It was in the gray of the dawn. Dick was riding at the head of the party, who followed in single file, for the tract lay through some boggy and broken ground in which two horses could not go abreast. Suddenly a hare that had been cropping the dank herbage thus early, stole into the path in front of them, and leaped slowly along under the very nose of the henchman’s charger. This, although an untoward omen, was too common an occurrence to create alarm. There was an established formula for all such cases made and provided. Though too good a Protestant to cross himself, Dick repeated the customary charm with edifying gravity; but, as though in defiance, the hare still kept on in front of them. At three different angles in the path she hesitated, seeming about to turn off to right or left, and then hopped slowly on in the direction they were travelling. The stout borderers grew pale. It was even proposed that they should retrace their steps and abandon the enterprise; but Dick suggested that as he was the person immediately in front, his must be the entire risk, and the warning must be especially intended for him. The others were well satisfied to take this view of the matter, and presently they were discoursing as blithely as before; but their leader felt a depression of spirits creeping over him, which he strove in vain to overcome, and as the gloom gathered darker and darker about him, he felt in the depths of his rude nature that presentiment of coming death, which, let philosophers say what they will, is no unusual precursor of the final catastrophe.
His past life comes back to him with strange vividness as he rides silently on. His father’s rude gray tower at the head of the glen; the sunny, grassy nook, where he used to play, by the shallow burn, with five sturdy urchins like himself, and one golden-haired brother, whom they missed at last from amongst them, and told each other in awed whispers, looking up at the sky the while, how ‘Willie was gone to heaven.’ Till to-day he had almost forgotten the gleam of his father’s broadsword, and the caresses of a gentle, care-worn woman who used to hush him to sleep with low plaintive songs. He remembers, too, with peculiar distinctness, that first ride on the tall bay gelding, and the mimic lance with which he drove his imaginary foray.
These early memories are clearer to him now than many a real scene of plunder and bloodshed in which he knows he has since taken too much delight, but his devotion to his chief is as intense as ever, albeit dashed with something of a melancholy tenderness that seems unnatural, and derogatory to both.
Another figure, too, comes flitting across the borderer’s mental sight—a figure that is seldom long absent from his dreams either by day or night—a figure that he dares to dwell on now for the first time these long weeks past without shame, because he feels that he is about to vindicate his loyalty to all belonging to her, or to her Queen.
He can almost hear the ringing tones of her voice, can almost catch the flutter of her dress. Surely he is bewitched! Bewitched, or else irrevocably doomed to death. As he gathers a sprig of witch-elm and fastens it in his morion, he says to himself that if he is really to die, he should like to see Mary Seton just once again.
CHAPTER XXXV.
‘For this is love, and this alone,
Not counting cost, nor grudging gain,