“Pretty innocent,” she said, “you mean well, but you know not what the word ‘sin’ means to such as I. Confess—­absolve!  Not even the Holy One and the Just could give me that.  I tell you I have eaten of the apple of the knowledge of good and evil—­yes, the very core I have eaten.  I have the taste of innocent blood upon my lips.  I have seen the axe fall, the axe which I put into the headsman’s hands.  I am condemned, and that justly.  But one of you shall live to taste sweet love, and the crown of life, and to feel the innocent lips of children at her breasts.  And the other—­but enough.  Farewell.  Fear not.  God, who has been cruel in all else, has given your lives to Sybilla de Thouars, ere in His own time He strike that guilty one with His thunderbolt.”

And as she went within, the eyes of the maids followed her; but the masked man with the naked sword never so much as turned his head, gazing straight forward over the battlements of the White Tower into the lilac mist which hung above the Atlantic.

CHAPTER LIII

SYBILLA’S VENGEANCE

There stands a solitary rock at the base of which is a cave, on the seashore of La Vendee.  Behind stretch the marshes, and the place is shut in and desolate.  Birds cry there.  The bittern booms in the thickets of grey willow and wet-shot alder.  The herons nest upon the pine trees near by, till the stale scent of them comes down the wind from far.  Ospreys fish in the waters of the shallow lake behind, and the scales of their prey flash in the sun of morning as they rise dripping from the dive.

In this place Sholto, Malise, and the Lord James Douglas were presently abiding.

It was but a tiny cell, originally formed by two portions of marly rock fallen together in some ancient convulsion or dropped upon each other from a floating iceberg.  In some former age the cleft had been a lair of wild beasts, or the couch of some hairy savage hammering flint arrowheads for the chase, and drawing with a sharp point upon polished bone the yet hairier mammoth he hunted.  But this solitary lodging in the wilderness had been enlarged in more recent times, till now the interior was about eight feet square and of the height of a man of stature when he stands erect.

The hearts of the three present cave-dwellers were sick and sad, and of them all the bitterest was the heart of Sholto MacKim.  It seemed to his eager lover’s spirit, as he climbed to the top of the sand dunes and gazed towards the massive towers of Machecoul rising above the green woodlands, that hitherto they had but wandered and done nothing.  The sorcerer had prevented them about with his evil.  They had lost Laurence utterly, and for the rest they had not even touched the outer defences of their arch enemy.

Thrice they had tried to enter the castle.  The first time they had taken by force two waggons of fuel from certain men who went towards Machecoul, leaving the woodmen behind in the forest, bound and helpless.  But at the first gate of the outer hall the marshal’s guard had stopped them, and demanded that they should wait till the cars were unloaded and brought back to them.  So, having received the money, the Scots returned as they went to the men whom they had left in the forest.