The Black Douglas Part 35

"Woman," he cried, "show me cause why I should not slay you. For, by G.o.d, I will, if aught of harm hath overtaken my master. Speak, I bid you, speak quickly, if you have any wish to live."

But the Lady Sybilla continued to smile--the same dreadful, mocking smile--and somehow Sholto, with his weapon bare and his arm nerved to the thrust, felt himself grow weak and helpless under the stillness and utter pitifulness of her look.

"You would kill me--kill _me_, you say--" the words came low and thrilling forth from lips which were as those of the dead whose chin has not yet been bound about with a napkin, "ah, would that you could!

But you cannot. Steel will not slay, poison will not destroy, nor water drown Sybilla de Thouars till her work be done!"

Sholto escaped from the power of her eye.

"My master--" he gasped, "my master--is he well? I pray you tell me."

Was it a laugh he heard in answer? Rather a sound, not of human mirth but as of a condemned spirit laughing deep underground. Then again the low even voice replied out of the expressionless face.

"Aye, your master is well."

"Ah, thank G.o.d," burst forth Sholto, "he is alive."

The Lady Sybilla moved her hand this way and that with the gesture of a blind man groping.

"Hush," she said, "I only said that he was well. And he is well. As I am already in the place of torment, I know that there is a heaven for those who die as William Douglas died."

Sholto's cry rang sudden, loud, despairing.

"Dead--dead--Earl William dead--my master dead!"

He dropped the palfrey's rein, which till now he had held. His sword fell unheeded on the turf, and he flung himself down in an agony of boyish grief. But from her white palfrey, sitting still where she was, the maiden watched the paroxysms of his sorrow. She was dry eyed now, and her face was like a mask cut in snow.

Then as suddenly recalling himself, Sholto leaped from the ground, s.n.a.t.c.hed up his sword, and again pa.s.sionately advanced upon the Lady Sybilla.

"You it was who betrayed him," he cried, pointing the blade at her breast; "answer if it were not so!"

"It is true I betrayed him," she answered calmly.

"You whom he loved--G.o.d knows how unworthily--"

"G.o.d knows," she said simply and calmly.

"You betrayed him to his death. Why then should not I kill you?"

Again she smiled upon him that disarming, hopeless, dreadful smile.

"Because you cannot kill me. Because it were too crowning a mercy to kill me. Because, for three inches of that blade in my heart, I would bless you through the eternities. Because I must do the work that remains--"

"And that work is--?"

"Vengeance!!"

Sholto was silent, trying to piece things together. He found it hard to think. He was but a boy, and experience so strange as that of the Lady Sybilla was outside him. Yet vaguely he felt that her emotion was real, more real perhaps than his own instinct of crude slaying--the desire of the wasp whose nest has been harried to sting the first comer. This woman's hatred was something deadlier, surer, more persistent.

"Vengeance--" he said at last, scarce knowing what he said, "why should you, who betrayed him, speak of avenging him?"

"Because," said the Lady Sybilla, "I loved him as I never thought to love man born of woman. Because when the fiends of the pit tie me limb to limb, lip to lip, with Judas who sold his master with a kiss, when they burn me in the seventh h.e.l.l, I shall remember and rejoice that to the last he loved me, believed in me, gloried in his love for me. And G.o.d who has been cruel to me in all else, will yet do this thing for me. He will not let William Douglas know that I deceived him or that he trusted me in vain."

"But the Vengeance that you spoke of--what of that?" said Sholto, dwelling upon that which was uppermost in his own thought.

"Aye," said the Lady Sybilla, "that alone can be compa.s.sed by me. For I am bound by a chain, the snapping of which is my death. To him who, in a far land, devised all these things, to the man who plotted the fall of the Douglas house--to Gilles de Retz, Marshal of France, I am bound. But--I shall not die--even you cannot kill me, till I have brought that head that is so high to the hempen cord, and delivered the foul fiend's body to the fires of both earth and h.e.l.l."

"And the Chancellor Crichton--the tutor Livingston--what of them?"

urged Sholto, like a Scot thinking of his native traitors.

The Lady Sybilla waved a contemptuous hand.

"These are but lesser rascals--they had been nothing without their master and mine. You of the Douglas house must settle with them."

"And why have you returned to this country of Galloway?" said Sholto.

"And why are you thus alone?"

"I am here," said the Lady Sybilla, "because none can harm me with my work undone. I travel alone because it suits my mood to be alone, because my master bade me join him at your town of Kirkcudbright, whence, this very night, he takes ship for his own country of Brittany."

"And why do you, if as you say you hate him so, continue to follow him?"

"Ah, you are simple," she said; "I follow him because it is my fate, and who can escape his doom? Also, because, as I have said, my work is not yet done."

She relapsed into her former listless, forth-looking, unconscious regard, gazing through him as if the young man had no existence. He dropped the rein and the point of his sword with one movement. The white palfrey started forward with the reins loose on its neck. And as she went the eyes of the Lady Sybilla were fixed on the distant hills which hid the sea.

So, leaving Sholto standing by the lakeside with bowed head and abased sword, the strange woman went her way to work out her appointed task.

But ere the Lady Sybilla disappeared among the trees, she turned and spoke once more.

"I have but one counsel, Sir Knight. Think no more of your master. Let the dead bury their dead. Ride to Thrieve and never once lose sight of her whom you call your sweetheart, nor yet of her charge, Margaret Douglas, the Maid of Galloway, till the snow falls and winter comes upon the land."

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

THE MACKIMS COME TO THRIEVE

Sholto MacKim stood watching awhile as the white palfrey disappeared with its rider into the purple twilight of the woods which barred the way to the Solway. Then with a violent effort of will he recalled himself and looked about for his horse. The tired beast was gently cropping the lush dewy herbage on the green slope which led downwards to his native cottage. Sholto took the grey by the bridle and walked towards his mother's door, pondering on the last words of the Lady Sybilla. A voice at once strenuous and familiar broke upon his ear.

"Shoo wi' you, impident randies that ye are, shoo! Saw I ever the like aboot ony decent hoose? Thae hens will drive me oot o' my mind!

Sholto, lad, what's wrang? Is't your faither? Dinna tell me it's your faither."

"It is more bitter than that, mither mine."

"No the Earl--surely no the Earl himsel'--the laddie that I hae nursed--the laddie that was to Barbara Halliburton as her ain dear son!"

"Mother, it is the Earl and young David too. They are dead, betrayed into the hands of their enemies, cruelly and treacherously slain!"