CHAPTER IX.

LOVE AND PRINCIPLE.

My promised husband and my dearest friend; Since heaven appoints this favoured race to reign, And blood has drenched the Scottish fields in vain, May I be wretched and thy flight partake? Or wilt not thou for thy loved Chloe's sake, Tired out at length submit to fate's decree. TICKELL.

"And this is the fate to which you have dedicated yourself?" said Lilian, weeping; "to become a follower of that fierce Dundee in the desperate course on which he is about to fling himself. Oh, Walter Fenton, this is the very folly of enthusiasm. Too surely can we see that the hand of Fate is against the House of Stuart."

"Lilian," replied her lover, with mournful surprise, "the daughter of an old Cavalier house should have other thoughts than these. Remember, dear Lilian, there is not in Europe a royal race for which so many of the good and the gallant, the brave and the loyal, have from the foughten field and the reeking scaffold given up their souls to God. Let no man judge harshly of those whose splendour is dimmed for a time; for the hour _shall_ come when in the full zenith of their pride and power, the old line of our Scottish kings----"

"'Tis all a dream, Walter. The entire nations are against them. I feel a presentiment that they and their followers are doomed to wither and perish like brands in the burning."

"My faith! art turning preacher, lassie?"

"Oh, what a prospect for thee, Walter!"

"The world is all before me; and I can always preserve my honour, my heart, and my sword. But thou, Lilian----"

"Am beside thee, dear Walter," said she, with touching artlessness; "and is not happiness better than honour?"

"True, true," replied the young man, while he kissed her hand, and his eyes filled with tenderness. "Ah, Lilian, it is the thought that I am leaving you, perhaps for ever, that alone unnerves me for the deadly venture in which we are about to engage. Hopeless though the cause of James may be, we have sworn not to survive it; and, come weal or woe, we will unfurl his standard on the northern hills, and if it waves not over us in victory, it shall never do so in defeat or dishonour; for to the last man we will perish on the sod beneath it. Your memory alone will make me sad--but am I singular? How many of these my brave companions have gentle ones to leave, mothers who bless, and sisters who love them, while I am alone. Save thee, there is nothing that binds me to this world. What of it is mine? The six feet that shall make my grave!"

"O! most ungrateful Walter," said Lilian, in a low voice of confusion and tenderness; "is not all that I have yours, manor and lands? are not these possessions ample? Greedy Gled," she added, smiling; "what better tocher would you have?"

"Lilian," sighed Walter, in a thick voice, as he pressed her hand to his heart, "it may not be, dearest--yet awhile, at least."

The blushing girl gave him a timid and startled glance of inquiry.

"I am solemnly pledged to Dundee."

"Cruel Claverhouse! has he more charms for you than I have?"

"You know that my heart is full of you, Lilian; but there is also room for ambition in it. I cannot live ignobly and obscure; as such I would be unworthy to possess you. I would feel myself a nameless intruder under the rooftree of your crested ancestors, whose armorial blazons on every panel and window-pane, would shame my meaner birth, and put me to the blush."

"Ungrateful! after all I have urged and said. 'Tis a dream, Walter, a mere dream, but one that will make the world dark--oh! very dark to me."

"'Tis very true; I am choosing the path of proscription, danger, and death; but the fortune of war may better the prospects of my faction."

"After years of separation, perhaps."

"With happiness in prospect, they would soon pass, dear Lilian."

"Oh, this wicked Claverhouse! he hath quite cast a glamour over you. How can you talk so calmly of years of separation? What may not be lost in that time?"

"My life on the field, or scaffold, perhaps."

"Your life is mine, Walter; it was pledged to me. Have you forgot the 20th of September, and the hour by the fountain?"

"Dearest girl, how could I ever forget it? 'Tis true, Lilian, that we are in the very flower of our days; the bloom of our youth and existence is at its full; love, tenderness, beauty, and susceptibility, all glow within our hearts."

"And will not the roll of years make them dull, diminish their force, and cool their fervour? Oh, heavens! I am quite making love to you," said Lilian, blushing crimson; "but danger and the risk of losing you have endued me with great boldness."

"But time will never diminish the love I bear thee, Lilian; and the memory of this hour's bitter struggle--this conflict between a love that is irresistible and the strong ties of honour, that bind me to the banner of Dundee, will haunt me to my grave!" Tears started into his eyes.

A silence ensued. Poor Lilian had nothing more to urge; and despite of all her gentleness, felt both intensely grieved and mortified, if not quite piqued, at Walter, whose heart was wrung by an agony too acute for words. As they rode past the thick woodlands that shelter the venerable church of St. Cuthbert, they heard a shrill but cracked voice chanting slowly--

"I like ane owl in désart am, &c."

"By Jove! 'tis the villain who slew poor Joram," exclaimed Walter, drawing a pistol from his holsters; but the voices of two other persons finishing the verse, arrested him. "Astonishment! 'tis the voice of Finland!" said Walter, as he spurred his horse close to a fauld dyke, on the other side of which he saw, what? Annie Laurie, and his old friend and brother Cavalier, Finland, on their knees, beside Mr. Ichabod Bummel, chanting a psalm in most dolorous accents.

"By all the devils!" said Walter, almost bursting with laughter; "'tis the age of miracles this! What, ho! Dick Douglas and Mistress Anne Laurie, singing hymns among the heather like two true laverocks of the persecuted kirk."

"Woe unto thee, thou troubler of the just in spirit!" cried Mr. Ichabod, unsheathing his broadsword. "I have plucked the youth and the maiden like brands from the fire which is fated to consume all such unrepentant persecutors of Israel as thee."

"I have seen a new light," said Finland, giving Walter a sly wink of deep meaning.

"And so have _I_," added Mistress Laurie, demurely; "and command thee, Walter Fenton, thou man of sin, to treat this holy expounder of the Gospel with becoming reverence."

"Annie--oh, Annie!" cried Lilian, as she boldly leaped the mare over the fauld dyke, and threw herself into the arms of her friend.

"My service to you, Mr. Ichabod," said Walter, bowing to the rawboned preacher; but quite unable to unriddle the mystery of this rencounter, he whispered to Finland (while the slayer of Joram was engaged with Lilian), "What the devil does all this mean, Dick?"

"Learn in a few words," replied Finland, who was in as miserable a plight as dust, smoke, and a hundred bruises could make him. "Annie and I had a most miraculous escape amid the horrors of last night. I will tell you of it anon--'twas quite a devil of a business. As for me, I am well used to such camisadoes, having been blown up at Namur, and twice nearly drowned in the Zuiderzluys; but how my adorable Annie escaped, Heaven, who saved her, can only know. We were in the hands of the most villanous mob the world ever saw; they were about to hang me from the arm of the Girth-cross; and Annie--oh! my blood bubbles like boiling water when I think of what they intended for her; when this leathern-jawed apostle, who, with all his psalm-singing and whiggery, hath some good points of honesty about him, brought us off, sword in hand; we bundled out of the city without blast of trumpet; and here we are. As a gentleman of cavalier principles," said Finland, colouring, "you may marvel that I would condescend to chant a psalm like a mere clown or canting herdsman; but as we are utterly at the mercy of this Ichabod Mummel or Bummel, I had no choice. He needs must----tush! you know the musty old saw."

"It is enough, maiden," said the preacher, replying to something Lilian had said, and taking, with an air of real kindness, the little hand of the shrinking girl within his own great bony paw, "I know thee to be the kinswoman of that godly matron, Grisel Napier, who, though wedded to as cruel a persecutor as ever bestrode a war-horse--yea, and though leavened in their wickedness withal, sheltered me in the days of my exceeding tribulation, when there was a flaming sword over Israel, and when, as a humble instrument in the cause of that great Saviour of the Kirk (whose coming I foretold in my _Bombshell_, whilk hath not yet the luck to be printed), I came from Holland to this land of anarchy, and had no where to lay my head. She clothed and sheltered me, for the sake of that loved kinsman who is now no more, slain by some accursed persecutor, whom I would smite--yea, maiden, both hip and thigh, if I had him within reach of this good old whinger, that so oft hath avenged the fall of our martyrs!"

Walter instinctively grasped his sword, startled by the stern energy of the preacher, who continued--

"It is enough maiden,--with me ye are safe, and to a place of peace I will conduct you and your friend; but for these two sons of the scarlet woman--these slaves of Jezebel, who have been nursled in the blood of our saints and martyrs, and in whom it grieves me to think ye have garnered up your hearts, I may not, and cannot, with a safe conscience, protect them. Let them depart from me in peace; let them follow him who, ere long, will be called to a severe account for all his dark misdeeds--John Grahame of Claverhouse."

"'Tis sound advice, Mr. Bummel," said Walter, tightening his reins, and drawing off his glove. "By Heaven! I had quite forgotten; he will have crossed the Forth by this time, and it will require some exertion of horseflesh to rescue my honour. Finland, we must go. Mount Lilian's horse. Lilian," he added, in a low and tremulous voice, "farewell now; commend me to Lady Grisel, and bid her bless me; farewell, Lilian--we must part at last;" and stooping from his horse, he gently pressed her to his steel-cased breast, and kissed her.

"Oh! Walter, remain--remain," murmured Lilian.

"It cannot be--it is impossible now; I am pledged to Grahame of Claverhouse." And afraid to trust himself longer within hearing of her soft entreaties, lest love might overcome the stern principles of loyalty in which he had schooled himself, he leaped his horse over the fauld dyke; and while he felt as if his very heart was torn by the agony of that separation, he dashed along the road to the west, leaving Finland to follow as he chose.

With a mind overcharged by sad and bitter thoughts, Walter galloped madly on, retracing the way he had come with Lilian; his mind seemed a very whirlpool, and the events of the last twenty-four hours a dream. A steep old bridge, which the roadway crossed near the ancient manor of Sauchtoun was ringing beneath his horse's heels, when a distant shout made him rein up.

"Hollo!" cried Finland, as he came after him breathlessly on the panting mare; "what the devil--art gone mad, Walter? Oh this tormenting love--ha! ha!"

"I envy this happy flow of spirits, Finland!"

"Then you envy me the possession of all that fate hath left me in this bad world. This devilish commotion hath confiscated my free barony of Finland, and torn my arms at the cross; still I am more gay than thee who hath nothing to lose."

"And after parting with one you love," continued Walter, almost piqued by his friend's lightness of heart; "parting perhaps for ever----"

"Tush, man--I am used to such partings. I have had many a love that was true while it lasted; but none like the passion I bear my dear Annie. My first flame was a blue-eyed damoisella of the Low Countries (her mother was a fleuriste in Ghent). I thought I loved her very much; but somehow at Bruges, Mons, and Bergen-op-Zoom, 'twas ever the same; I always left some one with a heavy heart; and cursed the générale, when in the cold foggy mornings it rang through the dark muddy streets, waking the storks on the high roofs above, and the drowsy boors in their beds below. I know that the wheels of fate and fortune are ever turning; some points may, and others must come round, to their first starting place, so I always live in hope. I was very sad in Ghent when our drums beat along the street of St. Michael, and I bade adieu to my fair one, coming away I remember by the window instead of the door."

"How--why?"

"I don't know, man," laughed Douglas; "but so we often left our billets in French Flanders. But I assure thee, lad, that under all this gaiety my heart is as heavy as thine; for I vow to thee, that the recollection of Annie with her beseeching blue eyes, her dark clustering hair and pallid cheek, the touching cadence of her voice, and the words she said to me are imprinted on my heart as if the hand of Heaven had written them there. By the bye I have composed a famous song about her."

"A song!"

"Music and all. I wrote it on the night we were about to sack the old house of Bruntisfield in search of yonder spindle-shanked apostle. Ah, if in my absence Craigdarroch should dare--but ho! yonder are some of our friends halted under a tree upon that grassy knowe."

"There is something odd being acted there. Does not yonder white feather wave in the steel bonnet of Dundee?"

"He is permitting some false Whig to sing his last psalm under _the_ convenient branch where he is doomed to feed the corbies. Dundee is very kind in that way sometimes."

Recrossing the stream called the Leith, they rode towards a knoll that rose amid the marshy ground near the castle loch of Corstorphine. There a dozen of the cavalier troopers were dismounted, and leaning on their swords or carbines, were holding their bridles in a cluster round Dundee, who was still on horseback, and in the act of addressing a disarmed prisoner, in whom with surprise and sorrow they recognized the young Laird of Holsterlee.

Cool and collected, with folded arms he firmly encountered the large dark eyes of Dundee, which were fixed with stern scrutiny upon him. The group of his comrades surveyed him with glances of mingled scorn and pity.

"Holsterlee!" said the Viscount, who held in one hand a long Scots pistol, in the other a letter; "how little could I once have suspected that you, the best cavalier of the king's life guard, and one in whose loyalty and high spirit I trusted so much, would stoop to this dishonour! The attempt simply of deserting to take service with this vile usurper, though bad enough in itself, is as nothing compared to the treachery which this stray letter has revealed. Fool and villain! thou knowest that I am the last hope of the king's cause in Scotland, and that if I fall it will be buried in my grave; and yet thou art in league with this accursed Convention to destroy me! A thousand English guineas for my head, thou villanous scape-the-gallows and companion of grooms and horseboys, who hast squandered away a fair repute and noble patrimony among rakehelly gamesters and women of pleasure, dost thou value the head of a Scottish peer at a sum so trifling? hah!" He uttered a bitter laugh. "What," he resumed, "hast thou to urge, that I should not hang thee from the branch of this beech tree?"

"That I am a gentleman," replied Holsterlee boldly; "a lesser baron of blood and coat-armour by twelve descents, and should not die the death of a peasant churl or faulty hound."

"Right!" exclaimed Dundee, whose dark and terrible eyes began to fill with their dusky fire. "A gentleman should die by the hand of another, for every punishment is disgraceful. DEATH is the only relief from the consciousness of crime. Thou shalt have the honour of perishing by the hand of the first cavalier in Scotland. _Thus_ shalt thou die--now God receive thy soul!" and pointing upward with his bridle hand, he levelled the pistol and fired. The ball passed through the brain of Holsterlee, and flattened against the plastered wail of a neighbouring cottage. The body sank prostrate on the turf, quivered for a moment, and then lay still and stiffening, with upturned eyes and relaxed jaws.

This act, which was the most terrible episode in the life of the stern Dundee, threw a chill on the hearts of his comrades; but he did not permit them to remain gazing on the lifeless remains of one who had ridden so long in their ranks, and who was the gayest fellow that ever cracked a jest, shuffled a card, or handed a coquette through the stately cotillion or joyous couranto.

"Our nags are somewhat breathed after the hot chase he gave us, gentlemen," said Dundee, deliberately reloading his pistol, and endeavouring under an aspect of external composure to conceal the immediate sorrow, remorse, and anger that too surely preyed upon his heart. "To horse! sling carbines--forward--trot!" and away they rode in silence leaving the cold remains of the dead man lying on the grassy sward, with his blood-dabbled locks waving in the morning wind, while the gleds and ravens wheeled and croaked around him with impatience.

But he felt not the one, and heard not the other.

He was stripped by the cottagers, and as his dress was remarkably rich, to prevent further inquiry they interred him where he lay between the bare beech tree and the old cottage wall*.

* On removing the walls of an old cottage near Tynecastle, a mile westward of Edinburgh, in 1843, the remains of a skeleton were found buried close by; the skull had been pierced by a bullet. In the plastered wall of the edifice a ball was found flattened against the stone.--_Edin. Advert._, April 18, 1843.