The knightly part of the great muster had already gone back to their tents and lodgings. The commonalty were mostly stringing away through the vales and hill passes to their homes, no longer in ordered companies, but in bands of two or three. Disputes and misunderstandings arose here and there between men of different provinces. The Galloway men called "Annandale thieves" at those border lads who came at the summons of the hereditary Warden of the Marches. The borderers replied by loud bleatings, which signified that they held the Galwegians of no better understanding than their native sheep.
It was a strange and varied company which rode home to Thrieve to receive the hospitality of the young Earl of Douglas and Duke of Touraine. The castle itself, being no more than a military fortress, containing in addition to the soldiers' quarters only the apartments designed for the family (and scant enough even of those) could not, of course, accommodate so great a company.
But as was the custom at all great houses, though more in England and France than in poverty-stricken Scotland, the Earl of Douglas had in store an abundant supply of tents, some of them woven of arras and ornamented with cloth of gold, others of humbler but equally serviceable material.
His mother, the Countess of Douglas, who knew nothing of the occurrences of the night of the great storm, nor guessed at the suspicions of witchcraft and diablerie which made a hell of the breast of Malise, the master armourer, received her son's guests with distinguished courtesy. Malise himself had gone to find the Abbot, so soon as ever he set eyes on the companion of the Marshal de Retz, that they might consult together--only, however, to discover that the gentle churchman had quitted the field immediately after he had obtained the consent of his nephew to the possession of the new chorister, to whom he had taken so sudden and violent a fancy.
The hoofs of the whole cavalcade were erelong sounding hollow and dull upon the wooden bridge, which the Earl's father had erected from the left bank to the southernmost corner of the Isle of Thrieve, a bridge which a single charge of powder, or even a few strokes of a wood-man's axe, had been sufficient to remove and disable, but which nevertheless enabled the castle-dwellers to avoid the extreme inconvenience of passing through the ford at all states of the river.