people.

But the object of all this rested calm and unmoved, and his cruel grey
eye had no expression in it save a certain tolerant and amused
contempt.

"Bah!" he muttered. "Would that I had slain ten millions of you! It is
my only regret that I had not the time. It is almost unworthy to die
for a few score children!"

During the journey to Nantes, Gilles de Retz kept the grand reserve
with which, when he came to himself, he had treated those who had
captured him. To the Duke only would he condescend to reply, and to
him he rather spoke as an equal unjustly treated than as a guilty
prisoner and suppliant.

"For this, Sire of Brittany," he said, "must you answer to your
overlord, the King of France, whose minister and marshal I am!"

The Duke would have made some feeble reply, but Pierre de l'Hopital
cut across the conversation with that stern irony which characterised
him.

"My lord," he said, "remember that before you were made Marshal of
France you were born a subject of the Duke of Brittany! And as such
you shall be judged."

"I decline to stand at your tribunal!" said the marshal, haughtily.

"_Soit!_" said the President, indifferently, "but all the same you
shall be tried!"

Duke John, knowing well that while his court was being held in the
capital city of his province, and especially during the trial of
Gilles de Retz, Nantes was no place for young maidens who had suffered
like Maud Lindesay and Margaret Douglas, sent them under escort to the
Castle of Angers.

Sholto MacKim and his father were allowed to accompany them, that they
might not be without some of their own country to speak with during
their sojourn in France. The Lord James, however, elected to abide
with the court. For there were many ladies there, and, having nobility
of address and desiring to perfect himself in the niceties of
fashionable speech (which changed daily), he had great pleasure in
their society, and rode in the lists by the side of the Loire with
even more than his former gallantry and success.

For, as he said, he needed some compensation for the long abstinence
enforced upon him by his habit of holy palmer. And right amply did he
make himself amends, and was accounted by dames fair and free the
lightsomest and properest Scot who had ever come into the land of
France.

With him Laurence remained, both because his father was still angry
with him on account of his desertion of them in Paris, and also
because having been so long in the Castle of Machecoul, there were
important matters concerning which in the forthcoming trial he alone
could give evidence.

Pierre de l'Hopital would have detained the Lady Sybilla as a possible
accomplice of the Sieur de Retz, but by the intercession of the
Scottish maidens, as well as by the sworn evidence of Sholto and the
Lord James, testifying that wholly by her means Gilles de Retz had
finally been caught red-handed, she was permitted to depart whither
she would.

"I will go to my sister," she said to Sholto, who came to know how he
could serve her. "It matters little. My work is nearly done!"

So, riding as was her custom all alone upon a white palfrey, she
passed out of their sight towards the south.

* * * * *

In the city of Nantes the rumour of the taking of Gilles de Retz had
spread like wild-fire, and as the cavalcade rode through the streets,
the windows rained down curses and the citizens hooted up from the
sidewalks. But the marshal kept his haughty and disdainful regard,
appearing like a noble nature who perforce companies for the nonce
with meaner men. He sat his favourite charger like a true companion of
Dunois and De Richemont, and, as more than one remarked, on this
occasion he looked like the royal prince and the Duke of Brittany the
prisoner.

So in the New Tower of the Castle of Nantes, Gilles de Retz was placed
to wait his trial. There is no need to give a long account of it. The
documents have been printed in plain letter, and all the world knows
how Clerk Henriet faltered under the stern questioning of Pierre de
l'Hopital, and how finally he declared fully all these iniquities
without parallel in which he had borne so cruel a part.

Poitou, more faithful to his master, held out till the threat of
torture and the appeals of his friend Henriet broke him down. But the
attitude and bearing of the chief culprit deserve that the historian
should not wholly pass them over.

Even in his first haughty and contemptuous silence, Gilles de Retz was
shifting his ground, and with a cool unheated intelligence orienting
himself to new conditions. It soon became evident to his mind that the
powers of Evil in which he trusted, and to whose service he had
consecrated his life and fortune, had befooled and betrayed him.

Well--even so would he fool them--if, by the grace of God, there were
yet any merit or hope in the service of Good. The priests said so. The
Scripture said so, and they might be right after all. At least, the
thing was worth trying.

For a cold and calculating brain lay behind the worst excesses of the
terrible Lord de Retz. The religion of the Cross might not be of much
final use--still, it was all that remained, and Gilles de Retz
determined to avail himself of it. So once more he apostasised from
Barran-Sathanas to Jehovah.

With an effrontery almost too stupendous for belief, he arrayed
himself in the white robes of a Carmelite novice and spent his prison
days in singing litanies and in private confession with his religious
adviser.

When the great day of the trial at last arrived, the marshal, who had
expected on the bench the weak kindly countenance of Duke John, was
called upon to confront the indomitable judicial rectitude of Pierre
de l'Hopital, President and Grand-Seneschal of Brittany.

Gilles de Retz appeared at his trial dressed in white of the richest
materials and with all his military decorations upon him. But his
judge, habited in stern and simple black, was not in the least
intimidated.

Then came the great surprise. After the evidence of Henriet and Poitou
had been read to him, the marshal was asked to plead. To the surprise
of all, the accused claimed benefit of clergy.

"I have been a great sinner," he said, "I have indeed deserved a
thousand deaths. But now I am a man of God. I have confessed. I have
received absolution for all my sins. God has forgiven me, and my soul
is cleansed!"

"Good!" answered Pierre de l'Hopital, "I have nothing to do with your
soul. I must leave that, as you very pertinently remark, to God. But I
am here to try your body, and if found guilty to condemn that body to
suffer the penalties by law provided according to the statutes of
Brittany."

Then Clerk Henriet was brought in to testify more fully of the crimes
beyond parallel in the history of mankind.

The court had been hung round with black, and the only object which
appeared prominent was a beautiful ivory crucifix with a noble figure
of the Redeemer of Men carved upon it. This was suspended, according
to the custom, over the head of the President of the Tribunal.

Henriet had not proceeded far with his terrible relation of well nigh
inconceivable crimes when he stopped.

"I cannot go on," he said, in a broken appealing voice; "I cannot tell
what I have to tell with That Figure looking down upon me!"

So, with the whole Court standing up in reverence, the image of the
Most Pitiful was solemnly veiled from sight, that such deeds of
darkness might not be so much as named in that holy and gracious
presence.

And during the ceremony Friar Gilles of the order of the Carmelites
stood up more reverently than any, for now, seeing that no better
might be, he had definitely renounced Barran-Sathanas and cast in his
lot with God Almighty.

* * * * *

"The sentence of this court is that you, Gilles de Laval, Lord of
Retz, Marshal of France, and you, Poitou and Henriet, be carried to
the meadow of La Biesse at nine of the clock on the morning of
to-morrow, and that you be there hanged and burned till you be dead.
And to God the Just One be the glory!"

The voice of Pierre de l'Hopital rang out through the silence of the
hall of judgment.

"Amen!" said Friar Gilles, devoutly crossing himself.

And so in due course on the meadow of La Biesse, by the side of the
blue Loire, the evil soul of Gilles de Retz went to its own place with
all the paraphernalia of repentance and in the full odour of a
somewhat hectic sanctity.

* * * * *

The day after the burning, a little company of riders left the city of
Angers, journeying westward along the Loire. It consisted of the
maidens Margaret Douglas and Maud Lindesay, with Sholto MacKim and a
dozen horsemen belonging to his Grace of Brittany. It had been
arranged that they were to be joined, upon an eminence above the river
on the right bank, by the Lord James, Malise, and Laurence, with the
escort which was to accompany them to the port of Saint Nazaire. There
(as was necessary in order to escape the troublesome navigation of the
swift and treacherous upper reaches) they would find vessels ready to
set sail for Scotland.

As the little cloud of riders left behind them the black towers of
Angers, they passed through woodland glades wherein, in spite of the
lateness of the season, the birds were singing. The air was mild and
delightsome. At last, leaving the river, they struck away inland,
having the frowning towers of Champtoce on their left as they rode.
Presently they came to a forest, wherein in days before the great
cruelty, Gilles de Retz had often hunted the wolf and the wild boar.

Here the woodland paths were covered deep with fallen leaves, and the
naked branches spoke of the desolation of a dead year.

As the maids rode forward first of their company and talked, as was
natural, of that which had taken place the day before at Nantes, they
became aware of the Lady Sybilla riding towards them on her palfrey of
white. She would have passed them without speech, with her head
downcast and her eyes fixed upon the dank ground with its covering
drift of dead autumnal leaves.

But Margaret, grateful for that which the Lady Sybilla had done for
them at Machecoul, spurred her steed and rode thwartwise to intercept
her.

"Sybilla," she said, "you will come with us to Scotland. I have many
castles there, and, they tell me, a princessdom of mine own. We shall
all be happy together and forget these ill times. Maud and I can never
repay that which you have done for us."

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