"Christian Jack--Presbyterian John, I should suggest," said he, as we cantered along the bridle-path, in Indian file, Cora at our head, with a firm little hand on her reins, her blue veil and her skirt, and two long black ringlets, floating behind her.
Lady Louisa followed close, her jet hair gathered up in thick and elaborate rolls by the artful fingers of her French _soubrette_; her larger and more voluptuous figure displayed to the utmost advantage by her tight riding-habit; and now, in a few minutes, the old ruin, with all its gaping windows, loomed in sight.
It was not an object of much interest, save to Cora and myself, for it had been the scene of many a picnic and visit in childhood, and had been long the seat of a branch of the Calderwoods now extinct and passed away.
Some strange and quaint legends were connected with it; and Willie Pitblado, old Kirsty at the Loanend, and Cora's nurse, had told us tales of the old lairds of Piteadie, and their "clenched hand," which was carved above the gate, that made us feel far from comfortable in the gloomy winter nights, when the vanes creaked overhead, and when the wind that howled down the wooded glen shook the cawing rooks in their nests and made the windows of old Calderwood House rattle in their sockets.
The little castle of Piteadie stands on the face of a sloping bank to the westward of Kirkaldy, and a little to the north of Grange, the old barony of the last champion of Mary Queen of Scots; and no doubt it is founded on the basement of a more ancient structure, for in 1530, during the reign of James V., John Wallanche, Laird of Piteadie, was slain near it, in a feudal quarrel, by Sir John Thomson and John Melville of the House of Raith.
The present edifice belongs to the next century, and is a high, narrow, and turreted pile. The windows are small, and have all been thickly grated, and access is given to the various stories by a narrow circular stair.
Within a pediment, half covered with moss, above the arched gateway in the eastern wall, is a mouldered escutcheon of the Calderwoods, bearing a saltire, with three mullets in chief; and a helmet surmounted by a clenched hand--the initials "W.C." and the date 1686.
Pit is a common prefix to Fifeshire localities. By some antiquarians it is thought to mean Pict; by others a grave.
Cora drew our attention to the clenched hand, and assured us that it grasped something that was meant to represent a lock or ringlet of hair.
Whether this was the case or not, it was impossible for us to say, so much was it covered by the green moss and russet-hued lichens; but she added that "it embodied a quaint little legend, which she would relate to us after dinner."
"And why not now, dear Cora?" said Lady Loftus. "If it is a legend, where so fitting a place as this old ruin, with its roofless walls and shattered windows?"
"We have not time to linger, Louisa," said Cora, pointing with her whip to the great hill of Largo, the cone of which was rapidly becoming hidden by a grey cloud; while another mass of vapour, dense and gloomy, laden with hail or snow, came heavily up from the German Sea, and began to obscure the sun. "See, a wintry blast is coming on, and the sooner we get back to the glen the better. Lead the way, Newton, and we shall follow."
"With pleasure," said I; and giving a farewell glance at the old ruin I might never see again, I turned my horse's head northward, and led the way homeward at a smart canter; but we had barely entered Calderwood avenue when the storm of hail and sleet came down in all its fury.
Dinner over, I joined the ladies early in the drawing-room, leaving the M.P. to take the place of Sir Nigel, who was still absent. The heavy curtains, drawn closely over all the oriels, rendered us heedless of the state of the weather without; and while Binns traversed the room with his coffee-trays, a group was gathered in a corner round Cora, from whom we claimed her story of the old castle we had just visited, and she related it somewhat in the following manner.
*CHAPTER IX.*
"Is there any room at your head, Emma? Is there any room at your feet? Is there any room at your side, Emma, Where I may sleep so sweet?
"There is no room at my side, Robin; There is no room at my feet. My bed is dark and narrow now; But, oh! my sleep is sweet." OLD BALLAD.
During the time of King Charles I. and the wars of the great Marquis of Montrose, his captain-general in Scotland--that terrible period when the civil war was waged in England, and Scotland was rent in twain between the armies of the Covenant and of the Cavaliers--William Calderwood of Piteadie was the lover of Annora Moultray,[*] daughter of Symon, the Laird of Seafield; a tower which stands upon the seashore, not far from Kinghorn.
[*] Pronounced "Moutrie" in Scotland.
Both were young and handsome; both were the pride of the district at kirk, market, and merry-meeting; and a time had been fixed for their marriage when the troubles of the Covenant came. Calderwood adhered to the king, and the father of his bride to Cromwell, and the Puritan English.
So the poor lovers were separated; their engagement deemed broken by the parents of Annora, who were dark, gloomy, and stern religionists--true old Whigs of Fife; but on the day before William Calderwood departed to join the great Marquis, who was advancing from the north at the head of his victorious Highlanders, he contrived to have a farewell interview with his mistress at the little ruined chapel of Eglise Marie, which stood, within a few years ago, at Tyrie, in the fields near Grange.
In those days of ecclesiastical tyranny and social espionage, little could escape the parish minister; so the Reverend Elijah Howler promptly apprised Symon of Moultray of his daughter's "foregathering" with the ungodly one at that relic of Popery, the chapel of Mary. They were surprised by the furious father, who exclaimed--
"Sackcloth and ashes! ye graceless limmer, begone to your spindle, and thou, mansworn loon, draw!"
Unsheathing his sword, he rushed upon Calderwood, and would have slain him, notwithstanding the sanctity of the place, but for the interference of his youngest son, Philip, who accompanied him, and parried the threatening sword.
He hurled, however, the deepest and most bitter reproaches upon Calderwood, as "an apostate from the kirk of God; the adherent of a king who had broken the Covenant; a leaguer with the mansworn and God-forsaken James Grahame of Montrose, and his murdering gang of Highland Philistines; the representative of a false brood, among whom no daughter of his should ever mate without a father's curse resting on her bridal-bed," with much more to the same purpose.
The young gentleman strove to deprecate his anger; but, "Away!" the fiery old man resumed; "hence, ye troubler o' Israel, who hast hearkened unto the devil and his prelates; and beware how ye cross the purpose o' Symon o' Seafield, for all the powers o' hell may fail to balk my vengeance!"
Under his shaggy brows his eyes glared at Calderwood as he spoke; and fiercely he drew his blue bonnet over them, as he hurled his broadsword into its scabbard, struck its basket-hilt significantly, and, grasping his terrified daughter by the wrist, dragged her rudely away. A farewell glance, mute and despairing, was all that the parted lovers could exchange. As for the injurious reproaches of the irate old man, Willie Calderwood heeded them not. He only mourned in his heart this civil and religious war, that had engendered hate and rancour in the breasts of those at whose board he had long been a welcome guest, and who certainly, at one time, loved him well.
If Symon of Seafield was rancorous in his animosity, his wife, the Lady Grizel Kirkaldie of Abden, was doubly so. Thus the poor Annora, as she sat by her side, guiding the whirling spindle, or spinning monotonously at her wheel, was compelled, in the intervals of prayer, bible reading, catechizing, and mortification of the body and spirit, to hear the most insulting epithets heaped upon the name of her young and handsome lover, whose figure, as she saw him last at Eglise Marie, with his long, black cavalier plume shading his saddened face, and his scarlet mantle muffling the hilt of the rapier he dared not to draw on _her_ father, seemed ever before her.
To prevent their meeting again, Annora was secluded and carefully watched in the upper storey of Seafield Tower; and by her brothers' fowling-pieces many a stray pigeon was shot, lest a note might be tied under its wing. The tower forms a striking feature on the sea-beaten shore, midway between the Kirkcaldy and Kinghorn-ness. It rests on one side on a mass of red sandstone rock; on the other it was guarded by a fosse and bridge, the remains of which can yet be traced. To the seaward lie the Vows--some dangerous rocks, on which, on a terrific night in the December of 1800, a great ship of Elbing perished with all her crew.