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"Lord have mercy on the innocence and cloistered quiet of the neophytes if they get our Laurie for an example!" muttered Malise to himself as he turned away. Even the young Earl smiled, perhaps remembering the last time he had seen the youth beside him, clutching and tearing like a wild cat at his brother's throat in the smithy of Carlinwark.
Molly, risen from her elbow to sitting posture, was looking at her with big, miserable eyes, her throat, so slight and pretty, swelling with the sobs coming. But the other came first, and with it came the terror. "Malise, Malise, hold me; hold me. I'm afraid!" Celeste was out. Alexina, holding her mother, could reach the bell, and rang it, again and again.
"Alas, yes," the Countess replied, "I know it, and grieve for you and your brothers. Of my Lord Malise I have also heard something." "Nothing good, I'll swear," interjected Prosper to himself. The Countess went on "Well, Sir Prosper, you stand as I stand, alone in the world. It would seem we had need of each other." Prosper bowed, feeling the need of nobody for his part.
The mother, holding her daughter's hands, was gazing up curiously, interestedly, her lips parted, as pleased interest will part any child's. There was contagious laughter in the eyes, too, the laugh of expectancy about to be gratified, as with children while the curtain goes up on a new scene. "You are as pretty as you can be, Malise; the Blair features used to look so solemn on a baby!"
"It is my ideal," said the artist, "and, by the mystic whisper of the heart, by the bright teaching of the star that rules my destiny, by the forbidden lore of which I have drank deeply, I know that the ideal of each mind is the reflex of the actual, and with the true artist fancy is existence!" The meerschaum was again filled, and Malise Grey contemplated his picture.
Sholto MacKim, the son of Malise the Smith, testifies to these things in his own clerkly script. The instant Lord William entered his own castle of Thrieve over the drawbridge, and without even returning the salutations of his guard, he turned about to the two men who had so masterfully compelled his return.
"I know, Malise," he said, "that I cannot offer you gold in return for your admirable handicraft. But 'tis nigh to Keltonhill Fair, do you divide this gold Lion betwixt those two brave boys of yours. Faith, right glad was I to be Earl of Douglas and not a son of his master armourer when I saw you disciplining for their souls' good Messires Sholto and Laurence there!" The smith smiled grimly.
"I tell you, it is the picture of old Malise of Ravenswood, and he is as like it as if he had loupen out of the canvas; and it is up in the old baron's hall that the maids launder the clothes in; and it has armour, and not a coat like the gentleman; and he has not a beard and whiskers like the picture; and it has another kind of thing about the throat, and no band-strings as he has; and "
Malise stood at his head till the Douglas swung himself into the saddle with a motion light as the first upward flight of a bird. He put his hand into a pocket in the lining of his "soubreveste" and took out a golden "Lion" of the King's recent mintage. He spun it in the air off his thumb and then looked at it somewhat contemptuously as he caught it.
Malise and the Abbot seemed to hear about them the plunging of riderless horses as they stumbled downwards through the night, their path lit by lightning flashes, green and lilac and keenest blue, and bearing between them the senseless form of William Earl of Douglas. His manuscript has come down to us and lies before the transcriber.
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