CHAPTER L.

THE SUMMER SPEAT.

"Well mounted on their gallant steeds, The brothers led the van; And with four-and-twenty troopers gude Their midnight march began."--_Ballad._

The fatal Friday was a dark and lowering day; the sun had been hidden in fiery clouds, and torrents of rain had fallen, swelling all the mountain streams. The minds of Euphemia and Sybilla Drummond, though joyful in the certainty of their loved sister's safety, were oppressed to some extent by vague forebodings of evil. Lord Drummond was still ignorant of his daughter's discovery, for he was absent on a mission of the insurgents, and was still nursing and maturing his plans of vengeance against James III., whom he deemed and styled "a forfeited and fugitive king."

Well attended, guarded, and surrounded as they were by many hundreds of faithful and obsequious vassals, whose adherence combined the love of the patriarchal clansman with the servility of the Lowland feudal serf, the two young lords had little difficulty in having the mansion of umquhile Sir Andrew Barton closely watched; and on the afternoon of Friday, Borthwick, who had been lying, _en perdue_, somewhere in the vicinity, announced to them that the two daughters of Lord Drummond had "set forth on their pretended pilgrimage to Loretto."

The two noble suitors hastened to assure themselves that such was indeed the case, and had the chagrin to see them pass out from Leith by St. Anthony's Porte, their cheeks flushed with fear and pleasure, and their eyes beaming, well mounted on ambling horses, with long and sweeping foot-cloths over their saddles, and each attended by a female servant, who rode on a pillion behind a page, and carried each a basket of offerings to the hermit.

"They ride fast," said Home, as they whipped their horses across the level links.

"They will come less speedily back," said Hailes, with his dark but courtly smile; "a heavy heart makes a slow wayfarer and their hearts I ween will be heavy enough."

"Two women and two pages----"

"A slender escort this for noble dames."

"Especially in such ticklish times as these."

"True, my lord; but what will not women risk for a lovers' sake?" said Hailes.

"Two painted pages (I'll have the rascals scourged!) may be guard enough in Lothian here; but in the Merse, or Teviotdale, a hundred spears were not a man too many, if one goes but a hundred yards from one's own gate."

"They have left betimes," said the chief of the Hepburns, looking up at a dial-stone that projected from the corner of St. Anthony's Gate.

"And at what time shall we set forth to spoil this precious pilgrimage--this dainty love-making?"

"Somewhere about six at even," said Hailes.

"Then we shall have the whole night before us."

"All the better; I have directed Borthwick and Blackcastle--"

"I doubt whether my kinsman would like such a conjunct partnership."

"Well, Blackcastle and Borthwick," said Home, impatiently, "with twenty of my most unscrupulous mosstroopers--Johnstones, thieves of Annandale, men who would spear their own brother if I wished them--to be all in their jacks betimes, and mounted to ride with us."

"Pleasant and honourable company," said Lord Hailes, with a smile.

"But fitted for the occasion, my lord," replied Home, firmly; "we know not but those scurvy fellows, Barton and Falconer, may have some of their ruffianly seamen with them; and if so, by my father's hand and by the crest of Home, though it be beneath our rank to draw on varlets such as these, I'll not leave in all Loretto one alive to tell the story to their admiral!"

As he spoke, Home clenched one hand, and with the other thrust his furred cap of maintenance over his dark and fiery eyes.

"Good, my lord; farewell until we meet again," said Hailes; "if to-day we do not teach these fellows a sharp lesson, this glorious raid against the court and king, and that most signal triumph before the walls of Stirling, have been less than vain."

And these two ferocious and unlettered nobles, though bent upon committing one of those atrocities which occurred daily among their proud, turbulent, and unpatriotic class in Scotland, bowed and parted as quietly and as pleasantly as if their appointed tryst had been for a pleasant evening ride in some green lane, instead of one for sacrilege and murder.

The troop of twenty men, who assembled near a gate of the King's Wark, and from thence set forth under the guidance of the two nobles, the Laird of Blackcastle and their new ally, Hew Borthwick, in their aspect and appearance did full justice to that character for ease and flexibility of conscience ascribed to them by Lord Home. They were all strong, dark, and sinewy men, whose forms were hardened into mere bone and brawn, and were durable as iron; for they were lawless mosstroopers, Scottish Bedouins, in fact; men who won every meal at the spear's point, and lived in their harness; men whose dwellings were among wild morasses, pathless woods, and inaccessible mountains; where law was never known, and religion little heard of; wild and predatory warriors, who fought against their countrymen as readily as against the common enemy that dwelt beyond the frontier; for, like the Ishmaelities, their hands were upraised against all men.

Their armour, which consisted of a splinted jack with plate sleeves and steel gloves, head-piece and gourgerin, was all rusty and well dinted by many a sword-cut and lance-thrust. Their beards and whiskers flowed out between their steel cheek-plates, ample and uncombed as the shaggy manes of their strong and active border steeds. Well-armed and fleetly-mounted, Home and Hailes, divested of every distinguishing badge, rode together at their head.

Wheeling off the main street between the hedge-rows of the Cotefield-loan, the whole party crossed the green and sandy links, and entered on the vast and purple expanse of the Figgate-muir, which was covered by the mossy stumps of an old druidical forest, whose roots are yet turned up by the plough and spade.

Shrill blew the wind, and drearily boomed the waves upon their left. The estuary of the Forth looked black as ink, and its billows rolled in white foam upon the lonely beach with a deep and hollow sound. The slanting aspect of the clouds showed that the rain, which had been pouring all that morning in torrents, was again about to descend; and though the party rode fast to escape it, they had only reached the little Chapel of Saint Mary Magdalene, which stood among some coppice near a stream that poured through a ravine into the sea, when it descended with such fury as almost to blind even the border riders, and the wind blew as if it would have blown its last, driving the sand from the shore across the open moor, and forcing the horsemen to seek shelter in the grove, while the two lords dismounted and entered the chapel, the door of which stood open, and before the altar of which they made the usual involuntary genuflection, by half-kneeling and signing the cross; and this, with them, was a very useless piece of mummery.

"How unlucky!" said Home, as the rain continued to fall in torrents upon the stone roof of the little oratory, while the stream beside it rolled in red foambells upon the beach; "this devilish tempest may spoil all, and there seems little chance of its lulling soon."

"Had our meeting with these rascals been elsewhere than at Loretto, there might not perhaps have been a storm."

"Art really so weak as to think this?" said Home.

"I know not what to think--but I like it not," replied his companion, shrugging his shoulders; for he was not without his share of the superstition incident to the time and country.

"How," continued Lord Home, with a lowering expression in his keen and fiery eyes, as he seated himself on a stone bench near the steps of the rude altar, and dashed the water from his plume; "your words would imply that Heaven itself was against us."

"I know not; but this sudden storm hath broken on us with wondrous fury, and here we are forced to draw our bridles within four miles of the place."

"Rest assured, my good lord, that Heaven leaves you and me to mind our own affairs. The elements would never be at peace if storms were raised to cross every man's purpose in Scotland; and least of all will they raise such an infernal hubbub as this to save a couple of scurvy varlets, who must swing, even as their companions swung, over Lander Bridge, in our raid of '82. There is one comfort, however," continued the practical but irreverent chief of the Homes, listening for a moment as the wind howled through the unglazed windows of the edifice, and the rain drenched the copsewood near it, and hissed along the beach till surf and sand were smoking; "we may be assured that the same storm which stays us here must keep our fair dames in shelter at Loretto, while it may also save us all trouble by kindly sending their lovers to feed the fishes of the Firth."

"But suppose we find the cockbirds flown?"

"Think not of such a disappointment."

"Yet such a thing is possible."

"Remember that Lady Euphemia, in her precious post scriptum, spoke of spending the night in vigil and in prayer."

"Profound prayer no doubt it will be, with a couple of saucy gallants to hold their tapers and turn the missal leaves," said Hailes, with a smile of contempt.

"St. Mary, how the sky darkens!"

"And how the rain comes down!"

"This burn beside us is swelling into a perfect torrent."

"How fare our rogues of Annandale in the thicket?"

"Ill enough, I doubt not," replied the Laird of Blackcastle; "and methinks they were as well riding as standing there, like todlowries under a lynn."

"You forget that no man could keep his saddle in such a tempest of wind," said Lord Home.

"Of a surety it must portend some coming evil; a pestilence, or an English invasion," added the superstitious Hailes.

As the chapel of Loretto stood in a solitary place beyond the eastern gate of Musselburgh, the two lords arranged that, on setting forth again, when once the Esk was crossed, it should be surrounded, an alarm given, and that all should be killed who issued forth--every man at least; for they had no wish to incur the vengeance of a tyrannical hierarchy which was full of power and strength, by actually slaughtering their victims within the walls or precincts of a church, if such a catastrophe could be possibly avoided.

But while, within a holy place, and close to the altar of their religion and their God--the symbolical throne, before which they had each gravely, and not the least in mockery, made a low reverence--they sat planning this projected outrage, and combining with their own views such suggestions as the mischievous and blood-thirsty spirit of Borthwick proposed, the storm still continued to howl along the shore; the rain still poured in one broad and blinding cataract; and torn from the woodlands by the furious wind, the wet leaves were whirled and swept in myriads across the moor, which at times was shrouded in mist and spray; and for hours this continued, with occasional gleams of lightning; and the mosstroopers, who had unsaddled their terrified horses and haltered them to the trees, now crowded, all drenched and disconsolate, into the dreary little chapel beside their leaders, where they grumbled and muttered under their thick beards, while drinking raw whiskey from their portable leather flasks and horn quaighs.

As the evening drew on and the place grew dark, they were not without their own fears that the elements were indeed in league against them; and now, enraged that their well-matured stratagem should be crossed by an intervention so unlooked for, their lords sat in sullen silence, listening to the din without; and the time seemed interminably long, for there were then no watches to mark the passing hours, and even had a dial been there, without the sun it had been useless.

"At last," said Home, "at last the wind lulls! Horse and spear, my Annan wights--let us mount, and begone!"

The horses were soon saddled and their riders mounted. Though the wind had lulled, the rain poured down as furiously as ever. The time was now past nine in the evening; but the gloomy aspect of the sky made the drenched landscape and the sea look very dark, for the sun had set enveloped in dense banks of opaque and murky cloud, behind the Ochil peaks, Dumiat, and the hills of Alloa.

The riders soon passed the hamlet named the Fisher Row, and reached the ancient bridge of the Roman Municipium, the arches of which still span "the mountain Esk," the opposite bank of which was covered with copsewood, where the dark and heavy oak mingled its thick crisped foliage with the lighter spray of the pale-green sauch and the feathery ash-tree. This venerable bridge consists of three quaint high and narrow arches, "over which," says one of our modern writers, "all of noble or kingly birth that approached Edinburgh for at least a thousand years must have passed; which has witnessed the processions of monks, the march of armies, and the trains of kings; which has rattled beneath the feet of Mary's ambling steed, and thundered beneath the war-horse of Cromwell."

Swollen by the summer flood, the Esk was found by our troopers to be rolling in one vast sheet of foam under the three arches, each of which are fifty feet in width; and in froth and spray its red current lashed furiously against their strong abutments, sweeping the mingled spoil of field and fell, uprooted trees, straw, hay, and grass, farm implements, rafters, and garden-pales, with the rolling carcasses of sheep and cattle, into the harbour, which was _then_ so deep as to admit the largest merchantmen of Norway, of Pomerania, and of Holland; and many of these vessels, built in that quaint style which the Dutch have yet retained unchanged, were riding with all their anchors out, to stem the furious _speat_.

The narrow pathway of the bridge was then barred or spanned by a transverse arch and an iron gate, traces of which are yet remaining in the parapets. The warder dwelt in a small house on the other side, and as the barrier was closed, the night darkening fast, and the rain still pouring down, the two lords and their drenched mosstroopers halloed loudly and impatiently for passage through; but the keeper of the gate paid not the slightest attention to their loud and angry summons.

"Hark," said Lord Hailes; "what hour is that now striking?"

The mournful notes of an old bell were now heard, but faintly and far between, upon the gusts of wind.

"Ten by Musselburgh clock," said Borthwick; "ten, and we still loiter here!"

Above the trees they could discern, against the murky sky, quaint steeple of the Town House, in which there yet remains a bell-clock of the fifteenth century, which was presented to the burgh by their High Mightinesses, the States of Holland.

The dusk was now so deep that the foliaged bank opposite seemed all black and solid; and the white and foaming river boiled and thundered past so rapidly and fiercely, that the boldest trooper among our adventurers shrunk from attempting to swim his horse across it; for if they essayed it above the bridge, they ran the chance of being brained against the arches, on which the stream had risen; and if below it, of being powerlessly swept with the _débris_ of its banks among the boats and shipping. Red and fiery, the stars were seen to peep at times between the flying scud, while the dark trees tossed their foliage on the gusty wind, like the black plumes of our modern Scottish infantry.

At times a mournful cry rose amid the gloom that enveloped the rolling river, and the grim horsemen reined back their reeking steeds, and looked darkly and inquiringly in each other's faces.

"Hear ye that, sirs?" said the Laird of Blackcastle. "What doth it sound like?"

"The monks chanting _De Profundis_ in St. Michael's Kirk," said Lord Hailes.

"God's malison on this base runnion of a warder!" cried Borthwick, impatiently.

"Hark!" said Hailes; "there comes that wailing cry again!"

"'Tis the Water Kelpie!" muttered the troopers, for the belief in that aquatic demon was yet strong in Scotland; and thus there was not a rider there who did not tremble at the idea of being drawn by that voracious fiend into his den below the flood.

"By my soul, I'll ride the river," said Hailes, boldly; "there should be a ford here, I think but the darkness is such that I cannot see."

"Beware in Heaven's name, my lord," cried Blackcastle, anxiously throwing his horse before the charger of his chief; "beware, lest your life be needlessly perilled; for even were the flood stemmed, ye may not abide the Kelpie's grasp. Listen to me," he continued, speaking breathlessly; "I had once a narrow escape from one at the Brig of Tyne, when last I crossed it during a Lammas flood. I had bought me a black horse from a strange-looking carle at the Haddington market; and at the sight of water, however far off, this horse became wild and frantic; it kicked, plunged, and neighed; and when we offered him a drink, he dashed over the bucket, and laved its contents about him with delight. When I rode him along the bridge at the Nunraw, he uttered an awesome yell as he rose into the air with me, and sprang over the parapet; and lo! I found myself astride a kelpie in that black Lammas flood, at mirk midnight! He turned upon me with open jaws, and eyes that blazed with fire! But I signed the cross between us, and then he sunk from me, yelling like a fiend as he was; and drowned I had been assuredly, had I not caught the branch of a sauch-tree and reached the shore----"

"And thy devilish horse-couper, what of him?"

"He was never more seen."

"St. Mary! he must have been the devil!" said Hailes.

"Or Michael Scott of Balwearie," said Home.

"Blackcastle, blow thy bugle," said his chief, "and we'll crop the gate-ward's ears if they hear it not."

"Woe to the loitering villain!" grumbled Home.

"His gudewife will be keeping him a-bed," said the other lord; "and perhaps the poor man dare not rise."

"I _have_ heard that the grey mare is the better horse here," said Blackcastle, as he blew a startling blast; "and I have seen good proof that the poor gate-ward is only Joan Tamson's man, as the saw hath it."

"How----"

"The rosemary sprig borne at their wedding now flourishes in his kail-yard, like a green bay-tree."

"The drowsy rascal; I'll strew its branches on his coffin board. Blow again!"

Once more Blackcastle poured the notes of his horn to the wind; and as the echoes mingled with the roaring of the river and the moaning of the trees, that low wailing cry, so chilling to their hearts, was heard again; and now lights began to twinkle in the warder's cottage.

"Pest upon thee, villain!" said Borthwick; "while we are detained here, our birds may indeed be flown from Loretto. He ought to know 'tis no ordinary errand that bringeth men abroad in weather such as this."

As he spake a white figure, evidently that of a woman in a long dress, appeared on the opposite bank of the stream, and beckoned repeatedly to the troopers to attempt the ford.

"'Tis the keeper's wife," said one; "I ken the carlin weel by her lang luggit mutch."

"'Tis the Kelpie--beware, beware!" said another, while their horses trembled, kicked, and plunged, and their eyes shot fire, as a deadly terror seemed to possess them--a terror easily communicated to their superstitious riders.

Still the figure pointed to the ford and beckoned impatiently.

"Thank you, mistress," cried Hailes; "but we would rather not attempt it; so instantly open the gate."

But she continued to beckon, and her voice, if she used it, was lost in the howling of the wind and the hoarse roaring of the stream; so, finding their horses were becoming quite unmanageable, Lord Home lost his temper, a commodity which he was ever losing and long of recovering.

"Hag!" he exclaimed; "undo the gate, or begone at once _to hell_!"

On this, it is related, a wild shriek was heard, and the white wavering figure disappeared.

At the same moment, the warder came hurriedly and opened the barrier.

"Wretched varlet!" said the imperious Home, giving the man a blow with his clenched hand; "thou hast kept us waiting long enough; why did not that hag of thine open the gate, instead of seeking to wile us by the ford?"

"A thousand humble pardons, noble gentlemen," stammered the poor warder; "but--but--a hag, said ye?"

"Ay, thy gudewife, carle," said Blackcastle; "I know her well enough by her long-eared coif."

"God assoil us! Ye have seen a spirit; for my wife was drowned at the ford this fatal morning, and noo we are streekin' her puir wat corpse for the burial! Oh! sirs," wept the keeper, "what is this o't--what is this o't?"

"By St. Mary! we have seen a spectre!" shouted Hailes, dashing spurs into his horse, and clearing the bridge at abound; and furiously all the train followed him through the dark but wide street of Musselburgh.

This event shed a species of horror over the whole party, whose faculties, never very clear at any time, were past inquiring whether or not it was a supernatural figure they had seen; so they all spurred on to leave the bridge and stream behind, and to reach Loretto as soon as possible. But whether the delay which occurred at the gate was productive of good or evil consequences to the lovers at the Hermitage, another chapter or so will disclose.