We will once more ask our readers to accompany us to the glen, the scene of our story. It was of an evening, calm and tranquil as that on which our tale opened, on a day in August, in the year 1815, that two travellers, leaving the postillion of their carriage to refresh his horses, advanced alone and on foot for above a mile into this tranquil valley; the air had all that deathlike stillness so characteristic of autumn, while over the mountains and the lake the same rich mellow light was shed. As the travellers proceeded slowly, they stopped from time to time, and gazed on the scene; and, although their looks met, and glance seemed to answer glance, they neither of them spoke: from their appearance, it might have been conjectured that they were foreigners. The man, bronzed by weather and exposure, possessed features which, in all their sternness, were yet eminently handsome: he wore a short thick moustache, but the armless sleeve of his coat, fastened on the bosom, was a sign still more indisputable than even his port and bearing, that he was a soldier. His companion was a lady in the very pride and bloom of beauty, but her dress, more remarkably than his, betrayed the foreigner; in the rapid look she turned from the bold scenery around them to the face of him at whose side she walked, one might read either a direct appeal to memory, or the expression of wonder and admiration of the spot. Too much engrossed by his own thoughts, or too deeply occupied by the scene before him, the man moved on, until at last he came in front of a low ruined wall, beneath a tall and overhanging cliff. He stopped for some seconds, and gazed at this with such intentness as prevented him from noticing the figure of a beggar, who, in all the semblance of extreme poverty, sat crouching among the ruins. She was an old, or at least seemed a very old woman—her hair, uncovered by cap or hood, was white as snow, but her features still preserved an expression of quick intelligence, as, lifting her head from the attitude of moping thought, she fixed her eyes stedfastly on the travellers.
“Give her something, 'mon cher,'” said the lady to her companion in French; but the request was twice made before he seemed conscious of it. The woman, meanwhile, sat still, and neither made any demand for charity, or any appeal to their compassion.
“This is Glenflesk, my good woman,” said he at length, with the intonation of a foreign accent on the words.
The woman nodded assentingly, but made no reply.
“Whose estate is all this here?” said he, pointing with his hand to either side of the valley.
“'Sorra one o' me knows whose it is,” said the woman, in a voice of evident displeasure. “When I was a child it was the O'Donoghues', but they are dead and gone now—I don't know whose it is.”
“And the O'Donoghues are dead and gone, you say? What became of the last of them?—what was his fate?”
“Is it the one that turned Protestant you mean?” said the woman, as an expression of fiendish malignity shot beneath her dark brows: “he was the only one that ever prospered, because he was a heretic, maybe.”