The Black Douglas | Page 8

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 fa?ry.