Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/37

24 beneath the rocks and ashes and elms of the Castle of Mains.

The land was lonely hill-side or thicket, with patches of coarse grain and pastures for beeves round the baronial or knightly tower, the sacred abbey or the little hamlet cowering meekly in the shadow of its great neighbours, the powers temporal and spiritual. The wild beasts—boar and wolf, hart and coney—abounded in a state of nature, or exceeded nature; for, down by the Nine-stane-rig, the huge green dragon, spewing smoke and spitting fire, devoured at one fell meal the nine fair daughters of the hynd of Durward of the Catscleugh.

On a bend of the Isla, where the silver water ran round a fringed promontory and productive haughs stretched right and left, rose the turrets of Baikie. The house was strong in site and strong in architecture—a battlemented, rugged, red sandstone building, with gateway and watch-tower, court and causeway, and moat filled with oozing mud, clayey stagnant water and dank plants, and fed by springs from the clear flowing river. And Baikie was trebled in strength by the character of its master. No feudal chief far or near was feared and followed like Sir Raoul. Bold, daring, fierce; lord of these acres, lord of his vassals, unaccountable save to God and his patron saint; engaged once in his life in a crusade against the infidel, buying immunity for all crime, for sacrilege itself, by mowing down the turbaned heads, as title reaper cuts the bearded ears in the golden September; losing every grain of scruple and every note of softness in the fulfilment of the vow—the performance of the sacrifice. It is a strain to a poor, modest, disciplined, modern mind to measure Sir Raoul in the plenitude of his might and the boundlessness of his will, to balance the mountain of his temptations, the meagreness of his lessons, the guilt of his soul.

In his own day, Sir Raoul was hated, feared, and half-worshipped with a dread admiration; rude in health, in the prime of his age, no belted earl or crowned prince ventured to control him on his own ground. There he ruled paramount: there he dispensed justice; there he took a life or a score of lives—or restored a stolen quey-calf or a silver-hooped quaich. Where his own passions were not concerned, he must have evinced a stem sort of truthfulness as well as an unflinching determination, for no man despised him, though many cursed his name, and if you search into antiquity, and trace cause and effect, you will find that the liar on the throne does not need to be a coward in order to be withered by the breath of men’s scorn. Sir Raoul’s own people, his soldiers in battle, his yeomen in peace, his servants—if you except the black boy Mahound—cherished a certain pride in Sir Raoul. They were proud of his invincibleness; they were proud of his prowess; they were, in their own humble submission, quite capable of crowing over the abject quailing of their enemies—the bands of feudal rivals, the grim, ragged robbers descending from the snowy Grampians, the black Danes still landing on the coast, the presumptuous priest who questioned whether service against the Moor should continually atone for neglected shrine, invaded sanctuary, and plundered treasure. His people had a grisly glory in Sir Raoul’s feats with the cross-bow and the broad-sword, in his fencing and wrestling, his hunting and fowling, in the fleetness of his foot, “the prance of his proud steed,” “the stroke of his oar,” even in his cursing over the spiced cup in the morning, and his trolling over the wassail-bowl at night. They had a trembling pleasure in his big, fair, formidable, stately, splendid person, where, when he was in full armour, barbaric steel and gold and pearls and rubies met. The morion and the breast-plate, the thigh-pieces and the armlets flashed white or glowed in ruddy light. There was a string of fairer beads than ever father told around his brawny throat, and hanging down on his breast, and on his signet-ring and the scabbard of his sword and the clasp of his bonnet, when he laid aside his helmet and sat in his hall, jewels, crimson as drops of Cyprus wine, flickered and gleamed. An open, imperious, dauntless face was Sir Raoul’s, with the sanguine yellow beard, the eagle nose, the eagle eye, and (Heaven help them!) some fancied that the strong mouth—which had a trick of opening to grind the white sharp teeth—was not without a semblance of the eagle’s beak. But the brave bold face was worn with passion, and the grey eyes were hollow with unsatisfied desire. It was inevitable with the man, a hero in his instincts and a tyrant in his practices, and circumstances brought it cunningly home. Sir Raoul of Baikie, unchallenged and unopposed as far as the eye could travel, over wood and water, moor and mountain, was thwarted at his heart’s core, and pining with singular unrest. There was one soul within the land, the barony, the tower, the marriage chamber, that owned no allegiance to Sir Raoul: despot over all besides, he had craved favour in that quarter, and craved in vain.

The Lord his Maker, and Sir Raoul knew how he had won Lady Dovach—won! how he had stormed, seized, bound, but not bent her, though she was the palest, most fragile thing of earth, air, or water; the lily in the shaded, gloomy, built-in garden, looked more erect, more stubborn, more staunch.

Dovach had been the sole child of a laird, whose lands marched with Baikie—a moderate man, who had said neither yea nor nay to the blustering of Sir Raoul. Dovach had grown up in those primitive days, in a rough, motherless solitude, a white, quiet, still girl with features like chiselled marble and eyes, also, like the deep, cool, fathomless, but intent eyes of a saint in a picture from beyond the seas; like those of the figures in the altar-piece of the little kirk of Foulis, yonder, where a sinful man might contemplate the Crucifixion, the dying Saviour, the thieves, Herod with his crown and sceptre, the high-priest in his mitre and bearing the roll of the law, the Roman centurion brandishing his sword, the Apostles and the women, all the persons, great and small—the very devils and angels waiting on the dead. Ninety-nine impetuous, arrogant men of war would have recoiled from Dovach, or brushed by her as if she had indeed been a sculptured or limned image; the hundredth might have run mad for her unearthly, spiritual charms,