One of the Six Hundred: A Novel
Tidings of this advance spread rapidly from the West to the East Neuk of
Fife. Great numbers of the Whig lairds repaired to the standard of
Baillie, the covenanting general; and among others who drew their swords
under him at the battle of Kilsythe, were Symon of Seafield and his
three sons.
The latter, fiery and determined youths, had but one object or idea--to
single out and slay without mercy William Calderwood, on the first field
where swords were crossed.
The parting injunction of their father to Dame Grizel was to leave
nothing undone to urge on the marriage of Annora with the Reverend
Elijah Howler, a sour-visaged saint, in Geneva cloak and starched bands,
with the lappets of a calotte cap covering his grizzled hair and
cadaverous cheeks, who, during the troubles that seemed to draw nearer,
had taken up his residence in that gloomy tower, which was half
surrounded by the waves.
At another time, had she dared, Annora, who was really a merry-hearted
girl, with curling chestnut hair and clear bright hazel eyes, might have
laughed at such a lover as this "lean and slippered pantaloon," who now,
in scriptural phraseology, culled chiefly out of the Old Testament,
besought her to share his heart and fortunes; but the dangers that
overhung her affianced husband and her father's household, whichever
side conquered in the great battle that was impending, and the monotony
of her own existence, which was varied only by the long nasal prayers
and quavering psalmody in which the inhabitants of the tower (chiefly
old women now) lamented the iniquity of mankind, and "warsled wi' the
Lord"--prayers and psalms that mingled with the cries of the sea-birds,
and the boom of the ocean on the rocks around the tower, all tended to
crush her naturally joyous spirit, and corrode her young heart with
artificial gloom.
She was frequently discovered in tears by Dame Grizel; and then sharp,
indeed, was the rebuke that fell upon her.
"Oh, mother dear," she would exclaim, "pity me!"
"Silence! bairn, and greet nae mair," the lady would reply, sharply.
"Hearken to the voice of ane that loves ye; but not after the fashion of
this miserable world--the Reverend Elijah. Bethink ye on whom your
hellicate cavalier may e'en the now be showering his ungodly kisses.
Bethink ye--
That auld love is cauld love,
But new love is true love.
Elijah loves ye weel, and, though the man be auld, his love is new and
true."
Annora shuddered with anger and grief; while her stern mother, giving
additional impetus to her spinning-wheel, as she sat in the ingle by the
hall fire, eyed her grimly askance, and muttered--
"Calderwood, forsooth! There never cam' faith or truth frae one o' the
line o' Piteadie since the cardinal was stickit by Norman Leslie, a
hundred years ago. Are ye a daughter o' mine and o' Symon Moultray, and
yet are hen-hearted enough to renounce God and his covenanted kirk, and
adhere to bishops and curates?--to seek the fushionless milk that cometh
frae a yeld bosom, sic as the kirk o' prelacy hath? Fie! and awa' wi'
ye!"
"I forsake nae kirk, mother," urged the poor lassie; "but I will adhere
to my Willie. Falsehood never came o' his line, and the Calderwoods are
auld as the three trees o' Dysart."
"And shall be shunned like the de'il o' Dysart," replied her mother,
beating the hearthstone with the high heel of her red shoe.
The cornfields were yellowing in the fertile Howe of Fife, and the woods
were still green in all their summer beauty, when, about Old Lammas-day,
in the year 1645, there went a vague whisper through the land--none knew
how--that a bloody battle had been fought somewhere about the Fells of
Campsie; that many a helmet had been cloven, many a blue-bonneted head
lay on the purple heather; and that many a Whig Fife laird had perished
with his followers.
Sorely troubled in spirit, the Reverend Elijah Howler took his
ivory-handled staff, adjusted his bands and his beaver above his calotte
cap, and, in quest of sure tidings, set forth to Kinghorn, at the
market-cross of which he had heard the terrible intelligence, that the
sword of the ungodly had triumphed--that Montrose had burst into the
lowlands like a roaring lion, seeking whom he might devour; and all
along the Burntisland Road Elijah saw the Fife troopers come spurring,
with buff-coats slashed, and harness battered, bloody, dusty, and having
all the signs of discomfiture and fear.
Ere long he learned that Symon of Seafield and his three sons were in
safety (thanks to their horses' heels); but that the Marquis of Montrose
had encountered the army of the covenant on the field of Kilsythe, where
he had gained a great and terrible victory, slaying, by the edge of the
sword, six thousand soldiers; that the killing covered fourteen miles
Scottish--_i.e._, twenty-five miles English--and that on the men of the
Fifeshire regiments had fallen the most serious slaughter.
In fact, very few of them ever returned, for nearly all perished, and
the terror of that day is still a tradition in many a hamlet of Fife.
Annora felt joy in her heart when her father and brothers returned; yet
it was not without alloy, for where was he whom she had sworn to love,
and a lock of whose dark brown hair she wore in secret next her heart?
Lying cold and mangled, perhaps, on the field of Kilsythe!
There one of her father's men, Roger of Tyrie, had found a relic of
terrible import. It was a kilmaur's whittle; the blade was of fine
steel, hafted with tortoiseshell, adorned with silver circlets. It was
graven with the Calderwood arms, and spotted with blood; but whose
blood?
Symon and his sons came home to the tower crestfallen, and with hearts
full of bitterness. Symon's steel cap, with its triple bars, had been
struck from his head by the marquis's own sword, and now he wore a broad
bonnet, with the blue cockade of the Covenant streaming from it, over
his left ear.
Long, lank, and grizzled, his hair flowed over his shoulders upon his
gorget and cuirass. His complexion was sallow, his expression fierce,
as he trod, spurred and jack-booted, into the vaulted hall of the tower,
and grimly kissed Dame Grizel on the forehead.
"The godless Philistines have been victorious, and yet ye have a' come
back to me without scratch or scar," she exclaimed, with Spartan
bitterness.
"Even sae, gudewife--even sae; but for that day at Kilsythe vengeance
shall yet be ours!"
"Yea, verily," groaned Elijah Howler; "for it was a day of woe, a day of
'wailing and of loud lamentation,' as the weeping of Jazer, when the
lords of the heathen had broken down her principal plants; and as the
mourning of Rachel, who wept for her children, and would not be
comforted."
"Get me a stoup o' ale," said Symon, with something like an oath, as he
flung aside his sword and gauntlets. "And thou, minion, after that day
o' bluid, will ye cling yet to that son o' Belial, Willie Calderwood?"
asked Symon, sternly, of his shrinking daughter. "Thrice I saw him in
the charge, and covered him ilk time wi' my petronel; but lead availed
not, and I hadna about me a siller coin that fitted the muzzle of my
weapon, else he had been i' the mools this nicht. But horse and spear
lads!" he added, turning to his sons. "Ere we sleep, we shall ride by
Grange, and rook out Calderwood Glen wi' a flaming lunt!"
So Symon and his sons had a deep carouse in the old hall with their
troopers, all sturdy "Kailsuppers of Fife," drinking confusion to their
enemies.
Now it is an open ruin; then it was crossed by a great oak beam, whereon
hung spears and bows. On the walls were the horns of many a buck from
Falkland Woods.
Many an oak almerie and meal-girnel stood round; and rows of pots and
pans, pell-mell among helmets and corslets, swords and bucklers, spits
and branders, made up the decorations and the furniture; while a great
fire of wood and coal from "my Lord Sinclair's heughs" blazed day and
night on the stone hearth, making the hall to seem in some places all
red and quivering in red light, or sunk in sable shadow elsewhere.
It had but two chairs--one for the laird, and one for the lady--for such
was then the etiquette in Scotland; thus even the Reverend Elijah had to
accommodate his lean shanks on a three-legged creepie.
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