CHAPTER XXII.

COUNT KŒNINGHEIM'S STORY--THE LILY OF CULBLEINE.

Few kirkyards in Scotland are more solemn or pleasing in aspect, or more romantically situated, than that of Logie, which lies four miles from the river Dee, in the parish of Logie-colstaine, in Aberdeenshire. It once surrounded the kirk of St. Woloc, the bishop and confessor; but every vestige of that ancient fane has now disappeared from the little mound of rich holm land, that rises above the small hills and broad muirs of the district, and from the bosom of which flows a miraculous spring called the Poldow, which yet enjoys a high reputation among the peasantry, for the cures it has wrought since the days when the good bishop blessed it, and rested from his pious labours in Strathdon, Balvenie, and Mar.

On the holm of Logie Kirk, the mouldering tombs, the old headstones--green with moss, or half sunk among the long dog-grass and broad-leaved dockens--the hedges that in summer are white with blossoms of the fragrant hawthorn, and one old gnarled yew, are all indicative of its being an ancient burial-ground. Here and there a broad throchstone, resting on four stunted balusters, spotted by grey lichens, and covered with letters half defaced by mischief or by time, yet remain to indicate where some valiant Knight of Cromar or Laird of the Garioch are lying; while the almost flattened mounds, the small round headstones with unpretending and unlettered fronts, taken perhaps from the bed of the adjacent burn, remain to shew where many a shepherd, patient, poor and God-fearing, and many a brave forester of Culbleine, who hacked and hewed, burned and shot as his laird or leader commanded him; harrying the lands of the Gordons to-day, and besieging the towers of the Leslies to-morrow--with many a bien bonnet laird, stern in purpose, unflinching as Brutus, and true to Scotland's kirk and king--yea, true as the steel of his good broadsword--are mouldering, or have mouldered into dust.

Rest them, God!

On the green velvet bank which slopes up from a little tributary of the Davinloch--a place where the winter grass grows rank, but where the white daisies spot the summer turf--are two long gravestones lying side by side, and somewhat apart from all the rest.

They cover the graves of two lovers.

Every person who passes through Cromar (as that part of Aberdeenshire is named) is taken to see them, for there is a sad story connected with them--a story which, to this hour, throws an occasional dash of sentimentality over the village girls and bonneted ploughmen, and which was long the theme of many a sad and many a dirge-like song. One of those stones was inscribed with a legend which I cannot give here, as Kœningheim's handwriting became so tremulous as to be illegible. On the other is carved a Scottish sword, with the words:

Heir Lyis Kenneth Logie--ane honorabill man.

The history of these sequestered tombs, is the history of Kœningheim's misfortunes and his crime.

In the sixteenth century, nearly the whole property of the now suppressed parish of Logie, in Mar, belonged to two families, the Gordons of Colstaine, and the Donaldsons of Culbleine--a vast forest. The dwelling of the former, named the Moat of Colstaine, was a strong square fortalice, surrounded by a barbican wall, which stood in the midst of a morass, not far from the little kirkyard holm which I have just described. A river (now shrunk to a runnel) washed this barbican on one side; a wet ditch defended it on the other.

The residence of the Donaldsons was an old Scottish manor-house or Place, having grated windows with loopholed-sills, vaulted apartments, and turrets at the angles. It stood among some fine old sycamores and oaks, on the moorland; and now my reader's eye may rest on the three leading features of the parish of Logie, as they appeared in the year of grace 1594; the grey old kirk of St. Woloc, with its graves dotting the green holm, its buttressed wall begirt with hawthorn hedges, and shaded by dark yew-trees, where the gled croaked by day and the owl screamed by night; lower down on the waterside, the strong tower with its broad chimneys and stone roofs, its grated casements and corbelled rampart; the great dule-tree before its gate--an ash that was seldom without its "tassel," in the shape of a thief from the south, or a Forbes hung in his boots, as the good people phrased it then; the old baronial manor on the lea, half hidden among dark green copsewood, with the smoke of its hall and spence, kitchen, bake and brewhouses ascending into the air.

In those days, the minister of the Kirk, the gudeman of the Place, and the laird of the Tower, were the three undoubted dignitaries of the parish; and when we remember that it was an age when the minister was (in his own estimation) a greater man than ever Cardinal Beaton dared to be; when the gudeman brought four-and-eighty horsemen, "weel boden in effeir of war," to the sheriff's quarterly Weaponshow; and that the laird marched thrice that number, and had moreover the power of sending half the country-side to pit or gallows, it must be allowed that the power of these three potentates in 1594, was infinitely greater than that enjoyed now by the Premier Duke of Scotland.

Let us go back twenty years.

In the year 1574, when our story opens, the family at the Tower consisted of the Lady Marjorie and her son, a boy of five or six years of age. His father had been seized by one of those fits of wandering, which so frequently possessed the Scottish noblesse of that and after times; and, with two hundred stout pikemen, he had joined the Border legion of Sir Walter Scott of Buccleugh, and died in his armour fighting--not for religion, as the laird, honest man! cared very little about that--but for honour and glory, on the walls of Namur. Some domestic quarrel--a sudden fit of spleen at his lady--was urged in the parish as the reason of his departing from his quiet little tower among the moors of Cromar, to fight the ferocious Spaniards under Ferdinand of Toledo; for though Dame Marjorie was a stanch Catholic (being a daughter of Halbert Cunninghame of the Boortree-haugh in Glencairn), the laird had heard Knox preach in his youth, and thought he was a Calvinist. Thus it was a dreich and doleful day, when a startled servitor of the Tower announced in the morning that a branch had been found at the foot of the dule-tree which overshadowed the gate.

Whenever a Gordon of Colstaine died, this old tree, like the oak of Dalhousie, dropped one of its loftiest branches.

There was sore mourning in the solitary tower, for by that mysterious warning the lady knew she was a widow, and that the father of her little boy had fallen, fighting against her faith and the creed of his ancestors; but for many a month no certain tidings came from that land, which has been so often the grave of the Scottish soldier, until Jock of the Cleugh, a pikeman who had followed the laird, came limping up to the barbican gate, with a light purse and heavy heart, and a tattered doublet, to tell Lady Marjorie how he had been one of that brave Border band, who had laid her husband in his narrow bed before the gate of Sainte Alban.

Old Jock of the Cleugh went no further than the Moat of Colstaine; for he deposited his crutches by the hall fire, and from thenceforward became one of the principal personages in the household, though he spent his whole time in drinking usquebaugh, flourishing his staff, and rehearsing tales of the laird's prowess and his own, and the valiant deeds of the Scottish Borderers, the bulwark of Flanders, and terror of the Spaniards. He taught the stable-boys many a point of farriery they had never known before, and the trenchermen many a trick with the dice, by which, however, they always lost, and he always won; but he shewed them how to pick the lock of the butler's pantry, to broach wine-casks without drawing the spigot; to train hawks, and to tell fortunes on cards; but his principal pupil was young Halbert Gordon, the son and heir of his umquhile leader. Partaking less of his mother's gentle nature, than his father's lofty spirit, the boy was froward, passionate, and bold; and thus, by the time he was ten years of age, Jock of the Cleugh, who found him an apt scholar, had quite unfitted the little fellow for living a quiet life, or adopting a peaceable avocation.

He had taught him to ride the wildest horses in the barony without bridle or saddle, and at full speed; he had taught him to handle a sword twice the length of himself, and to discharge a deadly shot, with arblast or arquebuse--to scour armour, sharpen blades, cast bullets, and make up bandoliers of powder. But there were many other features in the education acquired from this wooden-legged preceptor, which were more exceptionable; for he learned to drink "to a bluidy war," in a tass of raw usquebaugh, without once winking; to make faces at Mr. Jowlar during sermon, to steal his apples, and shoot his hens; to "cock his eye" at the dairymaid, and swear a few round oaths in High Dutch or Low Country Spanish, which had the double advantage of being more expressive than our plain Scottish, and less expensive, being evasions of the act by which swearers and banners come under the claws of the kirk-session; in short, under the tutelage of this old, one-legged and one-eyed, red-visaged, hard-drinking, swearing and storming veteran of the Flemish wars, young Halbert Gordon grew up a little desperado; and, as he increased in years, his ferocious disposition, and dangerous skill in using his hands, made him the aversion of all the young lairds, his companions, and a source of secret fear to all the little ladies in the neighbourhood.

The family of Donaldson at the Forest, consisted also of a widow, whose husband had left her with one daughter, the heiress of the old manor and all its pertinents. With her there also dwelt the son of a deceased sister, little Kenneth Logie, a poor and penniless orphan, who had no home save that which his kind aunt offered him; for his father, a ruined laird of Cromar, had fallen in a raid between the Earl of Mar and the Forbeses.

Isolated as those widows were in that sequestered district, there was no intercourse between them, and no community of feeling. The lady of the Moat was a strict Catholic, though her husband had fought against the gory banner of the Castiyador of Flanders. In her girlhood, she had heard Abbot Quentin Kennedy preach; and her father had seen the body of the great cardinal, hung naked and bleeding from the battlements of St. Andrews.

The lady of the Forest, the widow of umquhile John Donaldson, was a rigid Calvinist, and looking upon all Catholics with due aversion, gave the lady of the moated tower the utmost possible space when they met at the weaponshows, the burrow-town market, or on the horse way, lest their fardingales should touch; for each thought there was more than mortal contamination in the person of the other. The Calvinist was "a heretic;" the Catholic "an idolater;" and yet the poor for thirty miles round were wont to aver, that two women more beneficent, gentle-hearted, and amiable, within their own domestic circles, than the ladies of the Tower and Forest, could not be found in the kingdom of Scotland. The mischievous fulminations of the Reverend Maister Jowlar, the parish pastor, on one hand, and those of Father Ogilvie (a wandering priest of the Scottish mission), on the other, had left nothing undone to foster this unhappy state of local politics, and their adverse advices fanned the flames of discord, till the aversion and jealousy of the two brocaded and high-heeled dames extended downward through all their dependants. Thus we can compare the two estates of Colstaine and Culbleine only to two countries--a Catholic and a Protestant--in a state of watchfulness, and prepared for instant war. Very little would have brought the "heretics and idolaters" to blows; for if old Jock of the Cleugh with his wooden-leg, was ready to advance at the head of the Catholics, from the mosses and moorlands, on one side; the aged butler of Culbleine, who had shouldered a pike in 1559, and lost an eye at the memorable siege of Leith (fighting against M. d'Essé Epainvilliers, colonel-general of the French infantry in the service of the Scottish queen), was ready, on the other, to march at the head of the Calvinists; thus it required all the terror of the sheriff and his deputies to keep peace in the parish between the rival powers. But there were three little personages in this community, who, for a time at least, had no share in those religious heartburnings.

These were the little heiress of the Forest, her cousin, Kenneth Logie, and Halbert Gordon of the Tower. When Lily Donaldson was ten, and the boys two years older, they had frequently met in their rambles, and by meeting became playmates. Little Lily had bright blue eyes, and fair hair; she was light, happy, smiling, and seemed like a beautiful fairy--though there never was a fairy, so round, so noisy, and so full of fun and laughter; but Kenneth was a grave and quiet boy, with a mild eye and gentle voice, a pale and thoughtful brow.

Old people were wont to tap him on the head, and say he was like his mother.

Then Kenneth would bend his calm inquiring eyes on theirs, and wonder what like _this_ mother was; for he had never known any other parent than the mother of Lily. Though their chance companion, Halbert Gordon (a dark-eyed and black-haired boy), was a model of strength and health, he was neither stronger nor healthier than Kenneth, but was more rash, proud, passionate and resentful, than any boy in Croinar; and, as he rose in years, those troublesome propensities waxed strong within him, and grew with his growth. When his haughty mother, or Jock of the Cleugh, desired him to finish his prayers by a malediction on "all obstinate heretics," he always made a mental reservation in favour of his secret friends at the Forest--fair Lily Donaldson, and her quiet cousin, Kenneth Logie.

Now it happens that the little people of this world will have their little love dreams, as well as those who consider themselves men and women, but are only grown children after all; and thus a secret sympathy expanded in the hearts of little Kenneth and his pretty cousin--a sympathy which Lily's mother (who loved her dead sister's son as if he were her own) left nothing undone to fasten: and it strengthened fast this charming and childish love.

They were ever together, and were never known to quarrel. In that lonely pastoral district, all their amusements and objects were centred in each other; for save the dark, sullen boy of the moated Tower, they knew no other companion, and even he was known to them only by stealth.

Kenneth had no secrets from Lily, and Lily knew neither wish nor hope, a sorrow or a joy, in which "cousin Kenneth" did not participate. They seemed to have but one heart between them. The garden of the Place, with its closely clipped and gigantic yew hedges bordering grass walks (in the Scoto-French fashion), the fish-pond and the terraces, were the boundaries of the Eden they inhabited.

They knew of no land that lay beyond the blue hills of Strathdon, which seemed to them the verge of the habitable world. They indulged in visions, and what little people do not? Lily saw herself a great lady riding on a white palfrey, whose footcloth swept the ground; Kenneth saw himself the provost of a city--the general of an army--the laird of a noble barony--a belted earl, addressing the three estates in defence of the church, the laws, and liberties of Scotland. These airy castles faded away at nightfall, but were as brilliantly rebuilt in a thousand happy forms at their meetings next day. They were ever together, as we have said, and year after year, as it passed over their fair young brows, found them still wreathed with smiles.

The old lady of the Forest and the Lea, when she saw their curly heads nestling in the same plaid, would often bless them, and say,--

"My puir bairns, ye were just made for ilk ither!"

And the old servitors of the Place loved to call them their "young laird and leddy--man and wife," and were wont to foretell that one day they would become so.

Then the little pair looked with wonder into each other's bright eyes, marvelling what "man and wife" meant, but resolving that, whatever it did mean, they would not and could not love each other the less, or be less happy than they were; but would still hunt bees and butterflies, gather hare and heather bells, and make little chapels and houses in the green haughs, when the hawthorn bloomed in summer.

The round of their pleasures was small, and the _little chapel_--nathless the Reformation--was still a favourite amusement with the children of Scotland, as it is now with those of continental countries. Thus, a mimic altar was set up, with a cross and candles thereon; a circle of stones formed its precinct; Halbert Gordon was the officiating priest, and little Lily his whole congregation, and very devout she was; but without the circle of this baby chapel Kenneth Logie would stand doubtfully aloof, for his aunt and grim Master Jowlar had taught him to abhor such things, and, less compliant than the gentle Lily, he dreaded Catholicism as burned children dread the fire.

The banks of the kirk-burn, whose ceaseless waters came out of the distant woods, and whose far off source was one of wonder to their infant minds, reflected every day their smiling faces as they wove fairy caps among the rushes, or set fleets of bluebells floating down its current; but the bold young baron of the moated Tower led them elsewhere, for he shewed Kenneth where the golden eagle and the dark osprey built their nests in the perpendicular rocks of Baud-kroskie; and where the fierce fiumart nursed its red cubs among the ivy-covered holes, daring him to climb with his dagger in his teeth, to rob the former and slay the latter.

Then, when Kenneth modestly declined, the reckless Gordon, with a triumphant glance at the little lady, and a laugh of scorn and derision, would clench his poniard in his strong white teeth, and grasping the weeds, the ivy, the rocks, or bushes, would ascend the steep cliffs like a squirrel, with the clouds and mist above, and the waters of the Dee flowing deep and dark below, while the two cousins held their breath with terror, as they watched him. Then the eagle would be seen to fly from its eyry with a shriek, and, torn from its bed, the nest would fall at the feet of Lily; or at times she was still more terrified by a fox or a fiumart rolling down the rocks, drenched in its blood. Then came Halbert Gordon, descending with the rapidity of an evil spirit, with his cheek flushed and his eyes on fire, to laugh at Lily's terror and Kenneth's timidity; to exult in his own superior daring--to exhibit his bloody poniard, and say tauntingly--

"I will be a brave leal knight, even as my father was; but you, Master Kenneth, may weel become a monk, and snuffle Latin in Logie-Kirk."

Though less rash and vindictive, Kenneth was a brave boy, too; and his heart swelled with secret passion at these open taunts. Thus, by degrees, the fierce little chieftain of the Tower learned to despise him, and, as their years increased, he took every opportunity of endeavouring to lessen Kenneth in the estimation of his cousin. The boys often quarrelled; but, boy like, they just as often became apparent friends again. Kenneth Logie respected and even loved Gordon for his bravery; but feared his proud and passionate temper. Gordon admired Kenneth's skill as a deadly shot with the arquebuse and pistolette, but despised his caution; while Lily instinctively loved her cousin, and feared their companion, though he loved her well, for her exceeding gentleness, her obliging disposition, and the grace with which she said and did all those pretty nothings, which are as pleasing in the artless little girl as in the winning and well-bred woman.

Time passed on.

The boys became youths, both tall and strong; while the fair wild-bud that blossomed in the Forest of Culbleine, was daily unfolding some new charm as it expanded into beauty and bloom.