THE WOODS OF BIRNAM
Now the life at Stirling grew not to be long-time endured by me. The
chamber where the blow was stricken, the yard where the dead lay
buried, the vaunting courtiers, the painted courtesans parading the
town with their scented lovelocks and empty mirth, all bore so heavy
on my spirit that I was like to die, just to look from my window and
see it all.
Then it was that Laurence (who to hide his sometime abbatical dignity
was now called by the king’s name, “Laurence Stewart”) proved kind
with a kindness which cannot be counted in tale, or weighed in any
balance.
For one thing he took upon him to spare me the pain of coming and
going to the royal table, being great with James Stewart, and he of
the Fiery Face refusing him nothing. Nevertheless at first the king
would allow no further relaxation of watchfulness, than to permit me
to abide in my own apartment in the palace. So it is small wonder that
I waxed pale of face and of my person meagre to look upon. For myself
I thought that, having seen the dead that first night of my arriving
at Stirling, I also should surely die. For so runs the rune, and
indeed I was no ways unwilling it should be so.
But I was to find that it is not given to a woman to die when she
will. Many, pressed by griefs and falsities, have tried it, and prayed
to God for it sore and often, but save at the knife’s edge, it is not
granted to woman’s heart thus to break and pass like a bubble that is
blown. So I did not die, pray as I might.
Then at last, when Laurence had prepared the plans for certain great
new cannon, which he and his father were to forge somewhere on the
straths by Carron water, he besought the king again to permit me to
retire from the court, to some more peaceful and quiet habitation.
“Ah,” cried the king, “I know you, Sir Laurence. You would have her
back to her own country again, where every third man is a disbanded
rebel, every second a dour Douglas, and ilka man, woman, and bairn a
born traitor to their king! Na, na, Stewart in name though you be, ye
shall not wile the lass back in her turbulent southland. Let her gang,
an it please her, to the guid grey toon o’ Dunfermline, where it sends
its reek up fornent Edinburgh hersel’. Or let her gang to the kind
woman folk at Birnam, near to Dunkeld, where is a nunnery, and a bonny
water rinnin’ clear an’ broon, wi’ grand fish for the catchin’ and the
rae deer jookin’ oot o’ ilka covert. Let her choose! But to the south
she shallna gang!”
So it came about that to Birnam I went, where the house of the good
Sisters of Peace looked down on the towers of the cathedral out of a
kind of green silence.
Then, indeed, there was time for rest and thought, most sweet and
needful to me. For though I minded not greatly at the time the
battering of Mons Meg, and the terrible thunderbolts which she
launched upon us, yet when all was over and done with, I dared not
walk by the archery butts for fear of the whistle of arrows. And if so
much as a hare broke from a fern at my feet, or a blackbird chattered
among the bushes, I would leap and cry aloud like a halfling
dairymaid, at play round the corn-stacks with the lads what time the
gloaming falls.
But at Birnam we dwelt in a kind of tranced peace. The Superior was of
the king’s house--cousin-german, indeed, to that knight of Lorn whom
his mother had married after his father’s death at Perth--a woman well
on in years and who showed me much favour from the first. This, I fear
me, was not wholly on my account. Indeed, I cannot lay it in any part
to my own credit.
Now, how the loon managed it I know not, but from the very first the
Mother Superior took a vast liking to Laurence, saying that he was the
moral and image of her brother John, who had died in his youth,
stricken in the eye with a lance in some tourneying in France.
Perhaps Master Laurence gave the lady to know that, though now
permitted by the highest authority to return to the world and carry
mail and casque, he, too, had once in his time worn the robe
ecclesiastic, and gone on great embassies--yea, even to the Holy See
itself. At all events, so it was. Laurence had extraordinary
privileges among the Little Sisters of Peace, and I, as a guest and
the king’s ward, still more as his friend, could do much as I chose in
the house of these good women of Birnam.
This, as I say, came about out of no great love for me on the part of
the most excellent Mother Agneta; for, truth to tell, save Maud, I
have never drawn ordinary women to me, nor been wholly happy in their
society. For the most part, they have been to me (saving, of course,
Maud) as so much unripe fruit, chattering and backbiting, becking and
bowing their heads over some scraplet of news, or breaking their backs
at some endless broidering of bed-covers.
Now men, even in their wrong-doing, are not so. They wring the purple
juice from the grapes in full vintage--yes; they eat the apples of the
knowledge of good and evil till the fiery sword drives them forth,
waving every way before the port of paradise! But they do not--at
least, not the men I have known--speak evil of their neighbours behind
backs, nor make of the house-place, from roof-tree to cellarage, a
fret and a brawling, with their railing accusations and the yelp of
their ill-natured yatter.
By Saint Bride, I would choose rather to spend an age in Purgatory
with some sinner of sins, great and strong, apparent as Lebanon and
salt as the sea, than share an alcove in Paradise with such-like
women. And that is my mind upon the matter--concerning which enough
said. Mayhap ’tis more than will be held to my credit. Many women
there are whose ways and hearts are otherwise--only, saving Maud, I
have not met them.
So as I have related, Laurence of the king’s name came over to Birnam,
as often as His Majesty’s zeal for military enginery would permit him
to steal away from the making of cannon.
And the oftener he came, the better pleased was Sister Agneta, till at
last she got to calling him her brother John, and ended, as I think,
by believing herself that he was indeed of her blood and family--all
which was of little enough consequence to a young woman like myself,
save as matter for laughter afterwards.
So in the woods of Birnam Laurence and I walked, as we had done (it
seemed a myriad of years agone) in those of Cour Cheverney. But there
was no making of mill-wheels now, nor any setting of paper boats,
cunningly devised, adrift down the swift-running Tay. Once, I
remember, Laurence tried it. But the old sunlight that had glinted
through the white poplars at Cour Cheverney, and even gilded the
birches on the Balmaghie slopes, would not shine for us on Tayside and
in the midst of this drear December.
Faintly we smiled to each other at the lack of success, and I for one
knew that for the present, at least, the house of life was left to me
empty and desolate. In my cupboards there were no more any conserves
of delight. The palaces were emptied of myrrh and aloes and cassia,
and I, who had been reared as a king’s daughter, whose garments had
been of wrought gold, walked in black widow’s weeds among an unwedded
sisterhood.
My husband? He had fled to England. And I knew him. While I lived, he
would return no more. Soon he would find some pretext for
divorce--that I abode with the King of Scots, that I companied with
his enemies--anything--so that he might put me from him in name as he
had already done in fact.
Yet to all this I was strangely callous. For in me also there was part
of the Douglas heritage. From the first of our race, with here and
there an exception to make sure the rule, the Douglases had been ready
to forget that which they left behind. Did not, for the sake of the
glory of battle and the heady whirlwind of the charge, our Good Sir
James himself forget the sacred mission he had sworn to lay the heart
of the Bruce in holy earth? And as he, so, and with worse excuses, the
others!
Some for the honour of military renown, some for glory in the State
(and of these last the chief was he who had died at Stirling), others
for a fair woman--as my well-beloved brother William, who, ere at
Edinburgh they cut off his comely head, lifted up the goblet and drank
his last toast to the woman who had betrayed him in these words,
memorable amongst us for ever:
“I drink to you, my lady and my love!”
Some, not one woman only, tempted to forget the things that lay
behind. And of such was that strong man James Douglas--strong, yet
like to the statue with the head of gold and the feet of clay, seen by
the prophet. He was not born to be faithful, this James of Douglas,
and now, after the first wrench, the keen jarring _tang_ of the viol’s
string as it broke--lo! I cared as little for him as he for me.
At Birnam I had liberty to sit at ease in these sweet solitudes, and
with peaceful books to while away the hours. Lives of saints and
such-like were there in loads--every page a-drowse with dreamiest
opiates, poppy, pulsatilla, mandragora. Nevertheless, with the Douglas
unrest I yearned for other things than this, and that before long I
desired to be as free in name as in reality. By the king’s mandate of
annulment of my marriage? No! I could have had that for the asking. By
the dissolving power of the Holy Father? Three times no! I had surely
more than enough of his holy Bulls. They were Bulls barren, without
power to bind or loose, without power or progeny. “The pope’s Bulls
get no calves!” quoth the profane under their breaths.
No, James Douglas himself would of a certainty serve my turn. Give him
line enough, and a little time. He would remarry him. Neither the
thought of the woman who, in the gardens of Thrieve, had waited ten
years in silence and solitude, only that at the end he should betray
her--no, nor yet the memory of the girl who had shed her blood that
she might save his life, would have a moment’s power to hold him back
when the desire of the eye came upon him. I knew the breed--a right
strong, masculine, give-and-take breed it is, but not one fortunate to
the end. The hand of the righteous is against it! At the end of its
lusting it shall pull down the branch and bite the Sodom apple, to
find therein only dust and ashes--exceeding bitter fruit.
James Douglas was like the man I had heard Laurence read of in his
Latin Scripture. He could take his sword and go forth to rob, and to
slay, and to sail upon the sea. He could look forth like a lion into
the darkness, and after he had slain and robbed and returned, he would
lay all at the feet of his love--his new love whom he had found and
drawn to him by the same power wherewith he had drawn me--me and That
Other.
But at the uttermost end of all, God, sitting still on high, would
enter into judgment with the strong man!
Thus, in the meantime, I was not ill-content to abide at Birnam and
await the things which I knew would come to pass. Here Laurence,
riding mostly from Stirling and returning ere he was missed to the
forging of his cannons, was my chief visitor, and certainly he was the
one best pleasing to the Lady Superior.
And after a time there came back to his eyes some part of his old
innocent boyish insolence. For this, too, I liked him only the better.
No ways as great as Sholto was Laurence M‘Kim--far from being so good.
Yet, I think he suited me best. I had no wish to marry him, God knows,
yet had he set about to marry himself to another woman, I had never
cared to look man in the face again. And I had had that feeling almost
from the time I was a girl. Even at Cour Cheverney, if I could have
disposed of myself I would have chosen Laurence. Or, at least, so it
seems now.
Sholto could do great things--not only _could_, but _did_ them as they
came--making them only part of his daily work. Great, simple, large of
heart and determinate in action, it was difficult to find a fault in
him. I suppose Maud knew of many such that he had. But if she did--at
least she never named them to me.
But with Laurence all was otherwise. He had his moments of something
like pettishness. He would keep aloof from Birnam for weeks, judging
that I had not used him well enough, or with some light word of mine
rankling in his heart, like a thorn in the flesh.
Thus one day I asked how he could bring himself to aid in the breaking
down of Thrieve by great bolts of cannon, knowing what he knew--that
not only was I there, but another woman, the wife of his brother, and
with her five little children.
Right sharply he answered me--
“Whether or not I had assisted, the bolt would have been launched just
the same. The castle would have fallen. All that I did was to make the
blow sharp and sure. Moreover, my brother Sholto was captain of
Thrieve, had been so for many years, and I judged that he could find
means to protect his own!”
Then I asked him another question.
“And in all this, did you never once think of me? Or had you already
become a Stewart?”
He answered me with a sudden flash of anger, such as Sholto would
never have showed to any woman--
“I thought a great deal of the man, your husband!”
“Ah,” I asked again, “and pray, Laurence Stewart, what did you think
concerning him?”
“This,” he cried the words fiercely, “each time I pointed the cannon,
I prayed that the ball might strike him dead!”
“Ah,” I answered provokingly, “I knew you were a man powerful in
prayer! Give me your blessing, holy man!”