Dogs of various kinds were always basking before the fire on dun deer-skins; but the chief of them was Symon's great Scottish staghound, which was exactly of the breed and appearance described in the old rhyme--
Headed lyke a snake, Necked lyke a drake. Footed lyke a catte, Tayled lyke a ratte, Syded lyke a team, Chyned lyke a beam.
On that night Symon and his sons, with Roger of Tyrie, and other followers, crossed the hill to Piteadie, and sacked and set on fire the dwelling of the Calderwoods, who, as adherents of the king, were deemed beyond the pale of the law by the Scottish government.
In the murk midnight, from the tower head of Seafield, the heart-sticken Annora could see the red flames of rapine wavering in the sky, beyond the woods of Grange, in the direction where she knew so well her absent lover's dwelling stood; and when her father and brothers came galloping down the brae, and clattering over the drawbridge of the tower, they laughingly boasted that, in passing Eglise Marie, they had defaced the family tomb of the Calderwoods, and overthrown the throchstone that marked where Willie's mother lay, under the shadow of an old yew tree.
"The nest is gane, Grizy," said Symon, grimly, as he unclasped his corslet, and hung his sword on the wall; "the nest is scouthered weel, and the black rooks can return to it nae mair."
"Would that we could lure the tassel to the gosshawk again," said Lady Grizel, with a dark glance at her daughter.
"For what end, gudewife?" asked Symon, with surprise.
"To make him a tassel on the dule-tree there without," was the cruel response.
Annora felt as if her heart was bursting; it seemed so strange and unnatural that all this savage hate should exist because her poor Willie adhered to the king rather than to the kirk.
A few weeks passed, and there was loud revelry, and many a stoup and black-jack of ale and usquebaugh drained joyfully in Seafield, for tidings came of the total rout of the Scottish Cavaliers at Philiphaugh, and of the flight of the great marquis and all his followers none knew whither; but rumour said to High Germanie.
Had Willie Calderwood escaped? asked Annora, in her trembling heart; or had he fallen at the Slainmanslee, where the Covenanters butchered all who fell into their hands, even mothers with their babes that hung at their breasts?
And these acts, and many other such, did her new lover justify by many a savage quotation from the wars of the Jews in the days of old. Now the kirk was triumphant, and, Judas-like, had sold its king, as old Peter Heylin said, even as it would have sold its Saviour could it have found a purchaser.
Winter came on--a cold and bitter one--the soft spray of the sea froze on the tower windows of Seafield, while the moss and the grass grew together on the hearthstones of Piteadie, and the crows had built their nests in the old chimneys and nooks of the ruined castle.
Hard strove father and mother with Annora; but--
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.
She felt like Juliet in the feud between the families--
"Tis but thy _name_ that is my enemy;-- Though art thyself though, not a Montague. What's Montague? It is not hand or foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. ----Doff thy name; And for that name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself.
Even as water dropping on a granite rock will wear that rock away in course of time, so, by the systematic tyranny of her parents, and by their reiterated assurances, and even forged proofs, that Willie Calderwood had fallen, sword in hand, at the battle of the Barricades, was Annora worn and wearied into a state of acquiescence, in which she accepted Mr. Elijah Howler as her husband.
This was the climax of years of a gloomy, sabbatical life, during which the Judaical rigidity of religious observance made Sunday a periodical horror, and Seafield Tower a daily hell.
So they were married, and he removed her from the tower to the adjacent manse, from the more cheerful and ungrated windows of which she could see in the distance the roofless turrets and open walls of Piteadie, where the crows clustered and flapped their black wings, for the ruin had become a veritable rookery.
The king was dead; he had perished on the scaffold, and Scotland, under Cromwell and the false Argyle, was quiet, as we are told in that poetical romance by Macaulay, entitled "The History of England."
On a Sunday in summer, in the year of Glencairn's rising in the north for King Charles II., Annora sat in the Kirk of Calderwood about the beginning of sermon. The reverend Elijah, with straight, lank hair, and upturned eyes, Geneva bands and gown, after a glance at the dark oak pew where his young bride and victim sat, like the spectre of her former self, so pale, so crushed and heartbroken, twice repeated, in a dreary and quavering tone, the text upon which he was about to preach, with special reference to the rising in the north, inviting all sons of the Kirk to arm against the loyal Highlanders--
"_He saith among the trumpets, Ha! ha! and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting! He is not affrighted, neither turneth he back from the sword; he goeth forth to meet the armed men._"--Job xxxix.
Having given this warlike text, he adjusted his cloak, and turned the sand-glass, which, according to the fashion of those days, stood on the reading-desk. The rustle of Bible leaves, as of those that lie strewn in autumn, when gently stirred by the wind, passed through all the church; but from Annora's trembling and wan fingers, her Bible fell heavily to the ground.
At that moment a gaily-dressed young man, with the white rose in his plumed hat and on his laced mantle, with slashed doublet and boots, as he passed slowly up the aisle--the observed of all observers--as such cavalier fripperies were supposed to have passed away with Montrose and the king, stooped, and presented her with the fallen book.
Their haggard eyes met. He was pale even as death. A great wound, a sword-cut that traversed his face like a livid streak, in healing, had distorted the features; but like a glance of lightning that flashed into her soul, she recognized Willie Calderwood!
She would have shrieked, but lacked the power; a little sigh could only escape her, and so she swooned away.
There was a great commotion in the village kirk. She was borne forth into the air, and laid for a time upon a throchstane, or altar tomb, and was then conveyed to the manse, where she remained long as one on the verge of madness or the grave. The face of Willie, so sweet, so sad and earnest, but, alas! so sorely distorted, seemed ever before her, together with his gallant air and courtly bearing, all of which were so different from those of the sour-featured Whigs by whom she was surrounded.