MARY OF LORRAINE.

An Historical Romance.

BY

JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF
"THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "THE AIDE-DE-CAMP," "ARTHUR BLANE,"
ETC. ETC.

"It was English gold and Scots traitors wan
Pinkeycleuch, but no Englishman."
OLD RHYME.

A NEW EDITION

LONDON:
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS,
BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL;
NEW YORK: 129, GRAND STREET.
1865.

Contents

I. [THE TOWER OF FAWSIDE]
II. [WESTMAINS]
III. [THE DEATH FEUD]
IV. [AN OLD SCOTTISH MATRON]
V. [THE "GOLDEN ROSE."]
VI. [CURIOSITY]
VII. [THE BRAWL]
VIII. [THE REGENCY OF ARRAN]
IX. [MISTRUST]
X. [IN WHICH THE PATIENT PROGRESSES FAVOURABLY]
XI. [THE OPAL RING]
XII. [MASTER POSSET]
XIII. [HOME]
XIV. [PRESTON TOWER]
XV. [THE LETTER OF THE VALOIS]
XVI. [THE COUNTESS]
XVII. [A SNARE]
XVIII. [THE DEATH-ERRAND]
XIX. [CADZOW FOREST]
XX. [MILLHEUGH]
XXI. [A BOTHWELL! A BOTHWELL!]
XXII. [THE SCORNED AMITY]
XXIII. [CADZOW CASTLE]
XXIV. [THE JOURNEY]
XXV. [THE PROCESSION]
XXVI. [THE CONVENTION OF ESTATES]
XXVII. [MADELINE HOME]
XXVIII. [CHAMPFLEURIE]
XXIX. [THE DOUGLAS ROOM]
XXX. [THE ROMAN ROCK]
XXXI. [THE JOURNEY HOME]
XXXII. [THE CHATELAINE OF THE TORWOOD]
XXXIII. [THE NEISH'S HEAD]
XXXIV. [THE NEISH'S HEAD—STORY CONTINUED]
XXXV. [A RIVAL]
XXXVI. [THE RETURN]
XXXVII. [LADY ALISON]
XXXVIII. [THE CHAPEL OF ST. MARTIN]
XXXIX. [THE LURE]
XL. [THE WAKENING]
XLI. [A BLOODY TRYST]
XLII. [THE PASSING BELL]
XLIII. [THE CROSS OF FIRE]
XLIV. [THE INVASION]
XLV. [THE MEN-AT-ARMS]
XLVI. [THE PARLEY]
XLVII. [THE BLACK SATURDAY]
XLVIII. [THE BATTLE]
XLIX. [THE FLIGHT]
L. [HAWTHORNDEN]
LI. [JOY]
LII. [PEDRO DE GAMBOA]
LIII. [THE GUISE PALACE]
LIX. [THE DEPARTURE]
LV. [SEQUEL TO THE INVASION]
LVI. [THE ISLE OF REST]
NOTES I: [FAWSIDE OF THAT ILK]
NOTES II: [THE BATTLE OF PINKEY]

PREFACE.

In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe something of the manners and inner life of the Lowland Scots at the period referred to, modernizing the language, which, to my English readers, might otherwise prove unintelligible.

For the political corruption of the Scottish noblesse at that—as at every other—period of their annals, ample proofs to support me are furnished by "Rymer's Foedera," and "Tytler's History;" while the fact that Henry VIII. and his successors too often employed in Scotland other and very different emissaries than the two I shall introduce to the reader, has been amply proved by the Calendar of State Papers on Scotland, lately published by Mr. Thorpe, who shows us that, in addition to the devastations and burning of his lawless invading armies of English, Spaniards, and Germans, he was base enough to hire secret assassins, to remove all who were inimical to his matrimonial speculations in Scotland.

Incidentally, I have introduced the terrible episode of a Highland feud which occurred in the time of James V. The story of "The Neish's Head" is still remembered in Strathearn; and I believe a different version of it appeared some years ago in a work entitled "The Scottish Wars."

The mode of torture mentioned in the adventure at Millheugh Tower, was not uncommon in those barbarous days. My attention was called, by a friend, to a paper which is preserved at Cullen House, Bauffshire, and which furnished the idea.

It formed part of a collection of MSS. which belonged to the late Rev. John Grant, of Elgin, and which, with his library, he bequeathed to his chief, the Earl of Seafield. It refers to the feud between the Earls of Huntley and Murray (which ended in the murder of the latter, at the Castle of Donibristle, in Fifeshire), and is a copy of a petition from the latter noble, the chief of the Grants, and Dunbar, sheriff of Moray, praying the government of James VI. to grant them protection against Huntley and his followers, and craving redress for injuries which they had sustained at his hands. After narrating many instances of fire-raising and bloodshed perpetrated by the Gordons, it demands justice "for the cruel slaughter of John Mhor, son of Alaster Mhor Grant, a kinsman and follower of John Grant, of Freuchie, who was hanged and smeikit in the cruick, till he died, by Patrick Gordon, brother to William Gordon, of Monaltrie, and five or six others, at the instance and command of the said George, Earl of Huntley."

In this document, which was dated 1591, there is another barbarity which I care not committing to print; but such were the cruelties and recklessness of life, about the times immediately before and after the Reformation, and the regency of Mary of Lorraine.

In the notes I have given a list—the gradual collection of years—of some of those Scottish gentlemen who fell in defence of their country on the 10th of September, 1547; and I have little doubt that many of my readers may discover their ancestors amongst them. I have seen no similar list so ample, save one that I possess of the brave who died at Flodden with King James.

26, DANUBE STREET, EDINBURGH,
May, 1860.

MARY OF LORRAINE.

CHAPTER I.
THE TOWER OF FAWSIDE.

The castle looketh dark without;
Within the rooms are cold and dreary;
The chill light from the window fades;
The fire it burneth all uncheery.
With meek hands cross'd beside the hearth,
The pale and anxious mother sitteth;
And now she listens to the bat
That, screaming, round the window flitteth.
Mary Howitt.

Ten miles eastward from the Cross of Edinburgh, and two southward from the sandy shore of the Firth of Forth, stands an old and ruined fortalice, named the Castle of Fawside, on a green ridge which rises by gradual and gentle undulations, to the height of three hundred feet above the sea.

In summer the foliage of a group of venerable trees generally conceals much of this ancient mansion, which occupies a lonely and sequestered spot; but its square crumbling chimneys and round turrets, cutting the sky line above the leafy coppice, are visible to all who traverse the roads which lie at the base of the aforesaid ridge. Covered with wood, and a little to the westward, is the hill of Carberry, the scene of Queen Mary's memorable surrender (some twenty years after the period of our present story) to those titled ruffians who styled themselves the Lords of the Congregation.

The more ancient part of this mansion is of unknown antiquity, and consists of a narrow and massive tower, entered by a low-browed archway, built of deep-red sandstone, facing the north. The arch gives access to a suite of those strong dark vaults which form the substructure of all old Scottish houses, and from thence, by a steep wheel stair (which contains a curious and secret hiding-place) we may ascend to a hall, the groined stone roof of which is still remaining, though covered on the top, where once the stone bartizan lay, by a coating of rich grass.

Here, in this grim and narrow tower, in the twelfth century, dwelt William de Fawsyde, a baron in the first parliament of King David I.; and his son Edmund, who stood by that brave monarch's side, when, in the monastery of the Holy Rood, he gifted the lands of Tranent to Thor, the son of Swan. The more modern parts of this ruin are on the south, and consist of a huge gable, having two massive turrets, a steep and narrow circular stair, and several large windows, in which the enormous harrow-shaped iron gratings are still remaining. Stone water-spouts, finely carved, project from these turrets; but no date gives an index to the time of these additions, which are in the Scoto-French style of the sixteenth century.

Like all such edifices in Scotland, this castle is haunted. It is the abode of a spectral lady, who wears a dule-weed, or antique suit of mourning, and appears once yearly, flitting among the ruins, on the anniversary of that Black Saturday in September when the fatal field of Pinkey was fought on the green slope and beautiful plain between the ruins and the sea. Benighted shepherds, gipsies, and other wanderers, who have ventured to seek shelter under the crumbling roof of the old hall, have more than once encountered her, to their terror and dismay; but this restless spirit molests no one. Pale, sad, and silent, she generally sits in a corner of the great northern window, with her wheel or spindle, and like she of whom we read in the "Battle of Regillus," it has been said of her that,—

"As she plied the distaff,
In sweet voice and low,
She sang of great old houses,
And fights fought long ago;
So spun she, so sang she, until the east was grey,
Then pointed to her bleeding heart, and shrieked and fled away."

This quaint ruin, which is still engirt by the remains of a high barbican wall, entered by one of those strong yetlan iron gates peculiar to all baronial houses in Scotland, after the portcullis fell into disuse, was the residence and stronghold of the Fawsides of that ilk—one of the oldest families in the Lowlands of Scotland. And now, with the reader's pardon for this somewhat archæological and architectural preamble, we will proceed at once to open our story.

In the year 1547, when the little Mary Queen of Scots was a chubby child of five years old, and her turbulent and rebellious kingdom, then wavering between Catholicism and a new faith, for which there was no other name but Heresy, was governed by the somewhat feeble authority of a regent, in the person of James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran, and next heir to the throne, the tower of Fawside was inhabited by Dame Alison Kennedy, widow of Sir John Fawside, who had been slain in a feud by the Hamiltons of Preston; and this stern woman—for singularly stern she was by nature—was a Kennedy of the house of Colzean, and cousin of that ferocious Earl of Cassilis, who, thirty-three years after the epoch of this our history, deliberately roasted Allan Stewart, commendator of Crossraguel, before a blazing fire, having first denuded him of his clothes, and basted him well with grease; and there, sputtering like a huge turkey, the hapless priest was turned upon a spit, until, with his scorched and shrivelled hand, he signed a charter, gifting all the lands of his abbey unto the earl and his heirs.

On the evening of the 1st of August, the Feast of St. Peter ad Vincula (or the Festival of the Chains), 1547, this lady was seated at the northern window of her hall, gazing with fixed and anxious eyes over the tract of country that lay between her castle and the sea. Untouched and neglected, her ivory-mounted spinning-wheel stood near her; close by were six other wheels of plainer construction, evincing that she and the women of her little household had been spinning since the time of dinner, which, in those stirring days, was taken at the hour of twelve.

The sun was setting beyond the purple hills of Dunblane, and its golden gleam lit all the far-extending shores of Lothian and of Fife, with their gray bluffs, green bays, and sandy beaches, the straggling burghs of Grail and Kinghorn, and many a fisher-village, all dark and weather-beaten by the stormy gales that blow from the German Sea. At anchor in Musselburgh Bay were a few of those small craft which were then termed topmen, from their peculiar rigging, and which traded with the low countries in wool, skins, salmon, cloth, silks, and wine. They had huge square poops, and low prows beaked with iron, and were always well equipped with falcons, crossbows, and arquebusses, as a defence against English pirates and Moorish rovers.

Save where a few cottages and a clump of trees dotted the slope here and there, the country was all open between the tower in which the lady sat, and the green knoll crowned by St. Michael's Kirk of Inveresk, and the high antique bridge and the thatched or stone-slated houses of the "honest town" of Musselburgh. This venerable municipality was then terminated on the westward by a beautiful chapel, dedicated to our Lady of Loretto, to whose shrine the late King James V., with taper in hand and feet and head bare, had made more than one pilgrimage for the health of his first queen, Magdalene of Valois, and of his second, Mary of Lorraine; for this old shrine shared all the fame and sanctity of its elder prototype in Italy. A great part of the adjacent town was in ruins, just as it had been left by the English after their invasion under Lord Hertford, three years before the date of our story.

Below the hill of Inveresk lay a deep and dangerous morass, named the Howe Mire, then the haunt of the heron, the wild goose, and coot, the water kelpie, and the will-o'-the-wisp.

Three miles distant from the window at which Dame Alison was seated rose the high and narrow tower of Preston; and when her wandering eyes fell on its grim dark mass, they flashed with a hateful glare, while the gloom of her pale anxious brow grew darker, and its stern lines more deep; for she hated the race of Hamilton, to whom it belonged, with all the hate an old Scottish feud inspired.

On the green slope of Fawside Hill the shepherds, grey-plaided and bonneted, were driving home to fold and penn the flocks which had browsed there the livelong harvest day; and these were all of that old Scottish breed which is now completely extinct, but was small, active, and keen-eyed, with tawny faces, hairy wool, and well-curved yellow horns.

The quiet evening aspect of the pastoral landscape on which the lady gazed was not made more lively by the grisly forms of two dead men hanging upon the arm of an oak tree about a bow-shot from the tower gate, where the black rooks and ravenous gleds were perching or wheeling in circles round them. These unfortunates had been "hangit in their buits," as they phrased it in those days, by order of the baroness; for there was then a law "that ilk baron might cleanse his lands of trespassers thrice in the year;" so, on finding two on her estate of Fawside, she ordered them to be hanged, and, in five minutes thereafter, old Roger of the Westmains, her bailie, had them dangling from an arm of the dule tree. Her neighbours averred that this severity was exercised because the culprits bore the name of Hamilton; and a greater horror was added to the episode by the discovery that certain portions of their limbs had been abstracted in the night,—"Doubtless," said the bailie, "by the witches of Salt Preston, for the furtherance of their damnable cantrips."

"Half-past eight," muttered Lady Alison, as the last segment of the ruddy sun sank behind the dark peak of Dumeyat, "and no sign's yet of horse or man upon the upland road. Woe to you, Westmains, for a loitering fool! Thou art too old to scourge, and too faithful to hang, or, by my husband's grave, my mood to-night would give thee to one or other—the rod or the rope!"

As she spoke her thoughts aloud, in that manner peculiar to those who think deeply and are much alone, she beat the paved floor passionately with the high heel of her shoe. There she sat alone in that quaint old hall, with the shadows of night closing around her—alone, because she was a woman whom, from her stern nature and wayward humour, many feared and few loved.

For the hundredth time that day, she anxiously consulted the horologue. This clock was a curious piece of mechanism, which occupied a niche in the hall, and was supported on four little brass pillars, surmounted by a metal dome, on which the hours were struck by a clumsy iron hammer. It bore the date 1507, and the name Leadenhall, having been found in an English ship, taken by Sir Robert Barton, who had presented it as an almost priceless gift to her late husband.

Nine o'clock struck from this sonorous horologue; and then the pale mother, who, in those perilous and stormy days, waited for an only and long-absent son, struck her hands despairingly together, and again seated herself at the grated window of the hall, to watch the darkening shadows without.

Suddenly a sound struck her ear, and a horseman was seen galloping up the narrow bridle-path which traversed Fawside Brae and led direct to the castle wall.

"Nurse—nurse Maud!" said Lady Alison impetuously to an old woman wearing a curchie and camlet gown, who joined her; "my eyes are full of tears, and I cannot see—is that horseman our bairn, or only old Westmains?"

"'Tis Westmains—I would ken his grey mare amang a thousand."

"He rideth fast, nurse, for a man so old in years."

"Yea; but a drunken man and a famished horse come fast home to bower and stall," responded the Abigail crustily; "the hour is late, and Preston's men were at Edinburgh market to-day; so, perhaps our bailie had a shrewd guess the way might be beset between the night and morning."

"Beset!—and my son——" muttered the pale mother through her clenched teeth.

"Fear na for him; he has friends——"

"Friends?"

"Yes, madam—his sword and dagger, and stout hands to wield them! But here comes that drunken carle, the bailie."

As the nurse spoke, the horseman trotted his nag into the paved barbican of the tower, and dismounted.

CHAPTER II.
WESTMAINS.

Oh, when will ye come hame again?
Dear Willie, tell to me;
"When sun and moon loup o'er yon hill—
And that will never be!"
She turned hersel right round about,
Her heart burst into three;
"My ae best son is dead and gane,
The other I ne'er shall see."
Old Ballad.

"A light," exclaimed Lady Alison; "a light, that I may see by this loiterer's face whether he be tipsy or sober!"

Candles were soon flaming in the numerous sconces of polished tin and brass that hung on knobs around the hall, and shed a cheerful light through every part of it; yet it was not without what we in these days would deem a quaint and weird aspect. Many centuries had darkened this old mansion, and twelve generations had hung their swords in that baronial hall. It is lofty, arched with stone, and its walls are still massive, deep, and strong. Father Seton, the vicar of the adjacent village, who was locally known as Mass John of Tranent, and to whose writings we are indebted for much that concerns this old family, has left a minute description of all the "gear and inside plenishing of the castle."

Large oak chests, girnels and almries, the receptacles of linen, vessels for the table, food, corn, and beer, occupied the recesses. Trophies of arms and racks of spears stood between the windows. In this apartment there were but two chairs of carved oak. These, as usual then in Scottish halls stood on each side of the fireplace: one, being for the father of the family, had never been used since the slaughter of Sir John Fawside by the Laird of Preston; the other was for Dame Alison. Round the hall were ranged various forms, creepies, and buffet stools; these, like the long table, were all of black old oak from the Burghmuir, and allotted to the use of the family or visitors. The stone seats in the windows were laid over with cushions of Flemish damask, and had footmats of plaited rushes from the Howemire. The stone walls, which, as the season was warm, were divested of tapestry, had been recently decorated by Andro Watson, the late king's favourite painter, and bore numerous gaudy and quaint designs, representing family traditions, such as passages of arms and daring feats performed in war or in the chase.

Over the arched fireplace stood the portrait of umquhile Sir John of that ilk, the work of the same hand. Quaint, stark and stiff, he was on foot, in an old suit of mail of the fifteenth century, jagged with iron beaks; a snowy beard flowed below his girdle, and his right hand grasped the bridle of a white horse, on the back of which this grim figure had frequently been found mounted at midnight, as nurse Maud, and other old servants, had more than once affirmed!—for Fawside Tower was haunted even then, as a matter of course. Too much blood had been shed in and about it, and too many of its mailed proprietors had perished by bloody and violent deaths, for the mansion to be without its due proportion of spectral appearances and mysterious sounds.

Thus, an antique copper bell which swung at the gable of the tower tolled of its own accord, and all untouched by mortal hand, when a Fawside died; and on the Eve of St. John, a bearded visage, averred by some to be that of the late laird, peeped in the twilight through the hall windows, though these were more than twenty feet from the ground. The gleaming eyes would gaze sadly for a moment on the shrinking beholder, and then the visage melted slowly away into air.

Above the mantelpiece, as above the barbican gate, were the arms of this old family—gules, a fess between three besants, the heraldic badge assigned to a predecessor who had been in Palestine—Sir Robert of that ilk, having served St. Louis IX. in the last crusade, and taken the motto Forth and feir nocht: but enough of this dull archæology, and now to resume our narrative.

Followed by several of the household, male and female, all anxious to learn what the town news was, and chiefly whether there were any tidings of their young master's return from France, where he had been resident nearly seven years, the ground bailie, Roger Fawside, of the Westmains, a vassal and remote kinsman, entered the hall. He was a stout and thickset man, about fifty years of age; his beard was grizzled and grey, like his Lombard coat, which had long hanging sleeves, with rows of horn buttons from the shoulder to the wrist. He wore grey breeches and white ribbed stockings gartered at the knee, a blue bonnet, a sword and dagger, slung at a calf-skin girdle. Doffing his bonnet, he made a reverence to Lady Alison, and walking straight to where, upon a binn, near the hall door, there stood a barrel of ale furnished with a wooden cup, for all who chose to drink thereat; he drew forth the spiggot, and proceeded to fill the aforesaid vessel with a foaming draught. With her brows knit, and her dark eyes flashing, the tall old dame came hastily forward, and by one blow of her jewelled hand, dashed from his the wooden tankard, while she exclaimed—

"Satisfy my impatience, carle, ere you satisfy your thirst! Well, what tidings of my son, Westmains, or of his ship? speak , and quickly too, for you have tarried long enough!"

"A ship supposed to be his, my Lady Alison, was seen on the water of Forth this morning, but she hath not come to land."

"This morning——"

"Yes."

"Art sure of this!"

"Sure as I live, madam."

"And he not here yet!" pondered the lady.

"The skippers at Musselburgh kent her well—a French galley, high pooped and low waisted, with King Henry's banner displayed; men called her the Salamandre, or some such name."

"Likely enough; 'tis the crest of the late king's mistress, Diana, the Duchess of Valentinois; and this——"

"Was about the dawning of the day, madam."

"And since then," continued the lady impatiently, "she has not passed the Inch."

"There have been no storms to delay the ship?"

"None, save that made by Girzy Gowdie, of Salt Preston, by baptising a cat in the devil's name last week, as we a' ken."

"But that storm came and went to drown a skipper of Dunbar, who had slighted her daughter."

"And yesterday," added Nurse Maude, "she did her penance under a pile o' tarred barrels on Gulane Links."

"Rightly was she served, the accursed witch!" responded Roger of Westmains, recovering the wooden cup and applying it hastily to the spiggot of the barrel, from whence he achieved a draught of ale; "for 'tis now kenned that when she rode forth on a broom stick, in the auld fashion, thrice a year, to keep the devil's sabbath at Clootie's Croft, on the Lammermuir, she left in bed beside her gudeman, a three-legged stool in the likeness of herself; and the said stool (which was burned wi' her) only assumed its own form when Father John of Tranent, chanced to pass that way, telling his beads, about the matin time."

"Cease this gossip, bailie," said the lady, starting again to the north window; "a horseman!—see, see!—a horseman at last is ascending the brae side."

"But he wheels off to Carberry," added the nurse, in a voice like a moan.

"Alas!" exclaimed this stern woman, as her eyes began to fill with tears—"my son; why comes he not?"

"The dogs howled the lee lang night," said the wrinkled nurse, applying her apron to her eyes; "and 'twas not for nocht that yonder howlet screamed on the cape-house head yestreen."

"What mean ye, Maud?" asked the lady sharply.

"They are kenned omens of evil."

"Of evil say ye!"

"Yes—weel awat it is!"

"Havers, Kimmer!" said the ground bailie, taking another jug of ale; "just an auld wife's havers!"

"Thou art right, Westmains," added Lady Alison; "for I have believed but little in omens since Flodden Field was stricken."

"Why since then, lady?"

"On the morn my husband marched from here to join the king's host on the Burghmuir of Edinburgh, as he combed his beard—and a braw lang beard it was, Westmains"——

"I mind it weel, for it spread from ilk shoulder to the other, covering corslet and pauldrons."

"Well, as he combed it out with a steel comb twelve inches long, and buckled on his armour, lo! there appeared before him, in the mirror—what think ye all?"

"I know not," replied the bailie, in his abstraction contriving to fill a third jug of ale; "but many strange sights were seen in those days. We a' ken o' the spectres that King James saw at Lithgow Kirk and Jeddart Ha', and of the weird spirit-herald who summoned the souls of the slain—the doomed men of the battle at Edinburgh Cross."

"But what think you my poor husband saw!"

"As I live, I know not," replied the bailie; while the hushed crowd of dependents drew near to listen.

"A mort head where his own comely face should have been!"

"Preserve us a'!"

"Our lady o' Whitehorn!"

"Say ye so, my lady?" were the varied exclamations of the servants.

"Yes!—there stood the shining reflection of his cuirass, pauldrons, and sleeves of Milan plate, just as we see them limned in yonder portrait; but the gorget was surmounted by a grinning skull. And yet he fell not with the king on that fatal ninth of September."

"God rest him now, in his grave in Tranent Kirk! He was a leal brave man, our laird!"

"True, Westmains," replied the lady, while her large black eyes kindled. "But none of his race have died a natural death—it would seem to be their doom. All, all have perished in feud or in the cause of Scotland; and though my heart would break were a hair of my Florence's head to be touched, never shall son of this house die in his bed like a fat monk of St. Mary or a lurdane burgess of Haddington."

"Thou art true to thy race, Lady Alison."

"Tell me what other news you heard, Westmains, in yonder borough town?"

"A band of abominable witches have been dancing about the market cross, as they did last Hallowe'en, with the deil, in the likeness of a hairy Hielandman, playing the pipes to them."

"Pshaw! And yet, 'tis strange—this witchcraft, like the spirit of Lollardy, seems to grow apace in the land."

"They have been caught, and are to thole an assize. One is accused of giving devilish drugs and philtres to the Earl of Bothwell, wherewith to win the love of the queen mother"——

"Mary of Lorraine?"

"Another, of cutting off a dead man's thumbs to make hell-broth, wherein she dipped nine elf-arrows, and shot nine o' auld Preston's kye."

"A murrain on him! Would to Heaven the hag had shot himself! But he is reserved for a better end."

"How?"

"Can you ask?" said the lady fiercely. "To die by a Fawside's sword—by the sword of my only son!"

"And there was taken," resumed the garrulous bailie, "a grisly warlock, to whose house in Lugton, last Lammastide, there came the deil"——

"Save us and sain us!" muttered the servants, crossing themselves—for Scotland was Catholic still, in outward form, at least, and the credulity of the people seems almost incredible now.

"The devil! say you, Roger?" asked the lady, becoming suddenly interested.

"The grim black deil himsel, but in the likeness of a fair woman—the Queen of Elfen,—and was there delivered of a female bairn, who in the space of three weeks grew large enough to become his wife, and through whom he knew as much as ever True Thomas did of old; for he confessed that by taking a dog under his left arm, and whispering in his ear the queer word macpeblis, he could raise the King of Evil, his master, at will; and by sprinkling a blanket with Esk water, as a spell, he drew all the clew and verdure of Wolmet-mains to his ain farm land, leaving the other bare and withered. Then, worse than a', when Wolmet's wife was lying in her childbed-lair, by devilish cantrips, he cast the whole of her pain, dolor, and sickness upon John Guidlat, the baron bailie of Dalkeith, who, during the entire time of her travail, was marvellously troubled, with such agonies, fury, and madness, that it took the town drummer, the bellman and piper to boot, to hold him; but the moment the gentlewoman was delivered, John felt himself a whole man, and well; and so, for all these, things, the grey warlock o' Lugton is to be brankit wi iron, and worried by fire at the Gallows-haugh."

"Enough of such tidings as these; heard ye nought else at Edinburgh-Cross, Westmains?"

"Else?"

"Yes, 'tis of my son and the state I would speak,—not the wretched gossip of an ale-brewster's spence. What is the queen-mother,—what are the Regent Arran and his pestilent Hamiltons about?"

"The regent bydes him at Holyrood, the queen-mother at her house on the Castle-hill; and there seems but little love and muckle jealousy between them yet, as I learned from a proclamation anent false coining, for which I saw three Frenchmen hanged and beheaded this morning."

"Anything more?"

"Odslife! I think that was enough to see before breaking one's fast; and then their heads were spiked, where six others girn, on the Bristo Porte."

"Goose! I would thine was with them; for the news I seek oozes out of thee like blood-drops."

"And there was an Irish leper woman branded by a hot iron on both cheeks, for returning uncleansed to her own house in St. Ninian's Row."

"Oh, Westmains, my heart is heavy!" said the lady, seating herself after a pause, during which the ground bailie had filled and drained a fourth cup, to which a fifth would have succeeded had not Nurse Maud, as a hint that he had imbibed enough already, angrily driven home the spiggot: "This day is the first of August; and at noon we heard Father John of Tranerit say mass for St. Peter's benediction, that the shorn lambs might escape the danger of cold."

"Mass according to the ancient wont."

"Mass according to the Church and faith of our fathers," continued the lady, with some asperity; and then she added plaintively, "I was in hopes that my son—my absent lamb—would be with us ere sunset, and yet he comes not."

"A braw lamb," said Westmains merrily; "a tall and proper youth, six feet high, in full steel harness, with sword, dagger, and spurs."

"A lamb he is to me, Roger; though I trust he may yet prove worse than a wolf to that old fox, Hamilton of Preston. Oh, why doth he tarry?" continued the mother, beginning to soften; "can danger have beset him?"

"Consult Mass John anent this," whispered the nurse; "his prayers are as spells of power——"

"For those that pay him weel," added the bailie under his beard, while he scratched his chin.

"Will his prayers bring home my bairn, if a fair wind fails him, think ye?"

"I dinna ken. Like Our Lady's image in the Nunraw of Haddington, they bring rain when the Tranent folk need it to gar their kail grow; or make the weather fair and clear, as the case may be; then why may they not bring hame the young laird?"

"Ay, why, indeed!" muttered the nurse.

"Oh, peace, you silly carlin!"

"As you please, madam," retorted Maud. "But there is a wise woman in Preston-grange——"

"And what of her?"

"She can forsee things to come, and the return o' folk that are far awa, by turning a riddle wi' shears."

"Nay, nay; I would rather see my son no more than see him by necromancy and acts against God's holy word, Nurse. But Preston's men have been abroad to-day, and they seldom ride on a good errand," said Lady Alison, starting from her seat with a new glow of anger and terror in her breast; "but woe to them if aught happens to my son, for bearded men shall weep for it, and I will kill Preston on his own hearthstone, as I would a serpent in its lair! If that foul riever, who slew my husband under tryst, and my brave and winsome Willie—— but he dare not!" she added, checking the bitter surmise by a husky and intense whisper; "no, he dare not!"

And, sinking into her chair, with nervous fingers she grasped the arms of it, and fixed her wild dark eyes upon the wall, as if she saw there in imagination the hereditary foeman of her husband's house.

"Yes, yes, he will be here in the morning," she said suddenly, "for the ship has been seen. Nurse Maud, look out the best dornick napery, and have a fire of turf and coal lighted in his room; hang the crimson curtains on the carved stand-bed, and the green arras on its tenter-hooks. See that the kitchen wenches set a posset of spiced alicant to simmer by the ingle—for the mornings are chill now; let them look well to what is in the spence and almerie against his hame-coming. We must make a feast, Nurse; for after seven years in France our auld Scottish fare will be alike welcome and new to him."

"Seven years," said Maud, thoughtfully.

"Yes, Nurse; seven years come yule-tide hath our beloved bairn been absent from our hearth and hame."

Westmains went away to his grange, or farm, which lay westward of the tower. The strong gates of yetlan iron were now closed for the night, and the lady of Fawside retired, to pray for her absent son, who at that moment was only ten miles distant, but lying on his back, bleeding and gashed by three wounds: but I anticipate my story.

CHAPTER III.
THE DEATH FEUD.

Then pale, pale grew her tearfu' cheek,
"Let ane o' my sons three
Alane guide this emprise, your eild
May ill sic travel dree!
O where were I, were my dear lord,
And a' my sons to bleed;
Better to brook the wrong, than sae
To wreck the high misdeed."
Hardyknute.

Several days passed; and though the ship had certainly come from France, and lay near the Beacon Rock, with all her sails furled, there came no tidings of the widow's son. Horsemen rode east, and horsemen rode west; the burly Roger of Westmains wore himself almost to a shadow, and every steed in the stables was completely knocked up; but no trace of Florence Fawside had been discovered, from the time he left the barge of M. de Villegaignon, at the old wooden pier of Leith. And now, with the reader's permission, we will go back a little in our story.

The Fawsides of that ilk were neither powerful nor wealthy, and their purses bore no proportion to their pride or their pedigree; but they were landed barons of good repute, who took (or gave, which matters not) their name from their own property, bringing thence in time of war or tumult forty armed men to the king's host. Faithful and true in times of treason and invasion, this fine old race had never failed the Scottish crown; but a deadly, bitter, and inextinguishable feud, one of those hereditary and transmitted hatreds peculiar to some Scottish families, existed between them and the Hamiltons of Preston, whose lofty baronial tower stands about three miles distant from Fawside Hill.

William of Fawside served under David I., in his war against Stephen of England, and saved his life at the Battle of Northallerton. For this service he received, that night, a charter written on the head of a kettle-drum, the only piece of parchment which the Chancellor, Bishop Engelram, had at hand, and it is remarkable for a laconic simplicity peculiar alike to the age and country:—

"David Dei Gratiæ Rex Scottorum, to all his people greeting. Know ye that I have granted unto William, son of Adam, son of John of Fawside, the right of pasturage on Gladsmuir, in perpetual gift, until the Day of Doom."

Now, in future years, long after the saintly David and the mailed knight who fought by his stirrup at Northallerton had been gathered to their fathers, there sprang up the Hamiltons, whose tower of Preston was adjacent to this muir or waste land; and the charter of the Fawsides was deemed sufficiently vague to make them claim the right of having the pasturage in common. Scotsmen required little excuse for unsheathing the sword in those sturdy old times; and hence, about this miserable tract of ground, which was covered with broom, whin, heather, and huge black boulder-stones, the rival barons quarrelled and fought from generation to generation, carrying their cause of feud even to the foot of the throne. More than once, in the time of James IV., Fawside and Preston, with their armed followers, had fought a desperate combat at the Market-cross of Edinburgh, and been forcibly expelled by the citizens, led by their provost, Sir Richard Lawson, of Boghall and Highrigs, who perished at Flodden. Again and again, they had been forfeited by the Parliament, outlawed by the King, and excommunicated by the Abbot of Holyrood; but each maintained himself in his strong old tower, and seemed never a whit the worse.

When the Court of Session was established by James V., their dispute "anent meithes and marches" was brought forward, and their case was the first on the roll; but during its discussion (which sorely puzzled lawyers who were unable to sign their names) they so beset the lords with fire and sword on the highway and in their own residences, each threatening to cut off all who were friendly to the other, that the plea was indignantly thrust aside, and they were left to settle it by the old Scottish arbiter of justice, the broadsword.

They were the terror of East Lothian; they fought whenever they met, and each houghed, killed, or captured the sheep and cattle of the other, whenever they were found straying upon the disputed territory.

About twenty years before the period of our story, Sir John Fawside and Claude Hamilton of Preston (both of whom had fought valiantly at Flodden, and rendered each other good service in that disastrous field), accompanied by several gentlemen, their friends, at the particular request of the good King James V.—the King of the Commons and Father of the Poor, as he loved to style himself,—met on Gladsmuir, with the solemn intention of peacefully adjusting the long-vexed question of their boundaries, and setting march-stones upon the common. They were attended by certain learned notaries, who had been duly examined and certified by the bishop of their diocese, "as being men of faith, gude fame, science, and law;" but the tedium and technicalities of these legal pundits proved too dreary for such "stoute and prettie men," as an old diarist terms our two feudatories; and, in short, Sir John and Hamilton soon came to high words. In the dispute, Roger of Westmains closed up beside his leader, and on drawing his sword, received a stroke from the truncheon of an adversary. Roger ran him through the body, and on the instant all came to blows in wild melée. Every sword was out of its scabbard, every hand uplifted, and every tongue shouting taunts and the adverse cries of—

"A Hamilton! a Hamilton!"

"Fawside—'Forth and fear nocht!'"

The notaries tucked up the skirts of their long black gowns, and fled, while the clash of swords continued on the grassy common, where many a horse and man went down; but the Hamiltons proved the most powerful, being assisted by the vassals of their kinsman, the Earl of Yarrow. Fawside was slain, and all his followers were routed, and pursued by the exulting victors up the grassy brae to the gates of the tower, on the iron bars of which the Hamiltons struck with their sword-blades, in token of triumph and contempt.

When the brave Sir John fell, his neighbours were uncharitable enough to regret that he had not (before his departure) given Preston a mortal wound; as all deemed it a pity that two such fiery and restless spirits should be separated for a time, even by the barriers of the other world. Denuded of his knightly belt and sword, Sir John's body was found among the green whins upon the moor, and was buried in the church of Tranent, where a tablet in the north wall still bears his arms, surmounted by a helmet, and inscribed simply,—

"John Fawside of that Ilk."

Three bullets fired from calivers were found in his body. His widow had these carefully extracted, with the intention of returning them to Claude Hamilton with terrible interest; and thrice she dipped the dead man's dagger in the blood that oozed from his wounds, with the hope that, in a future time, her oldest boy might cleanse the blade in the blood of the slayer.

Dame Alison was a fierce and stern woman, "animated by such terrible passions as the heroines of the middle ages alone possessed." The partner and partaker of all her husband's ideas, his rights and wrongs—real or imaginary,—she now became inspired by one prevailing thought, and one only—revenge;—and so absorbed was she by this devouring passion, that nothing in this world seemed to possess the least interest or value, unless it might feed this demon, or further the terrible object she had in view. Secluded in her gloomy tower, with her two sons, William and Florence at her knee, she told them a thousand times the dark, bloody story of the old hereditary feud and hate—of their father's fall, and how, when tall men and strong soldiers, they must avenge it, by slaying him who proved his destroyer in time of truce and tryst—slaying him as they would a wolf in his den, or a serpent in his lair. And as she poured these wild incentives to future bloodshed into their boyish ears, she would point to where the tower of Preston reared its tall grim outline between them and the sea, and say such things as such a mother, living in that wild age and warlike land, alone could say, till the little impulsive hearts of the boys panted like her own, in anticipation of the hour that would lay Hamilton at their feet, and avenge that day's slaughter on Gladsmuir and Fawside brae.

She gave each one of the bullets found in her husband's corpse; the third she reserved and wore at her neck, with the intention that if her sons' hands failed her when they grew to manhood, she had still one left for vengeance in her own.

She would have appealed to the king; but the house of Hamilton was then in the zenith of its power, and complaints against one of a sept so numerous could find no echo at Falkland or at Holyrood; and so the years passed on.

Because Sir John had died unconfessed, and had been suspected of Lollardy, the Vicar of Tranent had at first refused him Church rites. For this affront, the stern dame denied him the corse-presents exacted then by the priests, and until the Reformation, in 1559—to wit, the best cow of the deceased; the umest-claith, or uppermost covering on the bed whereon he lay, together with the silver commonly called Kirk-richts; and farther, she threatened to send Westmains with a troop of horse, to burn both kirk and vicarage about the ears of his reverence.

Yearly, on the anniversary of her husband's fall, she went, with hair dishevelled, feet bare, and a taper in her hand, to hear mass said for his soul, in the church of Tranent; and after the service, with an irreverence which even the old vicar failed to restrain, she invoked the curses of Heaven on the Hamiltons of Preston. Her sons heard these things; they sank deep into their little hearts, and absorbed all their thoughts.

Often when she prayed at her husband's tomb (it had now become her altar) she imagined that strange sounds came from it; that she heard him chiding her delay in avenging him in this world and joining him in the next; and these morbid fancies fostered yet more her spirit of revenge.

By her injunctions, the gudeman of Westmains left nothing undone to render the boys hardy, stout, and athletic, and expert in the use of weapons of every kind; thus, ere William, the eldest, who possessed great comeliness of face and beauty of person, had reached his twelfth year, he was master of the sword and dagger, the bow and arquebuse; and he could toss a pike, pitch a bar, or handle a quarterstaff with the best man in the barony. His brother Florence had gone to France, as page in the suite of Anne de la Tour de Vendome (the widowed duchess of the regent, John of Albany), who had promised Lady Alison he would return the most accomplished cavalier in Scotland; and, as related, he had now been seven years absent.

Fired by the story which his mother never ceased repeating and enforcing, by touching references to the empty chair which stood unused by the hall fire, to the unused plate that was placed daily on the hall table, to keep alive the memory of the slain man whose rusty arms and mouldering garments were hung in conspicuous places, and to all of which Dame Alison hourly drew the attention of her boys,—fired by the reiteration of all this, one evening, in the autumn of 1541, when Hamilton of Preston had just returned from the battle of Haldenrig, where the army of Henry VIII. had been defeated with considerable slaughter, William Fawside, then in his fourteenth year, without consulting his mother, Father John of Tranent, or his warlike preceptor, old Roger of the Westmains, presented himself at the iron gate of Preston tower, and, while his swelling heart beat high and his smooth cheek flushed crimson with the consciousness of his own audacity, he demanded of the surly and bearded warder admittance to the laird. The servants of the latter narrowly and insolently scrutinized the boy, who bore the arms of his house, gules, a fess between three besants, worked in crimson and gold on the breast of his velvet doublet.

"See that he has nae weapon—nae sting aboot him, the young wasp!" said Symon Brodie, the butler, whose name and convivial habits have come down to us in a famous old drinking song.

"They are kittle cattle, the Fawsides," whispered Mungo Tennant, the warder, as they ushered the boy into the high-arched hall, where the grim old laird was reclining asleep in a huge black leather chair, covered by a wolf's-skin, and seated near a fire that blazed on the tiled hearth.

"Bairn!" he exclaimed, with more astonishment than anger, on being wakened, "what want ye of me?"

"My father's sword!" replied young William boldly.

"Your father!—And who was he, my callant?"

"Sir John of Fawside and that ilk——"

"Aha!"

"He whom ye foully slew under tryst, as all in the Lothians know."

The high, stern brow of old Preston grew black as night. He grasped the carved arms of his high-backed chair, and for a moment surveyed the boy with a terrible frown; then, perceiving that he neither quailed nor shrank under this glance, but stoutly paid it back, though his little heart trembled at his temerity, Preston relaxed his ferocity a little, and grimly replied, under his shaggy moustache,

"Ye lie, ye d—d little limmer!—and they who told ye so, foully lie! I slew him, true; but it was in fair fight, and at open feud, as God and all braid Scotland be my judge!"

"Be that as you will, I want his sword; and, betide me weal, betide me woe, I shall have it!"

"His sword?"

"Yes!"

"For what purpose?"

"That ye shall ken anon," replied the boy with flashing eyes and clenched hands.

"Ye have the dour devilish look o' that termagant Kennedy, your mother, in ye, lad. You are the widow's son Willie, I suppose?"

"I am. Your insolent grooms here ken me weel; and better shall they ken me ere this death feud be stanched! But the sword, Claude Hamilton of Preston!—I say, my father's sword!"

"But what want ye with it, loon?"

"To stab you to the heart, when the time comes," responded the fearless boy.

"By my faith! this little devil takes fire like the match of an arquebuse!" growled the tall, grim laird.

"My father's sword, foul riever!" continued Willie, stamping his foot.

Old Preston now laughed outright, for the boy's daring charmed his warlike spirit.

"Though lawful spulzie, taken in combat and under harness, receive the sword, and welcome, bairn," replied Preston, unhooking from the wall one of those long cross-guarded and taper-bladed swords used in the early part of the fifteenth century, and handing it the boy, who trembled with stern exultation as he there kissed the hilt of polished steel. "It was good King James's gift to your father on that bloody morning when first we forgot our quarrel and fought side by side, like brither Scots, on the green slope of Flodden Hill, where our best and bravest were lying on the brae-side thick as the leaves in Carberry Wood. Take the weapon, bairn. Your father was a leal and gallant man—rest him, God! for Scotland had no better,—and I, the man he hated most on earth, avow it; and ill would it become Claude Hamilton to keep the sword of such a father from such a son. Take it, bairn, and welcome; and I pray Heaven that we may meet no more!"

"False carle, we shall meet, and that thou shalt see!" responded the boy, pressing the sword to his breast, while his eyes filled with tears.

Symon Brodie, the butler, here raised his huge hand to smite the boy down, but the laird interposed.

"Beware, fellow!" said he, "and let the bairn alone; yea, and let him speak, too. What have I to fear from a fushionless auld carline and twa halfling laddies?"

"I have been told that you fear not God, although you are a Hamilton; but I will teach you, carle, to fear me!"

"A brave lad!" exclaimed the old laird, with an admiration which he could not repress. "I love to see a lad stand up thus for his father's feud and his family honour. But let this matter end; in twa hunder years and mair we have surely had enough of it! Give me thy hand, Willie o' Fawside, and I will ask pardon for slaying thy father. 'Twas done in hot blood and under harness; and I will even pay unto Mass John of Tranent a hundred French crowns to say funeral services for his soul's repose."

"My hand!"

"Yes, bairn; an auld man asks it of thee."

"Never!" replied William Fawside, shrinking back. "If I gave a hand to thee, my mother would slay me like a cur; and I would well deserve the death. So fare ye well! with a thousand thanks for this fair gift, until—we meet again."

And they did meet, most fatally, five years afterwards.

William Fawside, then in his nineteenth year, was a tall and handsome cavalier, than whom there was none more gay or gallant in costume, manner, or bearing at the court of the Regent Arran, to whom he officiated as Master of the Horse. He was the most graceful dancer on Falkland Green, and there, also, the victor of the ring and butts, with spear and bow; but when he and Claude of Preston, then a man well up in years, confronted each other in the lists under the southern brow of the Castle Rock of Edinburgh, to fight a solemn duel, to which the taunts and open accusations of murder (for so the widow styled her husband's fall on Fawside Brae) had brought him, the young Sir William saw, without pity, that his grey-haired adversary was animated by a reluctance which he was at no pains to conceal, for on many a day of battle his courage had been put to the sternest proof.

Cartels of defiance had been duly exchanged; mass had been said in the chapel of Our Lady in the Portsburgh; and there, in presence of the assembled citizens of Edinburgh, whose provost, William Craik, appeared on horseback in complete armour, and before a chair, in which sat George Earl of Errol, hereditary lord high constable of Scotland, as vicar-general to the infant queen, wearing on his surcoat the three shields of his house, in a field argent, and within a listed space, sixty paces long and forty broad, stood the young and resolute challenger, on foot, at the eastern end, and Preston at the western, all according to the custom of judicial combats. Each was in full armour of unpolished but highly-tempered steel, with open helmets; each bore a Scottish target, a sword, and dagger.

They were sworn solemnly by the constable, "That they had not brought into the lists other armour or weapons than such as were allowed by Scottish law, or any firework engine, witch's spell or enchantment, and that they trusted alone to their own valour, as God and His holy Evangelists should help them!"

It was then proclaimed that no man should speak or utter a cry, under penalty of a fine equal in value to twenty cattle; or put forth hand or weapon, under pain of forfeiting limb and life to the queen—the poor little unconscious queen, who was then in her cradle, in time-hallowed Holyrood.

The constable rose from his seat, and waved his white truncheon thrice, exclaiming,

"Let them go! Let them go! Let them go, and do their worst!"

This was the usual formula; and then they rushed on each other.

Preston fought warily; but the fury of his adversary and the wounds he inflicted soon raised the old man's blood, and, by one tremendous stroke of his two-handed sword, he clove the widow's son—her boasted, her fair and comely Willie—through helmet and bone, to the chin, slaying him in a moment; as the quaint records of the lord high constable's court have it, "cleaving him through harnpan and harns to ye bearde with ane straik of his quhinger."

His body was sent home for burial, but denuded of his armour,—every buckle of which had been that morn adjusted by his mother's hands,—of his jewels and rings, which, according to the form of judicial combats in Scotland, became, together with the posts and rails of the lists, the fees of the constable's servants.

Lady Alison was on her knees at her husband's altar-tomb in Tranent Church, imploring God to aid and to protect her son, when old Roger of Westmains arrived, with his eyes swollen by weeping, and his heart swollen by rage and sorrow, to detail the death of her eldest boy by the same relentless sword that slew his father! The fierce, stern woman heard him to an end, and then fell prostrate on the tomb, in a paroxysm of grief, and perhaps of remorse.

If the latter found way in her breast, it did not linger long. Three days she remained in a darkened chamber, without speaking to any one; on the morning of the fourth she came out, graver, more gloomy, and, if possible, paler than before, and said briefly to Westmains—

"Write to France—to the chateau of Anne of Vendome, and desire Florence to come home without delay. I have yet the bullets that were found in the body of his father; and if the widow of John of Albany hath kept her royal word, I may yet have sure vengeance on yonder murderer and his brood!"

"The tenants have brought their herezelds," said Westmains in a low voice.

"Remit them; but say, to put their swords to the grindstone, for the day cometh when I, Alison Kennedy, shall need them all."

The bailie referred to the gift given in case of death to the heir of an over-lord, generally the best cow, yielded by those who held of the said lord an oxgang of land.

There were now TWO places vacant at the hearth, two platters unused on the table, and two scutcheons hung in the kirk of Tranent; but the mangled images of those who were gone remained enthroned more darkly than ever in the heart of the widow and mother!

CHAPTER IV
AN OLD SCOTTISH MATRON.

Can Christian love, can patriot zeal,
Can love of blessed charity—
Can piety the discord heal,
Or stanch the death feud's enmity?
Scott.

Lady Alison of Fawside had been a beauty in her youth, when the stout and buirdly knight Sir John had wooed and won her, in the Castle of Calzean; and in memory of this alliance, the cognisance of the Kennedys, a chevron gules, between three cross-crosslets, fitched sable, may still be traced on the roof of the hall; but in the year when our story opens few traces remained of those charms which Huchown Clerk of Tranent, the old macker (i.e. troubadour) extolled in his poems, and for which he was rewarded yearly by a silver chain an ell long, three French crowns, and a camlet gown lined with Flemish silk, until his death, which happened about the close of the reign of King James V.

The widow was of great stature, yet her figure was graceful, noble, and commanding; her features were fine; her nose was straight; and her black eyebrows, which met above it, together with the peculiar lines of her mouth and chin, expressed firmness and unflinching resolution. Her complexion was deadly pale. Her once-black hair was grey and escaped in grizzled locks from under her escallop or shell-shaped cap, which was made of thick point-lace, like her close-quilled ruff and ruffles. Her attire was always a black damask dress, buttoned by small silver knobs, from the lower peak of her long stomacher, up to her ruff. She wore a rosary and cross of ebony, and a black locket containing the hair of her late husband and his slaughtered son; but no other ornament. Her pocket sun-dial, or perpetual almanac, a brass plate inscribed, "This table beginneth in 1540, and so on for ever," with her keys (and huge antique keys they were), her scissors and huswife hung at her girdle; and she used a long ivory-mounted cane to assist her in walking, and as gossips averred, wherewith to chastise her lacqueys and serving-men. Her busk was of hard wood, and contained a bodkin. This was literally a dagger seven inches long, and worn for defence in those stirring and perilous times.

Four-and-thirty years ago this stern woman, without shedding a tear, had seen her husband and all his kinsmen ride forth on that invasion of England which terminated at Flodden; but she welcomed him with transports of joy when he returned. Alas! old Westmains, covered with wounds, was the sole representative of forty stout men of Lothian, well horsed, with jack and spear, who had followed Fawside's pennon to the field. After this catastrophe, they had a few years peace with the Hamiltons of Preston, whose men had all escaped, being a portion of those many thousand Scots who melted away a week before the battle, and left King James with his knights and nobles to confront the foe alone.

Lady Alison was a Scottish matron of a very "old school" indeed, and possessed a stern and Spartan spirit incident to the times of war and tumult, raid and feud, amid which she had been born and bred. The annals of her country record the names of many such, who, in extremity of danger, possessed that resolute spirit with which Scott has gifted his imaginary Helen MacGregor, and the coolness of the Lady of Harden, who, when the larder was bare, placed a pair of Ripon spurs in her husband's plate at dinner, as a hint to mount and ride for England, where the fat beeves browsed on the green hills of Cumberland. There was black Agnes Randolph, the Countess of March, who, for five months defended her castle of Dunbar against the troops of Edward III., and foiled them in the end; there was the Lady of Edinglassie, who, after her husband had been slain by the Laird of Invermarkie, had the head of the latter cut off, in September, 1584, and conveying it "by its hoar locks" to Edinburgh, cast it at the feet of the startled James VI., as a token that she could avenge her own wrongs without appeal to Lowland judge or jury; there was the Lady Johnstone, of Annandale, who, after the battle of the Dryffesands, where, in 1593, seven hundred Maxwells fell beneath the spears and axes of her clan, is accused of dashing out the Lord Maxwell's brains with her own white hand, when she found that brave, humane, and courteous noble lying mortally wounded on the field, and when his silver locks were exposed by the loss of his helmet, which had been struck off in the mêlée; and this terrible deed she is said to have perpetrated with the ponderous iron key of Lochmaben Kirk, at the old thorn tree on the green holm of Dryffe. There was also that grim patriot, the old Marchioness of Hamilton, who, when her son entered the Firth of Forth, in 1639, at the head of six thousand Englishmen, rode to the beach with a pair of pistols at her saddlebow, vowing to God that she would shoot him as a traitor and a parracide, if he dared to land on Scottish ground under a foreign flag—a hint, which the recreant marquis, her son, fully understood and obeyed.

We believe few men now-a-days would relish having such fiery "and termagant Scots," as the partners of their bed and board; but the spirit and nature of these women were the development of the age in which they lived—an age when every house was a barred or moated garrison,—when every man was a trained soldier, and when a day seldom passed in city or hamlet without blood being shed in public fray or private feud; but these grim matrons, and such as these, were the mothers of the brave who led the line of battle at Ancrumford and Pinkey-cleugh, at Sark and Arkinhome, at Chevy Chase, Bannockburn, Haldenrig, and Northallerton, and on a thousand other fields, where Scottish men without regret—yea, perhaps, with stern joy—gave their swords, and lives, and dearest blood for the mountain-land that bore them.

It was this feudal and warlike spirit which made the resolute Lady Alison prosecute the quarrel against Preston with such determination and vindictiveness.

She wept in secret for her slaughtered son; but his death seemed to be only one other item in that heavy debt of hatred and thirst for vengeance which every drop of blood in the veins of Claude Hamilton could not assuage, even if poured out at her feet—a debt which she had no object in life but to pay with all the interest of her stern soul.

Tiger-like, she panted with eagerness for the return of her second son, Florence, doubting not that when the death of his father and brother were added to the old and inborn hatred of the House of Preston, his younger and more skilful hand could never fail in the combat to which she had resolved the slayer should be invited and goaded by every taunt, if he proved unwilling.

To her confessor, the old vicar of Tranent, who strove in vain to soothe this unchristian spirit, she would say fiercely,—"Peace! am I to forego my just feud at the behest of a book-i'-the-bosom monk? I trow not! I am a Kennedy of Colzean. Oh that this boy were back to me, that he might unkennel and slay the old wolf who bydes in yonder tower,—even as his ancestor slew the wolf of Gulane." "He has no son," she was wont to say with savage exultation, while grinding her strong white teeth and beating the floor with her cane; "his wife left him childless—he has no cub to transmit his blood with the feud to future times; so with him it must end. The sword of my Florence will end the strife with Preston's godless career and grasping race—black dool and pyne be on them!"

"But he has a niece," urged the white-haired vicar gently.

"A niece——" a

"His ward and heiress,—a ward of the crown, too."

"Mean ye that moppet the Countess of Yarrow, whose father drew the sword in pure wantonness on the day my husband fell?"

"Yes, Claude Hamilton's sister was an earl's wife."

"Why tell me that? what care I for his niece's coronet? We were belted knights and landed barons ere surnames were known in the North,—yea, a hundred years and more before a Hamilton was heard of. And this niece—what of her?"

"She may marry."

"Well—well."

"And her husband may—though Heaven forfend it—take up the feud."

"Had she a hundred husbands, we'll find cold iron for them all, priest—and in the sword is all my trust."

"Alas, lady! trust alone in God," replied the vicar, shaking his head; "He giveth much, and yet hath nought the less."

"Oh that my brave bairn were back. The French are skilful masters of the sword; and Anne of Albany promised me that Florence should have the best; that his hand should—if my Willie's failed—redress the wrongs of ages."

But, as already related, several days elapsed after the arrival of the ship, yet there came to Fawside tower no tidings of her son, whom, as he bears a part of some importance in our history, we must now introduce to the reader.

CHAPTER V
THE "GOLDEN ROSE."

Leo.—What would you have with me, honest neighbour?

Dog.—Marry, sir, I would have some confidence with you, that decerns you nearly.

Leo.—Brief, I pray you; for, you see, 'tis a busy time with me.

"Much Ado about Nothing."

The sun was setting in the westward—for in the year of grace 1547 it set in the westward just as it does now, though history omits to record the fact. Seven had tolled from the square towers of St. Mary and of the Commanderie of St. Anthony at Leith, on the evening of the first of August, the same on which we left a mother seated in the old tower upon the hills waiting anxiously for her son, when the latter—to wit, Florence Fawside—left the ship of the Sieur Nicolas de Villegaignon, knight of Rhodes, and admiral of the galleys of France, and landing with all his luggage, which consisted of three large leathern mails, found himself once more on terra firma, after a long but prosperous voyage from Brest; and, with a glow of satisfaction on his nut-brown visage, he stamped on the ground, to assure himself that it was not a planked deck, but the land—and good Scottish land too,—as he hurriedly approached the quaint wooden porch of "Ye Gowden Rois" (i.e. the "Golden Rose"), an hostel which bore that emblem painted on a huge signboard that swung between two wooden posts.

The latter were placed near the bank of the river, for although, to the eastward, there lay the charred remains of a wooden pier, burned by the English in 1544, Leith was destitute of a quay in those days; and thus a row of little gardens extended along the eastern bank between the water and the street of quaint Flemish-like mansions which faced it. These plots, or kailyards, were divided by privet or holly hedges, and among them lay fisher-boats, tar-barrels, rusty anchors, brown nets, and bladders, with other débris of the mercantile and fisher craft, which lay moored on both sides of the stream below Abbot Ballantyne's Bridge, the three stone arches of which spanned the Leith, where the pathway led to the church and burying-ground of St. Nicholas, and where stood a gate, at which a somewhat lucrative toll was levied by the monks of the Holy Cross.

Passing between the signposts and up the bank, Florence Fawside found himself before the "Golden Rose," a long irregular house three stories in height, built all of polished stone, yet having a front of elaborate timberwork forming two galleries, supported on carved pillars, and surmounted by three gables, whose acute apex sharply cut the sky-line, and gave the edifice a quaint and striking aspect. Cloaks of velvet and of camlet, horse-cloths, crimson saddles, belts of gold or buff leather, with one or two huge pieces of gaudy tapestry, were hung carelessly over the oak rails of the galleries, in which many persons were lounging, for the house and the stable-yard behind it were alike full of guests and bustle. The "Golden Rose" was the principal hostelry in Leith, and had been built for the accommodation of travellers, a few years before, by Logan of Restalrig, Lord Superior of the barony. Hence, the landlord, Ralf Riddel, being one of his vassals, was bound to give "up-putting to all the laird's retinue, man and horse, when they chanced to pass that way," a contingency which happened more frequently than the said Master Riddel, with all his inbred respect for the house of Logan, perhaps relished, especially as no overcharge could be made upon other visitors, for, by a statute of the late King James V., the bailies of royalties and regalities made a regular tariff of prices to be observed by all hostellers throughout the realm, and by this tariff the charges for corn, hay and straw, fish, flesh, bread, wine and ale, were all regulated and enforced under high penalties; but, by the same law, persons travelling with much money in their possession are wisely advised to reside with their friends. As Fawside entered, he observed a group of gentlemen, richly dressed, observing him narrowly from a dark gallery above the porch.

Though the arrival of a stranger, especially one on foot, did not usually excite much attention at the establishment of Master Ralf Riddel, the air and bearing, the handsome figure, and fine features of the young laird of Fawside, with his short-clipped beard and black moustache, à la François I., his magnificent crimson-velvet doublet, which was profusely embroidered with gold, and stiff as buckram and lace could make it, his enormous ruff and long sword, his little French cap of blue velvet, adorned by a long white feather, and diamond aigrette, the gift of Anne of Albany, his long black riding-boots, the tops of which joined his short trunk-hose, altogether caused the tapster and ostlers to make so favourable a report of his appearance that he was speedily waited on by the gudeman of the establishment in person.

He was conducted to an apartment the grated windows of which overlooked the stable-yard. The latter was full of pages, liveried lackeys, and armed troopers in iron-jacks, steel bonnets, and plate sleeves; horses, saddled and unsaddled, were led to and fro; and clumps of tall spears were reared here and there against the walls. The clamour of voices and clatter of hoofs, together with the neighing of steeds and barking of dogs, made the place instinct with life. The hostel was occupied by several of the noblesse and their retinues—for then no great lord could travel with out a troop of horse in his train; but, all unmindful of the bustle below, young Florence of Fawside, when the landlord returned, was gazing earnestly to the eastward, where, upon the crown of the high green eminence or sloping upland that overlooked the spacious bay of Musselburgh and stretched far away into Haddingtonshire, all bathed in gold and purple by the setting sun, he could discern, some ten miles distant, the outline of his old paternal home rising above the thicket of trees by which it was environed.

On turning, as he heard a step behind, he saw, on the roughly-hewn fir boards which formed the floor of the apartment, an ominous black stain, nearly a foot in circumference, to remind him that he dwelt in a land of swords and danger.

"I require a horse, gudeman," said he, divesting himself of his velvet mantle and rich sword-belt.

"A horse!—at this hour, sir?"

"Even so, my friend, for in less than an hour I must ride hence. You have, doubtless, a swift nag to spare?"

"Yea, sir, ten, if ye lacked them—ten, than whilk my Lord Regent hath none better in stall."

"'Tis well; and now for supper. I have been long in the land of kickshaws and frogs, where bearded men sup fricassees bedevilled with garlic and onions, in lieu of porridge and sturdy kailbrose; so, gudeman of mine, I long for a right Scottish dish."

"That shall ye have, fair sir, and welcome, with a stoup of Canary, Bourdeaux, or Alicant——"

"Nay, I am no bibber, believe me."

"We get brave gude wine hereawa in Leith, sir, by our trade with the Flemings of the Dam."

"After seven years in a foreign land, gudeman," said Florence, slapping the hosteller kindly on the back, while his heart swelled and his eyes filled, "your Scottish tongue comes like music to my ear—yea, like the melody o' an auld song, man; and I snuff up my native air like a young horse turned out to grass; for, save once a year, by a letter given me by a passing traveller hastening Paris-ward, I have heard naught from home, or of aught that passed in Scotland here."

"Nocht, said ye?"

"Naught—so the term of my absence seems marvellously long—naught but evil," he added, with a darkening expression of face.

"Evil!"

"Yea; for I have returned to avenge the death of a dear kinsman."

"Such errands are nothing new in Scotland," said Ralf Riddel, sighing and shrugging his shoulders.

"No—in these hot days of feud and endless quarrelling. 'Tis a heavy task I have in hand, gudeman; but it must be done, when I have obeyed the behests of those I left in France."

"Belong you to hereawa, sir?"

"I do," replied Fawside, smiling.

"May I be pardoned for—for——"

"For what?" asked Florence, while the hosteller smoothed down his front hair, and twirled his bonnet on his fingers; "for what should I pardon you?"

"For speiring your name?"

"You may be pardoned, but not gratified, gudeman," replied Florence, laughing. "There are over-many under your rooftree to make it safe for me to utter my name aloud, alone as I am; for though I have been wellnigh seven years away, I have not forgotten the danger of rashly telling one's name in fiery Scotland."

"You are right, sir; yet my house is one without reproach."

"What says this dark stain on the floor?"

"That there I slew an Englishman, in the May of '44, when all Leith was in flames—houses, ships, and and piers—and ten thousand of his comrades, under the Lord Hertford, were on the march for Edinburgh. Yea, sir, I slew him there by one blow of my jeddart staff, for making his quarters good at sword's point. The 'Gowden Rose' is a house without reproach."

"But its visitors may not be so, despite their silken doublets and gilded coats of mail. Whose jackmen and lacqueys are these in the stable-yard?"

"The followers of the Earl of Glencairn, and of his son, the Lord Kilmaurs; of the Lord Gray and his son, the Master, with others whom I ken not; but they muster eighty horsemen in all."

"The English faction!" muttered Fawside. "By Heaven, 'tis high time I had the water of Esk behind my horse's heels. And these lords——"

"Are all on their way to Stirling, to keep tryste with the Lord Regent."

"Fool that I was, not to know at once the shakefork of the stable worn by the ruffians of Glencairn," said Fawside, referring to the cognizance of the Cunninghames, which is argent, a shakefork sable, granted to Henry of Kilmaurs, who was master stabler to King Alexander III.

"And those fellows in pyne doublets and cuirasses?"

"With the oak branch in their burganets, and morsing horns at their girdles?"

"Yes."

"They are the liverymen of the laird of Preston."

"Of Claude Hamilton of Preston!" exclaimed Fawside, instinctively assuming his sword.

"Yes."

"By St. Giles, I was right to speak below my beard, and utter not my name." Then, in a fierce whisper, he added, "Is he here?"

"No."

"So much the better. But get me supper and a swift horse. Sumpter nags will come anon for my leathern mails, which I leave in your care, gudeman. Beware how you let men handle them, though my papers and valuables I carry on my own proper person, where my sword can easier answer any kind friend who inquires after them."

"My house, I have said, is stainless and sakeless."

"And now for supper," said Florence impatiently.

"I can let you have a pie of eels, from Lithgow Loch; a hash of Fife mutton, yea, mutton from Largo, where they say every tooth in a sheep's head is worth a French crown."

"Good!—the supper quick, the horse quicker," said Fawside laughing;—for it was a superstition in those days, and for long after, that the teeth of the flocks which browsed on the conical hill of Largo were turned to solid silver by its herbage.

He then turned once more to the window, to gaze on his mother's distant dwelling,—on those hills from whence the last gleam of sunlight had now died away. He drew from a pocket in the breast of his beautiful doublet two letters, tied with white ribbons saltirewise, and sealed with yellow wax, impressed by three fleur-de-lys. One was addressed—

"A Madame ma soeur, la Seine d'Ecosse."

The other bore—

"For Monseigneur the Earl of Arran, Lord Hamilton, Knight of St. Andrew and St. Michael, Regent of Scotland."

The young traveller surveyed these important missives with a smile of satisfaction, and once more consigned them to the secret pocket of his doublet. While left thus to himself and his own thoughts, certain parties in an adjoining apartment were taking a particular interest in his affairs.

CHAPTER VI.
CURIOSITY.

"Who's he?
I know not—Duke Humphrey, mayhap;
But this I know, my sword will test it soon."
Old Play.

This apartment, which was next to that in which Florence Fawside was testing the merits of the eels of Linlithgow Loch (which are still much prized) and Ralf Riddel's Largo mutton and Alicant wine, opened off the shady gallery wherein we left a gaily-attired group, who had watched the traveller enter the "Golden Rose."

This group, which had also been observing a number of poor lepers, who, under a guard of men-at-arms, were on the sands waiting the boats which were to convey them to banishment on Inch Keith, and had made them the subject of various cruel and ribald jokes—this group, was composed of several men of better position than conduct, for it consisted of that Earl of Glencairn, who had slain one of his nearest relations under tryst; of the Earl of Cassilis; of Patrick Lord Gray of Kinfawns, and his son the master; John Lord Lyle of Duchal, and his son James the Master of Lyle, who had together slain Sir John Penny, an unarmed priest. Several gentlemen of their different surnames were with them—all men who had more or less shed blood in the private quarrels and open feuds of that wild and lawless time. All were richly dressed, for the age was one of profusion and ostentation; the splendour of the third and fourth James was yet remembered in the land, which had not as yet suffered by the civil wars and depression subsequent to the Reformation. Many of those to whom we are about to introduce the reader had their coats of arms embroidered on the breasts of their gorgeous doublets; but the greater number wore half armour, gorgets, breast-plates, and plate sleeves; and all, without distinction, had long swords, Scottish daggers, and Italian pistols or calivers at their girdles; and they were all, in secret, members of the anti-national or English faction—of which more anon.

"I have a presentiment that yonder young galliard in the crimson velvet bravery bodes us no good," said the Lord Kilmaurs in an undertone. He was a stern and reckless noble, whose brown-velvet hat had already been perforated by two bullets in a brawl that day.

"Why think you so, son?" asked his father the earl, whose cold grey eye ever suggested the idea that his lordship said one thing while thinking another.

"He came from yonder gilded galley of the Sieur de Villegaignon—and see! here come the admiral's own bargemen, with the lilies of France upon their pourpoints, bearing his mails. By my soul, sirs, this spark is served like a king's ambassador!"

"And may he not be the envoy of Henry of France?" asked some one.

"Nay, for he is only young Florence Fawside of that ilk, as I understand," said the Lord Kilmaurs, to whose right eye a savage glare was imparted, together with a spasmodic contortion of that side of his face, by a dreadful sword-wound, which he received at the defeat of the English at Ancramford.

"Only!" reiterated his father, with an accent upon the word; "Mahoun! art thou sure of this?"

"Sure as I am a living man."

"But men say he is still in France," urged the Lord Lyle.

"Nay, my lord," began the Master of Lyle, "for the old beldame his mother——"

"She is a Kennedy of Colzean, and my near kinswoman," interrupted Lord Cassilis haughtily.

"I crave your pardon, though fortunately we are not of Carrick, where all men court St. Kennedie," replied the other, bowing with a smile on his lip and a sneer in his eye; "but Dame Alison hath written letters into France to the Duchess Anne of Albany and Vendome, desiring her to send back the youth, that he might avenge the death of his brother, whom Claude Hamilton of Preston slew at the king's barresse, and in fair fight, as we all can testify."

"Ay, old Preston's sword hath been reddened alike in the blood of father and son, a strange but not uncommon fatality."

"Consanguinity, my Lord Lyle, should make that quarrel ours too," said the Earl of Cassilis; "but fortunately, I have no wish to embroil myself with Preston, and the old dame Alison hath ever disdained our aid and alliance."

"If that bedizened spark be really Fawside her son, he has been long in the service of Anne de la Tour of Vendome, widow of the late Regent Albany," said one who had not yet spoken, and whose accent marked his country as England, though he wore the badges and livery of the house of Glencairn; "and rede me, sirs, he hath some other mission to Scotland here than his mother's feud with the Prestons."

"Thou art right, Master Shelly," said James Master of Lyle, as a sudden gleam shot athwart his sinister visage; "in these days, when trusty messengers are scarce and bribes high, falsehood dear and fidelity dearer, I doubt not he hath letters from Henry of Valois to the Queen-Mother, and from the grasping princes of the house of Guise to the Regent Arran—and these letters must be inimical to us. Is it thus thou wouldst say, my valiant captain of the Boulogners?"

"It is," replied the disguised English soldier, whose steel salade was worn well over his handsome face, for concealment.

"Such letters would let us see their game, which 'twere well to know ere they can learn ours," said Glencairn. "But if they are concealed in the lining of his doublet, in the scabbard of his sword, in the quills of his feathers, or perhaps indited with invisible necromantic ink by Catherine de Medicis—for I have known all these plans resorted to—we may kill the poor knave for nothing, and raise a pestilent hubbub in the burgh to boot."

"Kill him here, then," said Kilmaurs, his son.

"What, in the hostel?" said his father, starting.

"Yes," was the brief and fierce response.

"'Twould embroil us with Logan, whose property it is. But every thread of his garments shall be searched. 'Twas a shrewd thought of thine, Master Edward Shelly, for time presses in the matter of our baby-queen's marriage to thy baby-king."

"If we find such letters on him," said Kilmaurs with a ferocious glance at each of his companions in succession, "by the five wounds of God he shall swallow them ere he die. I made an English spy eat five on the night before the battle of Ancramford."

"And how fared he after?" asked Shelly laughing.

"Ill enough, I trow."

"How?"

"He straightway swelled up like a huge ball, and burst, whereby I opined that the letters had been written with poisoned ink."

"And these letters——"

"Were all anent the ransom of a friend of mine, who shared in England the exile of Mathew of Lennox, and whose lands had been gifted by the late James to me."

"Let us see to this man at once," said Lord Lyle; "for I assure you, sirs, that if this fellow beareth letters out of France to mar our lucrative plans, by my father's soul I will slay him, even as I slew that shaveling mass-priest Penny!"

"And how slew ye him?" asked Master Shelly, an Englishman of pleasing countenance and good presence, who seemed amused by the quaint ferocity of these Scottish lords.

"I slew him like a faulty hound, because I liked him not," replied Lyle with a fierce grimace; "and hewed off his shaven head with my whinger. Then my son reminded me that a soothsayer, the prior of Deer, who now sleeps in Roslin chapel, had foretold by his cradle that in days to come his head should be the highest in Scotland. In sooth, it shall be so, quoth I; and, fixing it on my spear, which was six Scottish ells in length, I rode home with it thus through all the Carse of Gowrie to my castle of Duchal, where you may yet see the bare pyked bones of it grinning on the bartizan wall."

"And what answer made you to the law?"

The other drew himself up with ineffable hauteur, and briefly replied—

"I am the Lord Lyle!"

"Hush, sirs," said Glencairn; "our man is in the next room, perhaps, and may overhear us."

"Let us see to him," said Kilmaurs, loosening his dagger in its sheath.

"Stay, sirs," said Shelly the Englishman; "and excuse me if I am less reckless in bloodshed than you; for, under favour, and with all due deference be it said, I came from a more peaceful land, where if the sword is drawn, it is usually for some weightier reason than because one man wears a dress striped with red and another wears it striped with green, or because one man wears a tuft of heather in his steel cap and another sports a sprig of laurel; and so, ere you proceed to violence in this matter, I would pray your lordship to be well assured of who this stranger is."

"If we suspect this knight of the crimson suit of being a spy of the Valois or the Guises, what matter is it who he is?" replied the master of Lyle impatiently. "But there is the landlord in conference with one of Preston's followers, so, let us inquire of him."

"Ralf Riddel!—gudeman, come hither," said Kilmaurs.

Thus commanded, Riddel ascended to the gallery, with several low bows, while the man with whom he had been conversing, and who was no other than Symon Brodie the butler of Preston, an unscrupulous and bloodthirsty swashbuckler, remained, bonnet in hand, on the steps a little lower down, to listen greedily to all he might overhear from a group so gaily attired.

"Did not yonder gay galliard come from a ship in the roads?" asked Lord Kilmaurs.

"Who?" responded Riddel, with evident reluctance.

"He of the crimson-velvet doublet and long French boots."

"Yes, sir," replied Riddel, with increasing hesitation, for he read mischief in the eyes of all.

"From the galley of Nicolas de Villegaignon?"

"Yes, my lords."

"He hath come from France, then!" said Kilmaurs sternly.

"It would seem so."

"Seem! Speak to the point," continued the fiery heir of Glencairn, "or, by the horns of Mahoun! we will burn thy house to the groundstone. It is so!"

"Yes—my lords,—yes."

"Speak out, cullionly knave," thundersd the Lord Kilmaurs, the long scar on whose visage became purple as his anger increased; "his name——"

"I ken it not."

"How—ye ken it not?"

"No."

"Why!"

"He conceals it."

"Hah! that betokens secrecy!" exclaimed Lord Lyle.

"And as we have secret projects," added his son, "we must suspect all of having the same; so doubt not that he hath letters. All who come from the vicinity of the Louvre, or the Hotel de Guise, bring dangerous letters to Holyrood, dangerous at least to us, and we must have them."

"He has come from France, my lords,—from France direct," said Symon Brodie, approaching and speaking in a whisper, as the abashed landlord withdrew. "Mairower, he is Florence Fawside of that ilk."

"You know him, then?" said several.

"Yea, and a' the race; I ken their dour dark look, and wha but he could wear on his breast, gules, a fess between three besants or?"

"Right, by Heaven!" said the master of Lyle.

"A follower of Anne of Vendome must have letters from which we may glean what France or the Lorraine princes mean to do," said Shelly bluntly; "cut him off if you will, but not here,—it must be done secretly."

"To horse, then," said Glencairn hoarsely, as if, wolf-like, he already scented blood on the soft evening breeze that came from the glassy river; "to horse, and beset all the roads—Leith-loan, the Figgate Muir, and every path to the southward and the east,—for if he passes the brig of Esk to-night our cause perhaps is lost. He bears, doubtless, letters to the Regent and Queen, with promises of war with England and succour from France. Pietro Strozzi, the Marechal Duke de Montmorenci, or the Comte de Dammartin, with twenty thousand arquebusiers and gendarmes, thrown into the scale against us, would leave our cause and the boy King Edward's but a feather-weight. To horse, sirs, and away; for this August gloaming darkens fast, and night will be on us anon!"

As the earl spoke, they all hurried to the stables, and proceeded to saddle and mount their horses for the deadly purpose in view, and none were more active than Symon Brodie and seven other armed lackeys of the Laird of Preston, who joined in the affair, with no other interest or intention than to cut off the poor youth, in prosecution of the wretched quarrel between their master's house and his; for men joined in such deadly things in those days, as readily as now we go to see a horse-race, a fire, or an election row.

Master Edward Shelly, the Englishman, who was disguised as a follower of the House of Glencairn, joined in the plot also, but with some unwillingness; for he ran considerable risk. By the laws of James II., any Englishman found in Scotland became the lawful captive of the first man who discovered him; and any Scottish subject who met an English man under tryst, as these noblesse were doing, was liable to imprisonment during the king's pleasure, and to the forfeiture of all he possessed.

Such was the law passed by the parliament at Stirling, in 1455.

CHAPTER VII.
THE BRAWL.

My sword, my spear, my shaggy shield,
They make me lord of all below;
For he who dreads the lance to wield
Before my shaggy shield must bow;
His lands, his vineyards must resign,
For all that cowards have is mine.
Dr. Leyden.

Being a married man, Ralf Riddel went straightway to his spouse, and in whispers—lest the panelled walls might have ears—he communicated his suspicions of the deadly intentions of his titled guests. A landlady of the nineteenth century would instantly, on learning such tidings, have made an outcry and summoned the police; but Euphemia Riddel received them with the coolness incident to those days, when every other morning a man slashed by sword or dagger was found dead or dying somewhere in the streets of Edinburgh.

"And what mean ye to do, gudeman?" she asked.

"Leave the event to Providence, gudewife."

"To Providence and their whingers!" she exclaimed.

"Hush, or the hail hive will be on us!" said he in a terrified whisper.

"Foul fa' ye, Ralf Riddel, if ye permit this wicked slaughter of a winsome young man!"

"But they would ding their daggers into me in a trice."

"What of that?" she asked sharply.

"A sma' matter to you perhaps, but mickle to me; and if I was pinked below the ribs by these bullies, Symon Brodie, that bluidthirsty and drunken butler o' auld Preston's would soon be drawing in his chair at the ingle. That chield is ower often here, gudewife, and I dinna like it. It is no aye for ale and up-putting he comes to the 'Golden Rose.' But what shall I do anent Fawside?"

"Gowk! do that whilk is right."

"And that is——?" queried Ralf, scratching his head—

"To send a saddled horse to the Burgess close, and let the young laird out by the back yett while these lords and loons are busy in the yard. Take the horse round by your own hand while I see to the puir gentleman."

The matter was thus arranged at once; and while the gudeman of the hostel led the nag through a narrow by-lane to the place indicated, an old and narrow alley of dark and lofty houses which opened eastward off the bank of the river, his better half acquainted the young traveller with the danger which menaced him. With the boldness of his race, he at first refused to fly, and resolved to confront these men and fight them. Then he thought of his mother, and yielded to the entreaties of the good woman, his preserver.

"I will owe you a brooch of gold for this, gudewife," said he, kissing her hand and buckling on his sword.

It was the first time so brave and handsome a gentleman had done her this courtesy, and the heart of the woman swelled anew with pride and sympathy.

"Away! away!" she exclaimed, "lest dool and wae light on thy house and home to-night!"

"I thank you, gudewife—thank you kindly; I would not for worlds, were they mine, be maimed in a night-brawl by swashbucklers such as these, for I have greater and nobler work to perform than crossing my sword with such a rabble rout."

"Ay, the defence of our holy Kirk of Rome?"

"Nay; I shall not be slow in defending that if the time come; but I have a beloved father's murder under tryst and a tender brother's death in mortal combat to avenge, with the wrongs of centuries, upon the Hamiltons of Preston!" replied Florence, who, instead of having his ardour cooled by the fate of his relatives, longed with intense eagerness to see unsheathed against him the same sword by which they fell, that he might slay its wielder without mercy or remorse.

"And now, fair sir, away!"

"And the horse——"

"Is at the Burgess Close foot, nigh unto the loan-end. Ride straight for Edinburgh, lest the eastward road to the Abbey Hill be beset."

"Thanks, madam," replied Florence, with a low French bow, as he loosened his long sword in its sheath, left the inn by a private door, and piloting his way in the twilight between hedgerows and low thatch-roofed cottages, reached the place where Riddel stood, holding the horse by its bridle. The hosteller would not listen to a word of thanks from Fawside, but urged him to "ride swiftly;" and assuredly time pressed, for he was barely in the saddle when at least forty armed and mounted men issued with scabbards, petronels, and hoofs clattering, from the stable-yard, and, separating into parties, proceeded at a rapid trot to beset the paths in every direction.

Fawside gave his horse the spur, and Riddel saw the sparks of fire fly from the flinty road as it sprang away towards the city.

When again the hosteller of the "Golden Rose" saw his fair roan nag, it was pierced by bullets, half-disembowelled, and lying drowned in the lake which then formed the northern moat of Edinburgh.

The darkness had now completely set in; and, save where a few trees, turf fences, or low dykes of stone and earth inclosed the fields, the whole country between the city and its seaport was open, but varied by many undulations and eminences covered by furze, tufted broom, and dark-green whin, or broken by hollows that were swampy, where the coot squatted in the oozy pools and the heron sent up its lonely cry from amid the thick rushes and masses of the broad-leaved water-dock.

Leaving Leith, which was then without those strong walls and iron gates by which it was engirt during the stormy regency of Mary of Lorraine, Fawside, after tracking his way almost instinctively through narrow alleys of thatched cottages and kail-gardens, ascended the brae above the Abbot's Bridge, and reached the road that led by the Bonny-toun (or Bonnie-haugh), a little hamlet where, in after-years, old Bishop Keith wrote his "History of the Scottish Church;" but the hum of the river, which there poured over a ledge of rough rocks, had scarcely died away in his rear, when swiftly and furiously he heard the clatter of iron hoofs upon the dusty bridle-road he was traversing.

At that moment the near hind shoe of his nag gave way, but by adhering to the hoof by a nail or two for some paces, nearly brought the animal down on its haunches, and even this trivial occurrence served to lessen the distance between Fawside and his pursuers, who cared not to disguise their purpose, as they shouted, halloed, and taunted him by all the epithets and scurrility incident to the vulgar of the time; and foremost of all this rout, who were becoming excited with a thirst for blood and all the ardour of a hunt or race, rode Symon Brodie, the butler of Preston, mounted on a blood horse which belonged to his master, and had more than once borne at its neck the silver bell, the prize of the winner at Lanark races.

"Come on! come on!" he was exclaiming; "and look, lads, to your whingers and spur-whangs, for we win on him fast! Turn ye, Fawside! turn ye! and face, if ye dare, the same men that slew your kinsmen! Through! through!—a Hamilton! a Hamilton!"

These taunts made Fawside's blood boil within him, and a storm of hatred at these enemies of his family now tracking him with the most deadly intentions, gathered with stern ferocity in his heart: but the odds were too many against him; and though his cheek glowed and every pulse quickened with passion, he held on his way towards the city without swerving or casting a single glance behind. His pursuers were now so close, that he could hear them encouraging each other and laughing at those whom they distanced.

"Spur on—spur on!" cried the butler; "this gay galliard has nine golden targets at his velvet hat."

"They will blink brawly at our bonnet-lugs in the morning sun!" exclaimed another, goring his horse on hearing this fabricated incentive to blood and robbery. "I have plundered Dame Alison's eel-arks in the Howmire for a month past, and grazed my nowte on Birsley brae, but I must e'en change a' that if the laird win hame."

"The auld devil in the tower will burst her bobbins wi' spite if we slay her son!" said a third.

"On, on," cried others, "ere he gain the town-gates, for then the watch and the craftsmen will be raised like a hornet's nest on us, and the provost has but one word for brawlers—the Wuddie!"

"Sooth ay!" panted Brodie, pricking his horse with his dagger to increase its speed; "beware o' the Buith-holders and armed burgesses, for he is a landed man, and if we slay him——"

"Aver that we took him for a brawler, a dustifute, or fairand man."

"Havers!" exclaimed the savage butler; "wit ye, lads, 'tis our master's just feud. The young wolf hath come from France to slay our master. Preston is auld now, while he is lithe and young; no battle could be fair between them, so let us cut him off ere we ride homeward to-night—cut him off I say!"

"By my father's hand!" exclaimed another horseman who came abreast of them, and panted as he spoke, "I will venture both craig and weason to drive my dagger in his brisket. I will teach Scottish men to become the spies of France."

"Or the paid hirelings of England," retorted Fawside, now turning for the first time, and with his wheel-lock petronel discharging a flying shot at haphazard among his pursuers. One by the side of the last speaker, who was the Lord Kilmaurs, fell prone with a loud cry on the narrow path. Whether he was killed outright, or merely wounded, his comrades never tarried to inquire; but with a shout of rage and defiance, continued the race for death and life in the dark.

This episode occurred near a mill belonging to the monks of Holyrood—a quaint old edifice, having enormous buttresses, and in which King Robert I., when well stricken in years, is said by tradition to have found shelter on a stormy winter night, when the path to Edinburgh was buried deep under the drifted snow.

Skirting a little loch, the waters of which turned the mills of the canons of Sanctæ Crucis, the fugitive continued his flight towards the city, up the undulating slope now covered by the New Town of Edinburgh, but then a wilderness of furze and broom, till he reached the North-loch, which formed a moat or protection for the capital of the James's; for on that side there was no other defence than this artificial sheet of water, which the magistrates could at all times deepen by closing the sluice at the eastern extremity, between the Dow-Craig, or Calton, and the Craig-end gate.

Before Fawside the long and lofty ridge of the ancient city on its steep of rock and hill, upreared its rugged outline against the starry sky, broken into a hundred fantastic shapes, and terminating at the westward in the black and abrupt bluffs, crowned by the ancient castle, which then consisted of four huge donjons or masses of mason-work, the towers of King David, of St. Margaret, of the constable, and the royal lodging; but all were black and grim, for neither in the guarded fortress nor the walled city did a single ray of light shine out to vary the dusky gloom of the scenery. Our fathers went to bed betimes in the year 1547.

In the bosom of the long and narrow loch which spread before him, the reflected stars were twinkling, and headlong down its grassy slope he rode, and, without a moment's hesitation, plunged in his panting horse, with knee and spur, voice and bridle, urging it to gain the opposite bank; then plunge after plunge resounded on both sides, as nearly a score of horsemen leaped in after him, dashing the waters into a myriad foamy ripples, and resolved to follow him to the last; while others, less determined, or less interested in his destruction, or the capture of the supposed French missives, reined up their chargers on the bank, and fired their wheel-lock petronels at him, as his roan horse breasted the dark water bravely, and snorted, swimming with its head aloft and flanks immersed. Ere it was mid-way across, the poor animal uttered a wild cry, writhed under the rider, and by throwing back its head in agony, announced that it was mortally wounded, for it sank almost immediately, leaving Fawside to disentangle his feet from the stirrups and strike out for the opposite bank. Fortunately he had learned to swim expertly in the Loire, when at Vendome; thus he soon gained the opposite bank, but not without considerable difficulty, as its steep slope was covered by rushes, slime, and weedy grass.

The wheel-lock, or pistol, used by the men-at-arms of those days, was an invention of the Germans, and we have a minute description of it in Luigi Collados' treatise on Artillery, published at Venice in 1586, when it was deemed a firearm as perfect as now we deem our boasted Enfield or Lancaster rifle. The lock was composed of a solid wheel of fine steel revolving on an axle, to which a chain was attached. On being wound, this wheel drew up a strong chain, which, on the trigger being pulled, whirled the wheel with such velocity that the friction of its notched edge struck fire from a flint screwed into a cock which overhung the priming-pan. The wheels took some time to wind up or span, as it was technically termed, by a spanner or key, which the pistolier carried by a ribbon at his neck; but after all this preparation, like many better inventions of a more modern time, this weapon occasionally hung fire, and refused to explode at all.

However, on the present occasion, the wheel-locks of Florence's pursuers did their duty fatally for the poor horse he rode, and, boiling with a fury which he could no longer restrain, panting and breathless with his rapid ride, his recent immersion and present danger, he unsheathed his sword, determined to kill the first who came ashore, ere he turned once more to fly.

The first who came within his reach proved to be a follower of the Lord Glencairn, Hobbie Cunninghame, or Hobbie of the Kuychtsrig, who, in the preceding year, had been nearly hanged for abstracting "the provost's ox"—a fat bullock presented annually by the town-council to their chief magistrate,—and whom he cut down by a single backhanded stroke. The second he slew at the third pass, and he felt, as he ran him through the body, something of a shudder when the man's hot blood poured through the cut-steel network of his swordhilt, and mingled with the cold water of the loch which dripped from his doublet sleeves. But he thought, perhaps, little more about it, as he turned and rushed up the nearest close or alley, pursued by a dozen of his untiring enemies, who abandoned their horses, and, with an ardour which their recent swim in the water failed to cool, followed him on foot up the steep slope, with swords and daggers drawn.

To quote a French writer when describing a similar incident—

"Let not our readers have the least bad opinion of our hero, who, after having killed a man, feared the police, but not God; for in 1547 all men were alike in this. They thought so little in that age of dying, that they also thought little of killing. We are brave now; but they were rash. People then lost, sold, or gave away their lives with profound carelessness."

Remorse or regret has nothing to do with this kind of killing; and any man who enjoyed a day or two shooting during the siege of Lucknow, or in the rifle-pits at Sebastopol, will tell you the same thing.

Fawside's blood was now fairly up, and he felt that with fierce joy he could make mince-meat of them all. The struggle was not merely a life for a life, but twelve lives for his—twelve swords against one! He reached the High Street, which traverses the crest of the lofty ridge occupied by the ancient city: it was involved in almost total darkness; for though in the reign of the late king the citizens had been ordained to hang out oil lanterns at certain hours, under the weaker rule of the Regent Arran they preferred alike to save their oil and the trouble. A vast breadth of opaque shadow enveloped this great thoroughfare, which was then encumbered by piles of timber and peat-stacks for fuel, as each citizen had one before his door; and there also—as in the streets of London and Paris at the same free-and-easy period—were huge mounds of every kind of household débris, amid which the pigs occupying the sties under fore-stairs and out-shots, revelled by day, as the kites and gleds did in the early morning before the booths were unclosed and the business of the day began; for these sable tenants of the adjacent woods swarmed then in the streets of Edinburgh, just as we may see them still about sunrise.

Between these piles of obstruction the skirmish continued, and Florence Fawside, finding that nearly all the arches of the various closes and wynds were closed and secured by massive iron-studded doors, which had been hung upon them as a security since the late invasion of '44, was compelled to continue his retreat through the Landmarket towards the Castle Hill; and then, having distanced several of his pursuers, he turned in wild desperation to face three who were close upon him, and whose swords there was no avoiding.

"They seek my letters or my life," thought he; "but my letters are more precious than my life—ay, more precious to Scotland and her little queen than the lives of fifty brave men. My mother—oh, my mother! what will be her thoughts if these assassins succeed in destroying me—hunting me thus to death like a mad dog. Oh, what a welcome home to my country!—the first night I tread again on Scottish ground. Hold your hands, sirs!" he exclaimed aloud. "I am on the queen's service, and the Lord Regent's too. Hold!—this is stoutrief, open felony and treason!"

"Fellow, thou makest a devil of a noise!" said the young Lord Kilmaurs, making a deadly thrust, which Florence parried, and almost by the same movement cut one of his companions across both legs, and for a moment brought the ruffian down upon his knees; but he started up and thrust madly at Fawside, whose back was now close to the wall of a house on the northern verge of the street, which there became narrow, as it approached the spur-gate of the Castle.

"Fie! armour—armour fie!" he exclaimed, using the cry of alarm then common in Edinburgh.

"Ding your whingers into him," said Kilmaurs furiously, as he paused for a moment to draw breath and let his companions' swords have full play, while his livid visage seemed by the starlight pale and green, as that of one who had been a corpse many days, and his dark eyes glittered like those of an incarnate demon. "At him to the hilt," he continued, "lest he rouse the burgh on us; for the common bell will be rung in five minutes, and then every bloated burgess and rascally booth-holder will be at the rescue, with halbert, jack and steel bonnet. At him, I say!"

"Are you Egyptians or thieves," said Fawside tauntingly; "if so, take my purse among ye and begone, in the name of the devil your master."

"No thieves or Egyptians are we," said Kilmaurs, again handling his sword with a savage laugh; "but Scottish gentlemen, who would fain know what paper news you bring out of France."

"From the three princes of the League," added Glencairn.

"The bloody Cardinal de Lorraine, and that foul kite of Rome, the Duc de Guise."

"And the Duc de Mayenne," added others, falling on with their swords.

"Ah!—'tis my letters rather than my life they seek," muttered Fawside. "Let me be wary—oh, let me be wary, blessed Heaven!"

He had now his single blade opposed at least to four; but, thanks to his own skill and the improvements made by a French master-at-arms on the earlier tuition he had received from old Roger of the Westmains, he kept them all in play, though his wrist began to fail and his sword-arm tingled to the shoulder. There shot a sharp and sudden pang through his left side, and on placing his hand there he felt the warm blood flowing from a wound. The sword of his first adversary, Lord Kilmaurs, had glanced along the ribs, and at the same moment a Cunningham gave him a stab between the bones of the sword-arm with a species of dagger, then named a Tynedale knife. There is an old saying that a Scotsman always fights best after seeing his own blood. Be that as it may, Fawside, on finding the current of his life now pouring from two wounds, that he was becoming weary, that there was a singing in his ears, a cloud descending on his eyes, and that the men with whom he fought seemed opaque shadows whose numbers were multiplying, and whose sword-blades his weapon sought and parried by mere instinct rather than by efforts of vision and skill—and, more than all, that many other merciless adversaries were coming clamorously and hastily up the street, a wild emotion of despair gathered with fury in his heart, at the prospect of never seeing his grey-haired mother more, and of being helplessly butchered on the first night he had set foot in the streets of Edinburgh after an absence of well-nigh seven years—butchered by men whom he knew not, and had never offended. Yet, with all this, he now disdained to cry for aid, but fought in silence and despair.

"He sinks at last!" said Symon Brodie with savage exultation. "A Hamilton! a Hamilton! Fawside, ye shall die!"

"Be it so. Then I to God and thou to the devil, false cullion!" he exclaimed, and by two well-directed thrusts he ran the half-tipsy butler and another knave through the body; but their steel caps had scarcely rung on the causeway when five or six other swords flashed before his eyes, and he received a third wound in the breast. On this a cry of agony, which was received by a shout of derision, escaped him.

"Kilmaurs, is not this fellow killed yet?" asked the Master of Lyle, who was one of the new-comers. "Devil bite me! is this French trafficker to keep twelve swordsmen in play and kill them all at his leisure!"

"Upon him now, his guard is down!" exclaimed the ferocious Kilmaurs, exasperated by the taunt of his compatriot, as he rushed forward to despatch the poor lad, whose head and hands were drooping as he reclined against the wall of a dark shadowy house, and felt that life and energy were alike passing away from him; when suddenly a tall man mingled his voice in the combat, and being armed with one of those poleaxes which all citizens were bound to possess for the purpose of "redding frays" within the burgh, he beat them back, shouting the while,

"Armour! armour! fie—to the rescue—fie!"

"What villain art thou?" demanded Glencairn imperiously, grasping his right arm.

"Fie! gar ding your whingers into him!" cried the others. "What matters it who he is?"

"Speak, rash fellow, lest I kill thee!" said the lofty noble. "I am the Lord Glencairn!"

"And I am Dick Hackerston, a burgess and free craftsman—a hammerman of Edinburgh. Fie!—have at ye a'! Is this fair play or foul, my lords and masters?" he exclaimed, as he swept them aside by describing a circle vigorously with his poleaxe.

At that moment blindness came upon the eyes of Florence, and a faintness overspread his limbs. The stone wall against which he reclined seemed to yield and give way; he felt the atmosphere change: a red light seemed to shine before his half-closed eyelids; and voices, gentle, softly modulated, and full of tender commiseration, floated in his ears.

He sank down—down he knew not, recked not where. ........ He heard a door closed violently ......... A stupor like death came over him, and he remembered no more! ........

CHAPTER VIII.
THE REGENCY OF ARRAN.

Yet if the gods demand her, let her sail,—
Our cares are only for the public weal:
Let me be deem'd the hateful cause of all,
And suffer, rather than my people fall.
The prize, the beauteous prize, I will resign,
So dearly valued, and so justly mine.
Iliad, i.

It has already been stated that the Regent of Scotland at this time was James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, better known amid the civil wars and woes of future years as the Duke of Chatelherault, a fief in Poitou, and formerly capital of the duchy of Chatelheraudois. His father was the first who obtained the earldom of Arran, and his mother was Janet Beaton, of Creich, niece of the unfortunate cardinal who was slain in the Castle of St. Andrew's. The French dukedom he received for the spirit with which he maintained Scottish and French interests against the valour of England and the machinations of that degraded and anti-national party the Scottish peers of King Henry's faction, a few of whom have already been introduced to the reader in the preceding chapter.

The little queen was a child in her fifth year; and Henry VIII., that wily and ferocious monarch, during his latter days left nothing untried, by subtle diplomacy, by open war, by hired assassins, and by bands of foreign condottieri leagued with his own troops, to remove from his path all obstruction to a marriage between his son Edward and the young queen of Scotland. He proposed to Arran, if he would deliver her person into his blood-imbrued hands, to assist him with all the power of England and Ireland to make for himself a new kingdom beyond the Forth, and to give his daughter Elizabeth, the future queen of England, in marriage to Arran's heir, the young Lord James Hamilton, then captain of the Scottish Archers in France; but the Regent knew how little Henry's boasts would avail him at the foot of the Grampians, or had patriotism enough to reject a proposal so wild and so disastrous with the disdain it merited; and so, in time, the English Bluebeard was gathered to his wives and to his fathers, bequeathing to the Duke of Somerset, Protector of England during the minority of Edward VI., the pleasant task of arranging, by fair means or foul, a matrimonial alliance between that prince and the little queen of "the rugged land of spearmen."

Cardinal Beaton, long a faithful and a formidable enemy to Scottish treason and to English guile, had perished by the hands of assassins, whose secret projects were better understood at Windsor than at Holyrood. The invasion of Scotland, and the almost total destruction of Edinburgh—the burnings and the devastations in the fertile Lothians by Lord Hertford's army, with the rout of the English at the bloody battle of Ancrum—ended for a time all hope of Somerset ever accomplishing the perilous work so rashly bequeathed to him by his grasping and imperious master; yet, being a brave and high-spirited noble, he still continued the attempt in secret, as he could never despair of having the nation ultimately betrayed while that faithless class, its nobility, existed.

The Scottish peers were now, as usual, divided into two factions, one who adhered to the old treaty with France, and the other—the basest, most venal, and corrupt—composed of those who urged the advantages of the matrimonial alliance between the infant Queen Mary and the boy King Edward. These men, though bearing names of old historic memory, the

"Seed of those who scorn'd
To stoop the neck to wide imperial Rome,"

were mean enough to receive in secret sums of money, first from Henry of England, secondly from the Protector Somerset, and by written obligations to bind themselves to further the selfish and aggressive schemes of both; while, in the same spirit of political perfidy, they gave to the Scottish Regent Arran the most solemn assurances of their entire concurrence with him, in his conservative measures for obeying the will of the late King James V.—whose noble heart they broke,—and in defending the realm of his daughter against all foreign enemies, more especially their ancient foemen of the south. On one hand they openly announced their resolution to support the Church of their fathers, and the faith that came from Rome; on the other, they secretly leagued with those who slew the primate of Scotland in his archiepiscopal castle at St. Andrews, and plotted for the plunder of the temporalities.

The noble Earl of Huntly, with Arran and the more patriotic—the unblemished and unbribed,—looked towards France for a husband for their queen, and for troops to enable them to resist the combined strength of Cassilis, Glencairn, Kilmaurs, and more than two hundred titled Scottish traitors, when backed by the military power of England, and those Spanish and German mercenaries under Don Pedro de Gamboa and Conrad Baron of Wolfenstein, whom the Protector maintained in Norham, Carlisle, and other strongholds near the border.

The weakness of Arran's government, the feeble power of the newly-instituted courts of law, the licentious lives of a hierarchy whose Church and power were nodding to their fall, the gradual declension of an ancient faith, and the dawn of a new one divested of all that was striking or attractive to the imagination, and which, from its grim novelty, the people neither loved nor respected at heart,—all tended to arrest the rapid progress which Scotland had made in art and science, music and poetry, architecture, literature, printing, and commerce, under the fatherly care of the six last kings of the Stuart race. Hence there was generated, about the epoch of our story, a greater barbarism among the feudal aristocracy and their military followers, all of whom were ever but too fierce, turbulent, and prone to bloodshed. Thus outrages, feuds, raids, and combats, the siege and storm of castles and towers, were mere matters of every-day life; and a fight of a few hundred men-at-arms a side, with lance and buckler, sword and arquebuse, in the streets of Edinburgh, Perth, or Aberdeen, occasioned less excitement among their warlike citizens than an election row, a casual fire, or a runaway horse, in these our jogtrot days of peace societies and Sabbatarian twaddle.

The more ancient laws of Scotland, by which a man's life might be redeemed for nine times twenty cattle, or when for shedding blood south of the Scottish Sea (i.e. Firth of Forth) a penalty of twenty-five shillings was levied, or when, for committing the same offence north of the same sea the value of six cattle was exacted—had now been succeeded by a regular code of stricter statutes, to be enforced by regular courts of law and justice. Yet blood was shed and life taken more often than before, in sudden quarrel and old hereditary feud, daily—yea, hourly,—without other punishment or remedy than such as the nearest clansman or kinsman might inflict with the sword and torch—and these were seldom idle.

The times were wild and perilous!

All men wore arms, and used them on the most trivial occasions. Even James V., so famous for his justice and lenity, when a boy in his eleventh year, with his little Parmese dagger, stabbed a warder at the gate of Stirling Castle, because the man would not let him out to ramble in the town.

Hence such outrages as the murder of Cardinal Beaton in his own castle, the slaughter of Sir John Fawside by Claude Hamilton of Preston, on the skirts of Gladsmuir. The besieging of John Lord Lindesay, sheriff of Fife, when in the execution of his office, by the lairds of Clatto, Balfour, and Claverhouse, with eighty men-at-arms, while at the same time the Grants amused themselves by sacking and burning the manor-house of Davy, in Strathnavern, and making a clean sweep of everything on the lands of Ardrossiere. Even the king's artillery, when en route from Stirling to Edinburgh, in 1526, were attacked, the gunners killed or dispersed, and the guns taken, by Bruce of Airth, who required a few field-pieces for his own mansion. Hence the slaughter of the Laird of Mouswaldmains by Bell of Currie, and of the Laird of Dalzel by the Lord Maxwell. Hence the abduction of Lady Margaret Stewart, daughter of Matthew Earl of Lennox, by her lover, the young Laird of Boghall, and the death of her husband John Lord Fleming, great chamberlain of Scotland, by the sword of John Tweedie, Baron of Drummelzier, who slew him when hawking, on the 1st November, 1524. Hence the slaughter of the Laird of Stonebyres by the rector of Colbinton; of two gentlemen named Nisbet, in the king's palace and presence, by Andrew Blackadder of that ilk; the murder of the Laird of Auchinharvie by the Earl of Eglinton; the assassination of that fine old priest and poet, Sir James Inglis, abbot of Culross, by the Baron of Tulliallan, in 1531, and the firing of the thatched kirk of Monivaird, in Strathearn, by the Drummonds, who destroyed therein "six score of the Murrayes, with their wives and childraine, who were all burned or slaine except one."

These little recreations of the Scottish landed gentry and their retainers were occasionally varied by branking scolding wives with iron bridles, or ducking them in ponds; burning witches and Lollards; hanging gipsies, and boring the tongues of evil-speakers with hot iron;—so that seldom a day passed, in town or country, without some stirring novelty of a lively nature.

One tract of land, where, in the year of Flodden, one thousand and forty-one ploughs had usually turned up the teeming soil, was now, as the Lord Dacre says, "clearly wasted, and had no man dwelling therein,"—wasted by his wanton inroads; and this desolated tract lay in the middle Marches, on the banks of the Leader, the Euse, and the Ale—the lovely border-land,—the land of war and song—of the sword and lyre; but there grew little grass, and less corn, where the hoof of the moss-trooper's steed left its iron print in the soil.

Superstition was not wanting to add to the terror of warring clans and those English devastators who, in 1544, laid Edinburgh in blazing ruin, and swept all the fair Lothians, as if the land had been burned up—tree, tower, and corn-field, hamlet, church, and hedgerow—by the fire which fell of old on the cities of the plain. Lady Glammes, a young and beautiful woman, was burned alive at Edinburgh, for treason, and some say sorcery; and in the year of our story, 1547, there was buried in the beautiful chapel of Roslin, Father Samuel, the prior of St. Mary of Deir, who was deemed a wizard so terrible that all the sanctity of the place could scarcely keep his bones from rattling in their stone sarcophagus.

Wonderful things were seen and heard of in those quaint old times.

In 1570, a monstrous fish, having two human heads, each surmounted by a royal crown of gold, swam up Lochfyne; and seven years after, a swarm of fish, each having a monk's hood on its head, came up the Firth of Forth. In Glencomie, a gentleman of the house of Lovat slew a veritable scaly dragon, which vomited fire like that encountered by St. George of old, and set the purple heather in a flame. The northern sky was nightly brightened by ranks of glittering spears and waving pennons. In the woful year of Pinkey-cleugh, a calf was brought forth with two heads, on Robert Ormiston's farm, in Lothian; and if other omen of evil to come were wanted, on the Westmains of Fawside, a huge bull which belonged to our friend Roger the Baillie, and was the pride of the parish, when browsing on the green brae-side, turned suddenly into a black boulder-stone, which may yet be seen by those who take the trouble of inquiring after it; while a "fierce besom" or comet that blazed o' nights in the southern quarter of the sky, portended evil coming from England, and made old men and grandmothers cower with affright in their cosy ingles beyond the fire, and tell their beads as their minds became filled with forebodings of dolor and woe: for though hardy and brave, they were simple souls—our Scottish sires, three hundred years ago.

Such was the state of the kingdom in the year of our story, and during the regency of Arran.

CHAPTER IX.
MISTRUST.

It will be great, thou son of pride!—I have been renowned in battle; but I never told my name to a foe.—Ossian.

Consciousness returned slowly to Florence Fawside, and when his eyes unclosed, he saw first the huge misshapen figures of a large green-and-russet-coloured tapestry, which covered the walls of a dimly-lighted room, the four carved posts of a bed, the magnificent canopy of which spread its shadow over him, and the soft laced pillows whereon his head reposed. Then he became sensible of the presence of persons moving about him on tiptoe, speaking in gentle whispers.

There were two women, young, beautiful, and richly dressed; and with them was a man whose white beard flowed over the front of his long and sable robe. Then came again the sensation of faintness—the sinking sensation of one about to die,—with the agony of his sword-wounds, which felt like the searings of a red-hot iron, when the hands of his fair attendants—soft, kind, and "tremulously gentle" hands they were—unbuttoned his doublet, untied his ruff, drew aside the breast of his lace shirt, and a handkerchief which he had thrust under it when first wounded, and which were now both soaked with blood. This caused his wounds to stream anew. He felt the current of his life gush forth, and while a faint cry of pity from a female voice came feebly to his ear, the sufferer, when making a futile effort to grasp the pocket which contained his fatal letters, became once more totally insensible.

The early dawn of a clear August morning was stealing through the iron-grated windows of the apartment in which he lay, when Florence awoke again to life, and, raising himself feebly on an elbow, looked around him.

He was in a chamber the walls of which were hung with beautiful tapestry; the ceiling was painted with mythological figures, and the oak floor was strewn with green rushes and freshly-cut flowers—for carpets were yet almost unknown in Britain. From a carved beam of oak, which crossed the ceiling transversely, hung a silver night-lamp, fed with perfumed oil, amid which the light was just expiring. In a shadowy corner of the room was an altar, bearing a glittering crucifix, before which were two flickering tapers, two vases of fresh roses, and an exquisitely-carved prie-Dieu of walnut-wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

The hangings of his bed were of the finest crimson silk, festooned by gold cords and massive tassels. On one side, through the window, he could see the green northern bank of the loch which bordered the city, and through which on the night before he had striven to swim his horse; beyond it were yellow fields, green copsewood, and purple muirland, stretching to the shores of the azure Forth. On the other side were the quaint figures of the old tapestry which represented a Scottish tradition well known in the days of Hector Boece—that on the day when the battle of Bannockburn was fought and won, a knight in armour that shone with a marvellous brilliance, mounted on a black steed, all foamy with haste and bloody with spurring, appeared suddenly in the streets of Aberdeen, and with a loud voice announced Bruce's victory to the startled citizens. Passing thence to the north with frightful speed, over hill and valley, this shining warrior was seen to quit the land and spur his steed across the raging waves of the Pentland Firth, and to vanish in the mist that shrouded the northern isles. Hence some averred he was St. Magnus of Orkney, while the more aspiring maintained that he was St. Michael the Archangel.

"Where am I?" was the first mental question of the sufferer, as he pressed his hand across his swimming forehead. "My letters!" was his next thought. On a chair near him hung his doublet: he made a great effort to ascertain if they were untouched, but sank back upon his pillow, exhausted by the attempt.

Morning was far advanced when he revived again. He found something cold and sharp in flavour poured between his lips; it refreshed him, and on looking up he became inspired with new energy on seeing again the two ladies whose forms he believed last night to have been the portions of a feverish dream, or to have been conjured by his fancy from those upon the tapestry.

One was a tall and beautiful woman, of a noble and commanding presence, about thirty years of age; her forehead was rather broad than high; her nose, long and somewhat pointed, might have been too masculine, but for the charming softness of her other features, especially her clear hazel eyes, which were full of sweetness, and expressed the deepest commiseration. That her rank was high, her attire sufficiently announced. She was dressed in a delentera of cloth-of-gold, the opened skirts of which displayed her petticoat of crimson brocade; her sleeves were of crimson satin tied by strings of pearl; her girdle was of gold surrounded by long pearl pendants; while a cross of diamonds sparkled on her breast.

Her companion seemed fully ten years younger: her stature was rather less; her complexion was equally fair; but her hair was of that deep brown which seems black by night; her features were so regular that nothing prevented them from being perhaps insipid; but the darkness of her eyebrows, with the vivacity of her deep violet-coloured blue eyes; and as she bent over the sufferer's bed, the rose-leaf tinge in her soft cheek came and went rapidly. She wore a loose robe of purple taffeta, trimmed with seed pearls; and among her dark hair there sparkled many precious stones; for the attire of people of rank in those days was gorgeously profuse in quality of material and elaboration of ornament.

"Mon Dieu!—he faints again!" said the former lady, in a soft but foreign accent, and with a tone of alarm.

"Nay, he only sleeps," whispered the other; "and see—now he wakens and recovers!"

"Saint Louis prie pour moi! but the pale aspect of this wounded boy so terrifies me!"

"Am I still in France?" murmured Fawside.

"Oh, he speaks of France!" exclaimed the elder, drawing nearer.

"Where am I, madame—in Paris?" asked Fawside faintly.

"Nay, you are safe in the city of Edinburgh."

"Safe! And who are you who condescend to treat me so humanely, so tenderly? Oh! I cannot dream. Last night—I now remember me,—I left the ship of the Sieur de Villegaignon, and was pursued by armed men,—by men who sought to murder me, and Heaven and they alone know why, for unto them I had done no wrong. I fell, wounded, I remember; but how came I here?"

"You must not speak, fair sir," replied the elder lady, placing her white and faultless hand upon the hot and parched mouth of the youth. "But listen, and I shall tell you. We heard the clash of swords (nothing singular in Edinburgh), and cries for 'help' beneath our windows; from whence we saw a man beset by many, who beat him down at last, though he fought valiantly with his back to the postern door of our mansion."

"A door!—methought it was a stone wall.

"Nay, sir, fortunately it was not the stone wall, but a door: my servants opened it; you fell inwards. It was instantly shut and barricaded, by nay orders, and thus we saved you."

"And this was last night?"

"Nay," replied the beautiful lady, smiling, and using her weetest foreign accent, "it was three nights ago."

"Three!"

"I have said so, monsieur."

"You are of France, dear madame?"

"So are many ladies at the Scottish court."

"And I—I——"

"Have been in sleep under the opiates of my physician, or at times delirious; but now, thanked be kind Heaven, and his judicious skill, all danger of fever is past."

"Three days and nights! Oh! madame, to how much inconvenience I must have put you."

"Say not so. To have saved your life is reward sufficient for my friend and me."

"Thanks, madame, thanks; not that I value life much, but for the sake of one I love dearly, and for the task I have to perform."

"One!—a lady, doubtless?" asked the younger, smiling.

"My mother!" replied Fawside, as his dark eyes flashed and suffused at the same moment!

"And your task is probably a pilgrimage?" continued she with the violet-blue eyes.

"Nay, lady, nay; no pilgrimage, but a behest full of danger and death, and inspired by a hate that seems at times to be a holy one—for the blood of a slain father inspires it."

"Madame," began the younger lady uneasily, "may it please your——"

"Stay!" exclaimed the other, interrupting the title by which she doubtless was about to be addressed;—and then they whispered together.

Fawside now remarked mentally that this was the third occasion on which she had been similarly interrupted.

"Here lurketh some mystery," thought he, glancing at his doublet, in the secret pocket of which his letters were concealed, "so let me be wary."

"These are exciting thoughts for one so weak and so severely wounded as you are," resumed the matron, for such she evidently was. "Know you who those outrageous assailants were?"

"Too well!—the men who slew my father under tryst, and my brave brother too, by falsity and secrecy, as 'tis said."

"And they?" faltered the lady.

"Who?"

"Your father and brother?"

"Were good men and leal."

"I doubt not that, sir. But their names?"

"Were second to none in the three Lothians."

"You are singularly wary, fair sir," said the elder lady proudly, and with an air of pique.

"And your father fell——," began the younger in a tremulous voice, as if the young man's vehemence terrified her.

"He fell so many years ago that the interest of my debt of blood and vengeance——"

"Is, I doubt not, doubled!"

"Yea, madame, quadrupled; and I shall have it rendered back duly, every drop."

"Oh! say not so," said the young lady, shuddering. "Think of all you have escaped, and how, on that fatal night, kind Heaven spared you."

"To avenge my family feud on those who would have slain me."

"And you have been in France?" said the lady in the cloth-of-gold, to change the subject.

"Yes, madame."

"And came from thence with Nicholas de Villegaignon?"

"Yes, madame."

"Ah, mon Dieu!—dear, dear France!" she exclaimed; "and you were there how long?"

"Seven happy years, lady."

"In the army, of course?"

"No."

"At the court of Henry of Valois?"

"No—with Anne de la Tour."

"The Duchess of Albany—a proud and haughty old widow."

"But a mistress kind and gentle to me. I had the honour to kiss King Henry's hand on my way home through Paris."

"Had you any letters or messages for Scotland?" asked the lady anxiously.

"Nay, I had no letters," he replied gloomily and briefly; "but tell me, pray, your names, your rank, ladies—in pity tell me!"

"Pardon us, sir," said the elder, patting his forehead kindly with her soft white hand; "in that you must hold us excused. We tell not our names lightly to a stranger—a wild fellow who fights with every armed man, and, for aught we know, makes love to every pretty woman, and who, moreover, shrouds in such provoking mystery his own name and purpose. So adieu, sir—a little time and we shall be with you again."

"Stay, madame—stay, and pardon me," he exclaimed, as they retired through the parted arras, and disappeared when its heavy fold closed behind them. Then he sank upon his pillow, exhausted even by this short interview.

"I am right," he muttered, as he lay with his eyes closed, in a species of half-stupor, or waking dream; "my name shall never pass my lips until I have the barbican gate of Fawside Tower behind me. And yet—and yet—how hard to mistrust that lovely girl with the dark-blue eyes and deep-brown hair!"

Rendered cautious by his late adventure, he tore off and defaced the armorial bearings, which, in the French fashion, he wore on the breast of his beautiful doublet, and resolved studiously to conceal alike his name, his purpose, and his letters, to say no more of whence he had come or whither he was bound, lest those two charming women, who so kindly watched and tended his sick couch, and who so sedulously concealed their names and titles, might be the wives, the loves, or kindred of his enemies.

Such were his resolves. But how weak are the resolves even of the brave and wary, when in the hands of a beautiful woman!

CHAPTER X.
IN WHICH THE PATIENT PROGRESSES FAVOURABLY.

His qualities were beauteous as his form,
For maiden-tongued he was, and thereof free;
Yet, if men moved him, he was such a storm
As oft twixt May and April we may see.
A Lover's Complaint.

Aided by his youth and strength, and doubtless by his native air, which blew upon his pale face through the northern windows of his chamber, when the breeze waved the ripening corn and wafted the perfume of the heather and the yellow broom-bells across the North Loch, Florence recovered rapidly. His wounds soon healed, under the soothing influence of the medicinal balsams applied to them, and of the subtle opiates which he received from the hands of his two fair attendants, and from those of the white-bearded physician, who, with a pardonable vanity, cared not to conceal his name, but soon announced himself to be Master Peter Posset, chirurgeon to the late King James V. of blessed memory (whose deathbed he had soothed at Falkland Palace), and deacon of the chirurgeon-barbers of Edinburgh—a body who, in virtue of their office, were exempted by their charter from serving on juries, and from the duties of keeping watch and ward within the city.

Master Posset was a man of venerable aspect, with a voluminous white beard. He was measured in tone, pedantic in manner, and bled and blistered, according to the rule of the age, only when certain stars and signs which were believed to influence the human body, were in certain mansions of the firmament,—for he was a deep dabbler alike in alchemy and astrology. Yet in 1533 he had studied and practised at Lyons as hospital physician under Rabellais, and been the medical attendant of Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, when that distinguished prelate travelled to Rome concerning the divorce of Henry VIII. of England in 1534. The residence of Master Posset was at the head of a forestair in the Lawn-market, where his uncouth sign,—a dried alligator, swung from an iron bracket, exciting fear and awe in the heart of country folks who came to buy or sell, and where the armorial cognizance of his craft,—argent, a naked corpse fessways proper, between a hand with an eye in its palm, the thistle and crown,—informed all that it was the domicile of the Deacon of the Chirurgeon-Barbers.

By his pedantry and prosy recollections of MM. Rabellais and Jean du Bellay, this worthy leech proved an intolerable bore to his patient; but he had evidently received due instructions to be reserved; for by no effort of cunning, of tact, and by no power of entreaty, could Fawside draw from him the secret of whose house they were in, and who were these two women so highly bred, so courtly, and so beautiful who attended him like sisters, and to whom he owed his life and rapid recovery. From a French valet who also attended him he was likewise unable to extract a syllable; for M. Antoine, though an excellent musician on the viol, made signs that he was dumb.

"Master Posset, good, kind Master Posset," said Florence one day, "I have exhausted all offers of bribes such as a gentleman in my present circumstances might make, and you have nobly rejected them all. Now I cast myself upon your pity, your humanity, to tell me who and what those two kind fairies are!"

"Who they are I dare not tell; what they are I may," replied the cautious leech.

"Say on, then. What are they?"

"A widow and a maid."

"The widow?" asked Florence impetuously.

"Is she with the hazel eyes and chestnut hair."

"The maid?"

"Of course the other, she with the darker hair and violet-blue eyes, and who, violet-like, secludes herself from all."

"The loveliest, thank Heaven!"

"Why thank you Heaven so fervently?" asked Master Posset with surprise.

"Ask me not!—ask me not!" exclaimed Fawside, in whose heart every glance, every action, and every trivial question or remark of the younger lady had made a deep impression.

"Their rank?"

"I may not, must not tell you," interrupted the physician hastily.

"It is high?"

"Few are nobler in the land."

"Ah! Master Posset, each looks like a queen."

"Perhaps they are so,—queens of Elfen," replied Master Posset, with a smile which his heavy white moustache concealed.

"You are most discreet, Master Apothecary," sighed Florence with impatience.

"To be discreet was one of my chief orders, and I am in the mansion of those who brook no trifling; and, as the great Rabellais was wont to say, discretion to a physician was as necessary as a needle to a compass."

"All this mystery seems rather peculiar and unnecessary; but thus much I can discern, that the younger gentlewoman treats the other with such deference and respect, that her rank must be inferior, though her beauty is second to none that I have seen even at the court of France."

"You are an acute observer, sir," replied the leech, reddening, and with some alarm; "but may not such deference and respect arise from her junior years?"

"Scarcely; for I can perceive that the elder is barely thirty years of age."

"Yet she has buried a second husband and at least two children."

"I shall soon discover her if you give me but one or two more such other details," said Florence laughing.

"You will not attempt it, I hope," said Master Posset, with growing alarm, and preparing to withdraw.

"Most worthy doctor, what is that which succeeds best in this world?"

"I know not."

"Shall I tell you?"

"Yes."

"Success. I have great faith in it."

"The very words of the great Rabelais!"

"The devil take Rabelais!" said Florence with annoyance.

"Shame on you, young sir!" said Master Posset, who considered this rank blasphemy.

"Pardon me; but by this faith in success I shall never fail," replied Fawside laughing. "I shall soon be gone from here, where I have played the owl too long, and when well enough I shall soar like the lark. Ah! good Master Posset, most worthy deacon, dost think I have spent seven years of my life between Paris and Vendome without being able to discover a pretty demoiselle's name when I had the wish to do so. She cannot conceal herself long from me, be assured of that."

"Is it gallant to talk thus of those gentlewomen whose roof shelters you, and from whom you also conceal your own name?" asked Posset angrily.

"It is not; and yet, by my faith, three sword wounds have given me more reason for caution than I ever thought would fall to my lot. But I will take patience, for time unravelleth all things."

"As I have heard the divine Jean de Bellay preach in Notre Dame at Paris many a time—yea, sir, verily time unravelleth all things."

"Yea, and avengeth all things," said a soft voice on the other side of his couch; and on turning, Fawside met the bright eyes of the lady and her friend fixed upon him.

The young man was very handsome. His features were regular, but striking and marked; his hair was cut short, but was black and curly; his nose was straight, with a well-curved nostril; his chin was well defined, and fringed by a short-clipped French beard. His shirt-collar being open, displayed a muscular chest, white as the marble of Paros, but crossed by the ligatures and bandages which retained the healing balsams on his wounds. His features had all the freshness and charm of youth, but over them was spread the languor of recent suffering and loss of blood; thus his fine eyes were unnaturally bright and restless. Finding that the noble lady had overheard his heedless remarks, Fawside made efforts to rise to bow, and, reddening deeply, said,—

"Pardon me, madam, I knew not that you were so near; nor you, sweet mistress," he added in a tremulous voice, as he addressed the younger and more beautiful of those striking women, in whose charming society he had been thrown, and to whose care he had found himself confided for more than a week.

Long conscious of the power of her beauty, it was impossible for this young lady not to perceive and feel pleased with the interest she was exciting in the breast of Florence, the expression of whose dark eyes and the tone of whose voice too surely revealed it.

This morning her sweetly feminine face was more than usually lovely in an ermined triangular hood, trimmed with Isla pearls from Angus, and these were not whiter than her delicate neck and ring-laden fingers; she seldom spoke, save when addressed by her friend, and her replies were always brief.

"I heard you mention Paris and the Vendomois," said the latter to the patient, as she bent her clear hazel eyes upon him, and as Master Posset respectfully withdrew from the chamber by retiring backwards through the arras. "I know the latter well, and every bend of the beautiful Loire, with the old castle of the Comtes de la Marche and the ducal mansion of Charles of Bourbon——"

"And the great old abbey of the Holy Trinity, with its huge towers, its pointed windows, and the reliquary——"

"Where the Benedictines keep in a crystal case the Holy Tear——"

"Wept by our Blessed Saviour over the grave of Lazarus."

"Ah, I see we shall have some recollections in common," said the proud lady, smiling; "and fair Paris—how looketh it?"

"Gay and great as ever, forming, to my eyes,—in its life, bustle, and magnitude,—a wondrous contrast to our grim Scottish burghs, with their barred houses, their walls and gates, and steep streets encumbered by stacks of peat and fuel and heather."

"Mon Dieu, yes; one may caracole a horse along the Rue St. Jacques or the Rue St. Honore without meeting such uncouth obstructions as these. Is the Hotel de Ville finished yet?"

"Nearly so."

"Are those four delightful monsters of M—M—oh, I forget his name—completed on the tower of St. Jacques de la Boucharie?"

"Yes, madam, and grin over Paris all day long."

"You see, I know Paris, sir."

"Madame is doubtless only Scottish by adoption."

The lady smiled sadly, while her friend laughed aloud.

"I can see it before me now, in fancy," said she while her fine eyes dilated and sparkled, "smiling amid the plain that is covered with golden corn, and bounded by the vine-clad hills that spread from Mont l'Hery to Poissy; Paris with its busy streets of brick-fronts and stone-angles, of slated roofs and many-coloured houses—the huge masses of the cité, the ville, the great Bastile, and the double towers of mighty Notre Dame! I see them all glittering in the cloudless sun of noon, as one day my little daughter shall see them too!"

"A daughter—you have a daughter, madam," said Fawside with growing interest, "and are a widow; in pity tell me who you are?"

"We two have our little secrets, fair sir," she replied, holding up a slender finger with a waggish expression.

"By the cross on my dagger, I swear to you, madam——"

"But your dagger is lost."

"I regret that deeply, for it was the present of a noble dame."

"Since we are so bent on fruitlessly questioning each other, may I ask her name?" said the younger lady.

"Diana de Poictiers, the Duchess of Valentinois; it bears her three crescents engraved upon the hilt; but I left it in some knave's body on the night of the brawl. If he lives, the diamonds in the pommel may perhaps prove a salve for his sores; if he dies, a fund for his funeral—but a pest on't! my brave dagger is gone."

"Accept this from me," said the taller lady, taking from an ebony buffet that stood near, a jewelled poniard, and presenting it to Florence.

"A thousand thanks, madam—a lady's gift can never be declined; but what do I see? The cipher of James V.—of his late majesty."

"'Twas his dagger," said the lady gloomily, "and with it he threatened to stab Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, the inquisitor-general of Scotland; but I arrested his hand and took away the weapon; for the gentle King James would never refuse aught to a woman, a priest, or a child."

"And so you were known to the fair mistress of Francis I.?" asked the young lady with a slightly disdainful pout on her pretty lip.

"Nay, madam, I cannot say that she knew me; but once when she and her royal lover quarrelled, I bore a letter from her to Francis, and at a time when no other person would venture to approach him, his majesty being furious on the arrival of tidings that his fleet before Nice had been destroyed by the galleys of Andrew Doria."

"This was three years ago."

"I was loitering one day in the gallery of the Louvre, when she approached me, 'M. le Page,' said she, placing a little pink note in my hand, 'will you do a service for me?'

"'I belong to Madame la Duchesse d'Albany,' said I; 'yet I shall gladly obey you, madam.'

"'Then you shall have ten golden crowns.'

"'Ten crowns! Ah, madam,' said I, gallantly, 'I would rather have ten gifts less tangible.'

"'You shall have both, boy,' said she, laughing merrily; 'the crowns now and the kisses hereafter.'

"Her note to Francis proved successful: in less than ten minutes that princely monarch was at her feet. But with her kiss, she gave me a Parmese dagger, which she wore at her girdle, the gift of her present lover, Henry of Valois, and which you, madam, have so nobly replaced by this."

As he spoke, Florence, with the true loyal devotion of the olden time, kissed the cipher which was engraved on its hilt.

At that moment Master Posset reappeared, and whispered in the ear of the lady of the mansion.

"Excuse me, sir," said she; "there are those without who would speak with me."

And on her retiring suddenly with the physician, Florence, somewhat to his confusion, found himself for a time left alone with the younger and, as we have more than once said, more attractive of his two attendants, and in whom, though as yet nameless, we have little doubt the sagacious reader has already recognized the heroine of our story.

CHAPTER XI.
THE OPAL RING.

Late my spring-time came, but quickly
Youth's rejoicing currents run,
And my inner life unfolded
Like a flower before the sun.
Hopes, and aims, and aspirations,
Grew within the growing boy;
Life had new interpretations;
Manhood brought increase of joy.
Mary Howitt.

After a pause their eyes met, and the lady's were instantly averted; the cheeks of both were suffused by a blush, for they "were so young, and one so innocent," that they were incapable of feeling emotion without exhibiting this charming, but, at times, most troublesome symptom of it.

The lady spoke first.

"And so, sir, you are still resolved to preserve your incognito—to maintain your character of the unknown knight?"

"Yes, madam," said he in the same spirit of banter, "while in the castle of an enchantress—for here, indeed, am I under a spell. And, more than all, my wounds have made me cautious to the extent, perhaps, of ingratitude."

"So you actually mistrust us!" exclaimed the lady colouring deeply, while her dark-blue eyes sparkled with mingled amusement and surprise.

"I will risk anything rather than lie longer under an imputation such as your words convey," replied the young man impetuously: "I am Florence Fawside of that ilk. And, now that you know my name, I pray you tell not my enemies of it, for I might be slaughtered here perhaps, without once more striking a gallant blow in my own defence. I have told you my name," he added, lowering his voice to an accent of tenderness, while attempting to take her hand; but she started back; "and now, dear lady, honour me with yours."

But the lady had grown deadly pale; her fine eyes surveyed the speaker with an expression of gloomy and startled interest, mingled with pity and alarm. Florence, on beholding this emotion, at once detected that he had made a mistake by the sudden revelation of his name, and a vague sense of helplessness and danger possessed his heart.

"I shall never forget the kindness, the humanity, and the tenderness with which you have treated me, lady; but why all this strange mystery—for you cannot be unfriended and alone here, as I at present am? Why have I been concealed even from your servants? None have approached me but Master Posset the leech, and a Frenchman, Antoine, who pretends—as I suspect—to be deaf or dumb. All betokens some mystery, if not some pressing danger. Oh, that I were again strong enough to use my sword—to sit on horseback and begone!"

"To all these questions I can only reply by others. Why all these complaints—whence this alarm?"

"I must begone, lady," said Florence with a tremulous voice; for though dazzled and lured by the beauty of the speaker on one hand, he dreaded falling into some deadly snare on the other; "I long to see my aged mother—and I have letters——"

"Not for the Regent, I hope?" said the young lady, coming forward a pace.

"Probe not my secrets, lady. I have told you my name—I am the last of an old race that never failed Scotland or her king in the hour of need or peril. I shall be faithful to you——"

"To me!" reiterated the beautiful girl in a low voice, while blushing deeply. "I need not your faith, good sir?"

"To you and to my royal mistress; but I long to leave this—to see once more the aged mother who tended my infant years——"

"A harsh and stern woman, who, if men say true, will urge you to the committal of dreadful deeds!"

"Say not so—she was ever gentle and loving to me, and to my brave brother Willie, who now, alas! sleeps in his father's grave."

"Gentle and loving!—so are the bear or the tigress to their cubs; but their fierce nature still remains."

"Remember that she you speak of is my mother, lady," said Florence, colouring with vexation.

"Pardon me—I speak but from report."

"I long, too, to see honest old Roger of the Westmains, with his white beard and hale nut-brown visage—my tutor in the science of defence, he who taught me to handle sword and dagger, arquebuse and pike, as if I had come into the world cap-a-pie; and next there is Father John of Tranent, the kind old vicar, who was wont in the long nights of winter to take me on his knee, and tell me such wondrous tales of Arthur's round table, of William Wallace, of Alexander, and of Hector—the prophecies of Thomas the Rhymer, and how they never fail to be fulfilled—the story of Red Ettin, the giant who had three heads, and of the Gyre Carlin, the mother-witch of all our Scottish witches, till my hair stood on end with terror of men so bold and people so weird and strange. I long to see my old nurse Maud, who was wont to rock me to sleep in the old turret, and sing me the 'Flowers of the Forest,' or the sweet old song of 'Gynkertoun;' and I long once more to find myself under the moss-covered roof of the old tower, where my mother waits and, it may be, weeps for me—that grim old mansion, with its barred gate, its dark loopholes, and narrow stairs, whose steps have been hallowed by time, and by the feet of generations of my forefathers who are now gone to God, and whose bones sleep under the shadow of His cross in the green kirkyard of Tranent."

"In short," said the lady, with a very decided pout on her beautiful red lips, "you are tired of dwelling here, and long to be gone."

"Here—ah, madam, say not so! Here, here with you, could I dwell for ever; but I have beloved ties and stern duties, that demand my presence elsewhere."

The dark-haired girl smiled and drooped her eyelids, while her confusion increased; for affection soon ripened in young hearts in those old days of nature and of impulse, before well-bred folks had learned to veil alike their hatred and their love under the same calm and impenetrable exterior.

The ice was now fairly broken, but their conversation became broken too.

After a pause, during which Florence had succeeded in capturing the little hand of the unknown, and kissing it at least thrice.

"You mean still to conceal your name from me!" said he with a tone of tender reproach.

"I act under the orders of another——"

"Another!—to whom do you yield this obedience? To me you seem inferior to none on earth."

"To none, I trust, in your estimation," said she, coquettishly.

"But to esteem, to love you as I do—to have intrusted you with my name, and yet to know not yours, is unkind, unfair, and subjecting me to torture and anxiety."

"I cannot give you my name—oh, pardon me, for in this matter, be assured, I am not my own mistress," said she, in a trembling voice.

"This is most strange, and like a chapter of Amadis, or some old romance. Then how shall I name you?"

"'Urganda the unknown,'[*] or aught you please," she replied, smiling to conceal her confusion as she withdrew her hand; and, taking from one of her fair and slender fingers a ring, she dropped it on the pillow of Florence, adding, "take this trinket—it has a secret by which one day you may know me. Take it, Florence Fawside, and wear it in memory of one who will never cease to regard you with most mournful interest, but who can never even be your—friend!"

[*] A famous enchantress in Amadis de Gaul.

"In memory—as if I could forget you while life and breath remained?" exclaimed Florence, bending over the jewel (an opal) to kiss it.

When he looked up the fair donor was gone. A tremulous motion of the arras in the twilight—eve had now closed in—indicated where she had vanished, before he could arrest her by word or deed, and implore an explanation of the strange and enigmatical words which had accompanied a gift so priceless to a lover.

She was gone; and, exhausted by the excitement of the interview, by the sudden turn it had taken, and the mutual revelation of a mutual interest in each other's hearts, Florence fell back upon his pillow, and lay long with his eyes closed and his whole being vibrating with joy, while the sober shadows of evening deepened in the tapestried room around him.

He was filled with a new happiness, his soul roved far away in the land of sunny dreams, his whole pulses seemed to quicken, and, with the conviction that this beautiful unknown loved him, he suddenly discovered there was in the world something else to live for than feudal vengeance.

"To-morrow I shall see her again," thought he; "to-morrow I shall hear her voice, and see her dear dove-like eyes assure me that she loves me still; and her name—oh, she must assuredly reveal it to me then. But are this interview and this ring, her gift, no fantasies of mine? Oh, to solve this strange mystery and concealment!"

As he thought thus, and gave utterance to his ideas half audibly, a red light flashed across the tapestried walls of the room. It came from the outside, and on raising himself he saw the wavering gleam of several torches on the well-grated windows, while the voices of men, one of whom, uttered hoarsely several words of command, the clatter of horses' hoofs, and the clank of iron-shod halberds and arquebuses, rang in the adjacent street. What did all these unusual sounds mean?

A vague emotion of alarm, filled his breast; he glanced round for his sword, and kept it in his hand in case of a sudden attack; but anon the gleam of the torches faded away, and the clatter of hoofs and spurs seemed to pass up the narrow street, and to lessen in distance.

Then all became still in the mansion and around it; and a foreboding, that portended he knew not what, fell upon the heart of the listener.

CHAPTER XII
MASTER POSSET.

I am thy friend, thy best of friends;
No bud in constant heats can blow—
The green fruit withers in the drought,
But ripens where the waters flow.
Mackay.

The morrow came with its sunshine; but the two fair faces which had been wont to shed even a more cheering influence over the couch of the wounded youth were no longer there. Hour after hour passed, yet they did not come; and Fawside recalled with anxiety the too evident sounds or signs of a rapid departure on the preceding evening.

So passed the day. Dumb Antoine alone appeared; but from his grimaces nothing could be gathered. Night came on, and with it sleep, but a sleep disturbed by more than one dream of a fair face, with dark-blue eyes and lashes black and long, deep thoughtful glances and alluring smiles.

At last there came a sound that roused the dreamer; a ray of light flashed through the parted arras from another room.

"She comes!" was the first thought of Florence. "At this hour, impossible!" was the second.

There was a light step. Dawn was just breaking; but the good folks of that age were ever afoot betimes. At last the arras was parted boldly, and Master Posset, bearing a lamp, with his long silvery beard glittering over the front of his black serge gown, which hung in wavy folds to his feet, approached, bearing on a silver salver the patient's usual breakfast of weak hippocras, with maccaroon biscuits. He felt the youth's pulse, looked anxiously at his eyes and wounds, pronounced him infinitely better, and added that he "might on this day leave his couch."

"And the ladies?" asked Florence, unable to restrain his curiosity longer.

"What ladies?" queried the discreet Master Posset.

"Those who for so many days have watched my pillow like sisters—the hazel-eyed and the blue-eyed—for, alas! I know not their names. Where were they all yesterday, and where are they to-day?"

"Gone!"

"Gone!" faintly echoed Florence;—"but whither?"

"To Stirling."

"But why to Stirling?" asked Florence impetuously.

"Because they have business with the Lord Regent."

"I will follow them. My doublet—my boots and hose. Good Master Posset, your hand. Ah! great Heaven! how my head swims, and the room runs round as if each corner was in pursuit of the other!" exclaimed Florence, who sprang from bed, and would have fallen had not the attentive leech caught him in his arms.

"We must creep before we walk; and you must walk, sir, before you can ride a horse."

"When may I sit in my saddle?"

"In three days, perhaps."

"In three days I shall be in Stirling!" said the other impetuously.

"You had better go home," said Posset bluntly. "'Tis the advice of a sincere friend, who would not have you ride to Stirling on a bootless errand."

"Why bootless, Master Possett, when I tell you that I love, dearly love, one of those who have so abruptly forsaken me."

Master Posset's face, at least so much of it as his voluminous beard and moustache permitted one to see, underwent various expressions at this sudden announcement—-astonishment and perplexity, alarm, and then merriment.

"Fair sir," said he, laughing and shrugging his shoulders (a habit he had probably acquired from M. Rabelais), "you forget yourself."

"Wherefore, forsooth? Are they so high in rank above a landed baron?"

"In Scotland few are higher."

"Do not say these discouraging things, but tell me their names; for the hundredth time I implore you."

"I dare not."

"If I used threats, what would you say?"

"As my friend Rabelais said to a French knight at Lyons, when similarly threatened."

"And what said your devil of a Rabelais?"

"That threats ill became a sick man, when used to his friend; and worse still from one of your junior years, to a man in whose beard so few black hairs can be reckoned as in mine."

"Most true—forgive me; but when once free of this house, I shall soon solve the mystery. A woman so lovely as the younger lady must be well known, and must have many lovers."

"Doubtless."

"Thou art a most discreet apothecary, Master Posset—yea, a most wonderful apothecary!" said Fawside, gnawing the end of his moustache, and continuing to attire himself during this conversation; "and you really think she has many?"

"Yes; yet from her strength of character, I am assured she is a woman who in her lifetime will have but one love."

"One; come, that is encouraging!"

"Though little more than a girl in years, she is a woman in heart, in soul, and in mind. Do you understand me?"

"Yes—truss me those ribbons—thanks, Master Posset—I understand you, but only so far that if I am not the love referred to, I shall pass my sword through the body of the other who may occupy that position. Her faintest smile is worth a hundred golden crowns!"

"A sentiment worthy of Rabelais; but as your friend, Florence Fawside—one your senior in life and experience by many years—cease to speak or think of her thus."

"Why, if I love her?" demanded the young man, with a mixture of sadness and that impetuosity which formed one of the chief elements of his character.

"Because there are (as I call Heaven to witness!) barriers between you——"

"Grace me guide! mean you to say she is married?"

"No; but still there are barriers insuperable to the success of such a love."

"To the brave?" asked Florence proudly.

"Yea, to the bravest."

"God alone knoweth what you all mean by this cruel enigma; but in three days I will set forth to solve it—to solve it or to die!"

The old doctor smiled at the young man's energy, and kindly offered the assistance of his arm to enable him to walk about the chamber, after obtaining from him his parole of honour, that without permission duly accorded he would not attempt to leave it or penetrate into other parts of the mansion.

The evening of the third day had faded into night, and night was passing into morning, when Master Posset appeared and said,—"Come, sir, horses are in waiting; we leave this immediately."

"In the dark?" asked Florence, with surprise.

"'Tis within an hour of dawn."

"A fresh mystery!—for whence—Stirling?"——"No."

"Whither then?"

"Fawside Tower—have you no ties there?"

"My mother—yes, my mother," said Florence, with a gush of tenderness in his heart, as he hastily dressed; "but once to embrace her, and then for Stirling—ho!"

"You may spare yourself the toil of such a journey; for I assure you, on the word of an honest man, that in less than three days perhaps those you seek will be again in Edinburgh."

To this the sole reply of Florence, was to kiss the opal ring, the secret of which he had as yet failed to discover.

"You must permit me to muffle your eyes."

"Wherefore, Master Posset? this precaution savours of mistrust, and becomes an insult."

"Laird of Fawside, I insist upon it; and she whose orders we must both obey also insists upon it."

"She—who?"

"The giver of the opal ring," whispered the doctor.

"Lead on—I obey," replied the young man, suddenly reduced to docility; "all things must end—and so this mystery."

Posset tied a handkerchief over the eyes of Florence, and taking his hand led him from the chamber, wherein he had suffered so much, and which he had now occupied for more than thirteen or fourteen days. He became conscious of the change of atmosphere as they proceeded from a corridor down a cold, stone staircase, and from thence to a street, evidently one of those steep, but paved closes of the ancient city, as they continued to ascend for some little distance. Then an iron gate in an archway (to judge by the echo) was opened and shut; then they walked about a hundred yards further, before Posset removed the muffling and permitted Fawside to gaze around him. On one side towered the lofty and fantastic mansions of the Landmarket[*] rising on arcades of oak and stone. Near him the quaint church of St. Giles reared its many-carved pinnacles and beautiful spire. Within its lofty aisles scarcely a taper was twinkling now; for already the careless prebendaries were finding other uses for their money than spending it in wax for its forty altars. Even the great brazen shrine in the chancel was dark; the money gifted so vainly by the pious and valiant men of old, to light God's altar until the day of doom—for so they phrased it—had been pounced upon by Lollard bailies for other purposes, and thirteen years later were to behold the shrine itself fall under the axe and hammer of the iconoclast, with the expulsion of the faith and its priesthood.

[*] An abbreviation of Inland-market.

The wide and lofty thoroughfare was dark. Here and there an occasional ray shot from some of the grated windows, pouring a stream of light athwart the obscurity, which the stacks of peat, heather, and timber, already referred to as standing before almost every door, according to common use and wont, made more confusing to a wayfarer. Fawside recognized the spot where Kilmaurs and his pursuers on that eventful night first overtook him, where he received his first wound, and where he made his first resolute stand against them, before he was beaten further up the street.

On a signal from Master Posset, a groom leading two saddled horses came from under the stone arcade of a lofty mansion, then occupied by Robert Logan of Coatfield, who in 1520 was provost of Edinburgh, and was the first official of that rank who had halberds carried before him. This groom, whom Fawside suspected to be no other than the Frenchman Antoine, lifted his bonnet respectfully and withdrew.

"Fawside, the white or grey nag is yours," said the physician; "mount, and let us be gone, for the morning draws on apace, and my time is precious."

Almost trembling with eagerness, if not with weakness, Florence leaped into the saddle of the white horse, which was a beautiful animal, as he could easily perceive by the amplitude of its mane and tail, by the action of its proud head and slender fore-legs; and as he vaulted to his seat, without even using a stirrup, he felt all his wounds twinge, as if they would burst forth anew, for they were merely skinned over.

In ten minutes more they had left the city, after tossing a gratuity (a few hardies, i.e. liards of Guienne, worth three halfpence each in Scotland, where they were then current) to the warder at the Watergate, and were galloping by the eastern road towards the tower of Fawside. The stars were still shining brightly, and their light was reflected in the glassy bosom of the estuary that opened on the north and east, beyond a vast extent of desert beach and open moor. The steep and ancient bridge of Musselburgh was soon reached, and then Master Posset drew his bridle, saying,—

"Here, Fawside, I must bid you farewell."

"Farewell! you who have treated me so kindly, so generously—farewell, when we are within three Scots miles of my mother's hearth! Nay, nay, good Master Posset, this can never be."

"It must—I repeat. Entreaties and invitations are alike needless. I obey but the instructions of those I serve, and they are dames who brook no trifling."

"Bethink you, dear sir, of the danger of being abroad at this early and untimeous hour, when broken men, Egyptians and all manner of thieves, beset every highway and hover in every thicket."

The physician smiled, and, opening the breast of his furred cassock, showed beneath it a fine shirt of mail, which was flexible, and fitted him closely as a kid glove. "I have thought cf all that," said he, "and I have, moreover, my dagger and a pair of wheel-lock petronels at my saddle-bow. So now, adieu."

"But my fees to you, and this horse, Master Posset——"

"You will find it a beautiful grey, though he looks milky-white under the stars."

"To whom am I to return it?"

"To none—it is a free gift to you."

"To me—a gift," said Florence with astonishment; "from whom?"

"The lady——"

"Who—which lady?"

"The taller, with the hazel eyes and blonde hair; and you must accept; for 'twere ungallant to refuse."

"All this but bewilders and perplexes me the more. Would it had been the gift of the other! Ah, Master Posset, I have but one dread."

"Come," said the physician, laughing, "that is fortunate—lovers usually have many."

"One ever present dread, common to every lover—that she does not love me in return, but may be playing with my affection to prove the power of her own charms."

"Take courage—you have seen no rival."

"No; yet she must have many admirers of her beauty, and more aspirants to her hand and wealth; and one of these might soon become a formidable rival."

"Then you have your sword."

"In such a case a poor resource."

"But one that never fails," responded the warlike apothecary, turning his horse; and, after reiterating their adieux, they separated, and in a short space Florence Fawside found himself cantering up the steep crowned by the church of St. Michael, and thence by a narrow bridle-road that led up the hill-side to his mother's tower.

Fourteen nights had elapsed since last we saw her sitting lonely by her hearth; and now she had long since learned to weep for her only son as for one who was numbered with the dead.

CHAPTER XIII.
HOME.

Hail, land of spearmen! seed of those who scorn'd
To stoop the proud crest to imperial Rome!
Hail! dearest half of Albion sea-wall'd!
Hail! state unconquer'd by the fire of war,—
Red war that twenty ages round thee blazed!
Albania.

Some thoughts such as these which inspired this now forgotten Scottish bard filled the swelling heart of Florence Fawside, as he urged his horse up the winding way which led to his paternal tower. The morning sun had now risen brightly above the long pastoral ridges of the Lammermuir, and he could see the widening Forth, with all its rocky isles, and the long sweep of sandy beach which borders the beautiful bay that lies between the mouth of the Esk and the green links of Gulane, whereon, in those days, there stood an ancient church of St. Andrew, which William the Lion gifted unto the monks of Dryburgh. The blue estuary was studded by merchant barks and fisher craft, with their square and brown lug-sails, beating up against the ebb tide and a gentle breeze from the west.

The sky was of a light azure tint, flecked by floating masses of snowy cloud, which, on their eastern and lower edges, were tinged with burning gold.

The hottest days of the summer were now gone, the pastures had become somewhat parched, and the shrivelled foliage that rustled in the woods of Carberry seemed athirst for the rains of autumn. Amid the coppice, the corn-craik and the cushat dove sent up their peculiar notes. The corn-fields were turning from pale green to a golden brown; and, as the morning breeze passed over it, the bearded grain swayed heavily to and fro, like ripples on the bosom of a yellow lake. The white smoke curled from the green cottage roofs of moss and thatch; the blue-bonneted peasants were at work in the sunny fields—the women with their snooded hair, or their white Flemish curchies (that came into fashion when James II. espoused Mary the Rose of Gueldres), were milking the cattle, grinding their hand-mills, or busy about their little garden-plots; and to Florence all seemed to illustrate his country, and speak to his heart with that love of home, which then, even more than now, was the purest passion of the Scottish people, and which, in all their wanderings, they never forget, however distant the land in which their lot in life may be cast.

Florence felt all this as he spurred up the green braeside, and heard the people in his mother-tongue cry, "God him speed;" for though they knew him not, they saw that he was a handsome youth, a stranger, nobly mounted and bravely apparelled.

Every step he took brought some old recollection to his heart. The gurgling brooks in which he had fished and the leafy thickets in which he had bird-nested, the old trees up which he had clambered, were before him now, and the days of his boyhood, the familiar voices and faces of his slaughtered father and brother, came vividly to memory. The song of a farmer who was driving his team of horses to the field, the lowing of the cattle, the barking of the shepherds' collies, the perfume of the broom and the harebell on the upland slope, all spoke of country and of home. But with this emotion others mingled.

With all the genuine rapture of a boyish lover, he kissed again and again his opal ring, the gift of that beautiful unknown, who had filled his heart with a secret joy and given life a new impulse.

"What can its secret be? Oh! to unravel all this mystery!" he exclaimed to himself a hundred times; but the ring baffled all his scrutiny and ingenuity.

He had now four projects to put in force immediately after his return home.

First, to deliver his letter to the Regent, Earl of Arran.

Second, to deliver the other missive of Henry of Valois to the queen-mother, Mary of Lorraine.

Third, to discover his unknown mistress.

Fourth, to avenge his father's feud and fall by ridding the world of Claude Hamilton of Preston, the Lord Kilmaurs, and a few others; after which he would settle soberly down in his mother's house, and, for a time, lead the quiet life of a country gentleman—at least, such a life as they led in those days, when their swords were never from their sides.

And now, as he surmounted the long ridge of Fawside, the landscape opened further to the south and eastward, and he saw the old square keep of Elphinstone, in which George Wishart had been confined in the preceding year by Patrick, Earl of Bothwell, and the wall of which had rent with a mighty sound—rent from battlement to basement, as we may yet see it, at the moment of his martyrdom before the castle of St. Andrews.

The heart of Florence beat six pulses in a second as he drew nearer home, and saw the huge column of smoke ascending lazily from the square chimney of the hall, and the black crows and white pigeons fraternizing together on the stone ridge of the copehouse; and now he passed old Roger's thatched domicile, the Westmains or Grange, from whence the inmates of the castle were supplied with farm produce. It was all under fine cultivation save one wild spot named the Deilsrig, which was set aside, or left totally unused, for the propitiation of evil spirits; and none in the neigbourhood doubted that cattle which strayed or grazed thereon were elf-shot by the evil one, for they were frequently found dead within the turf boundary of this infernal spot, as their huge bones whitening among the dog-grass remained to attest; and there, too, lay the unblessed graves of certain Egyptians, who, despite the protections granted by James IV to "Anthony Gavino, Lord and Earl of Little Egypt," had been judicially drowned in the river Esk by Earl Bothwell, the sheriff of Haddington.

Florence glanced at the place, which had so many terrors for him as a child, and dashed up to the arched gate of the tower, where his emotion was such, that it was not until after three attempts he could sound the copper horn which hung by a chain to the wall; for such was the fashion then, when door-bells and brass knockers, like gas and steam and electricity, were still in the womb of time.

In a minute more he had sprung from his horse and rushed up the stair to the hall, where his mother, with a cry of mingled fear and joy, clasped him to her breast, and wept like a true woman rather than the stern and Spartan dame she usually seemed. Then old Roger of the Westmains, in the exuberance of his joy, flung his bonnet in the fire and danced about the hall table; and the grey-haired nurse, Maud, contended with the vicar, Mass John of Tranent, for the next and longest embrace of the returned one; for all welcomed him back to his home as one reprieved from the dead; for surmise had been exhausted, and all ingenuity had failed to afford a clue to his mysterious disappearance after landing at Leith from the galley of M. de Villegaignon.

After the first transports of her joy had subsided—and, indeed, they subsided soon, for her natural sternness of manner and ferocity of purpose soon resumed their sway in her angry and widowed heart, his mother kissed him thrice upon the forehead, held him at arm's length from her breast, surveying his features with an expression of mingled love, tenderness, anxiety, and anger.

"Thou hast been ill, Florence; thy cheeks are pale, wan, and hollow. Thou hast been suffering, my son—yea, suffering deeply. How came this about? Say!—thou hast no secrets from thine old mother!"

"Ask these wounds, dear mother; they have kept me for fourteen days a-bed and absent from you," he replied, as he tore open his crimson doublet, and shirt, and displayed on his bosom the sword-thrust, which was scarcely skinned over.

"Kyrie eleison!" muttered the white-haired vicar, lifting up his thin hands and hollow eyes.

Roger of the Westmains uttered a shout of rage and grasped his dagger.

"My bairn—my braw, bonnie bairn!" exclaimed the old nurse with tender commiseration.

"Florence," said his mother through her clenched teeth, "whose sword did this?"

"Can you ask me, mother?"

"His!—would you say?" she asked in a voice like a shriek, while pointing with her lean white hand to Preston Tower, the walls of which above the level landscape shone redly in the morning sun.

"Nay, not his, but the swords of his followers."

"Of Symon Brodie and Mungo Tennant?"

"Even so; I heard their names in the mêlée."

"Accursed be the brood; for their swords were reddest and readiest in the fray in which your father fell!"

"They and others dogged me close on the night I landed. I fought long and bravely——"

"My own son!—my dear dead husband's only son!"

"But what could one sword avail against twenty others? Struck down at last, I would have been hewn to pieces but for the stout arm of a friendly burgher and the kindness of——of——those who salved my wounds and tended me—yea, mother, kindly and tenderly as you would have done," he added, while the colour deepened in his face, and he sank wearily into the chair in which his slain father had last sat, and which since that day none had dared to occupy, as his widow would have deemed it a sacrilege.

It required but the description of this last outrage to rouse the blood of Dame Alison and of all her domestics to boiling heat.

"Be calm, dear mother, be calm," said Florence, pressing her trembling hand to his heart. "In three days I shall be well enough to handle my sword, and then I shall scheme out vengeance for all I have endured."

"Thou hearest him, vicar?" exclaimed Lady Alison, striking her hands together, while her dark eyes shot fire. "The spirit of my buried husband lives again in his boy!"

"Lord make us thankfu' therefor!" muttered the listening servants, who shared every sentiment of their mistress.

"Be wary, madam!" said the tall thin priest. "Whence still this mad craving for revenge?"

"In the presence of this poor lamb, who has so narrowly escaped a dreadful death, weak, pale, and wounded, dost thou ask me this, thou very shaveling?" she exclaimed with scornful energy. "My husband's feud and fall!—Oh, woe is me!—and my winsome Willie's death——"

"Demand a fearful reprisal!" said Florence, with a vehemence increased by his mother's presence and example; "and fearful it shall be!"

"Vengeance," replied the priest firmly, but meekly, "is ever the offspring of the weakest and least tutored mind."

"Father John!" exclaimed the pale widow.

"I say so with all deference, my son, and with all respect for our good lady your mother. In her thirst for vengeance, like the last stake of a gamester, she will risk you, her only son—risk you by invading the province of God; for to Him alone belongeth vengeance. Remember the holy words, Dame Alison: 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will repay it.'"

"So priests must preach," said Florence; "but, under favour, father, laymen find forgiveness hard to practise."

"So hard," hissed Lady Alison through her sharp and firm-set teeth, "that for each drop of Preston's blood I would give a rood of land—yea, for every drop a yellow rig of corn! 'Twas but three weeks ago, come the feast of Bartholomew, he followed a thief with a sleuth-hound of Gueldreland within the bounds of our barony."

"He dared?" said Florence, sharing all his mother's anger.

"He or some of his people; and without asking our license, took and hanged him on a thorn-tree at the Bucklea. Did not his swine root holes in the corn on our grange, destroying ten rigs of grain and more, and he scornfully refused our demands to make the damage good? Yet he burned the byres of our kinsman Roger for taking a deer in his wood at Bankton, though any man may hunt in any forest—even a royal one—so far as he may fling his bugle-horn before him; yet he broke Roger's bow and arrows, took away his arquebuse, and hanged all his dogs. And wherefore? Because he was a Fawside and a kinsman of thine. And now they would have slain thee, my son—thee, in whom my joy, my hope, my future all are centred!" she added, embracing Florence, the expression of whose handsome face had completely changed to gloom and anger under her influence. "But while fish swim in yonder Firth, and mussels grow on its rocks, our hatred shall live!"

The vicar, a priest of benign and venerable aspect, smiled sadly, and shook his white head with an air of deprecation.

"I fear me, madam," said he, "that the fish and the mussels are races that bid fair to outlive alike the Fawsides of that Ilk and the Hamiltons of Preston, their folly, feuds, and wickedness."

"On Rood-day in harvest, a year past, as I sat here alone by my spinning-wheel, my husband's armour clattered where it hangs on yonder wall,—and wot ye why? Preston was riding over the hill, and near our gate. Preston! and alone! Could I have got the old falcon ready on the bartizan, he had been shot like a hoodiecrow, as surely as the breath of heaven was in his nostrils!"

"Fie! madam—fie! I cannot listen to language such as this!" said the vicar, erecting his tall figure and preparing to retire.

"The wrongs I have endured in this world, yea, and the sorrows, too——"

"Should teach you to look for comfort in that which is to come," said the priest, with asperity.

"Not till I have had vengeance swift, sure, and deep on the house of Preston. No, friar! preach as you may, Alison Kennedy will never rest in the grave where her murdered husband lies, but with the assurance that Claude Hamilton lies mangled in his shroud—mangled by the sword of her son Florence! And he may slay him in open war; for so surely as the souls and bodies of men are governed by stars and climates, we shall have war with the English ere the autumn leaves are off the trees, and so surely shall that traitor Hamilton join them, for he was one of those whom Henry took at Solway, and feasted in London, to suit his own nefarious ends—like Cassilis, Lennox, and Glencairn."

Roger of the Westmains heard with grim satisfaction all this outpouring of bitterness of spirit; for he shared to the full her animosity to the unlucky laird of Preston. To Roger, old Lady Alison was the greatest potentate on earth. Had the Regent Arran, or Mary of Lorraine, commanded him to ride with his single spear against a brigade of English, he might have hesitated; but had Lady Alison desired him to leap off Salisbury Craigs, he would probably have done so, without the consideration of a moment, and had his old body dashed to pieces at the foot thereof.

In joy for her son's return, the lady of the tower ordered the bailie to distribute drink-silver (as it was then termed) to all her servants and followers; largesses to the town piper and drummer of Musselburgh, and to the poor gaberlunzies who sat on the kirk styles of Tranent and St. Michael. She then directed all the harness and warlike weapons to be thoroughly examined, preparatory to commencing hostilities against the grand enemy, who, as we shall shortly see, was in his tower of Preston, thinking of other things than the mischief she was brewing against him.

A few days slipped monotonously away.

After Paris—the Paris of Francis I. and Henry II.,—and after the busy chateau of the Duchess of Albany at Vendôme, the quiet and gloom of the little tower of Fawside soon became insupportable to its young proprietor. Thus, instead of remaining at home, attending to the collection of his rents in coin and kain, conferring with old Roger anent green and white crops on the mains of the Grange, listening to the stories of his nurse, holding bloodthirsty councils of war with his mother, concerning the best mode of invading with fire and sword the territories of a neighbour, only separated from his own by a turf dyke, or weaving deadly snares for cutting him off by the strong hand, he spent his whole days in Edinburgh, caracoling his beautiful grey horse up and down the High-street, through the courts of the palace, before the house of M. d'Oysell, the French ambassador, in the Cowgate, in the Greyfriars' Gardens, in the royal park, and in every place of public resort, with a plume in his velvet bonnet and a hawk on his left wrist, as became a gallant of the time, in the hope of discovering, even for a moment, his lost love, the donor of the opal ring. Daily he visited the dwelling of Master Posset, at the sign of the Stuffed Alligator, in the Lawnmarket, to prosecute his inquiries there; but either from accident or design, that most discreet of apothecaries was never at home. Thus daily the young Laird of Fawside was doomed to return disappointed, weary, and dispirited to his gloomy antique hall, or to his gloomier old bed-chamber in the northern portion of the tower—a portion concerning which the following tradition is related by Father John:—

Sir Thomas de Fawsyde, who, in 1330, married Muriella, daughter of Duncan, Earl of Fife, when quarrelling with her one day about a favourite falcon, which she had permitted to escape in the wood of Drumsheugh, in the heat of passion, drew off his steel glove and struck her white shoulder with his clenched hand. Muriella, though tender and gentle, was proud and high-spirited. She felt this unkindness and affront so keenly and bitterly, that, without a tear or reproach, she retired from his presence and secluding herself in the northern chamber, never spoke again, and refusing all food and sustenance, literally starved herself to death. Upon this Earl Duncan, before King David II., accused the rude knight of having slain his daughter.

"And because it was notour and manifest," says Sir John Skene of Curriehill, in his quaint "Buke of the auld Lawes," printed in 1609, "that he did not slae hir, nor gave hir a wound of the quhilk she died; bot gave her ane blow with his hand to teach and correct hir, and also untill the time of hir death dearly loved hir, and treated hir as a husband weill affectionate to his wife, the king pronounced him clene and quit."

But the spirit-form of this lady, dressed in quaint and ancient apparel, of that rustling silk peculiar to all ghostly ladies, with her long hair dishevelled, weeping and mourning, was averred, for ages, to haunt the room where now her descendant lay nightly on his couch, dreaming of the secret love he was more intent on discovering, than of pursuing the hereditary quarrel of his race, and oblivious of delivering to the Regent Arran and Mary of Lorraine the letters with which he was charged from the court of France.

The reason of the last remissness was simply this; he believed his fair one to be in Edinburgh, while the queen-mother was occasionally at Stirling, and the regent was at his country castle, in Cadzow Forest, in Clydesdale.

CHAPTER XIV
PRESTON TOWER.

Then the Count of Clara began in this manner: "Sirs, it is manifest that men in this world can only become powerful by strengthening themselves with men and money; but the money must be employed in procuring men, for by men must kingdoms be defended and won."—Amadis of Gaul.

On the evening of the same day when Florence Fawside returned home, and his mother, like a spider in its hole, sat in her elbow-chair in the grim old tower upon the hill, weaving plots to net and destroy her feudal adversary, that detested personage in his equally grim old tower upon the lea, was forming plans of a similarly desperate, but much more extensive description.

The paved barbican of his residence was filled by nearly the same horses and horsemen, liverymen and pages, wearing the oak branch in their bonnets or the shakefork sable on their sleeves, and by many men-at-arms in helmet, jack, and wambeson, whom we formerly saw in the courtyard of the Golden Rose, at Leith, and whom we left in hot pursuit of Florence. As the shades of evening deepened on the harvest fields and bordering sea, the narrow slits and iron-grated windows of the old castle became filled with red light, for it was crowded by visitors; and the echoes of voices, of laughter, and shouts of loud and reckless merriment rang at times under the arched vaults of its ancient chambers.

Near Preston, a burgh of barony, composed of old houses of rough and rugged aspect, that cluster along a rocky beach of broken masses of basalt, denuded long ago of all earthy strata, stands this high square donjon tower of the Hamiltons of Preston, in later years a stronghold of the attainted Earls of Winton. The adjacent beach is now covered with shapeless ruins of redstone, from which, ever and anon, the ebbing sea sweeps a mass away; but in the time of our story these ruins were the flourishing saltpans of the enterprising monks of St. Marie de Newbattle, who, since the twelfth century, had pushed briskly the trade of salt-making; and nightly the broad red glares of their coal-fed furnaces were wont to shed a dusky light upon the rocky land and tossing sea—hence its present name, of the Priest-town-pans; though in days older still, when King Donald VII. was pining a blind captive in his prison, the locality was called Auldhammer. In 1547, its church was an open ruin, having been burned by the English three years before.

As a double security, within the barbican gate, this tower is entered by two arched doors on the east. One leads to the lower vaults alone; another, in the first story, reached by a ladder or bridge, gives access to the hall and sleeping apartments. Those who entered here, drew in the long ladder after them, and thus cut off all means of access from below. The vast pile of Borthwick, in Lothian, the tower of Coxton, near Elgin, the tower of Half-forest, near Inverurie, and many other Scottish castles of great antiquity, are constructed on this singular plan, where security was the first principle of our domestic architects. Preston had additions built to it in 1625; and a huge crenelated wall of that date still surmounts the simple machicolated battlements of the original edifice, making it one of the most conspicuous objects on the level land on which its lofty mass is reared. The original tower was one of the chain of fortresses garrisoned by Lord Home in the 15th century, and having been burned by the English army in 1650, after all the rough vicissitudes of war and time, it presents a mouldering, shattered, and venerable aspect.

The arched gate on the east was surmounted by the three cinque-foils pierced ermine of Hamilton; and on each side of it a large brass gun called a basilisk peered through a porthole, to "hint that here at least there was no thoroughfare." In short, Preston Tower is a mansion of those warlike, but thrifty and hearty old times when, by order, of the Scottish parliament, it was "statute and ordained that all lords should dwell in their castles and manors, and expend the fruit of their lands in the counterie where the said lands lay."

It had other tenants besides old Claude Hamilton and his cuirassed and turbulent retainers; as it was alleged to be haunted by a brownie and evil spirit; and for the latter Symon Brodie, the castle butler, nightly set apart a cup of ale. If Symon failed to perform this duty, the spirit, like a vampire bat, sucked the blood of one of the inmates. The little squat figure of the brownie, wearing a broad bonnet and short scarlet cloak, had been seen at times, especially on St. John's Night, to flit about the kitchen-door, watching for the departure of the servants, who always left to him, unmolested, his favourite haunt, the warm hearth of the great arched fireplace, where the livelong night he crooned a melancholy ditty, which sounded like the winter wind through a keyhole, as he swung above the griesoch, or gathering peat, from the iron cruik whereon by day, as Father John of Tranent records, "the mickle kail-pot hung."

The merriment was great in the old hall; for the supper, which had been a huge engagement or onslaught of knives and teeth upon all manner of edibles, was just over. People always fed well in those old times, if we may judge of the abundance which filled their boards three times per diem; yet what were they, or the Saxon gluttons of an earlier age, when compared to the youth who, unrestrained by the silly fear of civilized society, discussed before the Emperor Aurelian a boar, a sheep, a pig, and a hundred loaves; with beer in proportion; or to his imperial majesty Maximus Caius Julius, who—long live his memory—ate daily sixty-four pounds of meat, and drank therewith twenty-four quarts of rare old Roman wine!

The supper, a meal taken at the early hour of six in 1547, was over in Preston Hall. The long black table of oak had been cleared of all its trenchers and platters of silver, delft, tin, and wood; but a plentiful supply of wine—Alicant, Bordeaux, and Canary,—with ale and usquebaugh for those who preferred them, was substituted, in tall black-jacks which resembled troopers' boots, being made of strong leather, lined with pewter and rimmed with silver. Each of these jolly vessels held two Scottish pints (i.e. two quarts English); and drinking-vessels of silver for the nobles, horn for gentlemen, and wooden quaichs, cups, or luggies for their more favoured retainers, were disposed along the table by Symon Brodie (who had partly recovered from his sword-wound): we say more favoured retainers, for, as the drinking bout which succeeded the supper in Preston was a species of political conclave, a gathering of conspirators, the doors were carefully closed, and not a man, save those on whom the Scottish lords of the English faction could thoroughly rely, was permitted to remain within earshot; and hence, at each massive oak door of the hall stood an armed jackman, with his sword drawn; and on the dark pyne doublets, the dinted corslets and burganets, the brown visages and rough beards of these keen-eyed and listening sentinels, the smoky light of ten great torches which were ranged along the stone wall, five on each side, near the spring of the arched roof, flared and gleamed with a wavering radiance.

Nor were the party at the table less striking and picturesque.

In his elbow-chair old Claude of Preston occupied the head of the long board. His voluminous grey beard flowed over his quilted doublet, and concealed his gorget of fine steel; his bald head glanced in the light, and his keen, bright basilisk eyes surveyed the faces and seemed to pierce the souls of the speakers, as each in turn gave his suggestion as to the best mode of subverting that monarchy for the maintenance of which so many of their sires had died in battle.

There were present the Earl of Cassilis, he of abbot-roasting notoriety; the Earl of Glencairn and his son Lord Kilmaurs; the Lord Lyle and his son the Master; the Lord Gray; with two others whom we have not yet fully introduced to the reader; to wit, Patrick Hepburn Earl of Bothwell, abhorred by the Protestants as the first captor of George Wishart (and father of that Earl James who wrought the destruction of Mary Queen of Scots), and William Earl Marischal, the constable of Kincardine, both peers of a goodly presence, clad in half-armour, and wearing the peaked beard, close-shorn hair, and pointed moustache of the time.

Bothwell wore one of those curious thumb-rings concerning which bluff Jack Falstaff taunts King Hal. It was a gift from Mary of Lorraine, whom he once vainly believed to be in love with him, and whose slights had now driven him into the conspiracy against her. He had a golden girdle, which glittered in the light, and thereat hung the long sword which had been found clenched in the hand of his noble grandsire,

"Earl Adam Hepburn—he who died
At Flodden, by his sovereign's side,"

and which was popularly believed to have been charmed by a wizard, the late prior of Deer, in suchwise that the wielder of it should never have his blood drawn nor suffer harm, a spell which the wizard priest performed by kissing the hilt four times in the name of Crystsonday. Bothwell had been two years a prisoner in a royal fortress, for assisting in the raids and rapine of the late Earl of Yarrow; and after being many years banished from Scotland, had lived at Florence and Venice, where his natural turn for mischief and deep-laid plotting had been developed to the full.

Among these intriguers were two men of a very different kind, clad as followers of that master of treachery and statecraft, the fierce Earl of Glencairn, viz., Master Patten, who afterwards wrote the history of Somerset's hostile expedition into Scotland, and Master Edward Shelly, a brave English officer, whom we have already mentioned, and who was captain of a band of English soldiers known as the Boulogners. He had been at the capture and garrisoning of Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1544, where he superintended the rebuilding of the famous Tour de l'Ordre, a useless labour, as Edward VI. restored the town to France six years after. These two Londoners were still disguised in the livery of the Cunninghames, and, further to complete the imposture, wore peasants' coarse blue bonnets and those cuarans, or shoes of undressed hide, which obtained for our people the sobriquet of rough-footed Scots.

"Symon, ye loon, attend to the strangers," said Claude Hamilton. "Fill your bicker from the jack of Alicant, Master Shelly; or like you better a silver tassie, my man? I trust that you and worthy Master Patten, your secretary or servitor (we style such-like both in Scotland), have supped well?"

"Well, yea, and heartily sir," replied Shelly, wiping his curly beard with a napkin. "But Master Patten was whispering that he must teach your Scots cooks to make that which he loves as his own life—a jolly Devonshire squab and white-pot."

"Hah! And how make ye such, Master Patten?"

"With a pint of cream," replied Master Patten, "four eggs, nutmeg, sugar, salt, a loaf of bread, a handful of raisins, and some sweet butter. Then boil the whole in a bag, and seek a good tankard of March beer to wash it down with."

"God willing, sir, we shall learn your southern dishes, among other things, when, haply, we bring this marriage about with little King Edward VI. Each royal alliance hath brought some unco' fashion among us here in Scotland. Furred doublets came in with Margaret of Oldenburg; the Flemish hood with Mary of Gueldres; the velvet hat with Margaret Tudor; the French beard with Magdalene of Valois——"

"And please heaven, worthy sir," snuffled Master Patten, "accession of wealth and strength with his majesty Edward VI."

"Right!" said Glencairn gruffly; "and your Devonshire squab to boot. And now, my lords and gentles, to business; for the night wears on, and we must keep tryst with my Lord Regent betimes at Stirling, for you know that he would confer with some of us previous to a convention of the estates. Let Master Shelly speak; for Master Patten hath brought new letters and tidings from the Lord Protector of England."

"Well, sirs," said Shelly bluntly, "to resume where we last left off. The Protector of England pledges himself to invade Scotland with an army sufficient to bear down all opposition, provided you and your armed adherents cast your swords into the scale with him."

"Agreed!" said Claude Hamilton, glancing round the table.

"Agreed!" added all, in varying tones of approval.

On the table lay a map of Scotland,—one of those so quaintly delineated by M. Nicholas d'Arville, chief cosmographer to the most Christian king; and to this reference was made from time to time by members of the worthy conclave, who sat around it or lounged in the hall.

"How many fighting-men can you raise in that district named the Lennox, to aid our cause?" asked Shelly, placing a finger on the part which indicated that ancient county.

"Its hereditary sheriff, Matthew Earl of Lennox, is one of us," replied Bothwell; "and he can bring into the field eight thousand soldiers."

"And then there are the Isles," began Glencairn.

"Yea, my lord," said Shelly, with an approving smile, "of old a very hotbed of revolt against the Scottish crown."

"And the place wherein our Edwards readily fermented treason," added Patten, "and stirred their lords to war against your kings, as independent princes of the Hebrides."

"Trust not to the islesmen," said Bothwell; "the vanity of their chiefs was crushed a hundred years ago, on the field of Harlaw."

"But haply the spirit lives there yet," said Shelly, making a memorandum; "and if we sent a few war-ships through the Western Sea under the Lord Clinton or Sir William Wentworth, our two best admirals, it might be no difficult task to rouse it once again to action."

"You deceive yourself," said Lord Lyle coldly; "the sovereign of Scotland is now, both by blood and position, hereditary Lord of the Isles, and the chiefs remember with love and veneration the chivalry of James IV., and patriotism of his son, who died at Falkland."

"Now, my lords, to the terms of your adherence with England," said Shelly, unfolding a parchment, to which several small seals were attached by pieces of ribbon; and after hemming once or twice, he arose and read aloud:—

"It is covenanted and written between us, Edward Duke of Somerset, Earl of Hertford, Viscount Beauchamp, Lord Seymour, uncle to the king our sovereign, lord high treasurer and earl-marshal of England, captain of the isles of Guernsey and Jersey, lieutenant-general of all his majesty's forces by sea and land, governor of his highness's most royal person, and protector of all his domains and subjects, knight of the most illustrious order of the Garter, and certain lords and barons of the realm of Scotland—to wit—Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis——"

"Enough of this," said Cassilis bluntly, and with some alarm depicted in his face; "there are other peers who take precedence of me in parliament; so why not in this parchment of thine? moreover, we care not to hear our titles so rehearsed."

"In so dangerous a document as this," added some one.

"How, my lords," exclaimed Shelly with astonishment and something of scorn; "you dare not recede——"

"Dare not?" reiterated Cassilis, with a fierce frown.

"No," replied the Englishman bluntly.

"And wherefore, sirrah?"

"Because the Protector of England holds in his hand a document which, if sent to the Regent of Scotland, would hang seven among you as high as ever Haman hung of old."

"A document," repeated Kilmaurs, the gash on whose pale cheek grew black, while his eyes flashed fire; "is there another bond than this!"

"Yea, one written by Master Patten, and signed in the Star-chamber at London, by seven Scottish lords, then prisoners of war, after the field of Solway."

"And they—" queried Lyle, with knitted brow and inquiring eye.

"Bound themselves to assist King Henry VIII., of happy memory, in all his secret designs against their own country, promising to invest him with the government of Scotland during the little queen's minority; to drive out Arran and Mary of Lorraine; to admit English garrisons into all the fortresses; and, in short, to play the old game of Edward Longshanks, Comyn, and Baliol over again, in a land," added Shelly with an ill-disguised sneer, "that is not likely to display another Wallace, or to boast another field of Bannockburn."

"And those seven—" asked Lyle impetuously.

"Are the Earls of Cassilis and Glencairn, the Lords Somerville, Gray, Maxwell, Oliphant, and Fleming."

"Englishman, thou liest!" exclaimed the Master of Lyle, grasping his dagger; "the Lord Oliphant is my near kinsman."

"Peace, he lies not," said Cassilis; "I signed that bond, and by it will I abide."

"Yea, Master of Lyle," said Shelly blandly, with a glance of sombre scorn and fury in his eye; "and other documents there are, which, if known, would raise in Scotland such a storm that there is not an urchin in the streets of Edinburgh but would cast stones at you, and cry shame on the betrayers of his queen and country!"

"Silence, sirs," exclaimed old Claude Hamilton with alarm, "the conversation waxeth perilous."

"I am here on the crooked errand of the Duke of Somerset," said Shelly, rising with an air of lofty disdain, "no soldier's work it is, and rather would I have been with my stout garrison at Boulogne, than clerking here with worthy Master Patten."

"Thrice have you come hither on such errands, Master Shelly, and they seem to pay well," said Kilmaurs tauntingly.

The Englishman clenched his hand and blushed with anger, as he said imprudently,—

"Thrice I have ridden into Scotland since that red day at Ancrumford, and each time have I gone home with a prouder heart than when I crossed the northern border."

"Prouder?" reiterated the fiery Kilmaurs, coming forward with a resentful expression in his lowering eye.

"Yes," replied the Englishman boldly, and grasping the secret petronel which he wore under his mantle; "for each time I asked myself, for what sum would an English yeoman sell his fatherland, his father's grave, or his king's honour, even as these Scottish earls, lords, and barons do, for this accursed lucre?" With these words, Shelly tore the purse from his girdle and dashing it on the table, continued: "When I bethink me of the truth and faith, the unavailing bravery and the stanch honesty of the stout Scottish commons I am here to betray through those whom they trust and honour, my heart glows with shame within me! Assuredly 'tis no work this for an English captain; so do thou the rest, in God's name, good Master Patten."

As Shelly sat sullenly down, and twisted from side to side in his chair, as if seated on the hot gridiron of St. Lawrence, it was high time for the more politic Patten to speak; for savage glares were exchanged on all sides of the table; Kennedies and Cunninghames closed round, each by his chieftain's side; swords and daggers were half-drawn, and Shelly's life was in evident jeopardy; for his taunts, alike unwise and daring, had found an echo in the venal hearts of those at whom they were levelled.

"Whence this indignation, most worthy emissary?" asked Kilmaurs, whose insolence and hauteur were proverbial.

"I am an envoy—not an emissary," replied Shelly, eyeing him firmly from his plumed bonnet to his white funnel boots; "I am a soldier, and have the heart of a soldier—I thank God, not of a diplomatist. I know more of gunnery and the brave game of war, than the subtlety of statecraft. I am here to obey orders: these are to confer with you on what your lordships consider a salable matter—your allegiance; had it been, as it may one day be, to cut your throats, 'twere all one to Ned Shelly."

"Hear me, my most honourable and good lords," began Master Patten, in his most wily and seductive manner; "you cannot recede, so allow me to go on. The promises of the English Protector must naturally meet the fondest wishes of all. Listen to our indenture. Patrick Earl of Bothwell promises, on the faith of a true man, to transfer his allegiance to the young king of England, and to surrender unto English troops his strong castle of Hermitage, on condition that he receives the hand of an English princess——"

"Princess?" muttered several of the traitor conclave inquiringly, as they turned to each other.

"Who may she be?" asked Claude Hamilton with surprise.

"Katherine Willoughby, widow of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk," continued Patten, reading.

Bothwell smiled proudly, as he thought of his triumph over Mary of Lorraine.

"But," said the Earl of Glencairn, "what sayeth this dainty dame to be sold thus, like a bale of goods?"

"What she may say can matter little," replied Patten.

"'Tis said she affects one named Bertie."

"My lord, the Duke of Somerset will amend that."

"A worthy successor to the poor Countess Agnes Sinclair of Ravenscraig!" said the Master of Lyle with something of scornful commiseration.

"My first countess sleeps in the kirk of St. Denis, at Dysart," said Bothwell coldly, "so I pray you to proceed, Master Patten; this espousal is my matter."

"The Lord Glencairn and Claude Hamilton of Preston," continued the scribe, "offer to co-operate in the invasion of Scotland, and at the head of three thousand men, their friends and vassals, to keep the Regent Arran in check until the English army arrive; the former to receive a hundred thousand crowns in gold on the day the infant queen of Scotland is delivered into Somerset's hand, and the latter to obtain a coronet, with the titles of Earl of Gladsmuir and Lord Preston of Auldhammer."

"Agreed!" said Preston, glancing round with an air of satisfaction and curiosity to see how the announcement was received.

"On that day, sirs," added Master Patten, "the infant queen of Scotland shall share the glory of being joint sovereign of a realm containing the English, Irish, and Welsh, the Cornishmen, and the French of Jersey, Guernsey, and Calais."

"But," said Glencairn, "what if our devil of a regent, with a good array of Scottish pikes, standeth in the way of all this?"

"Then, by heaven, sirs, black velvet will be in demand among the surname of Hamilton!" exclaimed Kilmaurs.

"How?" asked Claude of Preston angrily. "Would you dare——"

"Exactly so!" interrupted Kilmaurs with his deadly smile.

"And the said Claude Hamilton, laird of Preston," continued poor Master Patten, reading very fast to avoid further interruptions, "hereby binds and obliges himself to bestow in marriage upon Master Edward Shelly, captain of the King of England's Boulogners, in reward for his services touching these state matters, the hand and estates of his niece, the Lady Madeline Hame, Countess of Yarrow, now his ward, and according to law in his custody as overlord, by the will of her late father the earl, who bound her to remain so until the age of twenty-one years."

"Thou art in luck, Master Shelly," said Kilmaurs, "for the lady is said to be beautiful."

"But suppose she will not have me?" suggested Shelly, who now smiled and played with the feather in his bonnet.

"Dare she refuse!" growled Claude Hamilton, gnawing his wiry moustache.

"We can get thee a love philtre from Master Posset," said Bothwell, laughing.

"As men say thou didst for Mary of Lorraine, what time she wellnigh died at Rothesay," whispered Glencairn.

"Then I philtred her with small avail," said the High Admiral, grinding his teeth, for he had really loved the widowed queen, while she had tolerated his addresses solely for political purposes of her own.

"But, Master Shelly, I know of one (a witch) who deals in love-charms, and who——"

"Nay, my Lord Glencairn," replied the English soldier laughing, "I will have none of this damnable ware. A pretty Scots lass is witch enough for me. And now that we have concluded this paction, to which also the Earls of Athole, Crawford, Errol, and Sutherland have given their adhesion on the promise of being 'honestly entertained,' I will drink one more tankard to its final success."[*]

[*] The political villany of which this chapter is descriptive is authentic. See Tytler, and particularly "Acta Regia," vol. iii.

"I have no heirs male," said Preston, almost with sadness; "and if this alliance be happily concluded, I will give away to the husband of my niece my lands of Over-Preston, if, during my lifetime, the said Edward Shelly shall give to me, as chief lord of the feu, a pair of gilt spurs and three crowns yearly at the feast of St. Barnabas."

"More luck still, Master Shelly!" said Bothwell.

"And I will grant to God and the church of St. Giles at Edinburgh, and to the monks serving God therein, for the health of my own soul, the souls of all my ancestors, the souls of the two Fawsides whom I slew, and for the souls of all the faithful dead, my wood and lands of Bankton for the yearly payment of a rose in Bleuch Farm."

"'Tis well!" said Shelly, with a singular smile, for he was alike indifferent to the old creed and the new. "But remember that by proclamations the Scottish people must be everywhere informed that we, the army of England, are coming to free them from the tyranny of the bishop of Rome—from the exorbitant revenues demanded by his church, whose meadows and pastures are to become the property of the barons, and that money shall no longer be levied among the poor by full-fed bishops and shorn shavelings for the celebration of masses and marriages, for burials and holy-bread, for wax and wine, vows and pilgrimages, processions, and prayers for children and fair weather, or for curses by bell, book, and candle, and all such Roman superstition. Say everywhere that we come with the sword, not to woo your queen, but to crush at once the falling hierarchy of Rome, even as we have crushed it in England! You understand me, sirs. And now, Master Patten, get your waxen taper ready. My lords, your seals and signatures to the bond; and remember, that a month hence the bridge of Berwick will be ringing to the tramp of armed feet on their northern march; and ere that time I shall have exchanged this Scottish bonnet for the steel burganet of my sturdy Boulogners."

The seals and the signatures of the few who could accomplish the (then) difficult task of affixing their degraded autographs to this rebellious bond were soon completed, and Master Shelly was consigning it to a secret pocket of his dagger-proof doublet, when Master Patten whispered waggishly,

"In sooth, sir, methinks a fair dame should have been also provided for me in this parchment."

"In good faith, Patten," said Shelly, laughing, "I love a lass at home in England—a fair jolly dame, who lives near Richmond; I have other two, who are as good as wives to me, at Calais and Boulogne; to wed a fourth, in Scotland here, were but to act King Harry over again, save that I don't shorten them by the head."

At that moment Symon Brodie, the butler, entered hastily, and whispered in the ear of his master, who exclaimed, while his nut-brown cheek grew pale,

"Fawside of that ilk has come home, say ye?"

"This morning our herdsmen on the Braehead saw him ride into the tower just as Tranent bell rang for the first mass."

"The devil!—Sayst thou so?" cried Kilmaurs, starting up. "Hath that fellow come alive again?"

"It wad seem sae, my lord," replied Symon, rubbing his half-healed sword-wound.

"Then we must have his French letters, even should we sack his house."

"Nay, sirs," said old Claude of Preston, "no such work as that shall be hatched here. I have had enough of the auld feud, and of Dame Alison, too—enough, and to spare. Not content with setting her husband and madcap eldest son upon me to their own skaith, she pays that auld gowk, Mass John of Tranent, to curse me daily, and consorts with witches and warlocks nightly for my destruction. Oh, 'tis a pestilent hag, this Dame Alison of Fawside!"

"A witch-carlin!" muttered the butler. "I hope some fine day to see the iron branks on her jaws."

"'Tis said she rambles about in the likeness of a brown tyke, to work evil on us," added Mungo Tennant. "If I had her once in that form, within range of my arquebuse——"

"Silence!" said the laird sternly; "the blood of her house is red enough upon my hands already!"

"Well, well. But the letters—the letters!" urged Kilmaurs impatiently; "are we to lose them?"

"If he ever had any, he must have delivered them long ere this," said Shelly.

"Under favour, sir," said Glencairn, "he left not Edinburgh (for the gate-wards are in our pay) until this day at dawn, or late last night, when one answering to his description rode through the Water-gate on a white horse. Word came tardily to the warder at the Brig of Esk; we had killed or taken him else at the Howmire."

"Let the tower of Fawside be watched narrowly," said Kilmaurs; "for these letters we must have ere we meet Arran and the Queen at Stirling, to know their plans as well as our own; for men should play warily who risk their heads in a game like ours, my lords."

"And now once more to the black jack, sirs," exclaimed the laird of Preston; "see to the wine-bickers, Symon, and fill—fill, while we drink thrice to the three fair brides whom this bond will soon make wedded wives—the Queen of Scots, the Countesses of Bothwell and Yarrow!"

That night the rebel lords and their retainers drank deep in Preston Tower; but tidings of an irruption of certain feudal enemies into Carrick, Kyle, and Cunninghame, giving all to fire and sword in these fertile districts, compelled Cassilis, Glencairn, Kilmaurs, and others, to depart on the spur ere mid-day; and hence it was that, as related in the preceding chapter, Florence Fawside found himself at such perfect liberty to ride daily to the city in his gayest apparel, and almost without armour, to prosecute a futile search for his fair unknown; while his fiery mother chafed and scoffed at his delay in commencing hostilities with the Hamiltons of Preston.

CHAPTER XV
THE LETTER OF THE VALOIS.

Madame, I was true servant to thy mother,
And in her favour aye stood thankfullie,
And though that I to serve be not so able
As I was wont, because I may not see—
Yet that I hear thy people with high voice
And joyful hearts cry continuallie—
Viva! Marie, tre noble Reyne d'Ecosse!
SIR RICHARD MAITLAND.

For seven consecutive days our hero traversed the streets of his native capital, poking his nose under the velvet hood of every lady whose figure or air resembled in any way those of his fair innmorata; and in these seven days he ran at least an average of eight-and-twenty risks of being run through the body for his impudence; but his handsome face, his suave apologies and brave apparel, obtained him readily the pardon of those he followed, jostled, or accosted. One evening he was just about to leave the city by the gloomy arch of the Pleasance Porte, above which grinned the skulls of those who had abetted the Master of Forbes in his wicked attempt upon the life of James V., when the booming of Mons Meg and of forty other great culverins from the castle-wall made the windows of the city shake; while the clanging bells in every church, monastery, and convent, gave out a merry peal.

He asked one who passed him, "What caused these signs of honour and acclaim?"

"The return of the Queen-Mother from Falkland," replied this person, a burgher, who was hastening from his booth, clad in his steel bonnet and jazarine jacket, with an arquebuse on his shoulder.

"The Queen-Mother!"

He paused, and, with an emotion of alarm; he remembered his dispatches from Henry of Valois to Mary of Lorraine and the Regent Arran, and resolved on the morrow to atone for his delay. As the armed citizen left him and mingled with the gathering crowd, the tone of his voice, and something in his air, brought to Fawside's memory that man of the stout arm and long axe who had so suddenly befriended him on that night, the desperate events of which seemed likely to influence the whole of his future career. Here was a key, perhaps, to the name and dwelling of his unknown beauty; but the chance was scarcely thought of ere it was gone!—already the armed stranger was lost amid the crowd that hurried up the adjacent close, to mingle, in the High Street, with the masses who greeted Mary of Lorraine with shouts of applause. She entered in the dusk, surrounded by torch-bearers and guarded by a body of mounted spearmen, led by Errol, the lord high constable of Scotland, a peer who was secretly in league with England against her. She was preceded by a long train of merchants, wearing fine black gowns of camlet, lined with silk and trimmed with velvet, according to the rule for all above ten pounds of stent; by the provost in armour, and the city officers and piper wearing doublets of Rouen canvas, and black hats with white strings, and all armed with swords, daggers, and partizans.

Arrived in the city on the morrow, Fawside rode at once to the residence of the Queen-Mother. He was well mounted, carefully accoutred, and armed to the teeth; for in those days no man knew what manner of men or adventures he might meet if he ventured a rood from his own gate.

His armour was a light suit of that species of puffed or ribbed mail which was designed as an imitation of the slashed dresses of the age. On his head was one of those steel caps known as a coursing-hat, adorned by a white feather. The mail was as bright as the hands of the first finisher in Paris (M. Fourbisser, Rue St. Jacques, armourer to the Garde du Corps Ecossais) could render it; and the cuirass was inlaid in gold, with a representation of the Crucifixion, as a charm against danger—a style introduced by Benvenuto Cellini, and named damasquinée; and Dame Alison, who, with a deep and deadly interest in her louring but affectionate eyes, had watched her son equipping himself and loading his petronels, sighed with anger that it was only for the city he was departing again.

"Edinburgh," she muttered; "ever and always Edinburgh! What demon lures thee there? Is it but to prance along the causeway, or flaunt before the saucy kimmers at the Butter Tron and Cramers-wives, thou goest with all this useless iron about thee?"

"Useless?" reiterated Florence with surprise.

"Yes—-useless to thee, at least!" she said, almost fiercely.

"Speak not so unkindly to me, dear mother; I am going elsewhere than to Edinburgh."

"Hah—whither?" she demanded, with some alarm.

"To the regent, on the business of the King of France; and in the wilds of the Torwood, or of Cadzow Forest, I may not find this iron, as you stigmatize the best of Milan plate, perhaps so useless a covering."

For the first time, the mother and son parted with coldness on her side; for the delay he exhibited in challenging Preston to mortal combat, or assaulting and sacking his farms, if not his tower, filled her angry heart with doubt and with disdain; for her long-cherished hope seemed on the eve of being dissipated.

These bitter emotions gave place to anxiety when, about nightfall, she heard news of the enemy. Roger of the Westmains hurriedly entered the hall, and, after paying his devoirs as usual to the ale-barrel, announced that, while driving a few stirks home from Gladsmuir—the fatal land of contention,—he had seen Claude Hamilton depart at the head of an armed train of at least twenty mounted men, by the road direct for Edinburgh.

"And my son is there alone!" was her first thought; for, in his anxiety to depart, and that he might with more freedom prosecute the search after his unknown, he had galloped westward from Fawside, without other friends than his sharp sword and his stout young arm.

"By this time—yea, long ere this," said Roger, looking at the sundial on the window-corner, "he will be far on the way to the Lord Arran's house of Cadzow, and not a horse in the barony could overtake him."

"Pray Heaven he may be so," replied the grim mother, crossing herself thrice; "he will be here to-morrow."

But many a morning dawned, and many a night came on, before she again saw her son, whose adventures we will now rehearse.

He soon ascertained that her majesty the queen-mother was at her new private residence (on the north side of the Castle-Hill Street), which, with its little oratory and guard-house, she had erected after the almost total destruction of Edinburgh by the English army in 1544. Holyrood Palace was burned on that occasion. Thus, at the time of our story, many of its southern apartments were in ruin; and hence Mary of Lorraine was compelled to find a more secure habitation within the walls of the city, and in the vicinity of the fortress, of which the gallant Sir James Hamilton of Stain-house was governor, until he was slain in a bloody tumult by the French.

Several persons, apparently of good position, were loitering near this little private palace, and to one of these—a page apparently—Fawside addressed himself; and on receiving a somewhat supercilious answer, he exclaimed angrily,—

"Quick, sirrah—announce me, for I must speak with the queen ere I ride for the lord regent's."

These words were overheard by two gentlemen richly dressed and brilliantly armed in gorgets and cuirasses of fine steel, with their swords and daggers glittering with precious stones. They were each attended by two pages, and jostled so rudely past Fawside, who had now dismounted, and held his horse by the bridle, that, had he not been amply occupied by his own thoughts, he would have called them severely to account, as an insult was never tolerated in those days.

"Bothwell!"

"Glencairn!" were the exclamations, as these worthies recognized and cautiously saluted each other.

"'Tis our man Fawside," whispered the latter; "doubtless he goes now to deliver his missives. Accursed folly that spared him; but 'tis too late now; let the queen receive hers."

"And he goeth hereafter to Arran. I heard him say so."

"He shall never pass through Cadzow Wood alive. I have a thought—stay—get me a clerk to write. Where lodges Master Patten?"

"At the upper Bow Porte—not a pistol-shot from this."

"This way, then," said Glencairn, twitching his friend's mantle; and they hurried away together, while the unfortunate Fawside, without the least idea that he was watched so narrowly, approached the Guise Palace, as it was named by the citizens.

This edifice, which was built of polished stone, was three stories in height; the access to it was by a turnpike stair, above the carved doorway of which were the cipher of the queen, "M.R.," and the pious legend, Laus et honor Deo, to exclude evil. On the opposite side of the narrow close was the guard-house, where a party of thirty men-at-arms, under Livingstone of Champfleurie, an esquire, all equipped by the queen, and brought from her own lands as private vassals, furnished sentinels for her modest dwelling. These men were armed with sword, dagger, and arquebuse, and bore on their doublets—which were of the royal livery of Scotland, scarlet faced with yellow—the arms of the queen-dowager, or bendwise gules, charged with the three winglets of Lorraine, and quartered with the Scottish arms,—sol a lion rampant within a double treasure, flory, and counter-flory, mars.

In those simple times, people of rank were easily accessible; thus, there was not much ceremony observed by royal personages. In a very brief space of time, Fawside found himself treading the oak floors of Mary of Lorraine's dwelling, as he was ushered by a page into a large apartment, the sombre tapestry of which was rendered yet darker by the narrow and ancient alley into which its three tall windows opened. This room was furnished with regal magnificence. The arras, which had formed a portion of the dowry of Yolande of Anjou, depicted the career of Garin the Wild Boar, who figures in the romance of "Gaharin de Lorraine." The chairs were covered with crimson velvet fringed with silver, and all bore the royal crown and cipher. The door and panelling, some of which are still preserved, were all of dark oak exquisitely carved, and in each compartment was a device, an armorial bearing, or a likeness of some member of the royal family; James V., with his pointed moustache, and bonnet smartly slouched over the right ear, being most frequently depicted. The ceiling, which is still preserved at Edinburgh, is of wood, and very singularly decorated. In the centre is the figure of our Saviour, encircled by the legend,—

Ego sum via, veritas, et vita.

In each compartment is an allegorical subject, such as the Dream of Jacob, the Vision of Death from the Apocalyse, &c., and one representing the Saviour asleep in the storm, with a view of Edinburgh, its castle and St. Giles's church in the background, His galley being afloat, not in the Sea of Galilee, but, curiously enough, in the centre of the North Loch.

Within a stone recess, canopied like a Gothic niche, and secured thereto by a chain of steel, stood the famous old tankard known as the Fairy Cup of King William the Lion.

Delrio relates, from Gulielmus Neubrigensis, that a peasant, one night, when passing near a rocky grotto, heard sounds of merriment; and on peeping in, beheld a quaint-looking company of dwarfish elves dancing and feasting. One offered him a cup to drink with them; but he poured out the bright liquor it contained, and rode off with the vessel, which was of unknown material and strange of fashion. It became the property of Henry the Elder, of England, and was presented by him to King William the Lion, of Scotland; after whom it became an heirloom of our kings,[*] and was now in the custody of Mary of Lorraine.

[*] "Discovrse of Miracles in the Catholic Chvrch." Antwerp, 1676.

Florence Fawside had barely time to observe all this, to unclasp his coursing-hat, glance at his figure in a mirror, and give that last and most satisfactory adjust to his hair, which every man and woman infallibly do previous to an interview, when the arras at the further end of the apartment was suddenly parted by the hands of two pages. Two ladies in rich dresses advanced, and our hero knew that he was in the presence of the widow of James V. He sank upon his right knee, and bowed his head, until she desired him to rise and approach, with a welcome, to her mansion, in a voice, the tones of which stirred his inmost heart, by the emotions and recollections they awakened.

Mary of Lorraine was the sister of Francis, Duc de Guise, and widow of Louis of Orleans, Duc de Longueville, before her marriage with James V. of Scotland. She was beautiful and still young, being only in her thirty-second year. She was fair-complexioned, with a pale forehead and clear hazel eyes, which were expressive alike of intelligence, sweetness, and candour. Her red and cherub-like mouth ever wore the most charming smile; her hair was partly concealed by her lace coif; her high ruff came close round her dimpled chin; and on the breast of her puffed yellow satin dress, which was slashed with black velvet, and trimmed with black lace, sparkled a diamond cross, the farewell gift of her sister, who was prioress of the convent of St. Peter, at Rheims, in Champagne.

"Rise, monsieur—rise, sir," said she, smiling; "it seems almost strange when a gentleman kneels to me now."

"Alas, madam, that the widow of James V. should find it so in the kingdom of her daughter."

"Or a daughter of Lorraine; but so it is, sir—treason and heresy are spreading like a leprosy in the land; nor need I wonder that those decline to kneel in a palace, who refuse to do so before the altar of their God! Mon Dieu, M. de Fawside; but we live in strange and perilous times. You tremble, sir—are you unwell?"

Mary of Lorraine might well have asked this, for Florence grew pale, and tottered, so that he was compelled to grasp a chair for support, when, in the queen who addressed him, and in the lady her attendant, who remained a few paces behind, holding a feather fan partly before her face, he recognized those who had tended, nursed, and cured him of his wounds—she of the hazel, and she of the dark-blue eyes:

To the beautiful queen, and her still more beautiful friend and dame d'honneur, he was already as well known as if he had been the brother of both. In this bewilderment he gazed from one pair of charming eyes to the other, and played with the plume in his coursing-hat, utterly unable to speak; till the queen laughed merrily, and said,—

"Monsieur is most welcome to my poor house in l'Islebourg,"—for so the French named Edinburgh, from the number of lakes which surrounded its castle; "so our little romance is at an end—monsieur recognizes us, Madeline—all is discovered!"

"Madeline!" whispered Florence in his heart; "that name shall ever be a spell to me."

"Well, Laird of Fawside—so you have business with us. But first, I pray you, be seated, sir; your wounds cannot be entirely healed. I remember me, they were terrible!"

"Ah, madam!" said he, in a voice to which the fulness of his heart imparted a charming earnestness and richness of tone, as he again knelt down, "how shall I ever repay the honour you have already done me? The services of a life—a life of faith and gratitude—were indeed too little. But whence, came all this mystery?"