'John Mure of Auchendrayne, know then that you are charged, along with
this your son, with the bloody murder of Sir Thomas Kennedy of Culzean,
Tutor of Cassillis; and also with the cruel death of William Dalrymple,
the young lad who brought you the message to your own house of
Auchendrayne, telling at what hour the Tutor should pass the trysting
place, where he was by you and yours foully assaulted and slain.'
'And who declares these things?' cried Mure, boldly, with a bearing more
like that of an innocent man than that of any criminal that ever I saw.
The Earl bade us who had accused them so justly to stand forth. Then
John Mure eyed us with a grave and amused contempt.
'My son's false wife, whom sorrow has caused to dote concerning her
father's death--her night-raking rantipole sister, and her paramour, a
loutish, land-louping squire--the Dominie of Maybole, a crippledick and
piping merry-Andrew that travelled with them--these are the accusers of
John Mure of Auchendrayne. They have seen, heard, noted what others
have been ignorant of! Nay, rather, is it not clear that they have
collogued together, conspiring to bear false witness against me and
mine--for the sake of the frantic splenetic madness of her who is my
son's fugitive wife, whose wrongs exist only in her own imaginings.'
'You have forgotten me!' said Robert Harburgh, quietly, stepping
forward.
'I know you well,' said John Mure, 'and I would have remembered you had
you been worth remembering. You are my Lord of Cassillis's squire and
erstwhile a gay cock-sparrow ruffler, now married to the Grieve's
daughter at Culzean.'
'Well,' said Harburgh, 'and what of that? Can a man not be all that and
yet tell the truth?'
'That I leave to one who is greater, to judge,' said John Mure.
'And I do judge, John Mure,' cried the Earl, rising in his chair of
state. 'I judge you to be a man rebel and mansworn, a traitor and a
man-slayer. For a score of years ye have keeped all this realm of
Carrick in a turmoil, you and they that have partaken with you in your
evil deeds.'
'Loud, swelling words are but wind, my lord Earl of Cassillis,' answered
Mure of Auchendrayne, a dry smile of contempt coming over his features.
'Now I will show thee, bold ill-doer,' said the Earl, fiercely, 'whether
I speak the words of a dotard or no. Forward, men, take him up and bind
him. Methinks we have yet engines within the castle of Dunure that can
make him declare the rights of this murderous treason!'
Then I rejoiced, not for the torture of our enemy, but because at last
the Earl saw fully with our eyes, and would right us against the cruel
oppressor of Marjorie Kennedy, and for the murder of my gentle and
courteous master.
But ere the men could carry out the orders of the Earl, the
broad-breeched man who had accompanied Auchendrayne, and who had all the
while stood still and watchful, dropped his plaid, which like a mask he
had held beneath his eyes. He was a middle-sized, fleshy man, with no
great dignity of face, and with a weak mouth that dribbled perpetually
at the side as if the tongue were too large for it. He wore a slashed
doublet very full at the sleeves, baggy trunks, and a sword in a plain
scabbard hanging at his side. I saw nothing further very particular
about the man save the shambling inward bend of his knees. But it was
with dumb amaze that the Earl looked at him, standing there arrested in
the act of pointing with his hand at John Mure. He stood with his jaw
fallen, and his eyes starting from his head.
'The King! the King!' he muttered in astonishment, looking about him
like one distracted.
'Ay, Baron Bailzie of Carrick, even your King,' said the man in the wide
trunk hosen, 'come to see how his sometime High Treasurer of Scotland
executes just judgment in his own regality!'
The Earl came quickly to himself, and he and all the people took off
their hats. He stepped down and made his obeisance to the King, bending
humbly upon his knee. Then he ushered the King to the throne whereon he
himself had been sitting, and took a lower seat beside Adam Boyd of
Penkill, his assessor in ordinary.
The King rose to speak.
'My Lord Earl and gentlemen of Carrick,' he said, with dignity enough,
but with a thick and rolling accent as if his tongue had been indeed too
big, 'I know this case to the bottom. I am fully persuaded of the
innocence of our trusty councillor, John Mure of Auchendrayne--who is
besides of the fraternity of learned men, and one that hath a history of
this realm in script ready for the printers, wherein he does full
justice both to myself and to my noble predecessors. He hath, as I
should nominate it, an exactness of expression and a perspicuity of
argument that have never been matched in the land. I propose shortly to
make him my historiographer royal. Also I, the King, do know him to be
a man well affected to the right ecclesiastical ruling of this kingdom,
and minded to help me with the due ordering of it.'
The King puffed and blew after his speech, and we and all that were
there stood silent, for to most of us he might as well have spoken in
the Hebrew of which he boasted himself so great a master. Then he went
on:--
'I have left my Lord Mar and my retinue some way in the rear. For we go
to hunt the deer in whatever forest the goodwill of our loyal subjects
may put at our disposal.'
'You are right welcome, my liege,' said the Earl John, starting up and
standing bareheaded, 'to my hunting lodges and retinue, both in the
Forest of Buchan and also at my house of Cassillis.'
The King bent towards him royally, for James the Sixth had manners when
he liked to show them--which, in truth, was not always.
'I thank you, trusty councillor,' said he; 'it is nobly and generously
done--qualities which also marked your all-too-brief tenure of the
office of High Treasurer of Scotland. But for the judging of this our
worthy subject, I propose to take that upon myself, being wholly
persuaded of his innocence. And as for those that have falsely accused
him, let the men underlie my will in the prison most convenient, and the
women be warded meantime in their own house and castle, till I cause to
be known my whole pleasure in the matter.'
We stood aghast, and knew not what to say, so completely had
Auchendrayne turned our flank with the King. Not a word had we found to
allege when the officers of the court, to whom the charge was given,
came to put the iron rings on our wrists and march us off, even as we
had hoped and expected to see Auchendrayne and his son taken.
And as the Dominie and I were haled away we could see Auchendrayne
bending suavely over the King's high seat, and His Majesty inclining to
him and talking privately back and forth, with many becks and uncouth
graces such as he had used in his address to the Earl and his people.
'He is the very devil himself,' said the Dominie, meaning Auchendrayne
and not the King; 'he hath not halted to cozen the greatest man in this
realm with his lying tongue!'
But I said nothing, for what had I to say? I had seen lands, honours,
love, and consideration vanish at a stroke.
*CHAPTER XLVI*
*THE JUDGMENT OF GOD*
The court of the Baron Bailzie of Carrick broke up in confusion. It had
been arranged that we should ride all together to the north, even to
Culzean, where His Majesty might have due entertainment provided for him
nearer than at my lord's castle of Cassillis. Also it was upon this
shoreside road that he had left the Earl of Mar and the favourite
attendants with whom James the Sixth ordinarily sallied forth to the
hunting.
Those of the Auchendrayne and Bargany party who hated us, clamoured that
the Dominie and I should be left warded in the lock-fast place of
Girvan, where our enemies would soon have ta'en their will of us. But
Robert Harburgh moved my lord, who went about dour and heartsick for the
failure of his plans in the matter of the Mures, to have us brought on,
with purpose to lodge us within the ancient strengths of Dunure.
So that as I rode hand-tied at the tail of the King's retinue, I was yet
near enough to have sight of Marjorie and Nell who rode before us. And
this was some comfort to my heart.
The way lay for miles along the seashore, which is here sandy, with a
broad belt of fine hard beach whereon the horses went daintily and well,
while at our left elbows the sea murmured.
The King and John Mure rode first, and His Majesty constantly broke into
loud mirth at some witty saying of his companion's. Level with them,
but riding moodily apart, was the Earl, while James Mure the younger
rode alone by himself behind these three.
I groaned within me for the exaltation of our enemy and at the
shortsightedness of anointed kings.
'Is there a God in heaven,' I cried aloud, 'thus to make no sign, while
the devil is driving all things headlong to destruction according to his
own devising?'
There was a God in heaven.
For, quick as an echo that answers from the wood, there before us upon
the sands, just where the levels had been overflowed at the last tide,
lay a thing which halted the advancing cavalcade as suddenly as an army
with banners. The men crowded about, and, having in the excitement
forgotten us their charges, we also were permitted to look. And this is
what we saw.
There upon the ribbed sea sand lay the dead body of the boy William
Dalrymple. I knew him at a glance, for all that so much had come and
gone since that day when I played at the golf game upon the green of
Maybole. He lay with his arms stretched away from his sides, his face
turned over, and one cheek dented deeply into the sand. It was a
pitiful sight. Yet the lad was not greatly altered--wind-tossed and
wave-borne as he had been, and now brought to cross the path of the
unjust at the very nick of time, by the manifest judgment and providence
of God.
'What means this?' said the King. 'Some poor drowned sailor boy. Let
us avoid!' For of all things he loved not gruesome sights nor the
colour of blood. But James Mure suddenly cried aloud at the vision, as
if he had been stricken with pain. And as he did so, his father looked
at him as though he would have slain him, so devilish was his glance of
hate and contempt.
But a woman who had come running hot-foot after the party, now rushed to
the front. She gave a loud scream, ear-piercing and frantic, when she
saw the tossed little body lying all abroad upon the sand.
'My Willie, my ain son Willie!' she cried. For it was Meg Dalrymple.
All her ignorant rudeness seemed to fade away in the presence of death,
and as she lifted the poor mishandled head that had been her son's, each
of us felt that she grew akin to our own mothers, widowed and bereaved.
For I think that which touches us most in the grief of a widow, is not
our feeling for a particular woman, but our obligation to the mother of
all flesh.
So when Meg Dalrymple lifted her son's head, it might have been a
mourning queen with a dead kingling upon her knee.
'My ain, my ain lad!' she cried. 'See, lammie, but I loved ye. Ye were
the widow's ae son. Fleeter-footed than the mountain roe, mair gleg
than the falcon that sits yonder on the King's wrist, ye were the hope
o' thy mither's life. And they hae slain ye, killed my bonny wean, that
never did harm to nae man--'
She undid a kerchief from about the white, swollen neck of her son.
'Kens ony man that image and superscription?' said she, pointing to an
embroidered crest upon it. John Mure strode forward hastily. He had
grown as pale as death.
'Give it me. I will pass it to His Majesty,' he said, holding out his
hand for it.
But the woman leaped up fiercely.
'Na,' she said; 'the butcher kens his knife; but he would only hide it
in the day of trial. I will give it to my ain well-kenned lord.'
And she put the napkin into the hands of the Earl of Cassillis, who
looked at it with the most minute attention.
'This kerchief,' said the Earl, gravely, 'has the crest and motto of
John Mure of Auchendrayne.'
The King looked staggered and bewildered.
'Let all dismount till we try further of this thing,' he said.
But John Mure would have had him go on, saying that it was yet more of
the plot. But the King would not now hearken to him; for he was an
obstinate man, and oftentime he would listen to no reason, though his
ear was ever open enough to flattery. Besides, he thought himself to be
the wisest man in all the islands and kingdoms of the world--wiser,
even, than Solomon the son of David.
So His Majesty commanded his inclination, and went up to the body.
There was also a rope around the neck with a long end, which was
embedded in the sand. With his own hand the King drew this out.
He held it up.
'Kens any man this length of rope?' he asked, looking about.
Now, one strand of sea-cordage is like another as two peas; but this was
our Solomon's way of judging--to find out the insignificant, and then
pretend that it told him a mighty deal.
Yet it so happened that there was a man there from out of the shoreside
of Girvan. He was a coastwise sailor, and he took the rope in his hand.
'This rope,' he said, turning it about every way, 'is Irish made, and
has been used to tie bundles of neat hides.'
'And who,' again asked the King--shrewdly, as I do admit, 'who upon this
coast trades with Ireland in the commodity of neat hides?'
'There are but myself and James Bannatyne of Chapeldonnan,' replied the
man, honestly and promptly.
'And this is not your rope?' said the King.
'Nay,' said the man, 'I would not buy a pennyworth of Irish hemp so long
as I could twine the hemp of Scotland--no, not even to hang an Irishman
would I do it. This is James Bannatyne's rope!'