"We shall see," replied Margaret, biting her cherry-like nether lip, and stamping her foot in growing wrath; but Murielle threw her white arms round her neck, and said plaintively, —
"You do not, you cannot mean all you say, Maggie. Ah, do not scold, when you should guide and aid me."
"Is it not my desire to see you happy?"
"Yes," sobbed Murielle; "I know, I hope that it is."
"And my husband's?"
"My kinsman, the earl, is a fearsome man!" said Murielle, with an ill-repressed shudder.
"Have I not striven for years to be your guide, your friend, your comforter, and now – "
"You would undo all the past, by making me the wife of the exiled Albany, that your husband's terrible aims and ends may be furthered, his feudal power and splendour increased."
"By raising you, perhaps, to" – the countess paused – "to a throne, little fool!"
"A throne?" reiterated Murielle, in absolute bewilderment.
"Yes, a throne," said Margaret, in a low voice, as she bent her black flashing eyes close to her startled sister's face; "where can all this leaguing and combination with Henry of England, Christian of Oldenburg, John of the Isles, and with so many discontented barons, end, but in the destruction of Livingstone, of Crichton, and of that boy-king, in whose name they slew the earl of Douglas?"
"Saint Mary keep us, sister; but this is murder, treason, regicide!" said Murielle, in terror and incredulity.
"I am speaking in our castle of Thrave," said the countess, significantly, as she patted the strong rampart with her white jewelled hand; "but I am unwise in talking to you of schemes, the magnitude of which you cannot comprehend, and the daring of which appals you."
"Oh, Maggie, all this can end but in one way."
"How?"
"Destruction, forfeiture, and death!"
"We shall see," replied the countess, calmly smoothing back her silky hair; "but to resume about this Patrick Gray —who is he, that he should aspire to love my sister, the daughter of a line of powerful earls?"
"He is a gentleman of stainless reputation, the trusted subject of the late king and of his son; a loyal soldier, whom, if I choose, I might marry to-morrow, and defy you all!" said Murielle, angrily.
Margaret now laughed in good earnest at her sister.
"Defy us?" she exclaimed; "lassie, you have gone crazy! I speak not of Ormond, of Pompherston, of Glendoning; but know you not that the smallest laird who bears our name could muster lances enough to harry his father's nest at Foulis, level his tower to the ground-stone, and swing his whole generation on the nearest tree?"
Murielle knew fully the truth of this, but she felt an increasing emotion of anger at the injustice and control to which she was so bluntly subjected, and now her haughty sister spoke again.
"Bear this in mind, that thrice has Earl James sworn by his most sacred oath, God, and his father's bones 'that our heather lintie, Murielle, shall be the bride of Albany, and sib to the throne, if not one day upon it;' so cease to think more of this lover of yours, who, by the bye, I believe, once loved me."
"Loved you!" exclaimed Murielle, in a breathless voice; "you, Margaret?"
"Yes," continued the imperious beauty, with confidence.
"He ever admired you, and as my sister, felt a friendship for you; but be assured that his dear heart never wandered from me," was the equally confident reply.
"You are a child!" retorted the countess.
"Perhaps I am, to endure all this petty tyranny; but a day may come – there are times when even a poor worm may turn."
"But think no more of him, I command you, for he is better as he is, dead, than living to be the rival of Robert, duke of Albany."
"Do not tell me, sister, that he was slain," said Murielle, in an imploring voice, while, her tears again fell fast; "he is not dead. I know that he is not dead!"
"You know?" said Margaret, changing colour.
"Yes."
"Indeed – how?"
"Because I am living still!" replied Murielle, with divine confidence and hope.
CHAPTER XIX
A FEUDAL LORD
And joy is mine
When the strong castles besieged shake,
And walls uprooted, totter and quake,
And I see the foemen join,
On the moated shore all compass'd round
With palisade and guarded mound.
The result of this conversation, the wild and daring schemes of ambition and revenge it unfolded, – schemes of which she was to be made the tool and the victim, filled Murielle with alarm, and made her more than ever resolve to seek refuge in a convent; but an escape from the guarded castle of Thrave was not a matter to be easily accomplished, as its garrison, formed of the earl's most faithful "retainers, was (as we are told in the third of volume of 'Caledonia'), never less than one thousand armed men."
A recent writer says, "in Scotland, but a hundred years ago, the head of a family was paramount, and household discipline was wielded without mercy." If such was the case a hundred years ago, it was exercised with greater rigour in the days of the second James.
So poor little Murielle found Thrave with all its splendour, a veritable prison, and the earl, her brother-in-law, a haughty and exacting tyrant.
Thrave, his greatest stronghold, was built upon an island of twenty acres in extent, formed by the rough and rapid Dee, situated about ten miles above its estuary, and thirty from its source, which is among the wooded hills of Minnigaff.
There on that islet the crusader Alan IV., lord of Galloway and constable of Scotland, had a fortress, and thereon, in after times, the Black Knight of Liddesdale, the comrade of Wallace and Bruce, reared the present castle of Thrave, a vast pile, the donjon of which is yet seventy feet in height, with walls eight feet in thickness, built of common stone from the adjacent moors.
The first story of this great pile consisted of the larder, the arsenals, and the dungeon, where many a chained wretch has wept during the hours that intervened between time and eternity.
In the second story were the apartments of the men-at-arms, the warders, grooms, and pages.
The third contained the apartments of the baron, his family, their guests, and the ladies' bower-chamber, with one apartment long secluded, that in which Archibald, earl of Douglas and lord of Galloway, – he whose second son won by his valour the titles of duke of Spruce and prince of Dantzig, died on the 3rd of February, 1400. Small Gothic windows gave light to these upper chambers, and narrow slits and loopholes to the lower.
A square barbican and four round flanking towers, with a deep fosse and drawbridge, formed the external barrier. After passing these, the only entrance to the keep was by a door placed so high in the wall that it opened on the second floor, and this strange mode of access was farther secured by a small portcullis, grooved into the solid stone, the work of "the Brawny MacKim," the hereditary smith of the family.
To victual this stronghold each of the twenty-eight parishes which form the stewardry of Kirkcudbright had to contribute a Lardner-mart-cow at Martinmas, for winter provisions; and the last attempt to levy these twenty-eight cattle was made in 1747, by William Maxwell, of Nithsdale.
In the front wall of the great tower, and immediately above the gateway, which bore all the armorial achievements of the proud and lordly owners, there still projects a large granite block, named the gallows knob, or hanging-stone, which, in the olden time, was seldom without its tassel, as the moss-troopers phrased it.
"Lest this barbarous emblem of feudal power should be minus its usual decoration," says a local historian, "when putrefaction became offensive before the corpse was cut down, if a malefactor was not in custody to be tucked up, it was replenished by some unoffending vassal. The charnel into which these victims were thrown is to this day named the 'gallows slot,' and notwithstanding the time that has elapsed since the downfall of the house of Douglas in Galloway, human bones in abundance were turned up when the present highway was made through it there in the year 1800."