“Ye have done me the chief honor a man can offer to a woman, Mr. Pollock, and Jean Cochrane will never forget that ye asked her in marriage. It cannot be, and it is better that I should say this without delay or uncertain speech, but I pray you, Mr. Henry, understand why, and think me not a proud or foolish girl. It is not that I do not know that you are a holy and a brave man, whom the folk rightly consider to be a saint, and whom others say would have made a gallant soldier. It is not that I doubt the woman ye wedded would be well and tenderly loved, for, I confess to you, ye seem to me to have the making of a perfect husband. And it is not that I”––and here she straightened herself––“would be afraid of any danger, or any suffering either, for myself or you. I should bid it welcome, and if I saw you laid dead for the cause ye love, I should take you in my arms and kiss you on the mouth, though you were red with blood, as I never kissed you living on our marriage day.” And she carried her head as a queen at the moment of her coronation.
“No,” she went on, while the glow faded and her voice grew gentle; “it is for two reasons, but one of them I tell you only to yourself, in the secrecy of your honor. I admire and I––reverence you as one lifted above 113 me like a saint, but this is not the feeling of a woman for the man that is to be her husband. I do not love you as I know I shall in an instant love the man who is to be my man when I first see him, and for whom I shall forsake without any pang my father’s house, or else, if he appear not, I shall never wed. That mayhap is reason enough, but I am dealing with you as a friend this day. Though my name be in the Covenant, I am not sure––oh, those are dark times––whether I would write it to-day with my own hand. I might be able to do so when I was your wife, but that I may not be. Yet it is left to me, Mr. Henry, to have your name in my prayers, that God may keep you in the hard road ye have chosen, and give you in the end a glorious crown. And I will ask of you to mention at a time Jean Cochrane before the throne of grace. For surely ye will be heard, and blessed shall she be for whom ye pray.”
For an instant there was silence, and then, before she left, Lady Jean, as Pollock stood with head sunk on his breast and lips moving in prayer, bent forward and kissed him on the forehead. When an hour later the minister descended to Lady Cochrane’s room, he told her that his suit was hopeless, but that he was thankful unto God that he had spoken with Lady Jean.
CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF THE AMALEKITE
It would have been hard to find within the civilized world a more miserable and distracted country than Scotland at the date of our history, and the West Country was worst of all. The Covenanters, who were never averse to fighting, had turned upon Claverhouse and his dragoons when they came to disperse a field-meeting at Drumclog, and had soundly beaten the King’s Horse. Then, gathering themselves to a head and meeting the royal forces under the Duke of Monmouth at Bothwell Bridge, they had in turn been hopelessly crushed. What remained of their army was scattered by the cavalry, and since that day, with some interludes, Claverhouse had been engaged in the inglorious work of dispersing Presbyterian Conventicles gathered in remote places among the hills, or searching the moss-hags for outlawed preachers. It was a poor business for one who had seen war on the grand scale under the Prince 115 of Orange, and had fought in battles where eighteen thousand men were left on the field. War was not the name for those operations, they were simply police work of an irksome and degrading kind. There were some who said that Claverhouse gloried in it, and that the inherent cruelty of his nature was gratified in causing obstinate Covenanters, who had not taken the oath, to be shot on the spot, and haling others to prison, where they were treated with extreme barbarity. Others believed that being a man of broad mind and chivalrous temper, he absolutely disapproved of the government policy and loathed the butcher work to which he and his troopers were set.
Upon one way of it he was a bloodthirsty tyrant, and upon the other he was an obedient soldier, but the truth was with neither view. There is no doubt that, like any other ambitious commander, he would much rather have been engaged in a proper campaign, and it may be granted that as a brave man he did not hanker to be the executioner of peasants; but he absolutely approved of the policy of his rulers, and had no scruple in carrying it out. It was the only thing that could be done, and it had better be done thoroughly; the sooner the turbulent and irreconcilable Covenanters 116 were crushed and the country reduced to peace the better for Scotland. And it must be remembered that, though they were only a fraction of the nation, the hillmen were a very resolute and harassing fraction, and kept the western counties in a state of turmoil. No week passed without some picturesque incident being added to the annals of this lamentable religious war, and whether it was an escape or an arrest, an attack or a defeat, the name of Claverhouse was always in the story. The air was thick with rumors of his doings, and in every cottage enraged Covenanters spoke of his atrocities. No doubt the king had other officers quite as merciless and almost as active, and the names of men like Grierson of Lag and Bruce of Earleshall and that fierce old Muscovite fighter, General Dalziel, were engraved for everlasting reprobation upon the memory of the Scots people. But there was no superstition so mad that it was not credited to Claverhouse, and no act so wicked that it was not believed of him. During the hours of day he ranged the country, a monster thirsting for the blood of innocent men, and the hours of the evening he spent with his associates in orgies worthy of hell. His horse, famous for its fleetness and beauty, was supposed 117 to be an evil spirit, and as for himself, everyone knew that Claverhouse could not be shot except by a silver bullet, because he was under the protection of the devil. Perhaps it is not too much to say that during those black years––black for both sides, and very much so for Claverhouse––he was, in the imagination of the country folk, little else than a devil himself, and it was then he earned the title which has clung to him unto this day and been the sentence of his infamy, “Bloody Claverse.”
Although there were not many houses of importance in the west which Graham had not visited during those years, it happened that he had never been within Paisley Castle, and that he had never met any of the family except the earl and his aged countess. Lady Cochrane and the Covenanting servants could have given a thumb-nail sketch of him which would have done for a mediæval picture of Satan, and an accompanying letter-press of his character which would have been a slander upon Judas Iscariot. Her heroic ladyship had, however, never met Claverhouse, and she prayed God she never would, not because she was afraid of him or of the devil himself, but because she knew it would not be a pleasant interview on either side. But it 118 was not likely in those times that the Dundonalds should altogether escape the notice of the government, or that Graham, ranging through the country seeking whom he might devour, as the Covenanters said, should not find himself some day under their roof. The earl himself was known to be well affected, and in any case did not count, but Lady Cochrane was a dangerous woman, and her brother-in-law, Sir John, had been plotting against the government and was an exile. No one was much surprised when tidings came to the castle early one morning that Claverhouse with two troops of his regiment, his own and the one commanded by Lord Ross, Jean Cochrane’s cousin, was near Paisley, and that Claverhouse with Lord Ross craved the hospitality of the castle. It was natural that he should stay in the chief house of the neighborhood, and all the more as Lord Dundonald was himself notoriously loyal, but it was suspected that he came to gather what information he could about Sir John Cochrane, and to warn Lady Cochrane, the real ruler of the castle, to give heed to her ways.