Part 7

"Silence! bairn, and greet nae mair," the lady would reply, sharply. "Hearken to the voice of ane that loves ye; but not after the fashion of this miserable world--the Reverend Elijah. Bethink ye on whom your hellicate cavalier may e'en the now be showering his ungodly kisses. Bethink ye--

That auld love is cauld love, But new love is true love.

Elijah loves ye weel, and, though the man be auld, his love is new and true."

Annora shuddered with anger and grief; while her stern mother, giving additional impetus to her spinning-wheel, as she sat in the ingle by the hall fire, eyed her grimly askance, and muttered--

"Calderwood, forsooth! There never cam' faith or truth frae one o' the line o' Piteadie since the cardinal was stickit by Norman Leslie, a hundred years ago. Are ye a daughter o' mine and o' Symon Moultray, and yet are hen-hearted enough to renounce God and his covenanted kirk, and adhere to bishops and curates?--to seek the fushionless milk that cometh frae a yeld bosom, sic as the kirk o' prelacy hath? Fie! and awa' wi' ye!"

"I forsake nae kirk, mother," urged the poor lassie; "but I will adhere to my Willie. Falsehood never came o' his line, and the Calderwoods are auld as the three trees o' Dysart."

"And shall be shunned like the de'il o' Dysart," replied her mother, beating the hearthstone with the high heel of her red shoe.

The cornfields were yellowing in the fertile Howe of Fife, and the woods were still green in all their summer beauty, when, about Old Lammas-day, in the year 1645, there went a vague whisper through the land--none knew how--that a bloody battle had been fought somewhere about the Fells of Campsie; that many a helmet had been cloven, many a blue-bonneted head lay on the purple heather; and that many a Whig Fife laird had perished with his followers.

Sorely troubled in spirit, the Reverend Elijah Howler took his ivory-handled staff, adjusted his bands and his beaver above his calotte cap, and, in quest of sure tidings, set forth to Kinghorn, at the market-cross of which he had heard the terrible intelligence, that the sword of the ungodly had triumphed--that Montrose had burst into the lowlands like a roaring lion, seeking whom he might devour; and all along the Burntisland Road Elijah saw the Fife troopers come spurring, with buff-coats slashed, and harness battered, bloody, dusty, and having all the signs of discomfiture and fear.

Ere long he learned that Symon of Seafield and his three sons were in safety (thanks to their horses' heels); but that the Marquis of Montrose had encountered the army of the covenant on the field of Kilsythe, where he had gained a great and terrible victory, slaying, by the edge of the sword, six thousand soldiers; that the killing covered fourteen miles Scottish--_i.e._, twenty-five miles English--and that on the men of the Fifeshire regiments had fallen the most serious slaughter.

In fact, very few of them ever returned, for nearly all perished, and the terror of that day is still a tradition in many a hamlet of Fife.

Annora felt joy in her heart when her father and brothers returned; yet it was not without alloy, for where was he whom she had sworn to love, and a lock of whose dark brown hair she wore in secret next her heart?

Lying cold and mangled, perhaps, on the field of Kilsythe!

There one of her father's men, Roger of Tyrie, had found a relic of terrible import. It was a kilmaur's whittle; the blade was of fine steel, hafted with tortoiseshell, adorned with silver circlets. It was graven with the Calderwood arms, and spotted with blood; but whose blood?

Symon and his sons came home to the tower crestfallen, and with hearts full of bitterness. Symon's steel cap, with its triple bars, had been struck from his head by the marquis's own sword, and now he wore a broad bonnet, with the blue cockade of the Covenant streaming from it, over his left ear.

Long, lank, and grizzled, his hair flowed over his shoulders upon his gorget and cuirass. His complexion was sallow, his expression fierce, as he trod, spurred and jack-booted, into the vaulted hall of the tower, and grimly kissed Dame Grizel on the forehead.

"The godless Philistines have been victorious, and yet ye have a' come back to me without scratch or scar," she exclaimed, with Spartan bitterness.

"Even sae, gudewife--even sae; but for that day at Kilsythe vengeance shall yet be ours!"

"Yea, verily," groaned Elijah Howler; "for it was a day of woe, a day of 'wailing and of loud lamentation,' as the weeping of Jazer, when the lords of the heathen had broken down her principal plants; and as the mourning of Rachel, who wept for her children, and would not be comforted."

"Get me a stoup o' ale," said Symon, with something like an oath, as he flung aside his sword and gauntlets. "And thou, minion, after that day o' bluid, will ye cling yet to that son o' Belial, Willie Calderwood?" asked Symon, sternly, of his shrinking daughter. "Thrice I saw him in the charge, and covered him ilk time wi' my petronel; but lead availed not, and I hadna about me a siller coin that fitted the muzzle of my weapon, else he had been i' the mools this nicht. But horse and spear lads!" he added, turning to his sons. "Ere we sleep, we shall ride by Grange, and rook out Calderwood Glen wi' a flaming lunt!"

So Symon and his sons had a deep carouse in the old hall with their troopers, all sturdy "Kailsuppers of Fife," drinking confusion to their enemies.

Now it is an open ruin; then it was crossed by a great oak beam, whereon hung spears and bows. On the walls were the horns of many a buck from Falkland Woods.

Many an oak almerie and meal-girnel stood round; and rows of pots and pans, pell-mell among helmets and corslets, swords and bucklers, spits and branders, made up the decorations and the furniture; while a great fire of wood and coal from "my Lord Sinclair's heughs" blazed day and night on the stone hearth, making the hall to seem in some places all red and quivering in red light, or sunk in sable shadow elsewhere.

It had but two chairs--one for the laird, and one for the lady--for such was then the etiquette in Scotland; thus even the Reverend Elijah had to accommodate his lean shanks on a three-legged creepie.

Dogs of various kinds were always basking before the fire on dun deer-skins; but the chief of them was Symon's great Scottish staghound, which was exactly of the breed and appearance described in the old rhyme--

Headed lyke a snake, Necked lyke a drake. Footed lyke a catte, Tayled lyke a ratte, Syded lyke a team, Chyned lyke a beam.

On that night Symon and his sons, with Roger of Tyrie, and other followers, crossed the hill to Piteadie, and sacked and set on fire the dwelling of the Calderwoods, who, as adherents of the king, were deemed beyond the pale of the law by the Scottish government.

In the murk midnight, from the tower head of Seafield, the heart-sticken Annora could see the red flames of rapine wavering in the sky, beyond the woods of Grange, in the direction where she knew so well her absent lover's dwelling stood; and when her father and brothers came galloping down the brae, and clattering over the drawbridge of the tower, they laughingly boasted that, in passing Eglise Marie, they had defaced the family tomb of the Calderwoods, and overthrown the throchstone that marked where Willie's mother lay, under the shadow of an old yew tree.

"The nest is gane, Grizy," said Symon, grimly, as he unclasped his corslet, and hung his sword on the wall; "the nest is scouthered weel, and the black rooks can return to it nae mair."

"Would that we could lure the tassel to the gosshawk again," said Lady Grizel, with a dark glance at her daughter.

"For what end, gudewife?" asked Symon, with surprise.

"To make him a tassel on the dule-tree there without," was the cruel response.

Annora felt as if her heart was bursting; it seemed so strange and unnatural that all this savage hate should exist because her poor Willie adhered to the king rather than to the kirk.

A few weeks passed, and there was loud revelry, and many a stoup and black-jack of ale and usquebaugh drained joyfully in Seafield, for tidings came of the total rout of the Scottish Cavaliers at Philiphaugh, and of the flight of the great marquis and all his followers none knew whither; but rumour said to High Germanie.

Had Willie Calderwood escaped? asked Annora, in her trembling heart; or had he fallen at the Slainmanslee, where the Covenanters butchered all who fell into their hands, even mothers with their babes that hung at their breasts?

And these acts, and many other such, did her new lover justify by many a savage quotation from the wars of the Jews in the days of old. Now the kirk was triumphant, and, Judas-like, had sold its king, as old Peter Heylin said, even as it would have sold its Saviour could it have found a purchaser.

Winter came on--a cold and bitter one--the soft spray of the sea froze on the tower windows of Seafield, while the moss and the grass grew together on the hearthstones of Piteadie, and the crows had built their nests in the old chimneys and nooks of the ruined castle.

Hard strove father and mother with Annora; but--

If a lass won't change her mind, Nobody can make her.

The Reverend Elijah Howler was a happy man in one sense; the cause of his beloved kirk was triumphant, though Cromwell's Puritans, who had succeeded the Cavaliers of Montrose as antagonists, bade fair to become sore troublers of Israel; and loud were the lamentations when, by sound of trumpet, the English sectaries warned the General Assembly to begone from Edinburgh, and to assemble no more. Yet the Reverend Elijah was unhappy in another sense. Annora heard his pious love-making with averted ear, and he might as well have poured forth his texts, his dreary talk, and intoned homilies, to the waves that beat at the rocky basement of the tower--at once Annora's prison and her home.

Meanwhile, she grew pale, and thin, and sickly. Her younger brother, Philip, pitied her in his heart, and, after making inquiries, learned that Willie Calderwood was now in France, where he had been wounded in a duel by the Abbe Gondy, but had become his friend, and now adhered to him when he had become famous as the Cardinal de Retz; and, as such, served and defended him in the wars of the Fronde, with a hundred other cavaliers of Montrose.

"Oh, waly, waly, my mother dear!" she exclaimed, using the bitterest old Scottish exclamation of grief, as she threw herself on the bosom of the unflinching Lady Grizel. "Pity me--pity me, for none love me here, and Willie is far far awa' in France owre the sea."

"A' the better, bairn--a' the better."

"But I may never see him mair!"

"A' the better still, bairn."

"Oh, mother dear," urged the weeping girl, "dinna say sae; ye'll rive my puir heart in twain amang ye. And this Fronde, and these Frondeurs, what is _it_, what are _they_?"

"What would it be but some Papist devilry, or a Calderwood wadna be in the middle o't?" was the angry response.

Poor Annora knew not what to think, for there were no newspapers in those days, and rumours of events in distant lands came vaguely by chance travellers, and at long intervals. Lothian and Fife were almost farther apart in those days than Scotland and France are now, in the matters of news and travel.

She felt like Juliet in the feud between the families--

"Tis but thy _name_ that is my enemy;-- Though art thyself though, not a Montague. What's Montague? It is not hand or foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. ----Doff thy name; And for that name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself.

Even as water dropping on a granite rock will wear that rock away in course of time, so, by the systematic tyranny of her parents, and by their reiterated assurances, and even forged proofs, that Willie Calderwood had fallen, sword in hand, at the battle of the Barricades, was Annora worn and wearied into a state of acquiescence, in which she accepted Mr. Elijah Howler as her husband.

This was the climax of years of a gloomy, sabbatical life, during which the Judaical rigidity of religious observance made Sunday a periodical horror, and Seafield Tower a daily hell.

So they were married, and he removed her from the tower to the adjacent manse, from the more cheerful and ungrated windows of which she could see in the distance the roofless turrets and open walls of Piteadie, where the crows clustered and flapped their black wings, for the ruin had become a veritable rookery.

The king was dead; he had perished on the scaffold, and Scotland, under Cromwell and the false Argyle, was quiet, as we are told in that poetical romance by Macaulay, entitled "The History of England."

On a Sunday in summer, in the year of Glencairn's rising in the north for King Charles II., Annora sat in the Kirk of Calderwood about the beginning of sermon. The reverend Elijah, with straight, lank hair, and upturned eyes, Geneva bands and gown, after a glance at the dark oak pew where his young bride and victim sat, like the spectre of her former self, so pale, so crushed and heartbroken, twice repeated, in a dreary and quavering tone, the text upon which he was about to preach, with special reference to the rising in the north, inviting all sons of the Kirk to arm against the loyal Highlanders--

"_He saith among the trumpets, Ha! ha! and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting! He is not affrighted, neither turneth he back from the sword; he goeth forth to meet the armed men._"--Job xxxix.

Having given this warlike text, he adjusted his cloak, and turned the sand-glass, which, according to the fashion of those days, stood on the reading-desk. The rustle of Bible leaves, as of those that lie strewn in autumn, when gently stirred by the wind, passed through all the church; but from Annora's trembling and wan fingers, her Bible fell heavily to the ground.

At that moment a gaily-dressed young man, with the white rose in his plumed hat and on his laced mantle, with slashed doublet and boots, as he passed slowly up the aisle--the observed of all observers--as such cavalier fripperies were supposed to have passed away with Montrose and the king, stooped, and presented her with the fallen book.

Their haggard eyes met. He was pale even as death. A great wound, a sword-cut that traversed his face like a livid streak, in healing, had distorted the features; but like a glance of lightning that flashed into her soul, she recognized Willie Calderwood!

She would have shrieked, but lacked the power; a little sigh could only escape her, and so she swooned away.

There was a great commotion in the village kirk. She was borne forth into the air, and laid for a time upon a throchstane, or altar tomb, and was then conveyed to the manse, where she remained long as one on the verge of madness or the grave. The face of Willie, so sweet, so sad and earnest, but, alas! so sorely distorted, seemed ever before her, together with his gallant air and courtly bearing, all of which were so different from those of the sour-featured Whigs by whom she was surrounded.

But she was informed by her younger brother, Philip, that she should never see that face or bearing more, as her lover had come home, sorely wounded and broken in health, not to seek vengeance on her or hers, but only to die among his kinsmen, the Calderwoods of the Glen; and that he had died there, three days after their meeting in the kirk; and was buried at Eglise Marie, in the tomb of the lairds of Piteadie.

It was in one of the last evenings of autumn, when after hearing this sorrowful narrative, and with it the knowledge that the only heart that ever truly loved her was cold in the grave, that Annora--in the craving for solitude and to be alone, left the old ivy-covered manse, and passing through the garden, issued into the glebe--a spacious park, surrounded by venerable trees--and seating herself upon a moss-grown stile, strove to think calmly, if possible, and pray.

Resplendent in gold and purple, the sky threw out in strong contour the summits of the Lomonds, from which the last rays of sunset had faded; and where she sat alone. The darkness had almost set in, the woods were so leafy and dense; yet in some places the twilight was liquid and clear. The trees were already yellowing fast, and the sear and russet leaves that had fallen before the strong gales that swept through the Howe, or great midland valley of Fife, were whirling about the place where she sat, as if to remind her that the year was dying.

Often in happier times had she wandered here with Willie, and the bark of more than one tree there bore their names and initials cut by his knife or dagger. The woodcock was seeking his nest in the hedges, and the snipe and the wild coot were among the reeds and rushes of the loch and burn; and Annora, as she gazed around her, thought sadly that it was the autumn of a year of married misery, and the winter of her aching heart.

Suddenly some mysterious impulse--for there was no sound but the sense of something being nigh, made her look round, and then a start, a shudder, convulsed her, rooting her to the spot; for there by the stile whereon she sat was Willie Calderwood, looking just as she had seen him last, in his cavalier dress, with plumed beaver and white cockade, long rapier and short velvet mantle: but his features, when viewed by the calm, clear twilight, seemed paler, his eyes sadder, and the sword wound on his cheek more livid and dark.

He was not dead--he lived yet, and her brother Philip had deceived her!

She made a start forward, and then drew back, withheld by an impulse of terror, and holding up her poor thin hands deprecatingly, faltered out--

"Oh! come not nigh me, Willie. I am a wedded wife."

"And false to me, Annora. Is it not so?" he asked, with a voice that thrilled through her.

She wept, and laid her hands upon her crushed heart, while Willie's sad eyes, that had a glare in them, caused doubtless by his wound, seemed to pierce her soul; they seemed so bright, so earnest, and beseeching in the autumn twilight.

"They told you I was false to you, or slain in France, and you believed them?"

"I did, Willie," she sobbed, as she covered her face.

"I have lain on many a field, lassie, where the rain of heaven and the wind of night swept over me--fields where the living could scarce be kenned frae the dead, yet I was never slain."

"But, oh," she urged, "Willie, never, never will ye ken----"

"I ken a'! They told you that I was dead, too, and graved in yonder kirk."

"They did, Willie dear--they did."

"Yet I am here before you. I came home to wed you, lassie, and to join my Lord Glencairn in the north, and to fight against this accursed Cromwell and his Puritans, but it maunna be," he added, sadly, in a hollow tone.

"Oh, leave me, Willie, leave me. If you should be seen wi' me----"

"Seen!" he exclaimed, with a bitter laugh.

"Oh, leave me; for what seek ye here?"

"But a lock o' your bonnie hair, lassie--a lock to lay beside my heart."

Her scissors were at the chatelaine that dangled from her girdle; she glanced fearfully at the windows of the manse, where lights were beginning to glimmer; but undoing her hair, she cut a long and ripply tress, and handed it to Willie. As she drew near, the expression of his eyes again froze her blood, they seemed so sadly earnest and glazed; and as his fingers closed upon the coveted tress, and touched hers, they felt icy cold and clammy, like those of a corpse.

Then a shriek of terror burst from her, and falling on the grass, she became senseless, and oblivious of everything.

For days after this she raved of her meeting with Willie Calderwood, and of the lock of hair she had given him. Some thought her mind wandered; but others pointed significantly to the facts that her scissors had been found by her side, and to where a large tress had been certainly cut from her left temple.

The young laird of Piteadie was assuredly dead, and buried among his kindred in St. Mary's Chapel; but the age was one of superstition, of wraiths, and omens; and people whispered, and shook their heads, and knew not what to think, save that she must have seen a spectre.

Ere a week elapsed, Annora died quietly in her mother's arms, forgiving and blessing her; but adhering to the story of the gift to her dead lover. So strong at last grew the excitement in the neighbourhood that some began to aver that he was not dead at all, but was leading a troop of horse, under Glencairn, in the north.

Even those who had seen the funeral cortege issue from the House of the Glen were so sceptical on the subject, that the tomb was opened by order of the next heir, and there, sure enough, was the body of Willie Calderwood; but the leaden cerements were rent from top to bottom, the grave-clothes were all in disorder, and in the right hand was clenched a long and silky tress of Annora's hair![*]

[*] The plough has recently uprooted the last stone of this old chapel; but its name, corrupted into "Legsmalie," is borne by the field where it stood.

How it came there none could say, though many averred it had been buried with him at his own request, and was the gift of other years; but the next heir, his nephew, William Calderwood, whose initials we may see above the eastern gate of the old fortalice, when he repaired it in 1686, in lieu of the palm branch of his name, placed above the helmet an arm and clenched hand, which holds a lock of hair--the same crest we all saw this morning.

From that time the Moultrays of Seafield never prospered. The last of the family was killed during the insurrection of 1715. Their line passed away. It was long represented by the Moultrays of Rescobie, also now extinct, and their tower is a crumbling ruin by the sea-shore.

* * * * *

Such was Cora's strange story, to which we all, myself included, listened with attention, though, sooth to say, I had heard it frequently before. Berkeley declared it to be "doocid good, but doocid queer."

In another land I was yet to hear a story still more gloomy and improbable than this--a story to be related in its place, and in some points not unlike the legend of the clenched hand.

While Cora had been rehearsing her gloomy story of the two ruined towers, my eyes had scarcely ever wandered from Louisa Loftus, who, with Miss Wilford and I, was seated in the same flirting, or tete-a-tete chair, and who, on this night, was in all the pride of her calm, pale, aristocratic beauty.

She was in the zenith of her charms; her figure, finely rounded, was full--almost voluptuous; her features were remarkably expressive to be so regular; and her eyes and glorious hair were wondrously dark when contrasted with the pure whiteness of her skin.

Seated under the brilliant crystal gaselier, the fine contour of her head, and the exquisite proportions of her bare shoulders and neck, on which a circlet of brilliants sparkled, were seen to perfection, and I felt bewildered while I watched her. Thus, I fear, Miss Wilford, in whose blue eyes a mischievous expression was twinkling, did not find me very entertaining company.

Down that fair neck a long black ringlet wandered, as if to allure, and at times it almost touched, my hand. Intoxicated by her beauty and close vicinity, I determined to do something to express my passion, even if I should do it--miserable timidity and subterfuge--under cover of a jest--a mockery.

Tremulously, between my fingers, unnoticed by others, I took the stray ringlet, and whispered in her ears--

"A strange story, that of my cousin's, Lady Louisa."