If a lass won't change her mind,
Nobody can make her.
The Reverend Elijah Howler was a happy man in one sense; the cause of
his beloved kirk was triumphant, though Cromwell's Puritans, who had
succeeded the Cavaliers of Montrose as antagonists, bade fair to become
sore troublers of Israel; and loud were the lamentations when, by sound
of trumpet, the English sectaries warned the General Assembly to begone
from Edinburgh, and to assemble no more. Yet the Reverend Elijah was
unhappy in another sense. Annora heard his pious love-making with
averted ear, and he might as well have poured forth his texts, his
dreary talk, and intoned homilies, to the waves that beat at the rocky
basement of the tower--at once Annora's prison and her home.
Meanwhile, she grew pale, and thin, and sickly. Her younger brother,
Philip, pitied her in his heart, and, after making inquiries, learned
that Willie Calderwood was now in France, where he had been wounded in a
duel by the Abbe Gondy, but had become his friend, and now adhered to
him when he had become famous as the Cardinal de Retz; and, as such,
served and defended him in the wars of the Fronde, with a hundred other
cavaliers of Montrose.
"Oh, waly, waly, my mother dear!" she exclaimed, using the bitterest old
Scottish exclamation of grief, as she threw herself on the bosom of the
unflinching Lady Grizel. "Pity me--pity me, for none love me here, and
Willie is far far awa' in France owre the sea."
"A' the better, bairn--a' the better."
"But I may never see him mair!"
"A' the better still, bairn."
"Oh, mother dear," urged the weeping girl, "dinna say sae; ye'll rive my
puir heart in twain amang ye. And this Fronde, and these Frondeurs,
what is _it_, what are _they_?"
"What would it be but some Papist devilry, or a Calderwood wadna be in
the middle o't?" was the angry response.
Poor Annora knew not what to think, for there were no newspapers in
those days, and rumours of events in distant lands came vaguely by
chance travellers, and at long intervals. Lothian and Fife were almost
farther apart in those days than Scotland and France are now, in the
matters of news and travel.