FATHER, MOTHER, AND SON.
Sir Brian rode north and west, crossing a small river, where he stopped
to bathe his wounds, and then forward again for six or seven miles,
until he came to the sea-coast and to the Kildhurm estates. It was
already dusk when he dismounted in the courtyard of his castle. He
had been absent for some weeks, and he had not been expected home so
soon; nevertheless he was welcomed back most respectfully. He made no
allusion to his late encounter at Ennerdale, but put on a gracious
demeanour, and seemed altogether in unusually good spirits. When his
wife came out to meet him, holding their little son by the hand, he
greeted her with more than his customary urbanity; and stooped to
kiss the boy, who, however, shrank away from him with an odd cry of
aversion, as if he had smelt the death-scent in his breath.
'He should be trained to better manners,' said the knight, with a smile.
'He should see the world, then,' answered the wife.
'Are we so wholly apart from the world,' returned Sir Brian, fixing
his eyes upon her, 'that no guests, bidden or unbidden, ever pass our
gates?'
'Who should visit us in a spot so remote as this?' exclaimed Lady
Kildhurm. 'It is much if now and then we catch sight of some clownish
tenant of ours, riding by on the road beyond the park.'
'You love London better--is it not so?'
'I was bred in London, Brian, and would gladly see it again. When we
married, thou didst promise me sometimes to return thither. But now for
three years I have not been a day's ride from the castle.'
'Indeed, I have been remiss, Ursula; but thou knowest how vexed the
country hath been of late, and I ever commanded hither and thither by
our gracious monarch. But I had hoped thou wouldst have found some
company in thy solitude.'
'Last night we had a visitor,' spoke up the boy, looking up in his
mother's face. 'I saw him--the big man with the red beard----'
'Silence, sirrah!' interrupted the knight, with a stern voice and
frown. 'What art thou, to contradict thy mother to her face! Look how
thy impudence hath made her blush! Off to thy nurse, and let me hear
thy babble no more to-day. Would a big red-bearded man have been here,
and thy mother not have told me of it?' And hereupon Sir Brian laughed.
After the boy had been taken away, he sat down in his high-backed chair
beside the hearth, and motioned with his hand to Lady Kildhurm to seat
herself opposite him.
'This is a lonely spot indeed,' he said, 'and withal none too safe
for an unarmed man to ride abroad. Even this very afternoon, Ursula,
as I was spurring along the road by Ennerdale Water, thinking of the
loving and wifely welcome thou wouldst give me on my arrival here, I
was set upon by a brawny ruffian, a huge, bearded varlet, with a sword
a cloth-yard and a half long. We fought beneath the Great Oak; and he
would have cloven me to the chine, save that, as good luck would have
it, he caught his blade against a branch, so that he lost his hold upon
the hilt. But my peril was great. See, I have brought away a twig of
the tree for remembrance of my escape.'
So saying he drew forth from his breast the cluster of acorns, and held
it towards his wife.
'There is blood upon it!' cried Lady Kildhurm, snatching back her
half-extended hand. 'Brian--what man was this?'
'What man?' he repeated with a short laugh. 'What but a robber, Ursula,
who would rob me of what I hold most precious? But methinks his ill
deeds are at an end now!'
'What hast thou done to him?' she asked, trembling very much.
'Nay, I did but pass my rapier through his weazand,' replied the
knight, keeping his black eyes on her face. 'Indeed, he was not worthy
to die by the hand of a true man, but should rather have been hanged
on the tree beneath which he fell, as a warning to all such vermin.
But in the hurry of the moment I stood not upon ceremony.... Do not
turn so pale, Ursula! Comfort thyself, dear wife--I got but a scratch
or so, which will be healed long ere the crows have made a meal of his
carcase.'
'This afternoon--by the Oak of Ennerdale?' said Lady Kildhurm in a dull
voice, her eyes wide open and fixed.
'And, by the bye, I took a trophy from him--a pretty trinket
enough--and have brought it to hang about thy neck as a keepsake.
See--pure gold it is, and in its shape strangely like the one I gave
thee years ago, and which thou hast doubtless kept so religiously
ever since. But this has in it, not my hair, but a braid cut from
some woman's head--his light-o'-love's, I take it. Throw that away as
unworthy thy chaste ownership: but accept the gold from thy loving
husband, Ursula!'
When Lady Kildhurm beheld this sure evidence that what she had perhaps
foreboded had come to pass, her trembling ceased, and she became
strangely composed. She held out her hand for the locket.
'Give it me,' she said. 'Ay, it is pretty, indeed; and I thank thee for
it more than for any other gift of thine. Why, this too is smeared with
blood; but my lips shall cleanse it--I will kiss it, kiss it, till all
is kissed away. And I will wear it in my bosom, Brian, and it shall
never come forth thence--never while I live, I promise thee. Thou canst
not say I did not prize this gift! The cluster of acorns--give me them
also. Hast thou anything else for me?'
'Here is his dagger,' returned the knight with an attempt at a sneer.
'Thou mayest find a use for that, perhaps!'
She took the dagger, and then, standing erect before her husband,
she met his glance unflinchingly. 'Farewell, Brian,' said she. 'Thou
hast been a hard and unloving husband to me. Often, when I would have
clung to thee, thou hast put me aside with cold and sneering words,
and hast shut me out from that confidence and fair entertainment
which a wife should have. For years thou hast confined me to this
solitude! travelling abroad thyself, and leaving me here, your wife
only in name, and as yielding meek obedience to your tyrannous will.
Thou hast neither loved, honoured nor cherished me, and since these
two years I have known that thou hast held me in suspicion. God alone
knows, or ever shall know, whether the suspicion was just. This is
my revenge--that I will leave thee in doubt! But hadst thou been
kinder to me, Brian--hadst thou answered the craving of my overwrought
heart--hadst thou been true to thy duty as a husband, thou wouldst
not have thought me failing in mine as a wife. But I do not ask
forgiveness: be God judge between us, which has most wronged the other!'
'You have much to say about God, madam,' broke in Sir Brian: 'but my
fear is, your deeds are less heavenly than your words.'
'Look to thy own deeds! for they shall condemn thee for ever!'
exclaimed Lady Kildhurm, raising both her hands, one holding the
dagger, and the other the cluster of acorns, and then letting them
droop slowly towards him. 'Thou hast slain a good and holy man, whose
shoe's latchet thou wast not worthy to unlace. Evil shall be thy
portion in this world: and if ever thou turnest thy steps heavenward,
may the blood which thou hast this day shed cause thee to slip and
stumble in the way!'
Having thus spoken, Lady Kildhurm retired to her chamber. Sir Brian
sat alone in his high-backed chair by the fire-place, resting his
lean cheek upon his hand, and staring at the embers. When a servant
came to bring him supper, he gave the man so black a look as to
send him frightened back; and during the rest of the night, no one
ventured to approach the room. As the hours passed away, every sound
was hushed, except the heavy thundering of the surf against the shore,
and the whipping of the wind-driven foam against the windows. Once
Sir Brian fancied he heard an outcry and a sobbing, as of a child in
distress,--the voice of his little son; but by degrees the sobbing died
away.
In the early morning, as Sir Brian stood at the window, he saw the grey
sea hurling itself at the bare coast, and the sea-gulls skimming and
eddying amidst the bitter foam of the great breakers. The grey walls
of Kildhurm Tower, which stood scarce a hundred paces from the shore,
were hoary with clinging flakes of froth. Directly opposite the window
where Sir Brian was standing, on the verge of the low headland, lay a
heap of something that had not been there the evening before. Was it
a mass of sea-wrack, cast up by the waves during the night? Sir Brian
could not see clearly; the window-pane was dim with salt, and his eyes
were heavy. He stealthily left the room, descended the staircase, and,
bareheaded as he was, crossed the wind-swept breadth of turf that
intervened between the tower and the headland.
There lay the body of his wife, face downwards, with arms outstretched,
and hands that clutched the turf. It was a spot to which she had often
come to sit, and to gaze for hours westward across the waves towards
Mona, where she was born. Sir Brian stood looking down at her, as he
had stood by that other dead body the day before. He had been the death
of them both. At first, indeed, he did not quite believe that she was
dead. He watched for some movement of those fingers which clutched so
sharply into the turf, those soft white fingers that yesterday had
been so tremulous. But there was no tremor in them now; they were
rigid as iron: the wind that fluttered her garments could not stir
them. Poor little hands! Perhaps, after all, Sir Brian had not pressed
them so lovingly, or so often as he might have done. He remembered
how, sometimes when they had touched his hair or his cheek, he had
moodily disregarded their touch, or had brushed them impatiently away.
What hands would caress him now? 'Hadst thou not failed in thy duty
as a husband;' and again: 'Mayst thou slip and stumble in the blood
which thou hast this day shed!' Those were words which could never be
unspoken. And yet Sir Brian waited beside the body, as if he expected
it to arise and speak to him.
But at length, setting his teeth together, he laid hold of the body,
and placed it face upwards across his knee. As he did so, the cause
of death was revealed. She had planted the dagger point upwards in
the earth, and had fallen upon it. Something else she had planted
there, though at the time Sir Brian did not know it--the acorns from
the fatal oak of Ennerdale; and she had fertilised them with her very
heart's blood.
Some of the servants, who had been peeping out from the castle windows,
aghast at so grim a spectacle, now made bold to approach and offer
their assistance. Sir Brian, however, as if he had not seen them, rose,
lifting the corpse in his arms, and stalked in silence up the ascent
to the castle gate, neither staggering nor pausing by the way. The
servants followed in a group after him.
When he got to the gate, he was met by his little son, who had his
father's black hair and eyes, and his mother's tremulous indignant
mouth. The child's nurse had in vain striven to keep him out of the
way, and from a knowledge of what had happened. He seemed, indeed, to
know more about it than anyone else.
'My dear mamma is dead!' quoth the infant heir of Kildhurm, his cheeks
flushing scarlet and his childish voice vibrating. 'You have killed
her, you wicked father, and I will never, never forgive you.'
Sir Brian stopped short, and his teeth began to chatter.
'Take the brat away!' he cried out.
But at the same moment his strength forsook him, and he would have
fallen on his own threshold, had not those behind upheld him, and
carried him and the dead woman into the castle. The stark warrior
never fully recovered from the effects of this adventure.