LITMIR.BIZ

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the door into the tower, within which the flames still glowed red, and from which every instant the crash of falling timber and the leaping flames answered each other.

      Ere my father sprang back, his figure stood plain and dark against the fire within, like that of a smith at his forge seen in the bygoing upon a snowy night. He held the unburned Bible clasped to his breast, but his left hand hung straight down by his side.

      A moment after he had sprung from a window and fallen upon his face on the pavement with the Bible beneath him.

      A dozen men ran towards him and seized him – Thomas of Drummurchie the first among them.

      'A traitor! A spy!' he cried, lifting a sword from the pile with clear purpose to kill. 'To the death with him! It is John Kennedy of Kirrieoch – I ken him well, a rank Cassillis thief!'

      And he would have slain my father forthwith, but that I ran among his legs and gripped him so close to me that he fell clattering on the pavement among the swords. Then I went and took my father's hand, standing by his side and crying out the while, —

      'Ye shallna, ye shallna kill my father. He never did ye harm a' the days o' his life!'

      'Who are you, and what do you here?' asked young Bargany in a voice of command, when they had set my father on his feet.

      'I am John Kennedy of Kirrieoch on Minnochside, and I came to Ballantrae to bury the corpse of my sister's man, Hew Grier, merchant and indweller there, that was this day laid in the earth.'

      So, right quietly and calmly, my father spoke among them all.

      'But what seek you in my burned Castle of Ardstinchar and alone with these dead men?' asked the young Bargany.

      With a quietness that came of the hills my father told the chieftain his plain tale, and his words were not words that any man could gainsay.

      Then Bargany answered him without consulting the others, as none but a great chief does whose lightest word is life or death.

      'Ye are here within my danger, and had I been even as your folk of Cassillis, ye should have died the death; but because ye stopped devil's work and, it may be, kept away a curse from us for the burning of the Holy Book, ye shall not die in my house. Take your life and your son's life, as a gift from Gilbert Kennedy of Bargany.'

      My father bowed his head and thanked his house's enemy.

      'Bring a horse,' cried the Laird, and immediately they set my father on a beast, and me in the saddle before him. 'Put the Bible for a keepsake in your winnock sole, turn out the steed on Minnochside, and come no more to Ballantrae in time of feud, lest a worse thing befall you!' So said he, and waved us away, as I thought grandly.

      Some of the men that had sworn enmity murmured behind him.

      'Silence!' he cried, 'am not I Lord of Bargany? Shall I not do as I will? Take your life, Kirrieoch. And whenever a Bargany rides by your door, ye shall give him bite and sup for the favour that was this night shown you in the courtyard of Ardstinchar.'

      'Ye shall get that, Bargany, and welcome, whether ye let me gang or no!' said my father. And pressing the Book to his bosom, and gathering up the reins in his unwounded hand, we rode unquestioned through the arch of the wall into the silence of the night. And the hill winds and the stillnesses without were like God's blessing about us.

      But from a knoll on the left of the entrance the man of the grey habit, he who had thrown the Bible, sat silent upon his horse and watched. And as we looked back, he still sat and watched. Him my father took to have been the devil, as he said to me many times that night ere we got to Minnochside.

      Also ere we left the clattering pavement behind, looking out from the postern door we saw the thrawn visage of him who was Allan Stewart, the tortured residue of the man who had once been Abbot of Crossraguel, and in stature like a square-shouldered tower.

      And this is the way my father brought home the burnt Bible to the house of Kirrieoch. There it bides to this day, blackened as to its bindings and charred at the edges, but safe in the wall press at my father's bed-head, a famous book in all the land, even as far as Glencaird and Dranie Manors upon the Waters of Trool.

      But it brought good fortune with it – a fortune which, God be thanked, still remains and grows. And as for my father, he never lifted sword nor spear against the house of Bargany from that day to this, because of the usage which Gilbert Kennedy gave him that night at the burning of Ardstinchar.

      Nevertheless, for all that, he exercised me tightly in the use of every weapon of war, from the skill of the bow to the shooting of the hackbutt. For it was his constant intent to make me an esquire in the service of Sir Thomas Kennedy of Culzean,1 reputed the wisest man and the best soldier in all the parts of Carrick and Ayr. As, indeed, I have found him.

      And this saving of the burning Bible was, as I guess, the beginning of my respect for religion – which, alas! I fear this chronicle will show to have been both a late-garnered and a thin-sown crop.

      CHAPTER II

      THE LASS OF THE WHITE TOWER

      Now, as the manner is, I must make haste to tell something of myself and have by with it.

      My name is Launcelot Kennedy, and I alone am the teller of this tale. In a country where all are Kennedies, friends and foes alike, this name of mine is no great head-mark. So 'Launcelot of the Spurs' I am called, or sometimes, by those who would taunt me, 'Launcelot Spurheel.' But for all that I come of a decent muirland house, the Kennedies of Kirrieoch, who were ever lovers of the Cassillis blue and gold – which are the royal colours of France, in memory of the ancient alliance – and ever haters of the red and white of Bargany, which we hold no better than butchers' colours, bloody and desolate.

      The story, or at least my own part in it, properly begins upon the night of the fair at Maybole – whither to my shame I had gone without troubling my master, Sir Thomas Kennedy of Culzean, with the slight matter of asking his permission. Indeed, none so much as knew that I had been to the town of Maybole save Helen Kennedy alone; and she, as I well knew (although I called her Light-head Clattertongue), would not in any wise tell tales upon me. There at the fair I had spent all my silver, buying of trittle-trattles at the lucky-booths and about the market-stalls. But upon my return I meant to divide fairly with Helen Kennedy, though she was fully two years younger than I – indeed, only sixteen years of her age, though I grant long of the leg and a good runner.

      So, being advised of my excellent intentions, you shall judge if I was not justified of all that I did to be revenged on the girl afterwards.

      It was the early morning of a March day when I came to the foot of the Castle of Culzean. I went with quiet steps along the shore by the little path that leads to the coves beneath. I carried the things that I had bought in a napkin, all tied safely together. Now, the towers of Culzean are builded upon a cliff, steep and perilous, overlooking the sea. And I, being but a squire of eighteen (though for my age strong and bold, and not to be beaten by anything or feared by any man), was lodged high up in the White Tower, which rises from the extremest point of the rock.

      Now, as I say, I had not made mention of the little matter of my going abroad to Sir Thomas, both because it was unnecessary to trouble him with so small a thing, and also on account of the strictness of his opinions. It was, therefore, the more requisite that I should regain my chamber without putting lazy Gilbert in the watch-house at the gate to the trouble of letting fall the drawbridge for me. I did not, indeed, desire to disturb or disarrange him, for he would surely tell his master, being well called Gabby Gib-cat, because he came of a race that never in their lives has been able to hold a secret for a single day in the belly of them – at least, not if it meant money, ale, or the goodwill of their lord.

      So it happened that before I went to Maybole I dropped a ladder of rope from the stanchions of my window, extremely strong and convenient, which came down to a ledge someway up among the rocks, at a place which I could easily reach by climbing. Thither I made my way while, as I tell you, the night was just beginning to dusk toward the dawning. I had all my buyings in my arms, tied up well and that tightly in the napkin, just as I had carried them from the lucky-booths

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