One of the Six Hundred: A Novel
Forth shining with all its ripples under the clear winter sun, with the
hills of the Lothians opposite, half shrouded in white vapour.
I would have given all I possessed to have been alone for half an hour
with Louisa Loftus, but no such chance or fortune was given me; and
though our ride to the ruined castle was, in itself, of small
importance, it proved ultimately the means towards an end.
One old woman, wearing one of those peculiar caps which Mary of Gueldres
introduced in Scotland, with a black band--the badge of widowhood--over
it, appeared at the door of a little thatched cottage, and directed us
by a near bridle-path to the ruin, smiling pleasantly as she did so.
"Newton," said Cora, "you remember old Kirsty Jack?"
"Perfectly," said I; "many a luggie of milk I have had from her in past
years."
Cora always wondered why people loved her, and why all ranks were so
kind to her; but the good little soul was all unaware that her girlish
simplicity of manner, her softness of complexion and feature, her
winning sweetness of expression and modulation of voice, were so
alluring. Had she been so, the charm had, perhaps, vanished, or had
become more dangerous by the exercise of coquetry. Often when I looked
at her, the idea occurred to me that if I had not been dazzled by Lady
Louisa, I should certainly have loved Cora.
The cottage bore a signboard inscribed, "_Christian Jack--a callender[*]
by the hour or piece_," an announcement which caused some speculation
among our English friends; and ignorant alike of its origin and meaning,
or what is more probable, affecting to be so, Berkeley laughed
immoderately at the word, simply because it was not English.
[*] Literally a mangle, from _calandre_, the French. The term has been
common all over Scotland for centuries. In Paris there is a street
named Rue de la Calandre.
"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.
A roofless and open ruin now, exposed to the blasts which sweep up the
Firth from the German Sea, it has long been abandoned to the seamew, the
bat, and the owl, or the ugla, as it was named of old in Fifeshire.
But the seclusion of Annora was not required; for, on the very day after
the interview which was so roughly interrupted at Eglise Marie, Willie
Calderwood, at the head of sixteen troopers, all sturdy "Kailsuppers of
Fife," well mounted and accoutred in half armour--_i.e._, back, breast,
and pot, with sword, pistol, and musketoon--had departed for the king's
host, and joined the Marquis of Montrose, whose troops, flushed with
their victorious battles at Tippermuir, Alford, Aldearn, and the Brig o'
Dee, came pouring over the Ochil mountains, to sack and burn the Castle
of Gloom.