HAWTHORNDEN.
The hazel throws his silvery branches down.
There, starting into view, a castled cliff,
Whose roof is lichen'd o'er, purple and green,
O'erhangs thy wandering stream, romantic Esk,
And rears its head among the ancient trees.
These caverns are spacious and circuitous, and occupy the entire rock
under the ancient castle; and Scottish antiquaries (a hard and dry,
yet credulous race at all times) have been lost in a maze of
conjectures concerning their origin and use, as they are in a great
part artificial. Tradition avers them to have been a stronghold and
place of retreat for the Pictish princes who once held the Lowlands;
and they still bear the names of "the gallery," "the guard-room," and
"the king's bedchamber;" for in these vaults, according to the Vicar
of Tranent, Lothus, who gave his name to Lothian, resided with his
queen, Anna, daughter of Aurelius Ambrosius, King of the Britons when
Hengist and his Saxons sorely troubled all the isle by their
invasion. In one of the caverns is a deep draw-well, beautifully
hewn like a vast cylinder through the living rock, where, in the pure
cold depth of its water, the reflected stars are sometimes seen at
noonday.
The sun was setting now beyond the purple Pentland Hills, and
Florence, with the roar of the recent battle yet buzzing in his ears,
with sorrow, gloom, and bitterness in his aching heart, crushed in
soul and vague in purpose, lay watching the sinking beams through a
fissure in the rocks, around which the dark-green ivy, the fragrant
wild briar, and the dog-rose grew together.
Far westward spread the lovely landscape, tinted with the ruddy light
of eve and with autumnal brown; murmuring over its rocky bed, which
occupies the entire space between the wood-crowned cliffs or walls of
rock that border in the narrow vale, the Esk flowed ceaselessly on.
The dense foliage that covered its banks exhibited all the varying
tints of the season; while on the rent and fissured fronts of the
opposing bluffs, that start abruptly up like ruined towers or
fantastic feudal castles, the western sun poured a warm glow, that
faded slowly as his wavering rays shot upward and sank beyond the
summits of the Pentlands. Grey lichens, green velvet moss, the
purple foxglove, the pink rose of Gueldres, and every species of wild
flower peculiar to the lowlands, covered the rugged banks and
freestone rocks, through the fissures of which many a tiny rill
poured down into the deep and lonely dell to join the Esk upon its
passage through a thousand windings, till it joined the sea near
Pinkey's corpse-strewn field.
Rock, wood, and water, silence and solitude, broken only by the
voices of the birds above and the brawl of the stream below, with the
deepening tints of the autumn evening--all that can make a sylvan
landscape charm, were there; but these accessories rendered the
thoughts of the wanderer more sad and bitter as he surveyed them, for
Florence loved his country well, and he had that day seen her banner
trodden in the dust. Then he remembered how, two hundred and fifty
years before, it was in these same caverns that the valiant Sir
Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie and the Black Knight of Liddesdale,
during the memorable and disastrous wars of the earlier Edwards,
lurked with a band of young and desperate patriots, and thus were
enabled to elude the pursuit of the temporary victors; that from
thence they had sallied forth to destroy the Flemings under Guy of
Namur, Count of Gueldres, in battle on the Burghmuir; that from
thence they issued to storm the castles of Edinburgh and Dunbar, and
to perform a hundred other brilliant feats of chivalry.
As these old memories occurred to him, he arose, and thought that, as
the darkness was at hand, he might make his way to the capital unseen
and on foot; but now, hearing a sound near the cavern mouth, he drew
his sword, to be prepared for any emergency.
Steps were heard; the screen of ivy and hawthorn was hastily torn
aside; the gleam of the western sky glittered on the polished helmet
and cuirass of an armed man, who with difficulty, as if wounded or
weary, made several ineffectual efforts to reach the cavern. None
but a native of the locality--one at least belonging to
Lothian--could know of this place, thought Florence, as he put forth
a hand to assist the stranger to clamber in, and found himself
confronted by the pale face and snow-white beard of Claude Hamilton
of Preston!
They surveyed each other in painful silence for nearly a minute.
The old baron was weary, wan, and by the blood-spots and dints which
his armour exhibited, his torn plume, and red sword-handle, had
evidently borne his full share in the dangers of that terrible field.
He, too, had been pursued by the stragglers of the foe, who were now
all mustering among the Scottish tents on Edmondstone Edge, previous
to an advance upon the capital, and its seaport. His horse, which
had borne him from the conflict, pierced by many arrows, and half
disembowelled by a sword-thrust, had sunk under him at the ford near
Lasswade; and now he was fain to seek the sheltering caves of
Hawthornden, for age and toll had rendered him almost incapable of
further exertion. But on recognizing Florence, his cheek crimsoned,
and his eyes sparkled with a sudden fury.
"We meet at last," said he, in a voice querulous with age, anger, and
weariness;--"meet after I have sought you everywhere, for these ten
days past; and now fortunately meet where there are none to see, and
none to separate us."
"Alas, sir!" replied Florence, "too well I know what you would say to
me."
"Thou whining loon, is it so with thee?" exclaimed the other
scornfully; "yes, I would speak of my kinswoman--of Madeline Home,
the Countess of Yarrow. What hast thou done with her? Where
secluded her if alive--where buried her if dead? How hast thou
spirited her away from me? Speak, lest I have thee riven at a
horse's tail!"
"What shall I say--what _can_ I say?" was the bewildered response of
Florence.
"Some say thy mother slew her, Florence Fawside," continued the old
man hoarsely, as he grasped the young man's arm, and shook him
vehemently in his grief and rage; "others say 'twas _thou_----"
"I--oh horror!"
"I care not which; but vengeance I will have, for the sake of my
sister who bore her, and of her father, that true and valiant earl,
who, on many a day since Flodden Field, has fought by my side, and
who loved me so well. Vengeance, I say, thou accursed son of a
wicked beldame--dost hear me?"
"Slay me, Claude Hamilton, if you will--I resist not," replied
Florence mournfully. "Weary of life, I sought death in every part of
yonder bloody field; but like that fated Jew who mocked his blessed
Lord upon the slope of Calvary in the days of old, he fled me
everywhere. The arrows rained upon me, harmless as snowflakes; and
swords, and spears, and cannon-shot have alike failed to maim me; and
I live yet--live without a wounds; but without joy--without desire or
hope!"
"What is all this to me--I would speak of my dear kinswoman--my dead
sister's only child----"
"Alas! I know nothing, and can say nothing of her."
"Nothing?" continued Hamilton, furiously drawing his dagger; "know ye
that stabbed--foully stabbed by the hand of the sacrilegious hag who
bore thee, her pure blood has stained the floor of the church of God!"
"The cause of your injurious words procures their pardon. Stabbed!
oh, too well know I that, for her blood dyed my hands as I knelt by
her side; a dagger was there--a bodkin--my mother--Madeline...."
muttered Florence incoherently. "God knows I am every way innocent,
sakeless, and free of Madeline's blood--my Madeline, whom I loved
with a love akin to worship! You have your dagger, Claude
Hamilton--you and I are each the last of our races--strike! add one
more item to the gory catalogue of this day's slaughter. Strike!" he
added, sinking on one knee; "I care not to leave the last and final
blow, with the triumph, if a triumph it is--and the fatal inheritance
of our houses--the hatred and the feud, to thee!"
Mad with a fury which rendered him pitiless as a hungry tiger,
Hamilton raised the dagger, and it flashed in the twilight which
straggled through the ivy screen that closed the cavern-mouth, when
his uplifted arm was arrested by the hand of some one behind, and the
_Countess of Yarrow_, with the vicar of Tranent, appeared before
them, as suddenly as if they had sprung from the floor of rock below.
"Guide me God, and every saint in heaven!" cried the old man, as he
dashed his poniard down; "am I going mad? or do I see before me
things that are not in existence!"