The little party pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l.
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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: IT WAS LIKE THE SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF TWO WHITE ANGELS WALKING FEARLESS AND UNSCATHED THROUGH THE GRIM DOMINIONS OF THE LORDS OF h.e.l.l.]
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 a.s.sured 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."
"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 pa.s.sant_."
A sudden lowering pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d, and he demands the sacrifice of the n.o.blest 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 a.s.sistants 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-gla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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.