HOME.
Hail, land of spearmen! seed of those who scorn'd
To stoop the proud crest to imperial Rome!
Hail! dearest half of Albion sea-wall'd!
Hail! state unconquer'd by the fire of war,--
Red war that twenty ages round thee blazed!
_Albania._
Some thoughts such as these which inspired this now forgotten
Scottish bard filled the swelling heart of Florence Fawside, as he
urged his horse up the winding way which led to his paternal tower.
The morning sun had now risen brightly above the long pastoral ridges
of the Lammermuir, and he could see the widening Forth, with all its
rocky isles, and the long sweep of sandy beach which borders the
beautiful bay that lies between the mouth of the Esk and the green
links of Gulane, whereon, in those days, there stood an ancient
church of St. Andrew, which William the Lion gifted unto the monks of
Dryburgh. The blue estuary was studded by merchant barks and fisher
craft, with their square and brown lug-sails, beating up against the
ebb tide and a gentle breeze from the west.
The sky was of a light azure tint, flecked by floating masses of
snowy cloud, which, on their eastern and lower edges, were tinged
with burning gold.
The hottest days of the summer were now gone, the pastures had become
somewhat parched, and the shrivelled foliage that rustled in the
woods of Carberry seemed athirst for the rains of autumn. Amid the
coppice, the corn-craik and the cushat dove sent up their peculiar
notes. The corn-fields were turning from pale green to a golden
brown; and, as the morning breeze passed over it, the bearded grain
swayed heavily to and fro, like ripples on the bosom of a yellow
lake. The white smoke curled from the green cottage roofs of moss
and thatch; the blue-bonneted peasants were at work in the sunny
fields--the women with their snooded hair, or their white Flemish
curchies (that came into fashion when James II. espoused Mary the
Rose of Gueldres), were milking the cattle, grinding their
hand-mills, or busy about their little garden-plots; and to Florence
all seemed to illustrate his country, and speak to his heart with
that love of _home_, which _then_, even more than now, was the purest
passion of the Scottish people, and which, in all their wanderings,
they never forget, however distant the land in which their lot in
life may be cast.
Florence felt all this as he spurred up the green braeside, and heard
the people in his mother-tongue cry, "God him speed;" for though they
knew him not, they saw that he was a handsome youth, a stranger,
nobly mounted and bravely apparelled.
Every step he took brought some old recollection to his heart. The
gurgling brooks in which he had fished and the leafy thickets in
which he had bird-nested, the old trees up which he had clambered,
were before him now, and the days of his boyhood, the familiar voices
and faces of his slaughtered father and brother, came vividly to
memory. The song of a farmer who was driving his team of horses to
the field, the lowing of the cattle, the barking of the shepherds'
collies, the perfume of the broom and the harebell on the upland
slope, all spoke of country and of home. But with this emotion
others mingled.
With all the genuine rapture of a boyish lover, he kissed again and
again his opal ring, the gift of that beautiful unknown, who had
filled his heart with a secret joy and given life a new impulse.
"What can its secret be? Oh! to unravel all this mystery!" he
exclaimed to himself a hundred times; but the ring baffled all his
scrutiny and ingenuity.
He had now four projects to put in force immediately after his return
home.
First, to deliver his letter to the Regent, Earl of Arran.
Second, to deliver the other missive of Henry of Valois to the
queen-mother, Mary of Lorraine.
Third, to discover his unknown mistress.
Fourth, to avenge his father's feud and fall by ridding the world of
Claude Hamilton of Preston, the Lord Kilmaurs, and a few others;
after which he would settle soberly down in his mother's house, and,
for a time, lead the quiet life of a country gentleman--at least,
such a life as they led in those days, when their swords were never
from their sides.
And now, as he surmounted the long ridge of Fawside, the landscape
opened further to the south and eastward, and he saw the old square
keep of Elphinstone, in which George Wishart had been confined in the
preceding year by Patrick, Earl of Bothwell, and the wall of which
had rent with a mighty sound--rent from battlement to basement, as we
may yet see it, at the moment of his martyrdom before the castle of
St. Andrews.
The heart of Florence beat six pulses in a second as he drew nearer
home, and saw the huge column of smoke ascending lazily from the
square chimney of the hall, and the black crows and white pigeons
fraternizing together on the stone ridge of the copehouse; and now he
passed old Roger's thatched domicile, the Westmains or Grange, from
whence the inmates of the castle were supplied with farm produce. It
was all under fine cultivation save one wild spot named the Deilsrig,
which was set aside, or left totally unused, for the propitiation of
evil spirits; and none in the neigbourhood doubted that cattle which
strayed or grazed thereon were elf-shot by the evil one, for they
were frequently found dead within the turf boundary of this infernal
spot, as their huge bones whitening among the dog-grass remained to
attest; and there, too, lay the unblessed graves of certain
Egyptians, who, despite the protections granted by James IV to
"Anthony Gavino, Lord and Earl of Little Egypt," had been judicially
drowned in the river Esk by Earl Bothwell, the sheriff of Haddington.
Florence glanced at the place, which had so many terrors for him as a
child, and dashed up to the arched gate of the tower, where his
emotion was such, that it was not until after three attempts he could
sound the copper horn which hung by a chain to the wall; for such was
the fashion then, when door-bells and brass knockers, like gas and
steam and electricity, were still in the womb of time.
In a minute more he had sprung from his horse and rushed up the stair
to the hall, where his mother, with a cry of mingled fear and joy,
clasped him to her breast, and wept like a true woman rather than the
stern and Spartan dame she usually seemed. Then old Roger of the
Westmains, in the exuberance of his joy, flung his bonnet in the fire
and danced about the hall table; and the grey-haired nurse, Maud,
contended with the vicar, Mass John of Tranent, for the next and
longest embrace of the returned one; for all welcomed him back to his
home as one reprieved from the dead; for surmise had been exhausted,
and all ingenuity had failed to afford a clue to his mysterious
disappearance after landing at Leith from the galley of M. de
Villegaignon.
After the first transports of her joy had subsided--and, indeed, they
subsided soon, for her natural sternness of manner and ferocity of
purpose soon resumed their sway in her angry and widowed heart, his
mother kissed him thrice upon the forehead, held him at arm's length
from her breast, surveying his features with an expression of mingled
love, tenderness, anxiety, and anger.
"Thou hast been ill, Florence; thy cheeks are pale, wan, and hollow.
Thou hast been suffering, my son--yea, suffering deeply. How came
this about? Say!--thou hast no secrets from thine old mother!"
"Ask these wounds, dear mother; they have kept me for fourteen days
a-bed and absent from you," he replied, as he tore open his crimson
doublet, and shirt, and displayed on his bosom the sword-thrust,
which was scarcely skinned over.
"Kyrie eleison!" muttered the white-haired vicar, lifting up his thin
hands and hollow eyes.
Roger of the Westmains uttered a shout of rage and grasped his dagger.
"My bairn--my braw, bonnie bairn!" exclaimed the old nurse with
tender commiseration.
"Florence," said his mother through her clenched teeth, "whose sword
did this?"
"Can you ask me, mother?"
"_His!_--would you say?" she asked in a voice like a shriek, while
pointing with her lean white hand to Preston Tower, the walls of
which above the level landscape shone redly in the morning sun.
"Nay, not his, but the swords of his followers."
"Of Symon Brodie and Mungo Tennant?"
"Even so; I heard their names in the _mêlée_."
"Accursed be the brood; for their swords were reddest and readiest in
the fray in which your father fell!"
"They and others dogged me close on the night I landed. I fought
long and bravely----"
"My own son!--my dear dead husband's only son!"
"But what could one sword avail against twenty others? Struck down
at last, I would have been hewn to pieces but for the stout arm of a
friendly burgher and the kindness of----of----those who salved my
wounds and tended me--yea, mother, kindly and tenderly as you would
have done," he added, while the colour deepened in his face, and he
sank wearily into the chair in which his slain father had last sat,
and which since that day none had dared to occupy, as his widow would
have deemed it a sacrilege.
It required but the description of this last outrage to rouse the
blood of Dame Alison and of all her domestics to boiling heat.
"Be calm, dear mother, be calm," said Florence, pressing her
trembling hand to his heart. "In three days I shall be well enough
to handle my sword, and then I shall scheme out vengeance for all I
have endured."
"Thou hearest him, vicar?" exclaimed Lady Alison, striking her hands
together, while her dark eyes shot fire. "The spirit of my buried
husband lives again in his boy!"
"Lord make us thankfu' therefor!" muttered the listening servants,
who shared every sentiment of their mistress.
"Be wary, madam!" said the tall thin priest. "Whence still this mad
craving for revenge?"
"In the presence of this poor lamb, who has so narrowly escaped a
dreadful death, weak, pale, and wounded, dost thou ask me this, thou
very shaveling?" she exclaimed with scornful energy. "My husband's
feud and fall!--Oh, woe is me!--and my winsome Willie's death----"
"Demand a fearful reprisal!" said Florence, with a vehemence
increased by his mother's presence and example; "and fearful it shall
be!"
"Vengeance," replied the priest firmly, but meekly, "is ever the
offspring of the weakest and least tutored mind."
"Father John!" exclaimed the pale widow.
"I say so with all deference, my son, and with all respect for our
good lady your mother. In her thirst for vengeance, like the last
stake of a gamester, she will risk you, her only son--risk you by
invading the province of God; for to Him alone belongeth vengeance.
Remember the holy words, Dame Alison: 'Vengeance is mine, saith the
Lord, and I will repay it.'"
"So priests must preach," said Florence; "but, under favour, father,
laymen find forgiveness hard to practise."
"So hard," hissed Lady Alison through her sharp and firm-set teeth,
"that for each drop of Preston's blood I would give a rood of
land--yea, for every drop a yellow rig of corn! 'Twas but three
weeks ago, come the feast of Bartholomew, he followed a thief with a
sleuth-hound of Gueldreland within the bounds of our barony."
"He dared?" said Florence, sharing all his mother's anger.
"He or some of his people; and without asking our license, took and
hanged him on a thorn-tree at the Bucklea. Did not his swine root
holes in the corn on our grange, destroying ten rigs of grain and
more, and he scornfully refused our demands to make the damage good?
Yet he burned the byres of our kinsman Roger for taking a deer in his
wood at Bankton, though any man may hunt in any forest--even a royal
one--so far as he may fling his bugle-horn before him; yet he broke
Roger's bow and arrows, took away his arquebuse, and hanged all his
dogs. And wherefore? Because he was a Fawside and a kinsman of
thine. And now they would have slain thee, my son--thee, in whom my
joy, my hope, my future all are centred!" she added, embracing
Florence, the expression of whose handsome face had completely
changed to gloom and anger under her influence. "But while fish swim
in yonder Firth, and mussels grow on its rocks, our hatred shall
live!"
The vicar, a priest of benign and venerable aspect, smiled sadly, and
shook his white head with an air of deprecation.
"I fear me, madam," said he, "that the fish and the mussels are races
that bid fair to outlive alike the Fawsides of that Ilk and the
Hamiltons of Preston, their folly, feuds, and wickedness."
"On Rood-day in harvest, a year past, as I sat here alone by my
spinning-wheel, my husband's armour clattered where it hangs on
yonder wall,--and wot ye _why_? Preston was riding over the hill,
and near our gate. Preston! and alone! Could I have got the old
falcon ready on the bartizan, he had been shot like a hoodiecrow, as
surely as the breath of heaven was in his nostrils!"
"Fie! madam--fie! I cannot listen to language such as this!" said
the vicar, erecting his tall figure and preparing to retire.
"The wrongs I have endured in this world, yea, and the sorrows,
too----"
"Should teach you to look for comfort in that which is to come," said
the priest, with asperity.
"Not till I have had vengeance swift, sure, and deep on the house of
Preston. No, friar! preach as you may, Alison Kennedy will never
rest in the grave where her murdered husband lies, but with the
assurance that Claude Hamilton lies mangled in his shroud--mangled by
the sword of her son Florence! And he may slay him in open war; for
so surely as the souls and bodies of men are governed by stars and
climates, we shall have war with the English ere the autumn leaves
are off the trees, and so surely shall that traitor Hamilton join
them, for he was one of those whom Henry took at Solway, and feasted
in London, to suit his own nefarious ends--like Cassilis, Lennox, and
Glencairn."
Roger of the Westmains heard with grim satisfaction all this
outpouring of bitterness of spirit; for he shared to the full her
animosity to the unlucky laird of Preston. To Roger, old Lady Alison
was the greatest potentate on earth. Had the Regent Arran, or Mary
of Lorraine, commanded him to ride with his single spear against a
brigade of English, he might have hesitated; but had Lady Alison
desired him to leap off Salisbury Craigs, he would probably have done
so, without the consideration of a moment, and had his old body
dashed to pieces at the foot thereof.
In joy for her son's return, the lady of the tower ordered the bailie
to distribute drink-silver (as it was then termed) to all her
servants and followers; largesses to the town piper and drummer of
Musselburgh, and to the poor gaberlunzies who sat on the kirk styles
of Tranent and St. Michael. She then directed all the harness and
warlike weapons to be thoroughly examined, preparatory to commencing
hostilities against the grand enemy, who, as we shall shortly see,
was in his tower of Preston, thinking of other things than the
mischief she was brewing against him.
A few days slipped monotonously away.
After Paris--the Paris of Francis I. and Henry II.,--and after the
busy chateau of the Duchess of Albany at Vendôme, the quiet and gloom
of the little tower of Fawside soon became insupportable to its young
proprietor. Thus, instead of remaining at home, attending to the
collection of his rents in coin and kain, conferring with old Roger
anent green and white crops on the mains of the Grange, listening to
the stories of his nurse, holding bloodthirsty councils of war with
his mother, concerning the best mode of invading with fire and sword
the territories of a neighbour, only separated from his own by a turf
dyke, or weaving deadly snares for cutting him off by the strong
hand, he spent his whole days in Edinburgh, caracoling his beautiful
grey horse up and down the High-street, through the courts of the
palace, before the house of M. d'Oysell, the French ambassador, in
the Cowgate, in the Greyfriars' Gardens, in the royal park, and in
every place of public resort, with a plume in his velvet bonnet and a
hawk on his left wrist, as became a gallant of the time, in the hope
of discovering, even for a moment, his lost love, the donor of the
opal ring. Daily he visited the dwelling of Master Posset, at the
sign of the Stuffed Alligator, in the Lawnmarket, to prosecute his
inquiries there; but either from accident or design, that most
discreet of apothecaries was never at home. Thus daily the young
Laird of Fawside was doomed to return disappointed, weary, and
dispirited to his gloomy antique hall, or to his gloomier old
bed-chamber in the northern portion of the tower--a portion
concerning which the following tradition is related by Father John:--
Sir Thomas de Fawsyde, who, in 1330, married Muriella, daughter of
Duncan, Earl of Fife, when quarrelling with her one day about a
favourite falcon, which she had permitted to escape in the wood of
Drumsheugh, in the heat of passion, drew off his steel glove and
struck her white shoulder with his clenched hand. Muriella, though
tender and gentle, was proud and high-spirited. She felt this
unkindness and affront so keenly and bitterly, that, without a tear
or reproach, she retired from his presence and secluding herself in
the northern chamber, never spoke again, and refusing all food and
sustenance, literally starved herself to death. Upon this Earl
Duncan, before King David II., accused the rude knight of having
slain his daughter.
"And because it was notour and manifest," says Sir John Skene of
Curriehill, in his quaint "Buke of the auld Lawes," printed in 1609,
"that he did not slae hir, nor gave hir a wound of the quhilk she
died; bot gave her ane blow with his hand to teach and correct hir,
and also untill the time of hir death dearly loved hir, and treated
hir as a husband weill affectionate to his wife, the king pronounced
him clene and quit."
But the spirit-form of this lady, dressed in quaint and ancient
apparel, of that rustling silk peculiar to all ghostly ladies, with
her long hair dishevelled, weeping and mourning, was averred, for
ages, to haunt the room where now her descendant lay nightly on his
couch, dreaming of the secret love he was more intent on discovering,
than of pursuing the hereditary quarrel of his race, and oblivious of
delivering to the Regent Arran and Mary of Lorraine the letters with
which he was charged from the court of France.
The reason of the last remissness was simply this; he believed his
fair one to be in Edinburgh, while the queen-mother was occasionally
at Stirling, and the regent was at his country castle, in Cadzow
Forest, in Clydesdale.