University of Virginia Library

The Lady Catherine Douglass:
1437.

That was a dark and bloody age all the world over; an age
in which, for the most part, might made right, and the law of
force was the only law in existence; an age in which, if some
restraint of chivalry and courteousness was still maintained—
some relics of the resplendent heroism and gentle gallantry of
knight-errantry still animated the bosom and actuated the conduct
of the warrior nobility of England, France, and Spain—
scarcely a ray of civilization enlightened the deep gloom which
still brooded over the masses even of those great and powerful
countries, who were in fact little elevated above the beasts their
companions, and like them easily satisfied so long as they
possessed a shelter against the weather, and nutriment to supply
their merest wants. In the neighboring realm of Scotland,
however, the gloom of barbarism was impervious; no gentleness
tempered the savage and unlettered valor of the fierce nobility,
which was at this period their sole virtue; no gentleness even
towards the fair sex; nor were these weaker and softer portions
of creation exempt from the hardness, the rigor, and sometimes
the cruelty of the age. The common people, whether on the
Borders, or the Lothians, and the Merse, were scarcely superior
to the veriest savages, either in their habits of thought or in
their mode of life; and it was among the highest of the larger

cities only that any of the comforts or refinements of life, only
among the monastic orders that any tincture of the rude letters
of the middle ages, could be found existing.

Distracted by the feuds which existed among all the noble
families of Scotland—feuds fought out with all the deadly rancor
peculiar to family dissensions, with indiscriminate slaughter of
all ages, sexes, qualities—waged with the unmitigated ferocity
of the times—with the storming of the castle, but without the
sparing of the cottage—with the devastation of the open country,
the conflagration of sparse hamlets and smaller borough towns,
even in periods of the profoundest foreign peace—that the unhappy
realm of Scotland presented everywhere south of the
Highland line the aspect of a country visited with the extremities
of fire and sword by an invading enemy; while to the
northward of that dreaded demarcation, the Highland clans
were wilder in their costumes, and no less terrible to their
neighbors, than were the wildest Indian tribes of North America
at the commencement of the present century.

Yet, in this dark and bloody time, in this distracted and almost
savage country, it was the fate of a sovereign to hold sway
over those ferocious barons, and over that turbulent and brutal
commons, whose virtues and whose talents would have done
honor to any age or nation, while his whole career speaks volumes
of reproach against those in which his lot was cast.

James the First, of Scotland, the first monarch of that most
unhappy of all royal houses, the house of Stuart, which, commencing
miserably with his own troubled and disastrous reign,
terminated no less miserably with that of his second English
namesake, more than two centuries later, leaving, as its annals,
little more than one continual record of civil war and domestic
slaughter, of perjury, tyranny, persecution, and treason, equally
on the one and the other side, of exile and assassination, of judicial

combats and judicial executions—James the First, of Scotland, was
the son of Robert the Third, by Annabella Drummond, herself a
distant relative of the reigning house, born in 1394 to the perilous
heirship of that throne which proved so fatal to his race. His
father—a weak and priest-ridden prince, constantly over-ruled,
and, indeed, virtually dethroned by his ambitious brother, the
Duke of Albany—dreading the worst from that false kinsman,
sent his young son, then in his eleventh year, to France, where
he might be brought up and educated by the allied and friendly
monarch of that civilized and warlike kingdom, until he should
attain the age of manhood, when he should return and claim
his own, a man and a king indeed.

Fate interposed, however, and by her interposition sealed the
doom of the fated line, and determined, as it would seem, by
that one act, the subjugation of the Scottish realm and its ultimate
union with the cognate crown of England—a union prolifie
of prosperity and peace alike to either country. An English
squadron, cruising in the North sea, intercepted the vessel,
freighted with the fortunes of a nation, and, as the respective
countries were then involved in war, carried it to the
Thames as lawful prize of war; whereafter the young prince
and his suite were consigned, according to the custom of the
day, state prisoners to the Tower of London.

Henry IV. was at that period king of England; and being
engaged in the heat and fierceness of the French wars, imagined
that by the detention of the young prince, who, in the following
year, by the demise of his weak father, became the young king,
he could deprive France of her Scottish alliance, and therefore
held him in a species of free captivity, half a hostage, half a
captive, but subject to no other personal restraints than those
of compulsory residence within the guarded limits of one or the
other of the Royal Palaces. Ungenerous treatment of a surety.

But when or where, in what period or what country, has policy
been generous?—policy, whose very nature is selfishness—whose
only object is to win the present greatest good for the man of
the nation, irrespective altogether of the fate or sufferings of
others. When we think on Napoleon, pining within the narrow
limits of his ocean isle—a boundless empire and domain to the
untutored, unambitious rustic—yet to his overvaulting spirit
strait in dimension as the narrowest of dungeons; when we
think on the noble Abd-el-Kader, gnashing his teeth, if not actually
in fetters, yet pent within the circuit of stone walls; his
eye accustomed to range over the illimitable desert, over the
topmost peaks of his native Atlas, bleared and blinking in the
glimmering twilight of his prison-house—when we think on
these, the victims of modern policy, how shall we visit with too
light reproach the sins, the crimes of that same policy, committed
when the lights of truth, of science, of religion, burned
dimly with a wavering flame over the doubtful nations!

Richard, the Lion Heart, tuning the cithern of the Troubadour
in that Austrian fortalice—James Stuart composing “the
King's Aubair” in the green slopes of Windsor—John of
Valois, a languid captive in the Tower, “that den of drunkards
with the blood of Princes”—Joan of Arc, writhing on her pile
in Rouen's crowded market-place—Louis of Enghien, in the
ditch of Vincennes, at murky morning's dawn—Napoleon glaring
over the blue Atlantic from the steep crags of St. Helena—
and the wild Arab champion wasting like a chained eagle, in
slow agony, far from his sandy wastes—a paradise to him—in the
heart of republican, free France, are but so many tokens that
the nature of man and policy of nations is the same as it was,
as it has been, is now—will it not be the same for ever?—
and that the watchword of the conqueror is still the same, Vœ victis!

But save in this the ungenerousness of national policy and
natural humanity, Henry IV. was generous to his captive, for
in his guarded solitudes of Windsor the youthful James of
Scotland received such an education as he could not have
hoped to enjoy in the barren and unlettered battle fields of
Caledonia. He grew up fair and powerful, accomplished in all
manly exercises, fully up to the standard of that day's accomplishments
of exercise and arms and manhood—accomplished
in all gentle virtues, liberal letters, antique lore, and modern
fashions, how far beyond all his contemporaneous rivals!
While his youthful equal, Harry of Monmouth, one day to
paralyse the heart of France by the fruitless prowess, fruitless
carnage of Agincourt, was learning how to “turn and wind his
fiery Pegasus,” that he might “witch the world” of his own day
with “noble horsemanship,” young James of Scotland was already
drinking deep at the well of English undefiled” in the shades
not long before semi-deified by the rich chaunts of Chaucer,
soon to be made immortal by the wild wood-notes of the Swan
of Avon; had already tuned his pipe to those strains which
shall survive the memory of his conquerors; had already won
by the witcheries of his arts, the graceful gallantry of his demeanor,
the gentle manners of his courteous youth, the heart
of one who claimed the style already of a right royal English
lady, one day, alas! to bear the thorny crown and troublous
title of a right royal Scottish Queen—beautiful, high-born
Joanna Beaufort, whom he first saw, first loved, a captive, from
his prison casements in the round tower of Windsor, while she
was wandering, fancy-free, amid the verdant slopes and royal
gardens towards the Little Park and the smooth meads of Datchet—places
which live, gardens which glow, and meads which
bloom to this day, happy memorials of the happier past, lusty
mementoes of the time when English life was lusty, when men

wore manhood with their beards, and women sought no rights
beyond the rights of womanhood; of conquering by their very
inability to conquer, and governing by virtue of submission.
And yet the women of that time, unprescient as they were in
that old day of “what fantastic tricks” their sex should some
time “play before high heaven, most ignorant of what they're
most assured, their glossy essence, making the angels weep,”
and all undreaming of the rights which they should one day
claim through their unborn posterity in a yet undiscovered
hemisphere, had, notwithstanding, a more clear insight into
the nature of their duties, and a more infinite capacity to do
and dare, and, if need were, to die, at duty's bidding, than ever
had the strongest-minded female of this nineteenth century
who pants to don the masculine attire and to achieve manly
laurels in the field, the forum, and the senate, seeing not that
they overstep the modesty of nature.

Hear therefore all, especially ye who burn in the advocacy of
the rights, hear a tale of the olden time, and a true tale, of the
duties—or what a Scottish maiden took to be such—of a true
woman.

It may seem a strange tale, it may seem a mistaken duty to
those who, reared in very different days, in a far distant clime,
and under circumstances most diverse—to those I say, who far
from believing loyalty to be a duty or a virtue, can scarcely be
induced to regard it as a principle, or as a fact at all; or induced
to consider it as other than the slavish truckling of a base
spirit, or the fanatical veneration of a superstitious spirit, to
something casually set above it; to such I say, it may seem a
strange tale and a mistaken duty; but I, for one, believe that,
in her line and season, the Lady Catherine Douglass did her
duty, as she understood it, and as it was; and did it well—and
that where she has gone, and where sooner or later we all must

follow her, she hath her exceeding great reward before Him,
who if he has said that he hath no regard for princes more
than for other men, has surely never said that he hath regard
for other men more than for princes; but bade with his own
immortal voice, “Render unto Cæsar the things which are
Cæsar's.”

Years had flown—as they will fly, joyous or unhappy, swift
or slow—on ignoble and noiseless wings, with their unvarying,
unalterable flight, and the boy captive had waked into the captive
man, the princely bud had bloomed into the royal flower.
Henry the Fourth, usurping Bolingbroke, had departed, murmuring
with his last sigh, as he saw in the clearsightedness of
coming death, his son untimely grasping at the royal circlet,
which he, himself, had grasped untimely, and now first felt to
be no blessing but a burden—

Henry the Fifth, the merry mad Prince Hal, the Victor of
Agincourt, had departed, and even in departing had discovered
that

The Earl of Bedford, the wise regent, had succeeded to the
sway of England, and so much of France as yet remained submissive
to the English sword and sceptre.

The captive prince was now, through Bedford's wiser, nobler
policy, the wise, accomplished, and good king of the unruly,

turbulent, and traitorous Scottish barons, of the tumultuous,
unlettered, savage Scottish people. The imprisoned bard of
Windsor was now the avenging judge of past crimes and past
abuses, the reforming monarch of an unreformed aristocracy,
the prince at peace with all foreign powers, but at the worst of
wars with the most perilous of all foes, his own jealous people.

His fate was, of course, that of all first reformers, to be abandoned
and misunderstood by those whom the reform should
have profited even to the raising them from brute nature to
humanity—to be overmastered and destroyed by the opponents
of all reform.

Deserted by his parliament, at terms of defiance with his bad
barons, misconceived by his rude people, never, perhaps, had
the captive's chain been so galling to his soul as was now the
king's crown—and often when served with bended knees, and
circled by uncovered heads, each of which, as he well knew
plotted daggers; bearing the style and title, but not the liberty
or power of a king—aye, often did he sigh for the tuneful days
of his peaceful prison-house, when his whole pride was confined
to his own heart, his whole kingdom comprised in the allgiance
of one other heart—now as then, fond, loyal, and his
own—the heart of bright and beautiful Joanna Beaufort.

For eighteen years he struggled wearily, yet well, against the
discontents and disorders which met him on every hand, having
no solace from his cares save in the society of his fair, accomplished
wife, and the ladies of her court, whom she had selected
not merely for their beauty or their birth, but for their taste,
their literary or musical talents: and of whom she had formed
a circle which, while it excited the rude scorn and boisterous
mockery of the prince barons of the Marches, was to her unfortunate
lord the only brighter phase of his existence.

That eighteenth year was marked by one event which seemed

for a moment to give promise of brighter fortunes in the future,
but like the most of the smiles of fortune, this also proved delusive,
and in the end disastrous. He had renewed the ancient
and time-honored alliance between France and his native land,
giving his daughter Margaret in marriage to the youthful heir
of the French throne, the then dauphin, afterwards Louis the
Eleventh, of evil memory, long before whose majority she had
the good fortune to pass into the peace of the quiet grave.
With splendid pomp, and a gorgeous train of northern knights
and nobles, accompanied moreover by a powerful body of life-guards,
who, in after days, formed the nucleus of the famous
mercenary bands of Louis—known as the Scottish archers, long
after the bow had become obsolete and given place to the
musket—the child-wife and infant princess set sail from the dark
and misty shores of Caledonia for the sunny plains of “la belle
France,” which she reached uninterrupted, although the English
fleet put to sea to intercept her; encouraged by their success in
her father's case, to adopt the same procedure in her own.
They failed as far as the daughter was concerned; but indirectly
their attempt proved the destruction of the hapless king
and father, whose life had been embittered from its very outset
by the intolerance and bitterness of their national hatred.

Exasperated by the cruel and ungenerous attempt, James set
a force on foot, and, declaring war on England, moved southwards
to invade the northern provinces of Cumberland, Northumberland,
and Durham, which were then to the ever-warring
borderers of the two Island kingdoms, what Flanders has been
in all modern ages to the rest of Europe, the common battle-field,
and as it were, the lists open at all times to all comers
with the trumpet note and challenge-call to combat à l'outrance.
But such was the ill-will of his nobles, curbed in their violence,
limited in their covetous ambition, and straitened in their revenues

by the confiscation of their wrongfully alienated crown-lands,
that James speedily discovered that his ill-regulated army
was like to prove more dangerous to himself than to his enemies;
and learning the formation of conspiracies against his
person, disbanded it at once, and suddenly retired to Perth, in
which his royal father had for the most part resided, and where
he had himself founded a Carthusian Monastery—the abbot and
brothers of which were his firm, and perhaps his only adherents.

It was a dark and gusty evening of February, when the Court
was assembled in an upper chamber—one of a long connected
suite of apartments in the Carthusian Monastery, to which the
unfortunate monarch had retreated in the hope—fruitless hope,
as it proved to be—of being permitted to pass the remainder of
his blameless days in the pursuit of literary ease and the gratification
of his gentle social tastes, and, for that age, almost
unnatural accomplishments. There can, perhaps, be no greater
misfortune for any man than to be born either far behind or far
in advance of his age; to be the former, is to be scoffed at as an
old-time dotard, a mere laudator temporis acti—to be the latter,
is to be persecuted, perhaps martyred, for opinion's sake, as a
heretic to admitted holy doctrines, or a vile innovator on time-hallowed
usages; and if so to a private individual, how much
more so to a monarch, untimely set to govern a people yet
unripe for change, and bigoted against reform.

Such was the case with the first of the Stuarts. Had he been
in his own day the king of France or England, he would have
still been a century in advance of the spirit of his kingdom.
Had he been, two centuries later in his own land, born to the
throne so fatally filled by the last Scottish sovereign of his race,
incomparable, guilty, hapless Mary, he would have still found
himself as unable to control the Ruthvens and the Lyndesays,

the Murrays and the Mortons, who drove her an exile to the
false hospitality of her southron sister-queen, as he was to compel
the respect and force the submission of his own Atholes and
Grahams.

The barons of his own fierce land required to be ruled by a
man as brave and fierce as themselves, who should govern them
with a sword for a sceptre; and in James Stuart they had one
whom they regarded as a sort of foreign jongleur; and this
weak, frivolous, vain, outlandish thing, neither all woman nor
half man, attempting to enforce over them, who owned no superior
but the wearer of a sharper sword, that supremacy which
they the most despised and loathed—the supremacy of the
law.

Therefore between him and them, as between the antagonistic
principles of diverse and conflicting ages, it was war for
existence—war à l'outrance.

The chamber in which, on that wild gusty night, James sat
with his queen and her ladies in easy and familiar state,—which,
indeed, scarcely could be called state,—was a large, low-ceiled,
vaulted hall, with huge round arched and mullioned casements.
Through these the merry glare of the great wood-fire, as it went
soaring up the chimney in sheets of ruddy flame and volumes
of illuminated smoke, mixed with the lustre of fifty waxen
sconces with broad silver reflectors, shone out far into the
murky night, beaconing to all the city that there the king held
court. The other decorations of that stately room were as
superior to the modes of the time, as were the personal habits
of its royal resident to those of his contemporaneous kings.
Instead of rushes, the floor was covered with rich tapestries, the
walls were draped with embossed and gilded Moorish leather
from Cordova, and, instead of arms and weapons, implements of
the chase, and trophies of the battle, were adorned with works

of art, such as art then was—ere its revival from the darkness
of the Middle Ages; with musical instruments, some of the
king's own construction—for in addition to his unquestioned
merit as a poet, he was a musician and composer of no mean
order; and with a few shelves of rare illuminated manuscripts.
One table strewn with missals, music, rude sketches, and a few
objects of what we should now call vertu, such as lacrymatories,
bronze and golden ornaments, antique arms, and funeral vases
extracted from the graves without the Roman native camps, or
the yet more ancient Pictish barrows; and another spread with
the delicacies of what was then termed a rare supper—for the
proper supper, which was the principal meal of the day, had
taken place some hours ago—with a due complement of the
cumbrous-looking, but picturesque settees and high-backed
arm-chairs, composed the furniture of this most unroyal royal
chamber—unroyal, for in it there was neither dais nor canopy;
neither footstool nor chair of state; neither the treasured fleursde-lis,
and unicorn of Scotland, nor any of the insignia of Caledonian
royalty; and in it there stood neither lords in waiting,
nor gentlemen of the household; neither pensioners nor ushers
of the rod; but only in attendance, by the board, two unarmed
pages, in the black and scarlet liveries of the realm, ready to
hand wine or refreshments to the company.

And that company—the king himself clad merely as a gentleman
of birth in plain black velvet; a gentleman of noble
stature and fine features—the latter marked with something of
that melancholy which was the characteristic of all his race,
and especially of his equally unhappy descendant, the first
Charles of England, in whom it was believed—long before the
first shadow gloomed on his political horizon—to be a prognostic
of violent and early death; the queen, stately, and finely
formed, and fair, with the rich complexion and luxuriant sunny

hair of England, and the high, aquiline features, still lineal in
the princely family of the house of Beaufort; and, lastly, her
four maids of honor—damsels whose very names denoted that
they were of the highest blood of Scotland; and of the blood,
from first to last, true and devoted to the Stuart—for there was
a Seyton and a Beatoun, a Carmichael and a Douglass—but of
these four, though all were young, graceful, and gentle, and fair
enough each one to be the cynosure, we have to do only with
the last; for she, the Lady Catherine Douglass, differed from
all the rest, not only in the style and character of her beauty,
but in her demeanor; and, indeed, her whole aspect on that
eventful evening was unusual at least, if not unbecoming in
such a presence.

She was very tall, very largely formed, and though delicate
and even slender, so fully rounded in her figure as to give the
idea of her having attained years far more mature than she
indeed had, for she was scarcely yet seventeen. Her profuse
hair, closely banded over her tresses, and falling in luxuriant
masses over her neck and shoulders, was black as night, as
were her heavy, straight brows, which imparted a character of
unusual sternness to features naturally grave and almost austere.
She sate apart from the rest in an embrasure of one of those
high windows, gazing steadfastly towards the town, and evidently
all untouched by the fine music and fine poetry which
were enriching all the atmosphere around her, although the
music and the words were both the composition of a king—of a
king beloved and present. So still she sate that the others had
entirely forgotten her presence, the rather that she was concealed
from their view by a stout clustered pillar casting a massive
shadow over the embrasure within which she had taken
post. But though she heeded not the company, nor was heeded
by them, it was evident that she was anything but pensive or

abstracted, for her face wore that air of strange excitement
which Scottish superstition believes to be the consequence of a
preternatural foresight, and which is commonly known to that
people as a raised look. Her lips are half apart; her eyes fixed
on vacancy; her ear turned in the peculiar attitude of listening.
One hand was pressed upon her heart as if it would repress its
beating; the other, as it hung down by her side, was clinched
as tightly as though it was closed upon the dudgeon of a
dagger.

Men said that Catherine Douglass loved her king with a love
that surpassed a subject's love of loyalty—even as a later Douglass
of the ruder sex loved the loveliest of all the Stuarts —
unhappy Mary. Had the strong blood of Douglass been mated
with the weak stream that ran in the veins of the Stuarts, it
might, perhaps, in either case, have saved its sovereign. As it
was, in both cases, the weak in falling dragged the stronger
down.

But now the time was close at hand—the hour had come, and
the men. And still the gay song went on, and the rich music
poured its stream unheard—unheard by those inspired ears of
Catherine, which, deaf to their merry minstrelsy, were filled
with sounds they could not hear, as were her eyes alive to sights
they could not see.

Without, the city had already sunk to sleep, and no sounds
had been heard over the streets and wynds late so populous and
noisy for above two hours, except the sad, soft sough of the
westland wind, as it came wailing down from the Highland
hills; and the dull, monotonous rush of the flooded Tay, as it
poured along beneath the city walls, swollen with the melting
snows, for it had thawed for several days, and the river was
bankful; and from hour to hour the clang of the convent bell
telling how the night rolled away.

No guard was set at the convent gate; only within the porch
beside a close-barred picket, under a blinking lanthorn, dozed,
muffled in his cowl, an old Carthusian.

Hard by, but close concealed within the mouths of several
narrow and filthy wynds or lanes, debouching into the High
street of Perth, between rows of houses so disproportionately
tall as to cause their openings to resemble the cavernous gorges
between precipitous cliffs, rather than human thoroughfares
between human dwellings, about forty or fifty powerfully built
men had been standing on the watch motionless for above two
hours, closely wrapped in heavy serge cloaks, fitted with capes
projecting far over their faces, which they completely concealed
from view. At length the echoes of the convent bell died into
silence, after the twelve stern notes that tell of midnight, and as
they died away, a faint and guarded footstep, accompanied by
a muffled clash of metal, was heard approaching.

“It is he at length!” whispered one of the watchers, uttering
a single low whistle, which was answered at once by two
similar notes, and followed by the approach of a person similarly
clad, but of more dignified port and taller stature than the
others.

“The time has come,” he said. “The lights are all out!
They have retired this half hour. Silence, and follow!”

And as they went in single file, their feet gave scarce a
sound on the rugged pavement, so thickly were they clothed in
felt, gliding along through the dim streets like fleeting ghosts,
in total silence, unless when that strange muffled clash was
heard, ominous of evil.

They reached the convent gate, and the leader, knocking
very gently, and whispering a countersign, it opened seemingly
automatous, for, when they entered, the sleeping Carthusian
was no longer there, and the blinking lanthorn only kept the

wicket. They entered one by one, and filed off silently one by
one into the cloistered court, the leader carrying the dull lanthorn
with him, and the ten who entered last, remaining within
the porch to guard against interruption from without.

The others, as they reached the grass-plat in the centre of
the cloister, threw off their mufflings, and stood revealed, a
band of grim and grisly warriors, with scar-seared faces, and
many with grey hair, and all with indubitable marks of high
birth and station in the insolent daring of their aspect, and the
fierce haughtiness of their bearing. All were armed cop-a-pie
in steel, but they had no crests on their basnets, no blazonings
on their steel coats, and they bore no weapons save—each in
his right hand—a long broad dagger, known as the misericorde,
unsheathed and ready for assassination. The tall, gaunt man
who led them still wore his vizor up, and the dark grizzled face
and snow-white hair revealed the uncle of the king—Walter,
the Earl of Athole. Lowering his aventaille, with a mute gesture,
he led onward, and all followed silently, for they still wore
their felt shoes over their mail hose, though little need there
seemed for such precaution.

No human being met them in the cloisters, nor in the vaulted
corridors, nor on the vast stone staircase—no human eye looked
down on them from the tall casements—no owl screeched at
the murderers, “not a mouse budged” for all their dull resounding
footsteps.

But within one faithful heart presaged their coming.

Within her embrasure, still as a marble statue, with lips
apart, clinched hand, and glaring, sate Catherine Douglass.

When the royal company arose for the night, she had not
arisen, and, none observing her where she sate withdrawn, all
fancied that she had retired before them, and was a-bed already.

The dying brands glimmered feebly through the great hall—
the waxen lights were dead in the sconces, and the pale watcher
scarcely seemed less dead than they.

Hark! hark! one by one—one by one—stealthy, ghostlike,
only not silent—on they came, up the stairs, through the corridor,
those muffled footsteps. They paused.

A loud, clear voice woke the night.

“The king! The king! To arms! to arms! within there,
Brandanes, look to your bills and bows! The traitors are
without! The doors are barred! Treason! fie, treason!”

It was the voice of Catherine Douglass—and at her cry there
was a rush from within, but it was not the steelclad rush of the
trusty Brandanes, the faithful body-guard, the men of Bute
and Islay—only the rush of unshod girlish feet, the rustle of
female garbs, and the firm stride of one manly foot—the foot
of a king come forth unarmed to die.

At the same instant came a hoarse whisper from without,
while a heavy hand pressed the door inward, as if expecting
to find no resistance. “Away! silly minion! There be no
Brandanes, nor no bars wherewithal to bar the gate!”

“Traitor, thou liest!” was the firm reply. “For I have
thrust mine arm into the staples, and when was not the blood
and bone of a Douglass stronger than bars of wood or bolts of
iron? Fly, my liege, fly— by the back stairway, and the postern—
McLouis and the Brandanes keep the river gate! away!
I will hold them!”

“Curses upon thee! Yield, minion! force it, Graham; break
in, Ruthven! Curses on her! curses! What if she be a
woman, or what avails a paltry wench's bones, when a king's
blood and a kingdom are at stake!”

There was the energetic rush of ten heavy shoulders of strong
men against the oaken door without— within there was the

steady and undaunted nerve of one pale girl in agony—and for
an instant's space the girl's nerve carried.

Then came a fearful, craunching, shivering crash— low but distinct,
and then the tearing of the white flesh and sinews,
drowned in the splintering din of wood, and the fierce tramp
of the armed assassins as they rushed in resistless.

No scream passed her pale lips in that extremity of torture
—her dying eyes swam towards her king, to see if her devotion
had availed to save him. But there he stood, horror-stricken,
trammelled by the clinging arms of his shrieking queen and
her maidens. Had he been free he would have dragged her
from that fatal, fruitless post; had he been armed he had
avenged her.

As it was, he died with her; manfully, as becomes a man,
in silence—royally, as becomes a king who cannot resist effectually,
unresistingly.

Fearfully in after days did the assassins rue their crime in
unheard-of tortures. But what tortures could expiate the
blood of that devoted girl, what price repay her glorious self-abandonment,
save that which we will not doubt she has
received—

The Crown of Martyrdom in Heaven!