TWO RIDING TOGETHER
"Joyous," she cried, as they went, "Oh, most joyous would it be to see
the noble castle and to have all the famous two thousand knights to
make love to me at once! To capture two thousand hearts at one sweep
of the net! What would Margaret of France herself say to that?"
"Is there no single heart sufficient to satisfy you, fair maid?" said
the young man, in a low voice; "none loyal enough nor large enough for
you that you desire so many?"
"And what would I do with one if it were in my hands," she said
wistfully; "that is, if it were a worthy heart and one worth the
taking. Ever since I was a child I have always broken my toys when I
tired of them."
The voices of the singing children on the green came more faintly to
their ears, but the words were still clear to be understood.
_"Off to prison you must go, you must go, you must go,
Off to prison you must go,
My fair lady!"_
"You hear? It is my fate!" she said.
"Nay," answered the Earl, passionately, still looking in her eyes.
"Mine, mine--not yours! Gladly I would go to prison or to death for
the love of one so fair!"
"My lord, my lord," she laughed, with a tolerant protest in her voice,
"you keep up the credit of your house right nobly. How goes the
distich? My mother taught it me upon the bridge of Avignon, where also
as here in Scotland the children dance and sing."
"First in the love of Woman,
First in the field of fight,
First in the death that men must die,
Such is the Douglas' right!"
"Here and now," he said, still looking at her, "'tis only the first I
crave."
"Earl William, positively you must come to Court!" she shrilled into
sudden tinkling laughter; "there be ladies there more worthy of your
ardour than a poor errant maiden such as I."
"A Court," cried Earl William, scornfully, "to the Seneschal's court!
Nay, truly. Could a Stewart ever keep his faith or pay his debts?
Never, since the first of them licked his way into a lady's favour."
"Oh," she answered lightly, "I meant not the Court of Stirling nor yet
the Chancellor's Castle of Edinburgh. I meant the only great
Court--the Court of France, the Court of Charles the Seventh, the
Court which already owns the sway of its rarest ornament, your own
Scottish Princess Margaret."
"Thither I cannot go unless the King of France grants me my father's
rights and estates!" he said, with a certain sternness in his tone.
"Let me look at your hand," she answered, with a gentle inclination
of her fair head, from which the lace that had shrouded it now
streamed back in the cool wind of evening.
Stopping Darnaway, the young Earl gave the girl his hand, and the
white palfrey came to rest close beneath the shoulder of the black war
charger.
"To-morrow," she said, looking at his palm, "to-morrow you will be
Duke of Touraine. I promise it to you by my power of divination. Does
that satisfy you?"
"I fear you are a witch, or else a being compound of rarer elements
than mere flesh and blood," said the Earl.
"Is that a spirit's hand," she said, laughing lightly and giving her
own rosy fingers into his, "or could even the Justicer of Galloway
find it in his heart to burn these as part of the body of a witch?"
She shuddered and pretended to gaze piteously up at him from under the
long lashes which hardly raised themselves from her cheek.
"Spirit-slender, spirit-white they are," he replied, "and as for being
the fingers of a witch--doubtless you are a witch indeed. But I will
not burn so fair things as these, save as it might be with the
fervours of my lips."
And he stooped and pressed kiss after kiss upon her hand.
Gently she withdrew her fingers from his grasp and rode further apart,
yet not without one backward glance of perfectest witchery.
"I doubt you have been overmuch at Court already," she said. "I did
not well to ask you to go thither."
"Why must I not go thither?" he asked.
"Because I shall be there," she replied softly, courting him yet again
with her eyes.
As they rode on together through the rich twilight dusk, the young man
observed her narrowly as often as he could.
Her skin was fair with a dazzling clearness, which even the gathering
gloom only caused to shine with a more perfect brilliance, as if a
halo of light dwelt permanently beneath its surface. Faint responsive
roses bloomed on either cheek and, as it seemed, cast a shadow of
their colour down her graceful neck. Dark eyes shone above, fresh and
dewy with love and youth, and smiled out with all ancientest
witcheries and allurements in their depths. Her lithe, slender body
was simply clad in a fair white cloth of some foreign fabric, and her
waist, of perfectest symmetry, was cinctured by a broad ring of solid
silver, which, to the young man, looked so slender that he could have
clasped it about with both his hands.
So they rode on, through the woods mostly, until they reached a region
which to the Earl appeared unfamiliar. The glades were greener and
denser. The trees seemed more primeval, the foliage thicker overhead,
the interspaces of the golden evening sky darker and less frequent.
"In what place may your company be assembled?" he asked. "Strange it
is that I know not this spot. Yet I should recognise each tree by
conning it, and of every rivulet in Galloway I should be able to tell
the name. Yet with shame do I confess that I know not where I am."
"Ah," said the girl, her face growing luminous through the gloom, "you
called me a witch, and now you shall see. I wave my hands, so--and you
are no more in Galloway. You are in the land of faëry. I blow you a
kiss, so--and lo! you are no more William, sixth Earl of Douglas and
proximate Duke of Touraine, but you are even as True Thomas, the
Beloved of the Queen of the Fairies, and the slave of her spell!"
"I am indeed well content to be Thomas Rhymer," he answered,
submitting himself to the wooing glamour of her eyes, "so be that you
are the Lady of the milk-white hind!"
"A courtier indeed," she laughed; "you need not to seek your answer.
You make a poor girl afraid. But see, yonder are the lights of my
pavilion. Will it please you to alight and enter? The supper will be
spread, and though you must not expect any to entertain you, save only
this your poor Queen Mab" (here she made him a little bow), "yet I
think you will not be ill content. They do not say that Thomas of
Ercildoune had any cause for complaint. Do you know," she continued, a
fresh gaiety striking into her voice, "it was in this very wood that
he was lost."
But William Douglas sat silent with the wonder of what he saw. Their
horses had all at once come out on a hilltop. The sequestered boskage
of the trees had gradually thinned, finally dwarfing into a green
drift of fern and birchen foliage which rose no higher than Black
Darnaway's chest, and through which his rider's laced boots brushed
till the Spanish leather of their gold-embossed frontlets was all
jetted with gouts of dew.
Before him swept horizonwards a great upward drift of solemn pine
trees, the like of which for size he had never seen in all his domain.
Or so, at least, it seemed in that hour of mystery and glamour. For
behind them the evening sky had dulled to a deep and solemn wash of
blood red, across which lay one lonely bar of black cloud, solid as
spilled ink on a monkish page. But under the trees themselves, blazing
with lamps and breathing odours of all grace and daintiness, stood a
lighted pavilion of rose-coloured silk, anchored to the ground with
ropes of sendal of the richest crimson hue.
"Let your horse go free, or tether him to a pine; in either case he
will not wander far," said the girl. "I fear my fellows have gone off
to lay in provisions. We have taken a day or two more on the way than
we had counted on, so that to-night's feast makes an end of our store.
But still there is enough for two. I bid you welcome, Earl William, to
a wanderer's tent. There is much that I would say to you."