"Ah," she said, "proud, are you? "Tis an ill place to bring pride to, this Castle of Machecoul. You will not deign to speak a word to a poor old woman now. But the day is not far distant when I shall have my pretty spitfire clinging about these old trembling knees, and beseeching me whom you despise, as a woman either to save you or kill you--you will not care which. _As a woman!_ Ha! ha! How long is it since La Meffraye was a woman? Was she ever rocked in a cradle? Did she play about any cottage door and fashion daisy chains, as I have seen you do, my pretties, long ere you came to Machecoul or even heard of the Sieur de Retz? Hath La Meffraye ever lain in any man"s bosom--save as the tigress crouches upon her prey?"
She paused and smiled still more bitterly and malevolently than before upon the two maidens.
"Did you chance to be awake yester-even?" she went on. "Aye, I know well that you were awake. La Meffraye saw right carefully to that. And you heard the crying that rang out of yonder high window, from which the light streamed all through the night. Wait, wait, my pretties, till it is your turn to be sent for up thither, when the shining knife is sharpened and the red fire kindled. You will not despise La Meffraye when that day comes. You will grovel and weep, and then will La Meffraye spurn you with her foot, till the noise of your crying be borne out over the forest, and for very gladness the wolves howl in the darkness."
The little Maid of Galloway was moved to answer, and her lips quivered. But Maud Lindesay sat pale and motionless, looking towards the north, from which she hoped for help to come.
"Our brother, the Earl of Douglas, will bring an army from his dukedom of Touraine, and sweep you and your castle from the face of the earth, if your master dares to lay so much as a finger upon us."
La Meffraye laughed a low, cackling laugh, and in the act showed the four long eye-teeth which were the sole remaining dental equipment of her mouth.
"Oh, Great Barran--" she chuckled, "listen to the pretty fool! Our brother will do this--our brother will do that. _Our_ brother will lick the country of Retz as clean as a dog licks a platter. Know you not, silly fool, that both your brothers are long since dead and under sod in the castle of your city of Edinburgh. I tell you my master set his little finger upon them and crushed them like flies on a summer chamber wall!"
Maud Lindesay rose to her feet as La Meffraye spoke these words.
"It is not true," she cried; "you lie to us as you have done from the first. The Earl of Douglas is not dead!"
It was now little Margaret who showed the spirit of her race, and put out her hand to clasp that of her elder comrade.
"Do not let her even know that she has power to hurt us with her words," she whispered low to Maud Lindesay. Then she spoke aloud:
"If that which you say be true and my brothers are dead--there are yet Douglases. Our cousins will deliver us."
"Your cousins have entered into your possessions," jeered the hag; "it is indeed a likely thing that they will desire your return to Scotland in order to rob them of that which is their own."
"We are not afraid," said the little maid, stoutly; "there are many in the land of the Scots who would gladly die to help us."
"Aye, that is it. They shall die--all die. Three of them died yester-even, torn to pieces by my lord"s wolves. Fine, swift, four-footed guardians of the Castle of Machecoul--La Meffraye"s friends! And one young c.o.c.k below there of the same gang hath gone even now to my lord"s chamber. He hath mounted the stairs he will never descend."
"Well," said the Maid of Galloway, "even so--we are not afraid. We can die, as died our friends."
"Die--die!" cried the hag, sharply, angered at the child"s persistence. ""Tis easy to talk. To snuff a candle out is to die.
Poof, "tis done! But the young and beautiful like you, my dearies, do not so die at Machecoul. No; rather as a dying candle flickers out--falls low, and rises again, so they die. As wine oozes drop by drop from the needle-punctured wine-skin--so shall you die, weeping, beseeching, drained to the white like a dripping calf in the shambles, yet at the same time reddened and shamed with the shame deadly and unnameable. Then La Meffraye, whom now you disdain to answer with a look, will wash her hands in your life"s blood and laugh as your tears fall slowly upon the latchet of her shoon!"
But a new voice broke in upon the railing of the hideous woman fiend.
"_Out, foul hag! Get you to your own place!_" it said, with an accent strong and commanding.
And the affrighted and heart-sick girls turned them about to see the Lady Sybilla stand fair and pale at the head of the turret stair which opened out upon the roof of the White Tower.
At this interruption the eyes of La Meffraye seemed to burn with a fresher fury, and the green light in them shone as shines an emerald stone held up to the sun.
The hag cowered, however, before the outstretched index finger of Sybilla de Thouars.
"Ah, fair lady," she whimpered, "be not angry--and tell not my lord, I beseech you. I did but jest."
"_Hence!_" the finger was still outstretched, and, in obedience to the threatening gesture, the hag shrank away. But as she pa.s.sed through the portal down the steps of the turret, she flung back certain words with a defiant fleer.
"Ah, you are young, my lady, and for the present--for the present your power is greater than mine. But wait! Your beauty will wither and grow old. Your power will depart from you. But La Meffraye can never grow older, and when once the secret is discovered, and my lord is young again, La Meffraye is the one who with him shall bloom with immortal youth, while you, proud lady, lie cold in the belly of the worm."
"It is true--all too true," said Sybilla de Thouars, sadly, "they are dead. The young, the n.o.ble were--and are no more. I who speak saw them die. And that so greatly, that even in death their lives cease not.
Their glory shall flow on so that the young brook shall become a river, and the river become a sea."
Then in few words and quiet, she told them all the heavy tale.
But when the maids made as though they would cleave to her for the sympathy that was in her words and because of her tears, she set the palms of her hands against their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and cried, "Come not near one whom not all the fires of purgatory can purify--one who, like Iscariot, hath contracted herself outside the mercy of G.o.d and of our Lord Christ!"
But all the more they clave to her, overpa.s.sing her protestations and clasping her, so that, being deeply moved, she sat down on the steps of a corner turret which rose from the greater, and wept there, with the weeping wherewith women are wont to ease the heart.
Then went Maud Lindesay to her and set her hand about her neck, and kissed her, saying: "Do not be sorry any more. Confess to the minister of G.o.d. I also have sinned and been sorry. Yet after came forgiveness and the unbound heart."
Then the Lady Sybilla ceased quickly and looked up, as it had been, smiling. Yet she was not smiling as maidens are wont to smile.
"Pretty innocent," she said, "you mean well, but you know not what the word "sin" means to such as I. Confess--absolve! Not even the Holy One and the Just could give me that. I tell you I have eaten of the apple of the knowledge of good and evil--yes, the very core I have eaten. I have the taste of innocent blood upon my lips. I have seen the axe fall, the axe which I put into the headsman"s hands. I am condemned, and that justly. But one of you shall live to taste sweet love, and the crown of life, and to feel the innocent lips of children at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And the other--but enough. Farewell. Fear not. G.o.d, who has been cruel in all else, has given your lives to Sybilla de Thouars, ere in His own time He strike that guilty one with His thunderbolt."
And as she went within, the eyes of the maids followed her; but the masked man with the naked sword never so much as turned his head, gazing straight forward over the battlements of the White Tower into the lilac mist which hung above the Atlantic.
CHAPTER LIII
SYBILLA"S VENGEANCE
There stands a solitary rock at the base of which is a cave, on the seash.o.r.e of La Vendee. Behind stretch the marshes, and the place is shut in and desolate. Birds cry there. The bittern booms in the thickets of grey willow and wet-shot alder. The herons nest upon the pine trees near by, till the stale scent of them comes down the wind from far. Ospreys fish in the waters of the shallow lake behind, and the scales of their prey flash in the sun of morning as they rise dripping from the dive.
In this place Sholto, Malise, and the Lord James Douglas were presently abiding.
It was but a tiny cell, originally formed by two portions of marly rock fallen together in some ancient convulsion or dropped upon each other from a floating iceberg. In some former age the cleft had been a lair of wild beasts, or the couch of some hairy savage hammering flint arrowheads for the chase, and drawing with a sharp point upon polished bone the yet hairier mammoth he hunted. But this solitary lodging in the wilderness had been enlarged in more recent times, till now the interior was about eight feet square and of the height of a man of stature when he stands erect.
The hearts of the three present cave-dwellers were sick and sad, and of them all the bitterest was the heart of Sholto MacKim. It seemed to his eager lover"s spirit, as he climbed to the top of the sand dunes and gazed towards the ma.s.sive towers of Machecoul rising above the green woodlands, that hitherto they had but wandered and done nothing. The sorcerer had prevented them about with his evil. They had lost Laurence utterly, and for the rest they had not even touched the outer defences of their arch enemy.
Thrice they had tried to enter the castle. The first time they had taken by force two waggons of fuel from certain men who went towards Machecoul, leaving the woodmen behind in the forest, bound and helpless. But at the first gate of the outer hall the marshal"s guard had stopped them, and demanded that they should wait till the cars were unloaded and brought back to them. So, having received the money, the Scots returned as they went to the men whom they had left in the forest.
After this repulse they had gone round and round the vast walls of Machecoul seeking a place vulnerable, but finding none. The ramparts rose as it had been to heaven, and the flanking towers were crowded night and day with men on the watch. Round the walls for the s.p.a.ce of a bow-shot every way there ran a green s.p.a.ce fair and open to the view, but in reality full of pitfalls and secret engines. From the battlements began the arrow hail, so soon as any attempted to approach the castle along any other way than the thrice-defended road to the main gate.
The wolves howled in the forests by night, and more than once came so near that one of the three men had to take it in turns to keep watch in the cave"s mouth. But for a reason not clear to them at the time they were not again attacked by the marshal"s wild allies of the wood.
The third time they had tried to enter the castle in their pilgrim"s garb, and the outer picket courteously received them. But when they were come to the inner curtain, one Robin Romulart, the officer of the guard, a stout fellow, suddenly called to his men to bind and gag them--in which enterprise, but for the great strength of Malise, they might have succeeded. For the outer gates had been shut with a clang, and they could hear the soldiers of the garrison hasting from all sides in answer to Robin"s summons.
But Malise s.n.a.t.c.hed up the bar wherewith the winding cogs of the gate were turned, and, having broken more than one man"s head with it, he forced the ma.s.sive doors apart by main force, so that they were able all unharmed to withdraw themselves into the shelter of the woods. So near capture had they been, however, that over and over again they heard the shouting of the parties who scoured the woods in search of them.
It was the worst feature of their situation that the Marshal de Retz certainly knew of their presence in his territories, and that he would be easily able to guess their errand and take measures to prevent it succeeding.
Their last and most fatal failure had happened several days before, and the first eager burst of the search for them had pa.s.sed. But the Scots knew that the enemy was thoroughly alarmed, and that it behoved them to abide very closely within their hiding-place.