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Updated: June 17, 2025
"Afraid, you goose!" said his father, giving him a slight shake by the collar. "What makes you afraid?" "What makes him to like the picture of Sir Malise Ravenswood then?" said the boy, whispering. "What picture, you natural?" said his father. "I used to think you only a scapegrace, but I believe you will turn out a born idiot."
As he looked, Sholto saw his father, a gigantic figure standing black and militant against the brightest of it. His hand grasped a huge wolf by the heels, and he swung the beast about his head as easily as he was wont to handle the forehammer at home. With his living weapon Malise had swept a space about him clear, and the beasts seemed to have fallen back in terror before such a strange enemy.
Gradually the anger passed out of the face of William Douglas as he listened to his sister's prattle, like the vapours from the surface of a hill tarn when the sun rises in his strength. He even thought with some self-reproach of his treatment of Malise and of his uncle the Abbot.
"He was forever harping about proprieties, and he wore me out trying to make me tie my money up; Malise isn't stingy, I'll say that, though she might have been she's a Blair. Jean shivered over spending money. And after there wasn't any left, he used to sit and cough and cry over his Shakespeare about it. He had thought he was going to be a great poet once, himself, Jean had."
Her eyes were dry, her lips compressed, her nostrils a little distended like those of a war-horse that sniffs the battle from afar. Outside the castle wall the news spread swiftly, and somewhere in the darkness a voice set up the Celtic keen. "Bid that woman hold her peace. I will hear the news and then we will cry the slogan. Say on, Malise!"
"Ho, guard, there!" he cried, "seize me this instant the Abbot of the New Abbey and Malise MacKim." And so much surprised but wholly obedient, twenty archers of the Earl's guard, commanded by old John of Abernethy, called Landless Jock, fell in at back and front. Malise, the master armourer, stood silent, taking the matter with his usual phlegm, but the Abbot was voluble.
It was an alluring face, and moved you so to tenderness, to do battle, to give protection, that it hurt. "Throw off your hat, Malise," suggested Molly. "Celeste, take her parasol from that chair. There is so much to hear about. I asked la femme de charge, when she was in this morning, if she'd ever heard of the Blairs.
Sholto gave him into the strong arms of Malise and stood erect to listen for any renewal of the attack. The wise smith, whose skill as a leech was proverbial, carefully felt James Douglas all over in the darkness, and took advantage of every flicker of summer lightning to examine him as well as his armour would permit.
"God in heaven!" cried a stern voice from below which made Sholto start, "we shall be broken first and last upon that woman. Would to God I had slain her with my hand! Tell the Earl that if he will not come to those that wait for him underneath the tower, I, Malise MacKim, will come and fetch him like a child in my arms, even as I did from under the pine trees at Loch Roan."
Generally it was her little pose that she did not care for jewels, but in her heart she loved them, as every woman does, primitive or civilized, young or three-score-and-ten. Now she put on what she had. Of late the fairness of Malise had deepened into abiding beauty, yet to-night it was the garb she was emphasizing it would seem, and what it stood for, not the personality.
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