A sensation of lassitude came upon Florence, who felt weary after his long and rough ride; and as the red flush of the August sun faded away behind the purple hills, and its warm tints grew cold on the rugged stems and crisping leaves of the Druid oaks of Cadzow, his mind became impressed by the sylvan beauty and intense solitude of the scenery, and reverted to those whose faces he had that morning left behind him; and, like all who have travelled, far and rapidly, he felt the difficulty of realizing the extent of distance that actually lay between him and them. With the last light of evening lingering on his glittering coat of mail, and the bridle of his white horse drooping over his right arm, he sat under a shady oak, like a knight errant of old, waiting for adventures; but though witches and fairies remained in Scotland, the age of giants and dwarfs and genii had passed away.
He thought of his mother, pale, austere, and reproachful; loving him well, fondly,—yea, madly,—and yet, withal, so ready to peril his life in maintaining her old hereditary feud, in the fulfilment of her savage vow, and for the gratification of her morbid vengeance—a life which might yet be useful to her queen and country—a young life, which the possessor of it had suddenly found to be invested with a new charm, a hitherto unknown value; and here, drawing off his long glove, he gazed on the opal ring of Madeline—Madeline who?
"Oh, perplexity!" he exclaimed; "'tis a romance with which our coquettish French queen is amusing herself, and of which she wishes to make me and this beloved girl the hero and heroine."
And, sunk in one of those reveries so natural to a lover, when he seems to talk to, and have responses from, the object beloved; when a thousand things are said that were omitted when last with her,—for when the heart is full, thoughts come quicker than language, Fawside remained in the twilight and in the forest, with the gloaming deepening around him, heedless alike of the outlaws who were averred to make their haunt there, and of the ferocious white bulls (Bos sylvestris), the famous red-eyed, black-horned, black-hoofed, and snowy-maned mountain bison of old Caledonia, herds of which have frequented the Forest of Cadzow from pre-historic days, long anterior to the Roman invasion, down to the present time.
On every hand spread the vast wilderness of oaks, some of which still measure twenty-five and twenty-eight feet in circumference, and are of an antiquity so great that they must have witnessed the rites of the Druids; being the last remains of that immense forest which anciently covered all the south of Scotland, from the waves of the Atlantic to those of the German Ocean.
In the wildest part of this wild wood—the Caledonia Sylva—stood the tower of Allan Duthie of Millheugh, in a little dell near a ruined and mossgrown mill, the fragments of which were overshadowed by an oak of stupendous dimensions, known as King Malcolm's Tree, from the following little legend, which (as we dearly love all that pertained to Scotland "in the brave days of old") we will take the liberty of inserting here.
A few years after the fall of Macbeth and the destruction of his castle of Dunsinane, Queen Margaret, Evan, the chancellor and Christian bishop of Galloway, revealed to King Malcolm III. a design which Duthac, one of his thanes, on whom he had bestowed many favours, had formed against his life, and which he resolved to put in execution as soon as he came to court.
"Be silent," said the king, "and leave me to deal with this matter in my own way."
Ere long, the accused noble came to court with a numerous train of half-savage warriors, barelegged and barearmed, from the wilds of Galloway, and on the day thereafter, Malcolm, who was residing in the Castle of Stirling, proclaimed a great hunting-match, and set forth for Cadzow Forest to hunt the mountain bull. In the most secluded part of the wood, he contrived to separate Duthac from the rest of the royal party, and drawing him into a gloomy little dell, under the shadow of a mighty oak, he leaped from his saddle and said,—
"Thane, dismount!"