[Contents]CHAPTER LXII.Withdrawal of the Scots Army—Obsequies of the Gallant Dead—The Mystery solved.Although the morning sun rose bright and cheerful upon Otterbourne, yet were its rays incapable of giving gladness to those in the Scottish camp. The little army of heroes had gained a great and glorious victory, but they had dearly paid for it in the single death of Douglas. There was, therefore, more of condolence than of exultation among them, as they gave each other good morrow. They broke up their encampment with silence and sorrow, and marched off towards Scotland, under the united command of the Earls of Moray and Dunbar, with the solemn pace and fixed eyes of men who followed some funeral pageant; indeed, it was so in fact; for at the head of the main body of the army was the car that carried the coffin of the Douglas. Before it was borne his banner, that “Jamais Arriere” which, in the hands of Sir Patrick Hepborne the younger, had so happily turned the fate of the battle; and, in compliment to the gallant young knight, it was his esquire, Mortimer Sang, to whom the honour of carrying it was assigned. Behind it came the fatal pennon of Piersie, which had been the cause of so much waste of human life, and around the machine were clustered all those brave knights who had lately looked up to the hero for the direction of their every movement—at whose least nod or sign they would have spurred to achieve the most difficult and dangerous undertakings, and whose applause was ever considered by them as their highest reward. The life and soul of the army seemed now to have departed. They hung their heads, and marched on, rarely breaking the silence that prevailed, except to utter some sad remark calculated to heighten the very sorrow that gave rise to it.[472]The last of their columns disappeared from the ground, and when Katherine Spears and the lady on whom she attended cast their eyes over it from the window of the tower in the Castle of Otterbourne, it was again as much a scene of peace as if no such fierce warfare had ever disturbed it. Huge heaps, and long lines, indeed, marked the places under which hundreds of those who had merrily marched thither now reposed, Scot and Englishman, in amity together. The ruined huts and broken-down entrenchments too were still visible; but the daisies and the other little flowers that enamelled the field, refreshed by the morning dew, had again raised their crushed heads, and the timid flocks and herds which had been scared by the din of arms, had again ventured forth from the covert whither they had been driven, and were innocently pasturing on the very spot where heroes had been so lately contending in the mortal strife. The lady, however, suffered her attention to be occupied with these objects for a brief space only ere she returned to perform her melancholy task of watching by those beloved remains she had so piously rescued from the promiscuous heaps of slaughter that covered the battle-field. She again sought the Chapel of the Castle, where lay the brave old knight Sir Walter de Selby, for it was he who, having met with some less merciful foe than Sir Patrick Hepborne, had been cut down in the melée. The mortal wound now gaped wide on his venerable head, and the beauty of his silver hair was disfigured with clotted gore. The tears of her who now seated herself by his bier fell fast and silently, as she bent over that benignant countenance now no longer animated by its generous spirit. Now it was she recalled all that affection so largely exhibited towards her from her very childhood. His faults had at this moment disappeared from her memory, and as the more remarkable instances of his kindness arose in succession, she gave way to that feeling natural to sensitive minds on such occasions, and bitterly accused herself of having but ill requited them.The body of Sir Walter remained in the Castle of Otterbourne for several days, until proper preparations were made there and at Norham for doing it the honours due to the remains of so gallant a knight, and one who had enjoyed so important a command. After the escort was ready, the lady parted with much sorrow from Katherine Spears, whose father was yet unable to bear the motion of a journey. She commended both to the especial protection of the Captain of the Castle, and then hastily seating herself in her horse-litter to hide her grief from observation, the funeral procession moved away.[473]It was long after the sunset of the second day, that the troops of the garrison of Norham, under the Lieutenant Oglethorpe, marched out in sad array to meet the corpse of their late governor. Clad in all the insignia of woe, and each soldier bearing a torch in his hand, they halted on the high ground over the village, and rested in mute and sorrowful expectation of the approach of the funeral train. Lights appeared slowly advancing from a distance, and the dull chanting of voices and the heavy measured tread of men were heard. The coffin had already been removed from the car in which it had hitherto been carried, and four priests who had gone to meet it, one of them bearing a crucifix aloft, now appeared walking bareheaded before it, and chanting a hymn. The coffin itself was sustained on the shoulders of a band of men-at-arms, who accompanied it from Otterbourne; and after it came the horse litter of the lady, attended by a train of horsemen who rode with their lances reversed. Among these, alas! no man belonging to the deceased was to be seen, for all had perished with him in the field.When the procession had reached the spot where the troops from Norham were drawn up to receive it, those who formed it halted, and the bearers, resigning their burden to the chief officers of the garrison, fell back to join their fellows. One-half of the soldiers of the Castle then moved on before the body, whilst the other half filed in behind the lady’s litter, and the men of Otterbourne were left to close up the rear of the pageant.As they descended the hill, the inhabitants of the village turned out to gaze on the imposing spectacle; and after it had passed by, they followed to witness the last obsequies of one whose military pomp had often delighted their eyes, and the hardy deeds of whose prime were even now in every man’s mouth.Having reached the entrance to the church, the soldiers formed a double line up to the great door, each man leaning upon his lance, in grief that required no acting. The lady descended from her litter. With her head veiled, and her person enveloped in black drapery, she leaned upon the arm of Lieutenant Oglethorpe, and followed the body with tottering steps and streaming eyes into the holy fane. The church was soon filled by the Norham soldiery, ranked up thickly around it, the blaze of the torches pierced into the darkest nook of its Gothic interior, and the solemn ceremony proceeded.The lady had wound up her resolution to the utmost, that she might undergo the trying scene without flinching. She[474]stood wonderfully composed, with her eyes cast upon the ground, endeavouring to fix her thoughts on the service for the dead, which the priests were chanting; when, chancing to look up, her attention was suddenly caught by the figure of a Franciscan monk, who, elevated on the steps of the altar, stood leaning earnestly forward from behind a Gothic pillar that half concealed him, his keen eyes fixed upon her with a marked intensity of gaze. Her heart was frozen within her by his very look, and, uttering a faint scream, she swooned away, and would have fallen on the pavement but for the timely aid of Oglethorpe and those who were present. Dismay and confusion followed. The ceremonial was interrupted; and the bystanders believing that her feelings had been too deeply affected by the so sad and solemn spectacle, hastened to remove her from the scene, so that she was quickly conveyed to her litter, and escorted to the Castle.The funeral rites were hurried over, and the body was committed to the silent vault, with no other witnesses than the officiating priests, the populace, and such of the officers and soldiers as had been bound to the deceased by some strong individual feeling of affection, and who now pressed around the coffin, to have the melancholy satisfaction of assisting in its descent.While the remains of Sir Walter de Selby were conveying from Otterbourne Castle, the Scottish Nobles and Knights who had accompanied the body of the Douglas were engaged in assisting at the obsequies of that heroic Earl at Melrose. All that military or religious pomp could devise or execute was done to honour his remains, and many a mass for the peace of his soul was sung by the pious monks of its abbey. The brave Scottish Knights surrounded his tomb in silence and sorrow, all forgetting that they had gained a victory, and each feeling that he had lost a private friend in him whose body they had consigned to the grave.It was only that morning that Sir Patrick Hepborne had heard accidentally from his esquire the particulars of his unexpected meeting with Katherine Spears; and this information, added to those circumstances which had so strangely occurred to himself, determined him to proceed to Norham the very next day, where he hoped to unravel the mystery that had been gradually thickening around him. The truce that had been already proclaimed ensured his safety, so that he entered the court-yard of the Norham Tower Hostel with perfect confidence. Although Hepborne and his esquire came after it was dark, the[475]quick eye of Mrs. Kyle immediately recognized them; and, conscious of the share she had had in the treachery so lately attempted against them, she took refuge in the innermost recesses of the kitchen part of the building. But Sang was determined not to spare her, and, after searching everywhere, he at last detected her in her concealment, from which he led her forth in considerable confusion.“So, beautiful Mrs. Kyle,” said he, “so thou wert minded to have done our two noble knights and their humbler esquires a handsome favour, truly, the last time they did honour thy house? By St. Andrew, we should have made a pretty knot dangling from the ramparts of Norham.”“Nay, talk not so, Sir Squire,” replied the hostess in a whining tone; “it was the wicked Sir Miers de Willoughby who did bribe me to put ye all in his power. And then he did never talk of aught else but the ransom for thy liberty; and in truth, love did so blind me that I thought no more of the matter. But I trow I am well enow punished for my folly; for here he came, and by his blazons and blandishments, he did so overmatch me that he hath ta’en from me, by way of borrow (a borrow, I wis, that will never come laughing home again), many a handful of the bonny broad pieces my poor husband Sylvester, that is gone, did leave me. Yet natheless have I enow left to make any man rich; and when Ralpho Proudfoot doth return frae the wars——”“Poor Ralpho Proudfoot will never return,” said Sang, interrupting her, in a melancholy tone; “these hands did help to lay him in the earth.”“Poor Ralpho,” cried Mrs. Kyle, lifting her apron to a dry eye, “poor Proudfoot! He was indeed a proper pretty man. But verily,” added she, with a deep sigh, whilst at the same time she threw a half-reproachful, half-loving glance at Sang, “verily, ’twere better, perhaps, for a poor weak woman to think no more of man, seeing all are deceivers alike. Wilt thou step this gate, Sir Squire, and taste my Malvoisie? Or wilt thou—”“What tramp of many feet is that I hear in the village?” demanded Sang, interrupting her.“’Tis nought but the burying o’ our auld Captain o’ Norham,” replied Mrs. Kyle; “I trust that we sall have some right gay and jolly knight to fill his boots. Auld de Selby was grown useless, I wot. Gi’e me some young rattling blade that will take pleasure in chatting to a bonny buxom quean when she comes in his way. I haena had a word frae the auld man for this I kenna how lang, but a rebuke now and then for the deboshing[476]o’ his men-at-arms, the which was more the fault o’ my good ale than o’ me. But where are ye running till, Master Sang?—Fye on him, he’s away.”Sang did indeed hasten to tell his master of the passing funeral procession, and Hepborne ran out to follow it. It had already reached the church, and by the time he got to the door the interior was so filled that it was only by immense bodily exertion that he squeezed himself in at a small side door. His eyes immediately caught the figure of the lady, and there they rested, unconscious of all else. The moment she lifted her head he recognized the features of Maurice de Grey and of her whom he had seen on the battle-field of Otterbourne. But her fainting allowed him not a moment for thought. The crowd of men-at-arms between him and the object of his solicitude bid defiance to all his efforts to reach her, and ere he could regain the open air her litter was already almost out of sight.“Poor soul,” said a compassionate billman, who had been looking anxiously after it, “thou hast indeed good cause to be afflicted. Verily, thou hast lost thy best friend.”“Of whom dost thou speak, old man?” demanded Hepborne eagerly.“Of the poor Lady Beatrice, who was carried to the Castle but now,” replied the man.“What saidst thou?” demanded Hepborne; “Lady Beatrice! Was not that the daughter of thy deceased governor? was not that the Lady Eleanore de Selby, now the Lady de Vere?”“Nay, Sir Knight, that she be not,” replied the man, “nouther the one nor the other, I wot; and if I might adventure to speak it, I would say that there be those who do think that the Lady Eleanore de Selby, now the Lady de Vere, hath no small spice of the devil in her composition, whilst the Lady Beatrice is well known to all to be an angel upon earth.”“Who is she, and what is her history, my good fellow?” demanded Hepborne, slipping money into his hand.“Meseems thou art a stranger, Sir Knight, that thou knowest not the Lady Beatrice,” said the man; “but I can well satisfy thy curiosity, seeing I was with good Sir Walter in that very Border raid during which she did become his. Our men had driven the herds and flocks from a hill on the side of one of the streams of Lammermoor, when, as we passed by the cottage of the shepherd who had fed them, his wife, with an infant in her arms, and two or three other children around her, came furiously out to attack Sir Walter with her tongue, as he rode at the head of his lances. ‘My curse upon ye, ye English loons!’ cried[477]she bitterly; ‘no content wi’ the sweep o’ our master’s hill, ye hae ta’en the bit cow that did feed my poor bairns. Better take my wee anes too, for what can I do wi’ them?’ A soldier was about to quiet her evil tongue by a stroke of his axe. ‘Fye on thee,’ said Sir Walter; ‘what, wouldst thou murder the poor woman? Her rage is but natural. Verily, our prey is large enow without her wretched cow.’ And then, turning to her with a good-natured smile on his face, ‘My good dame, thou shalt have thy cow.’ And the beast was restored to her accordingly. ‘The Virgin’s blessing be on thee, Sir Knight,’ said the woman. ‘And now,’ said Sir Walter, ‘by’r Lady, I warrant me thou wouldst have ill brooked my taking thee at thy word. Marry, I promise thee,’ continued he, pointing to a beautiful girl of five years, apparently her eldest child, ‘marry, I’ll warrant me thou wouldst have grudged mightily to have parted with that bonny face?’ ‘Nay, I do indeed love Beatrice almost as well as she were mine own child, albeit I did only nurse her,’ replied the dame; ‘but of a’ the bairns, she, I wot, is the only one that I could part with.’ ‘Is she not thy child, then?’ said Sir Walter; ‘whose, I pr’ythee, may she be?’ ‘That is what I canna tell thee, Sir Knight,’ replied the woman. ‘It is now about four years and a-half sith that a young lordling came riding down the glen. He was looking for a nurse, and the folk did airt him to me, who had then lost my first-born babe. He put this bairn, whom he called Beatrice, into my arms, and a purse into my lap, and away he flew again, saying that he would soon be back to see how the bairn throve. The baby was richly clad, so methought it must be some fair lady’s stolen love-pledge. But I hae never seen him sithence, nor need I ever look for him now. And troth, Robby and I hae enew o’ hungry mouths to feed withouten hers, poor thing—ay, and maybe a chance o’ mair.’ ‘Wilt thou part with the child to me, then?’ said Sir Walter; ‘I have but one daughter, who is of her age, and I would willingly take this beauteous Beatrice to be her companion.’ The poor woman had many scruples, but her husband, who now ventured to show himself, had none; and, insisting on his wife’s compliance, Beatrice was brought home with us to Norham, adopted by the good Sir Walter, and has ever been treated by him sithence as a second daughter. What marvel, then, Sir Knight, that she should swoon at his burying?”Light now broke in at once on Sir Patrick Hepborne. As we have seen in the opening chapter of our story, he was struck, even in the twilight, by the superior manner and attractions of the lady who had lost her hawk, and whose gentle demeanour[478]had led him to conclude that she was the Lady Eleanore de Selby, of whose charms he had heard so much. Having been thus mistaken at first, he naturally went on, from all he heard and saw afterwards, and especially in the interviews he had at Norham, with her who now turned out to have been the companion of the Lady Eleanore de Selby, to mislead himself more and more. He returned to his inn to ruminate on this strange discovery; but be the beautiful Beatrice whom she might, he had loved her, and her alone, and he felt that his passion now became stronger than ever. His mind ran hastily over past events; he at once suspected that his inconsiderate jealousy had been, in fact, awakened by accidentally beholding an interview between the real Eleanore de Selby and her lover, and he cursed his haste that had so foolishly hurried him away from Norham; he remembered the fair hand that had waved the white scarf as he was crossing the Tweed; he recalled the countenance, the behaviour, and the conversation of his page, Maurice de Grey; he kissed the emerald ring which he wore on his finger; and his heart was drowned in a rushing tide of wild sensations, where hope and joy rose predominant. His generous soul swelled with transport at the thought of being the protector of her whom he now adored, and whom he now found, at the very moment she was left, as he believed, in a state of utter destitution. His impatience made him deplore that decency forbade his visiting the Lady Beatrice that night, but he resolved to seek for an audience of her early the next morning.At such hour, then, as a lady could be approached with propriety, he despatched his esquire on an embassy to the Castle. He had little fear of the result, from what had already passed between them; but what was his mortification to learn that the Lady Beatrice had been gone from Norham for above five or six hours, having set out during the night on some distant journey, whither no one in the Castle could divine.It is impossible to paint the misery of Sir Patrick Hepborne. Hope had been wound up to the highest pitch, and the most grievous disappointment was the issue. He was so much beside himself that he was little master of his actions, and Mortimer Sang was obliged to remind him of the necessity of returning immediately to Melrose, to join his father, who, with the other Scottish nobles and knights, had resolved to stay there for the space of three days ere they should separate.The warriors parted, with solemn vows uttered over the grave of the Douglas; and Sir Patrick Hepborne and his son, accompanied by the Earl of Moray, Assueton, Halyburton, and[479]a number of other knights, set out for Hailes Castle. The Lady Isabelle was ready to receive them on their arrival. She sprang into the court-yard to clasp her father and her brother to her bosom; and although modesty and maiden bashfulness checked those manifestations of love towards her knight with which her heart overflowed, yet, as he kissed her hand, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes sparkled with a delight that could not be mistaken.Among those who came out to welcome the war-like party was old Gabriel Lindsay. Leaning on his staff on the threshold, he eagerly scanned each face that came near him with his dim eyes.“Where is my gallant boy?” cried he. “I trow he need seldom fear to show his head where valorous deads hae been adoing; he hath had his share o’ fame, I warrant me. Ha, Master Sang, welcome home. Where loitereth my gallant boy Robin? he useth not to be so laggard in meeting his old father, I wot. A plague on these burnt-out eyes of mine, I canna see him nowhere.”“Who can undertake the task of breaking poor Robert’s death to the old man?” cried Sang, turning aside from him in the greatest distress. “Sure I am that I would rather face the fierce phalanx of foes that did work his brave son’s death than tell him of the doleful tidings.”“Where hast thou left Robin, Master Sang?” said the doting old man again. “Ah, there he is; nay, fye on my blindness, that be’s Richie Morton. Sure, sure my boy was never wont to be laggard last; ’twas but the last time he came home with Sir John Assueton that he had his arms round my ould neck or ever I wist he was at hand; he thought, forsooth, I would not have ken’d him: but, ah, ha, Robin, says I to him——”“My worthy old friend,” said Sang, quite unable any longer to stand his innocent garrulity, so ill befitting the reception of the bitter news he had to tell him, and taking his withered arm to assist him into the Castle, and leading him gently to his chamber—“my worthy friend, come this way, and I will tell thee of thy son—we shall be better here in private. Robert Lindsay’s wonted valour shone forth with sun-like glory in the bloody field of Otterbourne; but——”“Ah, full well did I know that he would bravely support the gallant name of Lindsay,” cried the old man, interrupting him with a smile of exultation. “Trust me, the boy hath ever showed that he hath some slender streams of gentle blood in his veins; we are come of good kind, Master Sang, and maybe my boy Robin shall yet win wealth and honours to prove[480]it. My great-great-grandfather—nay, my grandfather’s great-great——”“But, Robert,” said Sang, wishing to bring old Gabriel back to the sad subject he was about to open.“Ay, Robert, Master Sang,” replied the old man, “where tarrieth he?”“At Otterbourne,” replied Sang, deeply affected. “Thy son, thy gallant son, fell gloriously, whilst nobly withstanding the whole force of the English line as they burst into our camp.”“What sayest thou, Master Sang?” said the infirm old man, who perfectly comprehended the speaker, but was so stunned by his fatal intelligence that his feeble intellect was confused by the blow—“what sayest thou, Master Sang?”“Thy heroic son was slain,” replied Sang, half choked with his emotions. “This lock of Robert Lindsay’s hair, and these trinkets taken from his person ere we committed his body to the earth, are all that thou canst ever see of him now, old man.”The esquire sat down, covered his face with his hands, and wept; and then endeavouring to command himself, he looked upward in the face of Gabriel Lindsay, who was standing before him like the decayed trunk of some mighty oak. The time-worn countenance of the old man was unmoved, and his dull eyes were fixed as in vacancy. The wandering so common to wasted age had come over his mind at that moment, sent, as it were, in mercy by Providence to blunt his perception of the dire affliction that had befallen him. Fitful smiles flashed at intervals across his face—his lips moved without sound—and at last he spoke—“And so thou sayest my boy will be here to-night, Master Sang, and that this is a lock of his bride’s hair? It is golden like his own; my blessing be on him, and that of St. Baldrid. But why feared he to bring her to me attence? Ha, doubtless he thought that the joyful surprise mought hae made my blood dance till it brast my ould heart. But no, Master Sang, joy shall never do for me what sorrow hath failed to work. I lost his mother—lost her in a’ her youth and beauty, and yet I bore it, and humbled myself before Him who giveth and taketh away, and was comforted; and shall I sink beneath the weight of joy? Nay, even had he died in the midst of his glory, I trust I am soldier enow, though I be’s ould, to have borne the news of my son having fallen with honour to Scotland, and to the name of Lindsay; but doth he think that his ould father may not be told, without risk, how he hath fought bravely—how he was noticed by the gallant Douglas—and, aboon a’, how he is coming[481]hame in triumph with a bonny gentle bride? And didst thou say they would be here to-night, Sir Squire? Fye, I must gang and tell Sir Patrick—and the brave young knight—and my Lady Isabelle; they will all rejoice in Gabriel’s glad tidings. A bonny bride, thou sayest, Master Sang; and shall I yet have a babe o’ Robin’s on my knee ere I die? But I must away to Sir Patrick.”He made an effort to go. Sang rose gently to detain him. He stopped—looked around him wildly—fastened his eyes vacantly for some moments on the ceiling—reason and recollection returned to him, and his dream of bliss passed away.“Oh, merciful God!” he cried, clasping his hands together in agony of woe. “Oh, my boy, my brave, my virtuous boy, and shall I never see thee more?”Nature with him was already spent; his failure was instantaneous; his limbs yielded beneath him, and he sank down into the arms of the esquire, who hastily laid him on the bed and ran for assistance. Sir Patrick Hepborne, his son, and the Lady Isabelle, as well as many of the domestics, quickly appeared in great consternation; but they came only to weep over the good old Seneschal—He was gone for ever.The death of this old and faithful domestic threw a gloom over the Castle, so that Assueton felt that he could hardly press on his marriage-day. At last, however, it was fixed. The preparations were such as became the house of Hepborne; and the ceremony was performed in presence of some of the first nobles and knights of Scotland.The Countess of Moray had come from Tarnawa to meet her Lord. Sir Patrick Hepborne, the younger, eagerly sought an opportunity of having private conversation with her, hoping to have some explanation of the strange disappearance of his page. But the noble lady, maintaining the same distance towards him she had so mysteriously used, seemed rather disposed to shun the subject; and it was not until Hepborne had prefaced his inquiry with a full exposition of all he suspected, and all he knew, regarding the Lady Eleanore de Selby and the Lady Beatrice, and that she really saw where his heart was sincerely fixed, that she would consent to betray the secret she possessed. Hepborne was then assured that his page Maurice de Grey was no other than the Lady Beatrice.Believing that Hepborne loved her, she had looked with joy to other meetings with him; she had been filled with anxiety when she heard of the encounter between him and Sir Rafe Piersie; and she was exulting in his triumph over that knight[482]at the very moment they came to tell her of his departure. She hastened to a window overlooking the Tweed, where she beheld the boat that was wafting him to Scotland. It was then, when she thought herself deserted, that she really felt that she loved. Almost unconscious of what she did, she waved her scarf. He replied not to the signal. Again and again she waved, and in vain she stretched her eyeballs to catch a return of the sign. The boat touched the strand; he sprang on shore, and leaped into his saddle. Again in despair she waved; the signal was returned, and that faint sign from the Scottish shore was to her as the twig of hope. So intense had been her feelings that she sank down overpowered by them. Recovering herself, she again gazed from the window. The ferry-boat had returned, and was again moored on the English side. She cast her eyes across to the spot where she had last beheld Sir Patrick. The animating figures were now gone—some yellow gravel, a green bank, a few furze bushes, and a solitary willow, its slender melancholy spray waving in the breeze, were all that appeared, and her chilled and forsaken heart was left as desolate as the scene.It was at this time that she was called on by friendship to dismiss her own griefs, that she might actively assist the high-spirited Eleanore de Selby. By the result of Sir Rafe Piersie’s visit, that lady was relieved from his addresses; but they were immediately succeeded by the strange proposals of her infatuated father, when deluded by the machinations of the Wizard Ancient. All her tears and all her eloquence were thrown away, and so perfect was Sir Walter’s subjection to the will of the impostor that even his temper was changed, and his affection for his daughter swallowed up, by his anxiety to avert the fate that threatened. Such coercion to a union sodisgustingmight have roused the spirit of resistance in the most timid female bosom; but Eleanore de Selby, who was high and hot tempered, resolved at once to fly from such persecution; and, taking a solemn vow of secrecy from the Lady Beatrice, she made her the confidant of a recent attachment which had arisen between her and a certain knight whom she had met at a tilting match held at Newcastle a short time before, when she was on a visit to an aunt who resided there. The Lady Eleanore informed her friend that her lover was Sir Hans de Vere, a knight of Zealand, kinsman to the King’s banished favourite the Duke of Ireland, who had lately come from abroad, and who looked to gain the same high place in King Richard’s affections which the Duke himself had filled. From him she had received a visit unknown to her father, and it[483]was the parting of the lovers after that meeting which had so filled Hepborne with jealousy. In the urgency of her affairs she implored her friend to aid her schemes, which were immediately carried into effect by means of the Minstrel.Having thus been gradually, though unwillingly, drawn to be an accomplice in the Lady Eleanore’s plans, Beatrice felt that she could not stay behind to expose herself to the rage of the bereft father. Having assisted her friend, therefore, to escape, she accompanied her, in male attire, to the place where her lover waited for her at some distance from Norham. There she parted, with many tears, from the companion of her youth, having received from her the emerald ring which Sir Patrick Hepborne afterwards became possessed of. Her own depression of spirits, occasioned by Sir Patrick’s unaccountable desertion of her, had determined her to seek out some convent, where she might find a temporary, if not a permanent retreat. Under the protection of old Adam of Gordon, therefore, she crossed the Tweed into Scotland. There he procured her a Scottish guide to conduct her to North Berwick, where he had a relation among the Cistertian nuns, and thither she was proceeding at the time she met Hepborne in the grove by the side of the Tyne.When Sir Patrick addressed her she felt so much fluttered that it was some time before she could invent a plausible account of herself; and when he proposed to her to become his page, love triumphed over her better judgment, and she could not resist the temptation of an offer that held out so fair an opportunity of knowing more of him, and of trying the state of his heart. As to the latter she became convinced, by some of those conversations we have detailed, that she had been cruelly deceived, and that she had in reality no share in it. She heard him passionately declare his inextinguishable love for theLadyEleanore de Selby, and when he said that he had seen too much of her for his peace of mind, she naturally enough concluded that they had met together on some former occasion. She became unhappy at her own imprudence in so rashly joining his party, and was anxious to avail herself of the first opportunity of escaping from one whose heart never could be hers. The Countess of Moray’s kindness to her as Maurice de Grey induced her to discover herself to that lady. She earnestly entreated that she might remain concealed, and that Sir Patrick might not be informed. It was the Lady Jane de Vaux who laid the plan for deceiving him about the departure of his page, and she and the Countess of Moray could not resist indulging in tormenting one whom they believed to have wantonly sported with the affections of[484]the Lady Beatrice, and who had consequently suffered deeply in the good opinion of both.The Minstrel, who, to do away suspicion, had returned to Norham immediately after the escape of the ladies, no sooner learned from the guide the change which had taken place in Beatrice’s plans, and that she had gone to Tarnawa, than he determined to follow her thither, under pretence of going to the tournament. Having learned from him that her benefactor, Sir Walter de Selby, had been overwhelmed with affliction for the loss of his daughter, of whose fate he was yet ignorant, and that he had also grievously complained of her own desertion of him, she was filled with remorse, and determined to return to him immediately, and to brave all his reproaches; but indisposition, arising from the trying fatigue of body and the mental misery she had undergone, prevented her setting out until several days after the departure of the Earl of Moray and his knights for Aberdeen. Hepborne could now no longer doubt of the attachment of the Lady Beatrice. The thought that he had ignorantly thrown away a heart so valuable as that which his intercourse with his page had given him ample opportunity to know, was a source of bitter distress to him. His spirits fled, he loathed society, and he industriously shunned the huntings, hawkings, dancings, and masquings that were going merrily forward in honour of his friend’s nuptials with his sister the Lady Isabelle.But Assueton was not so selfishly occupied in his own joys as not to be struck with the change in his beloved Hepborne. He besought him to unbosom the secret sorrow that was so evidently preying on his mind, and Sir Patrick, who had hitherto generously concealed it, that he might not poison the happiness in which he could not participate, at last yielded to the entreaty, and told him all. Sir John had but little of comfort to offer: the subject was one that hardly admitted of any. He saw that the only way in which friendship could be useful was by rousing him to do something that might actively divert his melancholy.Sir David de Lindsay having returned from his captivity in England, had lately arrived at Hailes, where Sir William de Dalzel and Sir John Halyburton had remained, to witness Assueton’s marriage. They were now about to proceed to London, to make good the pledge given to Lord Welles. Hepborne would have fain excused himself from the engagement he had so cheerfully made with them at Tarnawa, but Assueton contrived to pique his chivalric spirit, and at length succeeded in inducing him to become one of the party. Sir John even[485]offered to accompany his friend, but Hepborne would by no means permit him to leave his newly-married Lady.
[Contents]CHAPTER LXII.Withdrawal of the Scots Army—Obsequies of the Gallant Dead—The Mystery solved.Although the morning sun rose bright and cheerful upon Otterbourne, yet were its rays incapable of giving gladness to those in the Scottish camp. The little army of heroes had gained a great and glorious victory, but they had dearly paid for it in the single death of Douglas. There was, therefore, more of condolence than of exultation among them, as they gave each other good morrow. They broke up their encampment with silence and sorrow, and marched off towards Scotland, under the united command of the Earls of Moray and Dunbar, with the solemn pace and fixed eyes of men who followed some funeral pageant; indeed, it was so in fact; for at the head of the main body of the army was the car that carried the coffin of the Douglas. Before it was borne his banner, that “Jamais Arriere” which, in the hands of Sir Patrick Hepborne the younger, had so happily turned the fate of the battle; and, in compliment to the gallant young knight, it was his esquire, Mortimer Sang, to whom the honour of carrying it was assigned. Behind it came the fatal pennon of Piersie, which had been the cause of so much waste of human life, and around the machine were clustered all those brave knights who had lately looked up to the hero for the direction of their every movement—at whose least nod or sign they would have spurred to achieve the most difficult and dangerous undertakings, and whose applause was ever considered by them as their highest reward. The life and soul of the army seemed now to have departed. They hung their heads, and marched on, rarely breaking the silence that prevailed, except to utter some sad remark calculated to heighten the very sorrow that gave rise to it.[472]The last of their columns disappeared from the ground, and when Katherine Spears and the lady on whom she attended cast their eyes over it from the window of the tower in the Castle of Otterbourne, it was again as much a scene of peace as if no such fierce warfare had ever disturbed it. Huge heaps, and long lines, indeed, marked the places under which hundreds of those who had merrily marched thither now reposed, Scot and Englishman, in amity together. The ruined huts and broken-down entrenchments too were still visible; but the daisies and the other little flowers that enamelled the field, refreshed by the morning dew, had again raised their crushed heads, and the timid flocks and herds which had been scared by the din of arms, had again ventured forth from the covert whither they had been driven, and were innocently pasturing on the very spot where heroes had been so lately contending in the mortal strife. The lady, however, suffered her attention to be occupied with these objects for a brief space only ere she returned to perform her melancholy task of watching by those beloved remains she had so piously rescued from the promiscuous heaps of slaughter that covered the battle-field. She again sought the Chapel of the Castle, where lay the brave old knight Sir Walter de Selby, for it was he who, having met with some less merciful foe than Sir Patrick Hepborne, had been cut down in the melée. The mortal wound now gaped wide on his venerable head, and the beauty of his silver hair was disfigured with clotted gore. The tears of her who now seated herself by his bier fell fast and silently, as she bent over that benignant countenance now no longer animated by its generous spirit. Now it was she recalled all that affection so largely exhibited towards her from her very childhood. His faults had at this moment disappeared from her memory, and as the more remarkable instances of his kindness arose in succession, she gave way to that feeling natural to sensitive minds on such occasions, and bitterly accused herself of having but ill requited them.The body of Sir Walter remained in the Castle of Otterbourne for several days, until proper preparations were made there and at Norham for doing it the honours due to the remains of so gallant a knight, and one who had enjoyed so important a command. After the escort was ready, the lady parted with much sorrow from Katherine Spears, whose father was yet unable to bear the motion of a journey. She commended both to the especial protection of the Captain of the Castle, and then hastily seating herself in her horse-litter to hide her grief from observation, the funeral procession moved away.[473]It was long after the sunset of the second day, that the troops of the garrison of Norham, under the Lieutenant Oglethorpe, marched out in sad array to meet the corpse of their late governor. Clad in all the insignia of woe, and each soldier bearing a torch in his hand, they halted on the high ground over the village, and rested in mute and sorrowful expectation of the approach of the funeral train. Lights appeared slowly advancing from a distance, and the dull chanting of voices and the heavy measured tread of men were heard. The coffin had already been removed from the car in which it had hitherto been carried, and four priests who had gone to meet it, one of them bearing a crucifix aloft, now appeared walking bareheaded before it, and chanting a hymn. The coffin itself was sustained on the shoulders of a band of men-at-arms, who accompanied it from Otterbourne; and after it came the horse litter of the lady, attended by a train of horsemen who rode with their lances reversed. Among these, alas! no man belonging to the deceased was to be seen, for all had perished with him in the field.When the procession had reached the spot where the troops from Norham were drawn up to receive it, those who formed it halted, and the bearers, resigning their burden to the chief officers of the garrison, fell back to join their fellows. One-half of the soldiers of the Castle then moved on before the body, whilst the other half filed in behind the lady’s litter, and the men of Otterbourne were left to close up the rear of the pageant.As they descended the hill, the inhabitants of the village turned out to gaze on the imposing spectacle; and after it had passed by, they followed to witness the last obsequies of one whose military pomp had often delighted their eyes, and the hardy deeds of whose prime were even now in every man’s mouth.Having reached the entrance to the church, the soldiers formed a double line up to the great door, each man leaning upon his lance, in grief that required no acting. The lady descended from her litter. With her head veiled, and her person enveloped in black drapery, she leaned upon the arm of Lieutenant Oglethorpe, and followed the body with tottering steps and streaming eyes into the holy fane. The church was soon filled by the Norham soldiery, ranked up thickly around it, the blaze of the torches pierced into the darkest nook of its Gothic interior, and the solemn ceremony proceeded.The lady had wound up her resolution to the utmost, that she might undergo the trying scene without flinching. She[474]stood wonderfully composed, with her eyes cast upon the ground, endeavouring to fix her thoughts on the service for the dead, which the priests were chanting; when, chancing to look up, her attention was suddenly caught by the figure of a Franciscan monk, who, elevated on the steps of the altar, stood leaning earnestly forward from behind a Gothic pillar that half concealed him, his keen eyes fixed upon her with a marked intensity of gaze. Her heart was frozen within her by his very look, and, uttering a faint scream, she swooned away, and would have fallen on the pavement but for the timely aid of Oglethorpe and those who were present. Dismay and confusion followed. The ceremonial was interrupted; and the bystanders believing that her feelings had been too deeply affected by the so sad and solemn spectacle, hastened to remove her from the scene, so that she was quickly conveyed to her litter, and escorted to the Castle.The funeral rites were hurried over, and the body was committed to the silent vault, with no other witnesses than the officiating priests, the populace, and such of the officers and soldiers as had been bound to the deceased by some strong individual feeling of affection, and who now pressed around the coffin, to have the melancholy satisfaction of assisting in its descent.While the remains of Sir Walter de Selby were conveying from Otterbourne Castle, the Scottish Nobles and Knights who had accompanied the body of the Douglas were engaged in assisting at the obsequies of that heroic Earl at Melrose. All that military or religious pomp could devise or execute was done to honour his remains, and many a mass for the peace of his soul was sung by the pious monks of its abbey. The brave Scottish Knights surrounded his tomb in silence and sorrow, all forgetting that they had gained a victory, and each feeling that he had lost a private friend in him whose body they had consigned to the grave.It was only that morning that Sir Patrick Hepborne had heard accidentally from his esquire the particulars of his unexpected meeting with Katherine Spears; and this information, added to those circumstances which had so strangely occurred to himself, determined him to proceed to Norham the very next day, where he hoped to unravel the mystery that had been gradually thickening around him. The truce that had been already proclaimed ensured his safety, so that he entered the court-yard of the Norham Tower Hostel with perfect confidence. Although Hepborne and his esquire came after it was dark, the[475]quick eye of Mrs. Kyle immediately recognized them; and, conscious of the share she had had in the treachery so lately attempted against them, she took refuge in the innermost recesses of the kitchen part of the building. But Sang was determined not to spare her, and, after searching everywhere, he at last detected her in her concealment, from which he led her forth in considerable confusion.“So, beautiful Mrs. Kyle,” said he, “so thou wert minded to have done our two noble knights and their humbler esquires a handsome favour, truly, the last time they did honour thy house? By St. Andrew, we should have made a pretty knot dangling from the ramparts of Norham.”“Nay, talk not so, Sir Squire,” replied the hostess in a whining tone; “it was the wicked Sir Miers de Willoughby who did bribe me to put ye all in his power. And then he did never talk of aught else but the ransom for thy liberty; and in truth, love did so blind me that I thought no more of the matter. But I trow I am well enow punished for my folly; for here he came, and by his blazons and blandishments, he did so overmatch me that he hath ta’en from me, by way of borrow (a borrow, I wis, that will never come laughing home again), many a handful of the bonny broad pieces my poor husband Sylvester, that is gone, did leave me. Yet natheless have I enow left to make any man rich; and when Ralpho Proudfoot doth return frae the wars——”“Poor Ralpho Proudfoot will never return,” said Sang, interrupting her, in a melancholy tone; “these hands did help to lay him in the earth.”“Poor Ralpho,” cried Mrs. Kyle, lifting her apron to a dry eye, “poor Proudfoot! He was indeed a proper pretty man. But verily,” added she, with a deep sigh, whilst at the same time she threw a half-reproachful, half-loving glance at Sang, “verily, ’twere better, perhaps, for a poor weak woman to think no more of man, seeing all are deceivers alike. Wilt thou step this gate, Sir Squire, and taste my Malvoisie? Or wilt thou—”“What tramp of many feet is that I hear in the village?” demanded Sang, interrupting her.“’Tis nought but the burying o’ our auld Captain o’ Norham,” replied Mrs. Kyle; “I trust that we sall have some right gay and jolly knight to fill his boots. Auld de Selby was grown useless, I wot. Gi’e me some young rattling blade that will take pleasure in chatting to a bonny buxom quean when she comes in his way. I haena had a word frae the auld man for this I kenna how lang, but a rebuke now and then for the deboshing[476]o’ his men-at-arms, the which was more the fault o’ my good ale than o’ me. But where are ye running till, Master Sang?—Fye on him, he’s away.”Sang did indeed hasten to tell his master of the passing funeral procession, and Hepborne ran out to follow it. It had already reached the church, and by the time he got to the door the interior was so filled that it was only by immense bodily exertion that he squeezed himself in at a small side door. His eyes immediately caught the figure of the lady, and there they rested, unconscious of all else. The moment she lifted her head he recognized the features of Maurice de Grey and of her whom he had seen on the battle-field of Otterbourne. But her fainting allowed him not a moment for thought. The crowd of men-at-arms between him and the object of his solicitude bid defiance to all his efforts to reach her, and ere he could regain the open air her litter was already almost out of sight.“Poor soul,” said a compassionate billman, who had been looking anxiously after it, “thou hast indeed good cause to be afflicted. Verily, thou hast lost thy best friend.”“Of whom dost thou speak, old man?” demanded Hepborne eagerly.“Of the poor Lady Beatrice, who was carried to the Castle but now,” replied the man.“What saidst thou?” demanded Hepborne; “Lady Beatrice! Was not that the daughter of thy deceased governor? was not that the Lady Eleanore de Selby, now the Lady de Vere?”“Nay, Sir Knight, that she be not,” replied the man, “nouther the one nor the other, I wot; and if I might adventure to speak it, I would say that there be those who do think that the Lady Eleanore de Selby, now the Lady de Vere, hath no small spice of the devil in her composition, whilst the Lady Beatrice is well known to all to be an angel upon earth.”“Who is she, and what is her history, my good fellow?” demanded Hepborne, slipping money into his hand.“Meseems thou art a stranger, Sir Knight, that thou knowest not the Lady Beatrice,” said the man; “but I can well satisfy thy curiosity, seeing I was with good Sir Walter in that very Border raid during which she did become his. Our men had driven the herds and flocks from a hill on the side of one of the streams of Lammermoor, when, as we passed by the cottage of the shepherd who had fed them, his wife, with an infant in her arms, and two or three other children around her, came furiously out to attack Sir Walter with her tongue, as he rode at the head of his lances. ‘My curse upon ye, ye English loons!’ cried[477]she bitterly; ‘no content wi’ the sweep o’ our master’s hill, ye hae ta’en the bit cow that did feed my poor bairns. Better take my wee anes too, for what can I do wi’ them?’ A soldier was about to quiet her evil tongue by a stroke of his axe. ‘Fye on thee,’ said Sir Walter; ‘what, wouldst thou murder the poor woman? Her rage is but natural. Verily, our prey is large enow without her wretched cow.’ And then, turning to her with a good-natured smile on his face, ‘My good dame, thou shalt have thy cow.’ And the beast was restored to her accordingly. ‘The Virgin’s blessing be on thee, Sir Knight,’ said the woman. ‘And now,’ said Sir Walter, ‘by’r Lady, I warrant me thou wouldst have ill brooked my taking thee at thy word. Marry, I promise thee,’ continued he, pointing to a beautiful girl of five years, apparently her eldest child, ‘marry, I’ll warrant me thou wouldst have grudged mightily to have parted with that bonny face?’ ‘Nay, I do indeed love Beatrice almost as well as she were mine own child, albeit I did only nurse her,’ replied the dame; ‘but of a’ the bairns, she, I wot, is the only one that I could part with.’ ‘Is she not thy child, then?’ said Sir Walter; ‘whose, I pr’ythee, may she be?’ ‘That is what I canna tell thee, Sir Knight,’ replied the woman. ‘It is now about four years and a-half sith that a young lordling came riding down the glen. He was looking for a nurse, and the folk did airt him to me, who had then lost my first-born babe. He put this bairn, whom he called Beatrice, into my arms, and a purse into my lap, and away he flew again, saying that he would soon be back to see how the bairn throve. The baby was richly clad, so methought it must be some fair lady’s stolen love-pledge. But I hae never seen him sithence, nor need I ever look for him now. And troth, Robby and I hae enew o’ hungry mouths to feed withouten hers, poor thing—ay, and maybe a chance o’ mair.’ ‘Wilt thou part with the child to me, then?’ said Sir Walter; ‘I have but one daughter, who is of her age, and I would willingly take this beauteous Beatrice to be her companion.’ The poor woman had many scruples, but her husband, who now ventured to show himself, had none; and, insisting on his wife’s compliance, Beatrice was brought home with us to Norham, adopted by the good Sir Walter, and has ever been treated by him sithence as a second daughter. What marvel, then, Sir Knight, that she should swoon at his burying?”Light now broke in at once on Sir Patrick Hepborne. As we have seen in the opening chapter of our story, he was struck, even in the twilight, by the superior manner and attractions of the lady who had lost her hawk, and whose gentle demeanour[478]had led him to conclude that she was the Lady Eleanore de Selby, of whose charms he had heard so much. Having been thus mistaken at first, he naturally went on, from all he heard and saw afterwards, and especially in the interviews he had at Norham, with her who now turned out to have been the companion of the Lady Eleanore de Selby, to mislead himself more and more. He returned to his inn to ruminate on this strange discovery; but be the beautiful Beatrice whom she might, he had loved her, and her alone, and he felt that his passion now became stronger than ever. His mind ran hastily over past events; he at once suspected that his inconsiderate jealousy had been, in fact, awakened by accidentally beholding an interview between the real Eleanore de Selby and her lover, and he cursed his haste that had so foolishly hurried him away from Norham; he remembered the fair hand that had waved the white scarf as he was crossing the Tweed; he recalled the countenance, the behaviour, and the conversation of his page, Maurice de Grey; he kissed the emerald ring which he wore on his finger; and his heart was drowned in a rushing tide of wild sensations, where hope and joy rose predominant. His generous soul swelled with transport at the thought of being the protector of her whom he now adored, and whom he now found, at the very moment she was left, as he believed, in a state of utter destitution. His impatience made him deplore that decency forbade his visiting the Lady Beatrice that night, but he resolved to seek for an audience of her early the next morning.At such hour, then, as a lady could be approached with propriety, he despatched his esquire on an embassy to the Castle. He had little fear of the result, from what had already passed between them; but what was his mortification to learn that the Lady Beatrice had been gone from Norham for above five or six hours, having set out during the night on some distant journey, whither no one in the Castle could divine.It is impossible to paint the misery of Sir Patrick Hepborne. Hope had been wound up to the highest pitch, and the most grievous disappointment was the issue. He was so much beside himself that he was little master of his actions, and Mortimer Sang was obliged to remind him of the necessity of returning immediately to Melrose, to join his father, who, with the other Scottish nobles and knights, had resolved to stay there for the space of three days ere they should separate.The warriors parted, with solemn vows uttered over the grave of the Douglas; and Sir Patrick Hepborne and his son, accompanied by the Earl of Moray, Assueton, Halyburton, and[479]a number of other knights, set out for Hailes Castle. The Lady Isabelle was ready to receive them on their arrival. She sprang into the court-yard to clasp her father and her brother to her bosom; and although modesty and maiden bashfulness checked those manifestations of love towards her knight with which her heart overflowed, yet, as he kissed her hand, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes sparkled with a delight that could not be mistaken.Among those who came out to welcome the war-like party was old Gabriel Lindsay. Leaning on his staff on the threshold, he eagerly scanned each face that came near him with his dim eyes.“Where is my gallant boy?” cried he. “I trow he need seldom fear to show his head where valorous deads hae been adoing; he hath had his share o’ fame, I warrant me. Ha, Master Sang, welcome home. Where loitereth my gallant boy Robin? he useth not to be so laggard in meeting his old father, I wot. A plague on these burnt-out eyes of mine, I canna see him nowhere.”“Who can undertake the task of breaking poor Robert’s death to the old man?” cried Sang, turning aside from him in the greatest distress. “Sure I am that I would rather face the fierce phalanx of foes that did work his brave son’s death than tell him of the doleful tidings.”“Where hast thou left Robin, Master Sang?” said the doting old man again. “Ah, there he is; nay, fye on my blindness, that be’s Richie Morton. Sure, sure my boy was never wont to be laggard last; ’twas but the last time he came home with Sir John Assueton that he had his arms round my ould neck or ever I wist he was at hand; he thought, forsooth, I would not have ken’d him: but, ah, ha, Robin, says I to him——”“My worthy old friend,” said Sang, quite unable any longer to stand his innocent garrulity, so ill befitting the reception of the bitter news he had to tell him, and taking his withered arm to assist him into the Castle, and leading him gently to his chamber—“my worthy friend, come this way, and I will tell thee of thy son—we shall be better here in private. Robert Lindsay’s wonted valour shone forth with sun-like glory in the bloody field of Otterbourne; but——”“Ah, full well did I know that he would bravely support the gallant name of Lindsay,” cried the old man, interrupting him with a smile of exultation. “Trust me, the boy hath ever showed that he hath some slender streams of gentle blood in his veins; we are come of good kind, Master Sang, and maybe my boy Robin shall yet win wealth and honours to prove[480]it. My great-great-grandfather—nay, my grandfather’s great-great——”“But, Robert,” said Sang, wishing to bring old Gabriel back to the sad subject he was about to open.“Ay, Robert, Master Sang,” replied the old man, “where tarrieth he?”“At Otterbourne,” replied Sang, deeply affected. “Thy son, thy gallant son, fell gloriously, whilst nobly withstanding the whole force of the English line as they burst into our camp.”“What sayest thou, Master Sang?” said the infirm old man, who perfectly comprehended the speaker, but was so stunned by his fatal intelligence that his feeble intellect was confused by the blow—“what sayest thou, Master Sang?”“Thy heroic son was slain,” replied Sang, half choked with his emotions. “This lock of Robert Lindsay’s hair, and these trinkets taken from his person ere we committed his body to the earth, are all that thou canst ever see of him now, old man.”The esquire sat down, covered his face with his hands, and wept; and then endeavouring to command himself, he looked upward in the face of Gabriel Lindsay, who was standing before him like the decayed trunk of some mighty oak. The time-worn countenance of the old man was unmoved, and his dull eyes were fixed as in vacancy. The wandering so common to wasted age had come over his mind at that moment, sent, as it were, in mercy by Providence to blunt his perception of the dire affliction that had befallen him. Fitful smiles flashed at intervals across his face—his lips moved without sound—and at last he spoke—“And so thou sayest my boy will be here to-night, Master Sang, and that this is a lock of his bride’s hair? It is golden like his own; my blessing be on him, and that of St. Baldrid. But why feared he to bring her to me attence? Ha, doubtless he thought that the joyful surprise mought hae made my blood dance till it brast my ould heart. But no, Master Sang, joy shall never do for me what sorrow hath failed to work. I lost his mother—lost her in a’ her youth and beauty, and yet I bore it, and humbled myself before Him who giveth and taketh away, and was comforted; and shall I sink beneath the weight of joy? Nay, even had he died in the midst of his glory, I trust I am soldier enow, though I be’s ould, to have borne the news of my son having fallen with honour to Scotland, and to the name of Lindsay; but doth he think that his ould father may not be told, without risk, how he hath fought bravely—how he was noticed by the gallant Douglas—and, aboon a’, how he is coming[481]hame in triumph with a bonny gentle bride? And didst thou say they would be here to-night, Sir Squire? Fye, I must gang and tell Sir Patrick—and the brave young knight—and my Lady Isabelle; they will all rejoice in Gabriel’s glad tidings. A bonny bride, thou sayest, Master Sang; and shall I yet have a babe o’ Robin’s on my knee ere I die? But I must away to Sir Patrick.”He made an effort to go. Sang rose gently to detain him. He stopped—looked around him wildly—fastened his eyes vacantly for some moments on the ceiling—reason and recollection returned to him, and his dream of bliss passed away.“Oh, merciful God!” he cried, clasping his hands together in agony of woe. “Oh, my boy, my brave, my virtuous boy, and shall I never see thee more?”Nature with him was already spent; his failure was instantaneous; his limbs yielded beneath him, and he sank down into the arms of the esquire, who hastily laid him on the bed and ran for assistance. Sir Patrick Hepborne, his son, and the Lady Isabelle, as well as many of the domestics, quickly appeared in great consternation; but they came only to weep over the good old Seneschal—He was gone for ever.The death of this old and faithful domestic threw a gloom over the Castle, so that Assueton felt that he could hardly press on his marriage-day. At last, however, it was fixed. The preparations were such as became the house of Hepborne; and the ceremony was performed in presence of some of the first nobles and knights of Scotland.The Countess of Moray had come from Tarnawa to meet her Lord. Sir Patrick Hepborne, the younger, eagerly sought an opportunity of having private conversation with her, hoping to have some explanation of the strange disappearance of his page. But the noble lady, maintaining the same distance towards him she had so mysteriously used, seemed rather disposed to shun the subject; and it was not until Hepborne had prefaced his inquiry with a full exposition of all he suspected, and all he knew, regarding the Lady Eleanore de Selby and the Lady Beatrice, and that she really saw where his heart was sincerely fixed, that she would consent to betray the secret she possessed. Hepborne was then assured that his page Maurice de Grey was no other than the Lady Beatrice.Believing that Hepborne loved her, she had looked with joy to other meetings with him; she had been filled with anxiety when she heard of the encounter between him and Sir Rafe Piersie; and she was exulting in his triumph over that knight[482]at the very moment they came to tell her of his departure. She hastened to a window overlooking the Tweed, where she beheld the boat that was wafting him to Scotland. It was then, when she thought herself deserted, that she really felt that she loved. Almost unconscious of what she did, she waved her scarf. He replied not to the signal. Again and again she waved, and in vain she stretched her eyeballs to catch a return of the sign. The boat touched the strand; he sprang on shore, and leaped into his saddle. Again in despair she waved; the signal was returned, and that faint sign from the Scottish shore was to her as the twig of hope. So intense had been her feelings that she sank down overpowered by them. Recovering herself, she again gazed from the window. The ferry-boat had returned, and was again moored on the English side. She cast her eyes across to the spot where she had last beheld Sir Patrick. The animating figures were now gone—some yellow gravel, a green bank, a few furze bushes, and a solitary willow, its slender melancholy spray waving in the breeze, were all that appeared, and her chilled and forsaken heart was left as desolate as the scene.It was at this time that she was called on by friendship to dismiss her own griefs, that she might actively assist the high-spirited Eleanore de Selby. By the result of Sir Rafe Piersie’s visit, that lady was relieved from his addresses; but they were immediately succeeded by the strange proposals of her infatuated father, when deluded by the machinations of the Wizard Ancient. All her tears and all her eloquence were thrown away, and so perfect was Sir Walter’s subjection to the will of the impostor that even his temper was changed, and his affection for his daughter swallowed up, by his anxiety to avert the fate that threatened. Such coercion to a union sodisgustingmight have roused the spirit of resistance in the most timid female bosom; but Eleanore de Selby, who was high and hot tempered, resolved at once to fly from such persecution; and, taking a solemn vow of secrecy from the Lady Beatrice, she made her the confidant of a recent attachment which had arisen between her and a certain knight whom she had met at a tilting match held at Newcastle a short time before, when she was on a visit to an aunt who resided there. The Lady Eleanore informed her friend that her lover was Sir Hans de Vere, a knight of Zealand, kinsman to the King’s banished favourite the Duke of Ireland, who had lately come from abroad, and who looked to gain the same high place in King Richard’s affections which the Duke himself had filled. From him she had received a visit unknown to her father, and it[483]was the parting of the lovers after that meeting which had so filled Hepborne with jealousy. In the urgency of her affairs she implored her friend to aid her schemes, which were immediately carried into effect by means of the Minstrel.Having thus been gradually, though unwillingly, drawn to be an accomplice in the Lady Eleanore’s plans, Beatrice felt that she could not stay behind to expose herself to the rage of the bereft father. Having assisted her friend, therefore, to escape, she accompanied her, in male attire, to the place where her lover waited for her at some distance from Norham. There she parted, with many tears, from the companion of her youth, having received from her the emerald ring which Sir Patrick Hepborne afterwards became possessed of. Her own depression of spirits, occasioned by Sir Patrick’s unaccountable desertion of her, had determined her to seek out some convent, where she might find a temporary, if not a permanent retreat. Under the protection of old Adam of Gordon, therefore, she crossed the Tweed into Scotland. There he procured her a Scottish guide to conduct her to North Berwick, where he had a relation among the Cistertian nuns, and thither she was proceeding at the time she met Hepborne in the grove by the side of the Tyne.When Sir Patrick addressed her she felt so much fluttered that it was some time before she could invent a plausible account of herself; and when he proposed to her to become his page, love triumphed over her better judgment, and she could not resist the temptation of an offer that held out so fair an opportunity of knowing more of him, and of trying the state of his heart. As to the latter she became convinced, by some of those conversations we have detailed, that she had been cruelly deceived, and that she had in reality no share in it. She heard him passionately declare his inextinguishable love for theLadyEleanore de Selby, and when he said that he had seen too much of her for his peace of mind, she naturally enough concluded that they had met together on some former occasion. She became unhappy at her own imprudence in so rashly joining his party, and was anxious to avail herself of the first opportunity of escaping from one whose heart never could be hers. The Countess of Moray’s kindness to her as Maurice de Grey induced her to discover herself to that lady. She earnestly entreated that she might remain concealed, and that Sir Patrick might not be informed. It was the Lady Jane de Vaux who laid the plan for deceiving him about the departure of his page, and she and the Countess of Moray could not resist indulging in tormenting one whom they believed to have wantonly sported with the affections of[484]the Lady Beatrice, and who had consequently suffered deeply in the good opinion of both.The Minstrel, who, to do away suspicion, had returned to Norham immediately after the escape of the ladies, no sooner learned from the guide the change which had taken place in Beatrice’s plans, and that she had gone to Tarnawa, than he determined to follow her thither, under pretence of going to the tournament. Having learned from him that her benefactor, Sir Walter de Selby, had been overwhelmed with affliction for the loss of his daughter, of whose fate he was yet ignorant, and that he had also grievously complained of her own desertion of him, she was filled with remorse, and determined to return to him immediately, and to brave all his reproaches; but indisposition, arising from the trying fatigue of body and the mental misery she had undergone, prevented her setting out until several days after the departure of the Earl of Moray and his knights for Aberdeen. Hepborne could now no longer doubt of the attachment of the Lady Beatrice. The thought that he had ignorantly thrown away a heart so valuable as that which his intercourse with his page had given him ample opportunity to know, was a source of bitter distress to him. His spirits fled, he loathed society, and he industriously shunned the huntings, hawkings, dancings, and masquings that were going merrily forward in honour of his friend’s nuptials with his sister the Lady Isabelle.But Assueton was not so selfishly occupied in his own joys as not to be struck with the change in his beloved Hepborne. He besought him to unbosom the secret sorrow that was so evidently preying on his mind, and Sir Patrick, who had hitherto generously concealed it, that he might not poison the happiness in which he could not participate, at last yielded to the entreaty, and told him all. Sir John had but little of comfort to offer: the subject was one that hardly admitted of any. He saw that the only way in which friendship could be useful was by rousing him to do something that might actively divert his melancholy.Sir David de Lindsay having returned from his captivity in England, had lately arrived at Hailes, where Sir William de Dalzel and Sir John Halyburton had remained, to witness Assueton’s marriage. They were now about to proceed to London, to make good the pledge given to Lord Welles. Hepborne would have fain excused himself from the engagement he had so cheerfully made with them at Tarnawa, but Assueton contrived to pique his chivalric spirit, and at length succeeded in inducing him to become one of the party. Sir John even[485]offered to accompany his friend, but Hepborne would by no means permit him to leave his newly-married Lady.
CHAPTER LXII.Withdrawal of the Scots Army—Obsequies of the Gallant Dead—The Mystery solved.
Withdrawal of the Scots Army—Obsequies of the Gallant Dead—The Mystery solved.
Withdrawal of the Scots Army—Obsequies of the Gallant Dead—The Mystery solved.
Although the morning sun rose bright and cheerful upon Otterbourne, yet were its rays incapable of giving gladness to those in the Scottish camp. The little army of heroes had gained a great and glorious victory, but they had dearly paid for it in the single death of Douglas. There was, therefore, more of condolence than of exultation among them, as they gave each other good morrow. They broke up their encampment with silence and sorrow, and marched off towards Scotland, under the united command of the Earls of Moray and Dunbar, with the solemn pace and fixed eyes of men who followed some funeral pageant; indeed, it was so in fact; for at the head of the main body of the army was the car that carried the coffin of the Douglas. Before it was borne his banner, that “Jamais Arriere” which, in the hands of Sir Patrick Hepborne the younger, had so happily turned the fate of the battle; and, in compliment to the gallant young knight, it was his esquire, Mortimer Sang, to whom the honour of carrying it was assigned. Behind it came the fatal pennon of Piersie, which had been the cause of so much waste of human life, and around the machine were clustered all those brave knights who had lately looked up to the hero for the direction of their every movement—at whose least nod or sign they would have spurred to achieve the most difficult and dangerous undertakings, and whose applause was ever considered by them as their highest reward. The life and soul of the army seemed now to have departed. They hung their heads, and marched on, rarely breaking the silence that prevailed, except to utter some sad remark calculated to heighten the very sorrow that gave rise to it.[472]The last of their columns disappeared from the ground, and when Katherine Spears and the lady on whom she attended cast their eyes over it from the window of the tower in the Castle of Otterbourne, it was again as much a scene of peace as if no such fierce warfare had ever disturbed it. Huge heaps, and long lines, indeed, marked the places under which hundreds of those who had merrily marched thither now reposed, Scot and Englishman, in amity together. The ruined huts and broken-down entrenchments too were still visible; but the daisies and the other little flowers that enamelled the field, refreshed by the morning dew, had again raised their crushed heads, and the timid flocks and herds which had been scared by the din of arms, had again ventured forth from the covert whither they had been driven, and were innocently pasturing on the very spot where heroes had been so lately contending in the mortal strife. The lady, however, suffered her attention to be occupied with these objects for a brief space only ere she returned to perform her melancholy task of watching by those beloved remains she had so piously rescued from the promiscuous heaps of slaughter that covered the battle-field. She again sought the Chapel of the Castle, where lay the brave old knight Sir Walter de Selby, for it was he who, having met with some less merciful foe than Sir Patrick Hepborne, had been cut down in the melée. The mortal wound now gaped wide on his venerable head, and the beauty of his silver hair was disfigured with clotted gore. The tears of her who now seated herself by his bier fell fast and silently, as she bent over that benignant countenance now no longer animated by its generous spirit. Now it was she recalled all that affection so largely exhibited towards her from her very childhood. His faults had at this moment disappeared from her memory, and as the more remarkable instances of his kindness arose in succession, she gave way to that feeling natural to sensitive minds on such occasions, and bitterly accused herself of having but ill requited them.The body of Sir Walter remained in the Castle of Otterbourne for several days, until proper preparations were made there and at Norham for doing it the honours due to the remains of so gallant a knight, and one who had enjoyed so important a command. After the escort was ready, the lady parted with much sorrow from Katherine Spears, whose father was yet unable to bear the motion of a journey. She commended both to the especial protection of the Captain of the Castle, and then hastily seating herself in her horse-litter to hide her grief from observation, the funeral procession moved away.[473]It was long after the sunset of the second day, that the troops of the garrison of Norham, under the Lieutenant Oglethorpe, marched out in sad array to meet the corpse of their late governor. Clad in all the insignia of woe, and each soldier bearing a torch in his hand, they halted on the high ground over the village, and rested in mute and sorrowful expectation of the approach of the funeral train. Lights appeared slowly advancing from a distance, and the dull chanting of voices and the heavy measured tread of men were heard. The coffin had already been removed from the car in which it had hitherto been carried, and four priests who had gone to meet it, one of them bearing a crucifix aloft, now appeared walking bareheaded before it, and chanting a hymn. The coffin itself was sustained on the shoulders of a band of men-at-arms, who accompanied it from Otterbourne; and after it came the horse litter of the lady, attended by a train of horsemen who rode with their lances reversed. Among these, alas! no man belonging to the deceased was to be seen, for all had perished with him in the field.When the procession had reached the spot where the troops from Norham were drawn up to receive it, those who formed it halted, and the bearers, resigning their burden to the chief officers of the garrison, fell back to join their fellows. One-half of the soldiers of the Castle then moved on before the body, whilst the other half filed in behind the lady’s litter, and the men of Otterbourne were left to close up the rear of the pageant.As they descended the hill, the inhabitants of the village turned out to gaze on the imposing spectacle; and after it had passed by, they followed to witness the last obsequies of one whose military pomp had often delighted their eyes, and the hardy deeds of whose prime were even now in every man’s mouth.Having reached the entrance to the church, the soldiers formed a double line up to the great door, each man leaning upon his lance, in grief that required no acting. The lady descended from her litter. With her head veiled, and her person enveloped in black drapery, she leaned upon the arm of Lieutenant Oglethorpe, and followed the body with tottering steps and streaming eyes into the holy fane. The church was soon filled by the Norham soldiery, ranked up thickly around it, the blaze of the torches pierced into the darkest nook of its Gothic interior, and the solemn ceremony proceeded.The lady had wound up her resolution to the utmost, that she might undergo the trying scene without flinching. She[474]stood wonderfully composed, with her eyes cast upon the ground, endeavouring to fix her thoughts on the service for the dead, which the priests were chanting; when, chancing to look up, her attention was suddenly caught by the figure of a Franciscan monk, who, elevated on the steps of the altar, stood leaning earnestly forward from behind a Gothic pillar that half concealed him, his keen eyes fixed upon her with a marked intensity of gaze. Her heart was frozen within her by his very look, and, uttering a faint scream, she swooned away, and would have fallen on the pavement but for the timely aid of Oglethorpe and those who were present. Dismay and confusion followed. The ceremonial was interrupted; and the bystanders believing that her feelings had been too deeply affected by the so sad and solemn spectacle, hastened to remove her from the scene, so that she was quickly conveyed to her litter, and escorted to the Castle.The funeral rites were hurried over, and the body was committed to the silent vault, with no other witnesses than the officiating priests, the populace, and such of the officers and soldiers as had been bound to the deceased by some strong individual feeling of affection, and who now pressed around the coffin, to have the melancholy satisfaction of assisting in its descent.While the remains of Sir Walter de Selby were conveying from Otterbourne Castle, the Scottish Nobles and Knights who had accompanied the body of the Douglas were engaged in assisting at the obsequies of that heroic Earl at Melrose. All that military or religious pomp could devise or execute was done to honour his remains, and many a mass for the peace of his soul was sung by the pious monks of its abbey. The brave Scottish Knights surrounded his tomb in silence and sorrow, all forgetting that they had gained a victory, and each feeling that he had lost a private friend in him whose body they had consigned to the grave.It was only that morning that Sir Patrick Hepborne had heard accidentally from his esquire the particulars of his unexpected meeting with Katherine Spears; and this information, added to those circumstances which had so strangely occurred to himself, determined him to proceed to Norham the very next day, where he hoped to unravel the mystery that had been gradually thickening around him. The truce that had been already proclaimed ensured his safety, so that he entered the court-yard of the Norham Tower Hostel with perfect confidence. Although Hepborne and his esquire came after it was dark, the[475]quick eye of Mrs. Kyle immediately recognized them; and, conscious of the share she had had in the treachery so lately attempted against them, she took refuge in the innermost recesses of the kitchen part of the building. But Sang was determined not to spare her, and, after searching everywhere, he at last detected her in her concealment, from which he led her forth in considerable confusion.“So, beautiful Mrs. Kyle,” said he, “so thou wert minded to have done our two noble knights and their humbler esquires a handsome favour, truly, the last time they did honour thy house? By St. Andrew, we should have made a pretty knot dangling from the ramparts of Norham.”“Nay, talk not so, Sir Squire,” replied the hostess in a whining tone; “it was the wicked Sir Miers de Willoughby who did bribe me to put ye all in his power. And then he did never talk of aught else but the ransom for thy liberty; and in truth, love did so blind me that I thought no more of the matter. But I trow I am well enow punished for my folly; for here he came, and by his blazons and blandishments, he did so overmatch me that he hath ta’en from me, by way of borrow (a borrow, I wis, that will never come laughing home again), many a handful of the bonny broad pieces my poor husband Sylvester, that is gone, did leave me. Yet natheless have I enow left to make any man rich; and when Ralpho Proudfoot doth return frae the wars——”“Poor Ralpho Proudfoot will never return,” said Sang, interrupting her, in a melancholy tone; “these hands did help to lay him in the earth.”“Poor Ralpho,” cried Mrs. Kyle, lifting her apron to a dry eye, “poor Proudfoot! He was indeed a proper pretty man. But verily,” added she, with a deep sigh, whilst at the same time she threw a half-reproachful, half-loving glance at Sang, “verily, ’twere better, perhaps, for a poor weak woman to think no more of man, seeing all are deceivers alike. Wilt thou step this gate, Sir Squire, and taste my Malvoisie? Or wilt thou—”“What tramp of many feet is that I hear in the village?” demanded Sang, interrupting her.“’Tis nought but the burying o’ our auld Captain o’ Norham,” replied Mrs. Kyle; “I trust that we sall have some right gay and jolly knight to fill his boots. Auld de Selby was grown useless, I wot. Gi’e me some young rattling blade that will take pleasure in chatting to a bonny buxom quean when she comes in his way. I haena had a word frae the auld man for this I kenna how lang, but a rebuke now and then for the deboshing[476]o’ his men-at-arms, the which was more the fault o’ my good ale than o’ me. But where are ye running till, Master Sang?—Fye on him, he’s away.”Sang did indeed hasten to tell his master of the passing funeral procession, and Hepborne ran out to follow it. It had already reached the church, and by the time he got to the door the interior was so filled that it was only by immense bodily exertion that he squeezed himself in at a small side door. His eyes immediately caught the figure of the lady, and there they rested, unconscious of all else. The moment she lifted her head he recognized the features of Maurice de Grey and of her whom he had seen on the battle-field of Otterbourne. But her fainting allowed him not a moment for thought. The crowd of men-at-arms between him and the object of his solicitude bid defiance to all his efforts to reach her, and ere he could regain the open air her litter was already almost out of sight.“Poor soul,” said a compassionate billman, who had been looking anxiously after it, “thou hast indeed good cause to be afflicted. Verily, thou hast lost thy best friend.”“Of whom dost thou speak, old man?” demanded Hepborne eagerly.“Of the poor Lady Beatrice, who was carried to the Castle but now,” replied the man.“What saidst thou?” demanded Hepborne; “Lady Beatrice! Was not that the daughter of thy deceased governor? was not that the Lady Eleanore de Selby, now the Lady de Vere?”“Nay, Sir Knight, that she be not,” replied the man, “nouther the one nor the other, I wot; and if I might adventure to speak it, I would say that there be those who do think that the Lady Eleanore de Selby, now the Lady de Vere, hath no small spice of the devil in her composition, whilst the Lady Beatrice is well known to all to be an angel upon earth.”“Who is she, and what is her history, my good fellow?” demanded Hepborne, slipping money into his hand.“Meseems thou art a stranger, Sir Knight, that thou knowest not the Lady Beatrice,” said the man; “but I can well satisfy thy curiosity, seeing I was with good Sir Walter in that very Border raid during which she did become his. Our men had driven the herds and flocks from a hill on the side of one of the streams of Lammermoor, when, as we passed by the cottage of the shepherd who had fed them, his wife, with an infant in her arms, and two or three other children around her, came furiously out to attack Sir Walter with her tongue, as he rode at the head of his lances. ‘My curse upon ye, ye English loons!’ cried[477]she bitterly; ‘no content wi’ the sweep o’ our master’s hill, ye hae ta’en the bit cow that did feed my poor bairns. Better take my wee anes too, for what can I do wi’ them?’ A soldier was about to quiet her evil tongue by a stroke of his axe. ‘Fye on thee,’ said Sir Walter; ‘what, wouldst thou murder the poor woman? Her rage is but natural. Verily, our prey is large enow without her wretched cow.’ And then, turning to her with a good-natured smile on his face, ‘My good dame, thou shalt have thy cow.’ And the beast was restored to her accordingly. ‘The Virgin’s blessing be on thee, Sir Knight,’ said the woman. ‘And now,’ said Sir Walter, ‘by’r Lady, I warrant me thou wouldst have ill brooked my taking thee at thy word. Marry, I promise thee,’ continued he, pointing to a beautiful girl of five years, apparently her eldest child, ‘marry, I’ll warrant me thou wouldst have grudged mightily to have parted with that bonny face?’ ‘Nay, I do indeed love Beatrice almost as well as she were mine own child, albeit I did only nurse her,’ replied the dame; ‘but of a’ the bairns, she, I wot, is the only one that I could part with.’ ‘Is she not thy child, then?’ said Sir Walter; ‘whose, I pr’ythee, may she be?’ ‘That is what I canna tell thee, Sir Knight,’ replied the woman. ‘It is now about four years and a-half sith that a young lordling came riding down the glen. He was looking for a nurse, and the folk did airt him to me, who had then lost my first-born babe. He put this bairn, whom he called Beatrice, into my arms, and a purse into my lap, and away he flew again, saying that he would soon be back to see how the bairn throve. The baby was richly clad, so methought it must be some fair lady’s stolen love-pledge. But I hae never seen him sithence, nor need I ever look for him now. And troth, Robby and I hae enew o’ hungry mouths to feed withouten hers, poor thing—ay, and maybe a chance o’ mair.’ ‘Wilt thou part with the child to me, then?’ said Sir Walter; ‘I have but one daughter, who is of her age, and I would willingly take this beauteous Beatrice to be her companion.’ The poor woman had many scruples, but her husband, who now ventured to show himself, had none; and, insisting on his wife’s compliance, Beatrice was brought home with us to Norham, adopted by the good Sir Walter, and has ever been treated by him sithence as a second daughter. What marvel, then, Sir Knight, that she should swoon at his burying?”Light now broke in at once on Sir Patrick Hepborne. As we have seen in the opening chapter of our story, he was struck, even in the twilight, by the superior manner and attractions of the lady who had lost her hawk, and whose gentle demeanour[478]had led him to conclude that she was the Lady Eleanore de Selby, of whose charms he had heard so much. Having been thus mistaken at first, he naturally went on, from all he heard and saw afterwards, and especially in the interviews he had at Norham, with her who now turned out to have been the companion of the Lady Eleanore de Selby, to mislead himself more and more. He returned to his inn to ruminate on this strange discovery; but be the beautiful Beatrice whom she might, he had loved her, and her alone, and he felt that his passion now became stronger than ever. His mind ran hastily over past events; he at once suspected that his inconsiderate jealousy had been, in fact, awakened by accidentally beholding an interview between the real Eleanore de Selby and her lover, and he cursed his haste that had so foolishly hurried him away from Norham; he remembered the fair hand that had waved the white scarf as he was crossing the Tweed; he recalled the countenance, the behaviour, and the conversation of his page, Maurice de Grey; he kissed the emerald ring which he wore on his finger; and his heart was drowned in a rushing tide of wild sensations, where hope and joy rose predominant. His generous soul swelled with transport at the thought of being the protector of her whom he now adored, and whom he now found, at the very moment she was left, as he believed, in a state of utter destitution. His impatience made him deplore that decency forbade his visiting the Lady Beatrice that night, but he resolved to seek for an audience of her early the next morning.At such hour, then, as a lady could be approached with propriety, he despatched his esquire on an embassy to the Castle. He had little fear of the result, from what had already passed between them; but what was his mortification to learn that the Lady Beatrice had been gone from Norham for above five or six hours, having set out during the night on some distant journey, whither no one in the Castle could divine.It is impossible to paint the misery of Sir Patrick Hepborne. Hope had been wound up to the highest pitch, and the most grievous disappointment was the issue. He was so much beside himself that he was little master of his actions, and Mortimer Sang was obliged to remind him of the necessity of returning immediately to Melrose, to join his father, who, with the other Scottish nobles and knights, had resolved to stay there for the space of three days ere they should separate.The warriors parted, with solemn vows uttered over the grave of the Douglas; and Sir Patrick Hepborne and his son, accompanied by the Earl of Moray, Assueton, Halyburton, and[479]a number of other knights, set out for Hailes Castle. The Lady Isabelle was ready to receive them on their arrival. She sprang into the court-yard to clasp her father and her brother to her bosom; and although modesty and maiden bashfulness checked those manifestations of love towards her knight with which her heart overflowed, yet, as he kissed her hand, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes sparkled with a delight that could not be mistaken.Among those who came out to welcome the war-like party was old Gabriel Lindsay. Leaning on his staff on the threshold, he eagerly scanned each face that came near him with his dim eyes.“Where is my gallant boy?” cried he. “I trow he need seldom fear to show his head where valorous deads hae been adoing; he hath had his share o’ fame, I warrant me. Ha, Master Sang, welcome home. Where loitereth my gallant boy Robin? he useth not to be so laggard in meeting his old father, I wot. A plague on these burnt-out eyes of mine, I canna see him nowhere.”“Who can undertake the task of breaking poor Robert’s death to the old man?” cried Sang, turning aside from him in the greatest distress. “Sure I am that I would rather face the fierce phalanx of foes that did work his brave son’s death than tell him of the doleful tidings.”“Where hast thou left Robin, Master Sang?” said the doting old man again. “Ah, there he is; nay, fye on my blindness, that be’s Richie Morton. Sure, sure my boy was never wont to be laggard last; ’twas but the last time he came home with Sir John Assueton that he had his arms round my ould neck or ever I wist he was at hand; he thought, forsooth, I would not have ken’d him: but, ah, ha, Robin, says I to him——”“My worthy old friend,” said Sang, quite unable any longer to stand his innocent garrulity, so ill befitting the reception of the bitter news he had to tell him, and taking his withered arm to assist him into the Castle, and leading him gently to his chamber—“my worthy friend, come this way, and I will tell thee of thy son—we shall be better here in private. Robert Lindsay’s wonted valour shone forth with sun-like glory in the bloody field of Otterbourne; but——”“Ah, full well did I know that he would bravely support the gallant name of Lindsay,” cried the old man, interrupting him with a smile of exultation. “Trust me, the boy hath ever showed that he hath some slender streams of gentle blood in his veins; we are come of good kind, Master Sang, and maybe my boy Robin shall yet win wealth and honours to prove[480]it. My great-great-grandfather—nay, my grandfather’s great-great——”“But, Robert,” said Sang, wishing to bring old Gabriel back to the sad subject he was about to open.“Ay, Robert, Master Sang,” replied the old man, “where tarrieth he?”“At Otterbourne,” replied Sang, deeply affected. “Thy son, thy gallant son, fell gloriously, whilst nobly withstanding the whole force of the English line as they burst into our camp.”“What sayest thou, Master Sang?” said the infirm old man, who perfectly comprehended the speaker, but was so stunned by his fatal intelligence that his feeble intellect was confused by the blow—“what sayest thou, Master Sang?”“Thy heroic son was slain,” replied Sang, half choked with his emotions. “This lock of Robert Lindsay’s hair, and these trinkets taken from his person ere we committed his body to the earth, are all that thou canst ever see of him now, old man.”The esquire sat down, covered his face with his hands, and wept; and then endeavouring to command himself, he looked upward in the face of Gabriel Lindsay, who was standing before him like the decayed trunk of some mighty oak. The time-worn countenance of the old man was unmoved, and his dull eyes were fixed as in vacancy. The wandering so common to wasted age had come over his mind at that moment, sent, as it were, in mercy by Providence to blunt his perception of the dire affliction that had befallen him. Fitful smiles flashed at intervals across his face—his lips moved without sound—and at last he spoke—“And so thou sayest my boy will be here to-night, Master Sang, and that this is a lock of his bride’s hair? It is golden like his own; my blessing be on him, and that of St. Baldrid. But why feared he to bring her to me attence? Ha, doubtless he thought that the joyful surprise mought hae made my blood dance till it brast my ould heart. But no, Master Sang, joy shall never do for me what sorrow hath failed to work. I lost his mother—lost her in a’ her youth and beauty, and yet I bore it, and humbled myself before Him who giveth and taketh away, and was comforted; and shall I sink beneath the weight of joy? Nay, even had he died in the midst of his glory, I trust I am soldier enow, though I be’s ould, to have borne the news of my son having fallen with honour to Scotland, and to the name of Lindsay; but doth he think that his ould father may not be told, without risk, how he hath fought bravely—how he was noticed by the gallant Douglas—and, aboon a’, how he is coming[481]hame in triumph with a bonny gentle bride? And didst thou say they would be here to-night, Sir Squire? Fye, I must gang and tell Sir Patrick—and the brave young knight—and my Lady Isabelle; they will all rejoice in Gabriel’s glad tidings. A bonny bride, thou sayest, Master Sang; and shall I yet have a babe o’ Robin’s on my knee ere I die? But I must away to Sir Patrick.”He made an effort to go. Sang rose gently to detain him. He stopped—looked around him wildly—fastened his eyes vacantly for some moments on the ceiling—reason and recollection returned to him, and his dream of bliss passed away.“Oh, merciful God!” he cried, clasping his hands together in agony of woe. “Oh, my boy, my brave, my virtuous boy, and shall I never see thee more?”Nature with him was already spent; his failure was instantaneous; his limbs yielded beneath him, and he sank down into the arms of the esquire, who hastily laid him on the bed and ran for assistance. Sir Patrick Hepborne, his son, and the Lady Isabelle, as well as many of the domestics, quickly appeared in great consternation; but they came only to weep over the good old Seneschal—He was gone for ever.The death of this old and faithful domestic threw a gloom over the Castle, so that Assueton felt that he could hardly press on his marriage-day. At last, however, it was fixed. The preparations were such as became the house of Hepborne; and the ceremony was performed in presence of some of the first nobles and knights of Scotland.The Countess of Moray had come from Tarnawa to meet her Lord. Sir Patrick Hepborne, the younger, eagerly sought an opportunity of having private conversation with her, hoping to have some explanation of the strange disappearance of his page. But the noble lady, maintaining the same distance towards him she had so mysteriously used, seemed rather disposed to shun the subject; and it was not until Hepborne had prefaced his inquiry with a full exposition of all he suspected, and all he knew, regarding the Lady Eleanore de Selby and the Lady Beatrice, and that she really saw where his heart was sincerely fixed, that she would consent to betray the secret she possessed. Hepborne was then assured that his page Maurice de Grey was no other than the Lady Beatrice.Believing that Hepborne loved her, she had looked with joy to other meetings with him; she had been filled with anxiety when she heard of the encounter between him and Sir Rafe Piersie; and she was exulting in his triumph over that knight[482]at the very moment they came to tell her of his departure. She hastened to a window overlooking the Tweed, where she beheld the boat that was wafting him to Scotland. It was then, when she thought herself deserted, that she really felt that she loved. Almost unconscious of what she did, she waved her scarf. He replied not to the signal. Again and again she waved, and in vain she stretched her eyeballs to catch a return of the sign. The boat touched the strand; he sprang on shore, and leaped into his saddle. Again in despair she waved; the signal was returned, and that faint sign from the Scottish shore was to her as the twig of hope. So intense had been her feelings that she sank down overpowered by them. Recovering herself, she again gazed from the window. The ferry-boat had returned, and was again moored on the English side. She cast her eyes across to the spot where she had last beheld Sir Patrick. The animating figures were now gone—some yellow gravel, a green bank, a few furze bushes, and a solitary willow, its slender melancholy spray waving in the breeze, were all that appeared, and her chilled and forsaken heart was left as desolate as the scene.It was at this time that she was called on by friendship to dismiss her own griefs, that she might actively assist the high-spirited Eleanore de Selby. By the result of Sir Rafe Piersie’s visit, that lady was relieved from his addresses; but they were immediately succeeded by the strange proposals of her infatuated father, when deluded by the machinations of the Wizard Ancient. All her tears and all her eloquence were thrown away, and so perfect was Sir Walter’s subjection to the will of the impostor that even his temper was changed, and his affection for his daughter swallowed up, by his anxiety to avert the fate that threatened. Such coercion to a union sodisgustingmight have roused the spirit of resistance in the most timid female bosom; but Eleanore de Selby, who was high and hot tempered, resolved at once to fly from such persecution; and, taking a solemn vow of secrecy from the Lady Beatrice, she made her the confidant of a recent attachment which had arisen between her and a certain knight whom she had met at a tilting match held at Newcastle a short time before, when she was on a visit to an aunt who resided there. The Lady Eleanore informed her friend that her lover was Sir Hans de Vere, a knight of Zealand, kinsman to the King’s banished favourite the Duke of Ireland, who had lately come from abroad, and who looked to gain the same high place in King Richard’s affections which the Duke himself had filled. From him she had received a visit unknown to her father, and it[483]was the parting of the lovers after that meeting which had so filled Hepborne with jealousy. In the urgency of her affairs she implored her friend to aid her schemes, which were immediately carried into effect by means of the Minstrel.Having thus been gradually, though unwillingly, drawn to be an accomplice in the Lady Eleanore’s plans, Beatrice felt that she could not stay behind to expose herself to the rage of the bereft father. Having assisted her friend, therefore, to escape, she accompanied her, in male attire, to the place where her lover waited for her at some distance from Norham. There she parted, with many tears, from the companion of her youth, having received from her the emerald ring which Sir Patrick Hepborne afterwards became possessed of. Her own depression of spirits, occasioned by Sir Patrick’s unaccountable desertion of her, had determined her to seek out some convent, where she might find a temporary, if not a permanent retreat. Under the protection of old Adam of Gordon, therefore, she crossed the Tweed into Scotland. There he procured her a Scottish guide to conduct her to North Berwick, where he had a relation among the Cistertian nuns, and thither she was proceeding at the time she met Hepborne in the grove by the side of the Tyne.When Sir Patrick addressed her she felt so much fluttered that it was some time before she could invent a plausible account of herself; and when he proposed to her to become his page, love triumphed over her better judgment, and she could not resist the temptation of an offer that held out so fair an opportunity of knowing more of him, and of trying the state of his heart. As to the latter she became convinced, by some of those conversations we have detailed, that she had been cruelly deceived, and that she had in reality no share in it. She heard him passionately declare his inextinguishable love for theLadyEleanore de Selby, and when he said that he had seen too much of her for his peace of mind, she naturally enough concluded that they had met together on some former occasion. She became unhappy at her own imprudence in so rashly joining his party, and was anxious to avail herself of the first opportunity of escaping from one whose heart never could be hers. The Countess of Moray’s kindness to her as Maurice de Grey induced her to discover herself to that lady. She earnestly entreated that she might remain concealed, and that Sir Patrick might not be informed. It was the Lady Jane de Vaux who laid the plan for deceiving him about the departure of his page, and she and the Countess of Moray could not resist indulging in tormenting one whom they believed to have wantonly sported with the affections of[484]the Lady Beatrice, and who had consequently suffered deeply in the good opinion of both.The Minstrel, who, to do away suspicion, had returned to Norham immediately after the escape of the ladies, no sooner learned from the guide the change which had taken place in Beatrice’s plans, and that she had gone to Tarnawa, than he determined to follow her thither, under pretence of going to the tournament. Having learned from him that her benefactor, Sir Walter de Selby, had been overwhelmed with affliction for the loss of his daughter, of whose fate he was yet ignorant, and that he had also grievously complained of her own desertion of him, she was filled with remorse, and determined to return to him immediately, and to brave all his reproaches; but indisposition, arising from the trying fatigue of body and the mental misery she had undergone, prevented her setting out until several days after the departure of the Earl of Moray and his knights for Aberdeen. Hepborne could now no longer doubt of the attachment of the Lady Beatrice. The thought that he had ignorantly thrown away a heart so valuable as that which his intercourse with his page had given him ample opportunity to know, was a source of bitter distress to him. His spirits fled, he loathed society, and he industriously shunned the huntings, hawkings, dancings, and masquings that were going merrily forward in honour of his friend’s nuptials with his sister the Lady Isabelle.But Assueton was not so selfishly occupied in his own joys as not to be struck with the change in his beloved Hepborne. He besought him to unbosom the secret sorrow that was so evidently preying on his mind, and Sir Patrick, who had hitherto generously concealed it, that he might not poison the happiness in which he could not participate, at last yielded to the entreaty, and told him all. Sir John had but little of comfort to offer: the subject was one that hardly admitted of any. He saw that the only way in which friendship could be useful was by rousing him to do something that might actively divert his melancholy.Sir David de Lindsay having returned from his captivity in England, had lately arrived at Hailes, where Sir William de Dalzel and Sir John Halyburton had remained, to witness Assueton’s marriage. They were now about to proceed to London, to make good the pledge given to Lord Welles. Hepborne would have fain excused himself from the engagement he had so cheerfully made with them at Tarnawa, but Assueton contrived to pique his chivalric spirit, and at length succeeded in inducing him to become one of the party. Sir John even[485]offered to accompany his friend, but Hepborne would by no means permit him to leave his newly-married Lady.
Although the morning sun rose bright and cheerful upon Otterbourne, yet were its rays incapable of giving gladness to those in the Scottish camp. The little army of heroes had gained a great and glorious victory, but they had dearly paid for it in the single death of Douglas. There was, therefore, more of condolence than of exultation among them, as they gave each other good morrow. They broke up their encampment with silence and sorrow, and marched off towards Scotland, under the united command of the Earls of Moray and Dunbar, with the solemn pace and fixed eyes of men who followed some funeral pageant; indeed, it was so in fact; for at the head of the main body of the army was the car that carried the coffin of the Douglas. Before it was borne his banner, that “Jamais Arriere” which, in the hands of Sir Patrick Hepborne the younger, had so happily turned the fate of the battle; and, in compliment to the gallant young knight, it was his esquire, Mortimer Sang, to whom the honour of carrying it was assigned. Behind it came the fatal pennon of Piersie, which had been the cause of so much waste of human life, and around the machine were clustered all those brave knights who had lately looked up to the hero for the direction of their every movement—at whose least nod or sign they would have spurred to achieve the most difficult and dangerous undertakings, and whose applause was ever considered by them as their highest reward. The life and soul of the army seemed now to have departed. They hung their heads, and marched on, rarely breaking the silence that prevailed, except to utter some sad remark calculated to heighten the very sorrow that gave rise to it.[472]
The last of their columns disappeared from the ground, and when Katherine Spears and the lady on whom she attended cast their eyes over it from the window of the tower in the Castle of Otterbourne, it was again as much a scene of peace as if no such fierce warfare had ever disturbed it. Huge heaps, and long lines, indeed, marked the places under which hundreds of those who had merrily marched thither now reposed, Scot and Englishman, in amity together. The ruined huts and broken-down entrenchments too were still visible; but the daisies and the other little flowers that enamelled the field, refreshed by the morning dew, had again raised their crushed heads, and the timid flocks and herds which had been scared by the din of arms, had again ventured forth from the covert whither they had been driven, and were innocently pasturing on the very spot where heroes had been so lately contending in the mortal strife. The lady, however, suffered her attention to be occupied with these objects for a brief space only ere she returned to perform her melancholy task of watching by those beloved remains she had so piously rescued from the promiscuous heaps of slaughter that covered the battle-field. She again sought the Chapel of the Castle, where lay the brave old knight Sir Walter de Selby, for it was he who, having met with some less merciful foe than Sir Patrick Hepborne, had been cut down in the melée. The mortal wound now gaped wide on his venerable head, and the beauty of his silver hair was disfigured with clotted gore. The tears of her who now seated herself by his bier fell fast and silently, as she bent over that benignant countenance now no longer animated by its generous spirit. Now it was she recalled all that affection so largely exhibited towards her from her very childhood. His faults had at this moment disappeared from her memory, and as the more remarkable instances of his kindness arose in succession, she gave way to that feeling natural to sensitive minds on such occasions, and bitterly accused herself of having but ill requited them.
The body of Sir Walter remained in the Castle of Otterbourne for several days, until proper preparations were made there and at Norham for doing it the honours due to the remains of so gallant a knight, and one who had enjoyed so important a command. After the escort was ready, the lady parted with much sorrow from Katherine Spears, whose father was yet unable to bear the motion of a journey. She commended both to the especial protection of the Captain of the Castle, and then hastily seating herself in her horse-litter to hide her grief from observation, the funeral procession moved away.[473]
It was long after the sunset of the second day, that the troops of the garrison of Norham, under the Lieutenant Oglethorpe, marched out in sad array to meet the corpse of their late governor. Clad in all the insignia of woe, and each soldier bearing a torch in his hand, they halted on the high ground over the village, and rested in mute and sorrowful expectation of the approach of the funeral train. Lights appeared slowly advancing from a distance, and the dull chanting of voices and the heavy measured tread of men were heard. The coffin had already been removed from the car in which it had hitherto been carried, and four priests who had gone to meet it, one of them bearing a crucifix aloft, now appeared walking bareheaded before it, and chanting a hymn. The coffin itself was sustained on the shoulders of a band of men-at-arms, who accompanied it from Otterbourne; and after it came the horse litter of the lady, attended by a train of horsemen who rode with their lances reversed. Among these, alas! no man belonging to the deceased was to be seen, for all had perished with him in the field.
When the procession had reached the spot where the troops from Norham were drawn up to receive it, those who formed it halted, and the bearers, resigning their burden to the chief officers of the garrison, fell back to join their fellows. One-half of the soldiers of the Castle then moved on before the body, whilst the other half filed in behind the lady’s litter, and the men of Otterbourne were left to close up the rear of the pageant.
As they descended the hill, the inhabitants of the village turned out to gaze on the imposing spectacle; and after it had passed by, they followed to witness the last obsequies of one whose military pomp had often delighted their eyes, and the hardy deeds of whose prime were even now in every man’s mouth.
Having reached the entrance to the church, the soldiers formed a double line up to the great door, each man leaning upon his lance, in grief that required no acting. The lady descended from her litter. With her head veiled, and her person enveloped in black drapery, she leaned upon the arm of Lieutenant Oglethorpe, and followed the body with tottering steps and streaming eyes into the holy fane. The church was soon filled by the Norham soldiery, ranked up thickly around it, the blaze of the torches pierced into the darkest nook of its Gothic interior, and the solemn ceremony proceeded.
The lady had wound up her resolution to the utmost, that she might undergo the trying scene without flinching. She[474]stood wonderfully composed, with her eyes cast upon the ground, endeavouring to fix her thoughts on the service for the dead, which the priests were chanting; when, chancing to look up, her attention was suddenly caught by the figure of a Franciscan monk, who, elevated on the steps of the altar, stood leaning earnestly forward from behind a Gothic pillar that half concealed him, his keen eyes fixed upon her with a marked intensity of gaze. Her heart was frozen within her by his very look, and, uttering a faint scream, she swooned away, and would have fallen on the pavement but for the timely aid of Oglethorpe and those who were present. Dismay and confusion followed. The ceremonial was interrupted; and the bystanders believing that her feelings had been too deeply affected by the so sad and solemn spectacle, hastened to remove her from the scene, so that she was quickly conveyed to her litter, and escorted to the Castle.
The funeral rites were hurried over, and the body was committed to the silent vault, with no other witnesses than the officiating priests, the populace, and such of the officers and soldiers as had been bound to the deceased by some strong individual feeling of affection, and who now pressed around the coffin, to have the melancholy satisfaction of assisting in its descent.
While the remains of Sir Walter de Selby were conveying from Otterbourne Castle, the Scottish Nobles and Knights who had accompanied the body of the Douglas were engaged in assisting at the obsequies of that heroic Earl at Melrose. All that military or religious pomp could devise or execute was done to honour his remains, and many a mass for the peace of his soul was sung by the pious monks of its abbey. The brave Scottish Knights surrounded his tomb in silence and sorrow, all forgetting that they had gained a victory, and each feeling that he had lost a private friend in him whose body they had consigned to the grave.
It was only that morning that Sir Patrick Hepborne had heard accidentally from his esquire the particulars of his unexpected meeting with Katherine Spears; and this information, added to those circumstances which had so strangely occurred to himself, determined him to proceed to Norham the very next day, where he hoped to unravel the mystery that had been gradually thickening around him. The truce that had been already proclaimed ensured his safety, so that he entered the court-yard of the Norham Tower Hostel with perfect confidence. Although Hepborne and his esquire came after it was dark, the[475]quick eye of Mrs. Kyle immediately recognized them; and, conscious of the share she had had in the treachery so lately attempted against them, she took refuge in the innermost recesses of the kitchen part of the building. But Sang was determined not to spare her, and, after searching everywhere, he at last detected her in her concealment, from which he led her forth in considerable confusion.
“So, beautiful Mrs. Kyle,” said he, “so thou wert minded to have done our two noble knights and their humbler esquires a handsome favour, truly, the last time they did honour thy house? By St. Andrew, we should have made a pretty knot dangling from the ramparts of Norham.”
“Nay, talk not so, Sir Squire,” replied the hostess in a whining tone; “it was the wicked Sir Miers de Willoughby who did bribe me to put ye all in his power. And then he did never talk of aught else but the ransom for thy liberty; and in truth, love did so blind me that I thought no more of the matter. But I trow I am well enow punished for my folly; for here he came, and by his blazons and blandishments, he did so overmatch me that he hath ta’en from me, by way of borrow (a borrow, I wis, that will never come laughing home again), many a handful of the bonny broad pieces my poor husband Sylvester, that is gone, did leave me. Yet natheless have I enow left to make any man rich; and when Ralpho Proudfoot doth return frae the wars——”
“Poor Ralpho Proudfoot will never return,” said Sang, interrupting her, in a melancholy tone; “these hands did help to lay him in the earth.”
“Poor Ralpho,” cried Mrs. Kyle, lifting her apron to a dry eye, “poor Proudfoot! He was indeed a proper pretty man. But verily,” added she, with a deep sigh, whilst at the same time she threw a half-reproachful, half-loving glance at Sang, “verily, ’twere better, perhaps, for a poor weak woman to think no more of man, seeing all are deceivers alike. Wilt thou step this gate, Sir Squire, and taste my Malvoisie? Or wilt thou—”
“What tramp of many feet is that I hear in the village?” demanded Sang, interrupting her.
“’Tis nought but the burying o’ our auld Captain o’ Norham,” replied Mrs. Kyle; “I trust that we sall have some right gay and jolly knight to fill his boots. Auld de Selby was grown useless, I wot. Gi’e me some young rattling blade that will take pleasure in chatting to a bonny buxom quean when she comes in his way. I haena had a word frae the auld man for this I kenna how lang, but a rebuke now and then for the deboshing[476]o’ his men-at-arms, the which was more the fault o’ my good ale than o’ me. But where are ye running till, Master Sang?—Fye on him, he’s away.”
Sang did indeed hasten to tell his master of the passing funeral procession, and Hepborne ran out to follow it. It had already reached the church, and by the time he got to the door the interior was so filled that it was only by immense bodily exertion that he squeezed himself in at a small side door. His eyes immediately caught the figure of the lady, and there they rested, unconscious of all else. The moment she lifted her head he recognized the features of Maurice de Grey and of her whom he had seen on the battle-field of Otterbourne. But her fainting allowed him not a moment for thought. The crowd of men-at-arms between him and the object of his solicitude bid defiance to all his efforts to reach her, and ere he could regain the open air her litter was already almost out of sight.
“Poor soul,” said a compassionate billman, who had been looking anxiously after it, “thou hast indeed good cause to be afflicted. Verily, thou hast lost thy best friend.”
“Of whom dost thou speak, old man?” demanded Hepborne eagerly.
“Of the poor Lady Beatrice, who was carried to the Castle but now,” replied the man.
“What saidst thou?” demanded Hepborne; “Lady Beatrice! Was not that the daughter of thy deceased governor? was not that the Lady Eleanore de Selby, now the Lady de Vere?”
“Nay, Sir Knight, that she be not,” replied the man, “nouther the one nor the other, I wot; and if I might adventure to speak it, I would say that there be those who do think that the Lady Eleanore de Selby, now the Lady de Vere, hath no small spice of the devil in her composition, whilst the Lady Beatrice is well known to all to be an angel upon earth.”
“Who is she, and what is her history, my good fellow?” demanded Hepborne, slipping money into his hand.
“Meseems thou art a stranger, Sir Knight, that thou knowest not the Lady Beatrice,” said the man; “but I can well satisfy thy curiosity, seeing I was with good Sir Walter in that very Border raid during which she did become his. Our men had driven the herds and flocks from a hill on the side of one of the streams of Lammermoor, when, as we passed by the cottage of the shepherd who had fed them, his wife, with an infant in her arms, and two or three other children around her, came furiously out to attack Sir Walter with her tongue, as he rode at the head of his lances. ‘My curse upon ye, ye English loons!’ cried[477]she bitterly; ‘no content wi’ the sweep o’ our master’s hill, ye hae ta’en the bit cow that did feed my poor bairns. Better take my wee anes too, for what can I do wi’ them?’ A soldier was about to quiet her evil tongue by a stroke of his axe. ‘Fye on thee,’ said Sir Walter; ‘what, wouldst thou murder the poor woman? Her rage is but natural. Verily, our prey is large enow without her wretched cow.’ And then, turning to her with a good-natured smile on his face, ‘My good dame, thou shalt have thy cow.’ And the beast was restored to her accordingly. ‘The Virgin’s blessing be on thee, Sir Knight,’ said the woman. ‘And now,’ said Sir Walter, ‘by’r Lady, I warrant me thou wouldst have ill brooked my taking thee at thy word. Marry, I promise thee,’ continued he, pointing to a beautiful girl of five years, apparently her eldest child, ‘marry, I’ll warrant me thou wouldst have grudged mightily to have parted with that bonny face?’ ‘Nay, I do indeed love Beatrice almost as well as she were mine own child, albeit I did only nurse her,’ replied the dame; ‘but of a’ the bairns, she, I wot, is the only one that I could part with.’ ‘Is she not thy child, then?’ said Sir Walter; ‘whose, I pr’ythee, may she be?’ ‘That is what I canna tell thee, Sir Knight,’ replied the woman. ‘It is now about four years and a-half sith that a young lordling came riding down the glen. He was looking for a nurse, and the folk did airt him to me, who had then lost my first-born babe. He put this bairn, whom he called Beatrice, into my arms, and a purse into my lap, and away he flew again, saying that he would soon be back to see how the bairn throve. The baby was richly clad, so methought it must be some fair lady’s stolen love-pledge. But I hae never seen him sithence, nor need I ever look for him now. And troth, Robby and I hae enew o’ hungry mouths to feed withouten hers, poor thing—ay, and maybe a chance o’ mair.’ ‘Wilt thou part with the child to me, then?’ said Sir Walter; ‘I have but one daughter, who is of her age, and I would willingly take this beauteous Beatrice to be her companion.’ The poor woman had many scruples, but her husband, who now ventured to show himself, had none; and, insisting on his wife’s compliance, Beatrice was brought home with us to Norham, adopted by the good Sir Walter, and has ever been treated by him sithence as a second daughter. What marvel, then, Sir Knight, that she should swoon at his burying?”
Light now broke in at once on Sir Patrick Hepborne. As we have seen in the opening chapter of our story, he was struck, even in the twilight, by the superior manner and attractions of the lady who had lost her hawk, and whose gentle demeanour[478]had led him to conclude that she was the Lady Eleanore de Selby, of whose charms he had heard so much. Having been thus mistaken at first, he naturally went on, from all he heard and saw afterwards, and especially in the interviews he had at Norham, with her who now turned out to have been the companion of the Lady Eleanore de Selby, to mislead himself more and more. He returned to his inn to ruminate on this strange discovery; but be the beautiful Beatrice whom she might, he had loved her, and her alone, and he felt that his passion now became stronger than ever. His mind ran hastily over past events; he at once suspected that his inconsiderate jealousy had been, in fact, awakened by accidentally beholding an interview between the real Eleanore de Selby and her lover, and he cursed his haste that had so foolishly hurried him away from Norham; he remembered the fair hand that had waved the white scarf as he was crossing the Tweed; he recalled the countenance, the behaviour, and the conversation of his page, Maurice de Grey; he kissed the emerald ring which he wore on his finger; and his heart was drowned in a rushing tide of wild sensations, where hope and joy rose predominant. His generous soul swelled with transport at the thought of being the protector of her whom he now adored, and whom he now found, at the very moment she was left, as he believed, in a state of utter destitution. His impatience made him deplore that decency forbade his visiting the Lady Beatrice that night, but he resolved to seek for an audience of her early the next morning.
At such hour, then, as a lady could be approached with propriety, he despatched his esquire on an embassy to the Castle. He had little fear of the result, from what had already passed between them; but what was his mortification to learn that the Lady Beatrice had been gone from Norham for above five or six hours, having set out during the night on some distant journey, whither no one in the Castle could divine.
It is impossible to paint the misery of Sir Patrick Hepborne. Hope had been wound up to the highest pitch, and the most grievous disappointment was the issue. He was so much beside himself that he was little master of his actions, and Mortimer Sang was obliged to remind him of the necessity of returning immediately to Melrose, to join his father, who, with the other Scottish nobles and knights, had resolved to stay there for the space of three days ere they should separate.
The warriors parted, with solemn vows uttered over the grave of the Douglas; and Sir Patrick Hepborne and his son, accompanied by the Earl of Moray, Assueton, Halyburton, and[479]a number of other knights, set out for Hailes Castle. The Lady Isabelle was ready to receive them on their arrival. She sprang into the court-yard to clasp her father and her brother to her bosom; and although modesty and maiden bashfulness checked those manifestations of love towards her knight with which her heart overflowed, yet, as he kissed her hand, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes sparkled with a delight that could not be mistaken.
Among those who came out to welcome the war-like party was old Gabriel Lindsay. Leaning on his staff on the threshold, he eagerly scanned each face that came near him with his dim eyes.
“Where is my gallant boy?” cried he. “I trow he need seldom fear to show his head where valorous deads hae been adoing; he hath had his share o’ fame, I warrant me. Ha, Master Sang, welcome home. Where loitereth my gallant boy Robin? he useth not to be so laggard in meeting his old father, I wot. A plague on these burnt-out eyes of mine, I canna see him nowhere.”
“Who can undertake the task of breaking poor Robert’s death to the old man?” cried Sang, turning aside from him in the greatest distress. “Sure I am that I would rather face the fierce phalanx of foes that did work his brave son’s death than tell him of the doleful tidings.”
“Where hast thou left Robin, Master Sang?” said the doting old man again. “Ah, there he is; nay, fye on my blindness, that be’s Richie Morton. Sure, sure my boy was never wont to be laggard last; ’twas but the last time he came home with Sir John Assueton that he had his arms round my ould neck or ever I wist he was at hand; he thought, forsooth, I would not have ken’d him: but, ah, ha, Robin, says I to him——”
“My worthy old friend,” said Sang, quite unable any longer to stand his innocent garrulity, so ill befitting the reception of the bitter news he had to tell him, and taking his withered arm to assist him into the Castle, and leading him gently to his chamber—“my worthy friend, come this way, and I will tell thee of thy son—we shall be better here in private. Robert Lindsay’s wonted valour shone forth with sun-like glory in the bloody field of Otterbourne; but——”
“Ah, full well did I know that he would bravely support the gallant name of Lindsay,” cried the old man, interrupting him with a smile of exultation. “Trust me, the boy hath ever showed that he hath some slender streams of gentle blood in his veins; we are come of good kind, Master Sang, and maybe my boy Robin shall yet win wealth and honours to prove[480]it. My great-great-grandfather—nay, my grandfather’s great-great——”
“But, Robert,” said Sang, wishing to bring old Gabriel back to the sad subject he was about to open.
“Ay, Robert, Master Sang,” replied the old man, “where tarrieth he?”
“At Otterbourne,” replied Sang, deeply affected. “Thy son, thy gallant son, fell gloriously, whilst nobly withstanding the whole force of the English line as they burst into our camp.”
“What sayest thou, Master Sang?” said the infirm old man, who perfectly comprehended the speaker, but was so stunned by his fatal intelligence that his feeble intellect was confused by the blow—“what sayest thou, Master Sang?”
“Thy heroic son was slain,” replied Sang, half choked with his emotions. “This lock of Robert Lindsay’s hair, and these trinkets taken from his person ere we committed his body to the earth, are all that thou canst ever see of him now, old man.”
The esquire sat down, covered his face with his hands, and wept; and then endeavouring to command himself, he looked upward in the face of Gabriel Lindsay, who was standing before him like the decayed trunk of some mighty oak. The time-worn countenance of the old man was unmoved, and his dull eyes were fixed as in vacancy. The wandering so common to wasted age had come over his mind at that moment, sent, as it were, in mercy by Providence to blunt his perception of the dire affliction that had befallen him. Fitful smiles flashed at intervals across his face—his lips moved without sound—and at last he spoke—
“And so thou sayest my boy will be here to-night, Master Sang, and that this is a lock of his bride’s hair? It is golden like his own; my blessing be on him, and that of St. Baldrid. But why feared he to bring her to me attence? Ha, doubtless he thought that the joyful surprise mought hae made my blood dance till it brast my ould heart. But no, Master Sang, joy shall never do for me what sorrow hath failed to work. I lost his mother—lost her in a’ her youth and beauty, and yet I bore it, and humbled myself before Him who giveth and taketh away, and was comforted; and shall I sink beneath the weight of joy? Nay, even had he died in the midst of his glory, I trust I am soldier enow, though I be’s ould, to have borne the news of my son having fallen with honour to Scotland, and to the name of Lindsay; but doth he think that his ould father may not be told, without risk, how he hath fought bravely—how he was noticed by the gallant Douglas—and, aboon a’, how he is coming[481]hame in triumph with a bonny gentle bride? And didst thou say they would be here to-night, Sir Squire? Fye, I must gang and tell Sir Patrick—and the brave young knight—and my Lady Isabelle; they will all rejoice in Gabriel’s glad tidings. A bonny bride, thou sayest, Master Sang; and shall I yet have a babe o’ Robin’s on my knee ere I die? But I must away to Sir Patrick.”
He made an effort to go. Sang rose gently to detain him. He stopped—looked around him wildly—fastened his eyes vacantly for some moments on the ceiling—reason and recollection returned to him, and his dream of bliss passed away.
“Oh, merciful God!” he cried, clasping his hands together in agony of woe. “Oh, my boy, my brave, my virtuous boy, and shall I never see thee more?”
Nature with him was already spent; his failure was instantaneous; his limbs yielded beneath him, and he sank down into the arms of the esquire, who hastily laid him on the bed and ran for assistance. Sir Patrick Hepborne, his son, and the Lady Isabelle, as well as many of the domestics, quickly appeared in great consternation; but they came only to weep over the good old Seneschal—He was gone for ever.
The death of this old and faithful domestic threw a gloom over the Castle, so that Assueton felt that he could hardly press on his marriage-day. At last, however, it was fixed. The preparations were such as became the house of Hepborne; and the ceremony was performed in presence of some of the first nobles and knights of Scotland.
The Countess of Moray had come from Tarnawa to meet her Lord. Sir Patrick Hepborne, the younger, eagerly sought an opportunity of having private conversation with her, hoping to have some explanation of the strange disappearance of his page. But the noble lady, maintaining the same distance towards him she had so mysteriously used, seemed rather disposed to shun the subject; and it was not until Hepborne had prefaced his inquiry with a full exposition of all he suspected, and all he knew, regarding the Lady Eleanore de Selby and the Lady Beatrice, and that she really saw where his heart was sincerely fixed, that she would consent to betray the secret she possessed. Hepborne was then assured that his page Maurice de Grey was no other than the Lady Beatrice.
Believing that Hepborne loved her, she had looked with joy to other meetings with him; she had been filled with anxiety when she heard of the encounter between him and Sir Rafe Piersie; and she was exulting in his triumph over that knight[482]at the very moment they came to tell her of his departure. She hastened to a window overlooking the Tweed, where she beheld the boat that was wafting him to Scotland. It was then, when she thought herself deserted, that she really felt that she loved. Almost unconscious of what she did, she waved her scarf. He replied not to the signal. Again and again she waved, and in vain she stretched her eyeballs to catch a return of the sign. The boat touched the strand; he sprang on shore, and leaped into his saddle. Again in despair she waved; the signal was returned, and that faint sign from the Scottish shore was to her as the twig of hope. So intense had been her feelings that she sank down overpowered by them. Recovering herself, she again gazed from the window. The ferry-boat had returned, and was again moored on the English side. She cast her eyes across to the spot where she had last beheld Sir Patrick. The animating figures were now gone—some yellow gravel, a green bank, a few furze bushes, and a solitary willow, its slender melancholy spray waving in the breeze, were all that appeared, and her chilled and forsaken heart was left as desolate as the scene.
It was at this time that she was called on by friendship to dismiss her own griefs, that she might actively assist the high-spirited Eleanore de Selby. By the result of Sir Rafe Piersie’s visit, that lady was relieved from his addresses; but they were immediately succeeded by the strange proposals of her infatuated father, when deluded by the machinations of the Wizard Ancient. All her tears and all her eloquence were thrown away, and so perfect was Sir Walter’s subjection to the will of the impostor that even his temper was changed, and his affection for his daughter swallowed up, by his anxiety to avert the fate that threatened. Such coercion to a union sodisgustingmight have roused the spirit of resistance in the most timid female bosom; but Eleanore de Selby, who was high and hot tempered, resolved at once to fly from such persecution; and, taking a solemn vow of secrecy from the Lady Beatrice, she made her the confidant of a recent attachment which had arisen between her and a certain knight whom she had met at a tilting match held at Newcastle a short time before, when she was on a visit to an aunt who resided there. The Lady Eleanore informed her friend that her lover was Sir Hans de Vere, a knight of Zealand, kinsman to the King’s banished favourite the Duke of Ireland, who had lately come from abroad, and who looked to gain the same high place in King Richard’s affections which the Duke himself had filled. From him she had received a visit unknown to her father, and it[483]was the parting of the lovers after that meeting which had so filled Hepborne with jealousy. In the urgency of her affairs she implored her friend to aid her schemes, which were immediately carried into effect by means of the Minstrel.
Having thus been gradually, though unwillingly, drawn to be an accomplice in the Lady Eleanore’s plans, Beatrice felt that she could not stay behind to expose herself to the rage of the bereft father. Having assisted her friend, therefore, to escape, she accompanied her, in male attire, to the place where her lover waited for her at some distance from Norham. There she parted, with many tears, from the companion of her youth, having received from her the emerald ring which Sir Patrick Hepborne afterwards became possessed of. Her own depression of spirits, occasioned by Sir Patrick’s unaccountable desertion of her, had determined her to seek out some convent, where she might find a temporary, if not a permanent retreat. Under the protection of old Adam of Gordon, therefore, she crossed the Tweed into Scotland. There he procured her a Scottish guide to conduct her to North Berwick, where he had a relation among the Cistertian nuns, and thither she was proceeding at the time she met Hepborne in the grove by the side of the Tyne.
When Sir Patrick addressed her she felt so much fluttered that it was some time before she could invent a plausible account of herself; and when he proposed to her to become his page, love triumphed over her better judgment, and she could not resist the temptation of an offer that held out so fair an opportunity of knowing more of him, and of trying the state of his heart. As to the latter she became convinced, by some of those conversations we have detailed, that she had been cruelly deceived, and that she had in reality no share in it. She heard him passionately declare his inextinguishable love for theLadyEleanore de Selby, and when he said that he had seen too much of her for his peace of mind, she naturally enough concluded that they had met together on some former occasion. She became unhappy at her own imprudence in so rashly joining his party, and was anxious to avail herself of the first opportunity of escaping from one whose heart never could be hers. The Countess of Moray’s kindness to her as Maurice de Grey induced her to discover herself to that lady. She earnestly entreated that she might remain concealed, and that Sir Patrick might not be informed. It was the Lady Jane de Vaux who laid the plan for deceiving him about the departure of his page, and she and the Countess of Moray could not resist indulging in tormenting one whom they believed to have wantonly sported with the affections of[484]the Lady Beatrice, and who had consequently suffered deeply in the good opinion of both.
The Minstrel, who, to do away suspicion, had returned to Norham immediately after the escape of the ladies, no sooner learned from the guide the change which had taken place in Beatrice’s plans, and that she had gone to Tarnawa, than he determined to follow her thither, under pretence of going to the tournament. Having learned from him that her benefactor, Sir Walter de Selby, had been overwhelmed with affliction for the loss of his daughter, of whose fate he was yet ignorant, and that he had also grievously complained of her own desertion of him, she was filled with remorse, and determined to return to him immediately, and to brave all his reproaches; but indisposition, arising from the trying fatigue of body and the mental misery she had undergone, prevented her setting out until several days after the departure of the Earl of Moray and his knights for Aberdeen. Hepborne could now no longer doubt of the attachment of the Lady Beatrice. The thought that he had ignorantly thrown away a heart so valuable as that which his intercourse with his page had given him ample opportunity to know, was a source of bitter distress to him. His spirits fled, he loathed society, and he industriously shunned the huntings, hawkings, dancings, and masquings that were going merrily forward in honour of his friend’s nuptials with his sister the Lady Isabelle.
But Assueton was not so selfishly occupied in his own joys as not to be struck with the change in his beloved Hepborne. He besought him to unbosom the secret sorrow that was so evidently preying on his mind, and Sir Patrick, who had hitherto generously concealed it, that he might not poison the happiness in which he could not participate, at last yielded to the entreaty, and told him all. Sir John had but little of comfort to offer: the subject was one that hardly admitted of any. He saw that the only way in which friendship could be useful was by rousing him to do something that might actively divert his melancholy.
Sir David de Lindsay having returned from his captivity in England, had lately arrived at Hailes, where Sir William de Dalzel and Sir John Halyburton had remained, to witness Assueton’s marriage. They were now about to proceed to London, to make good the pledge given to Lord Welles. Hepborne would have fain excused himself from the engagement he had so cheerfully made with them at Tarnawa, but Assueton contrived to pique his chivalric spirit, and at length succeeded in inducing him to become one of the party. Sir John even[485]offered to accompany his friend, but Hepborne would by no means permit him to leave his newly-married Lady.