Roger of Westmains, who had never before witnessed such scenes between Lady Alison and her son, or any of her family, gazed after her wistfully, and then surveying the young laird with a perplexed glance, he shook his white head in a way that might mean anything or nothing, just as one might choose to construe it, and withdrew after his fiery mistress.
Then, with the manner of one who had been thoroughly worried, Florence laid aside his book, took his mantle, sword, and coursing-hat; and ordering out his favourite grey, galloped from the tower at a furious pace, he knew not and cared not whither—anywhere to be rid of his mother's fierce taunts—of his own bitter thoughts and perplexities.
He had but one fixed wish as he cast his eyes to the green ridge of Soltra and the greener brow of Dunprender Law, that ere midnight the red blaze of those beacons he had so recently erected thereon might warn all Scotland of the coming foe! War itself would be a relief from the excitement or irritation he endured now.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE CHAPEL OF ST. MARTIN.
With a graceful step and stately,
Proud of heart and proud of mien;
With her deep eyes shining grayly,
Cometh Lady Madeline,
Trembling as with cold;
With cheek red-flush'd like daisy tip,
And full-ripe pouting ruby lip,
And hair of tawny gold.
Household Words.
Plato asserted that hopes were the dreams of people waking; and Thales the Milesian affirmed that hope was the most lasting of all things; for when all seemed lost to man, it still remained. Thus our lover, like every other lover before the flood, or since, hoped on, though prejudice, fortune, and hostility had raised between him and Madeline Home barriers that seemed all but insurmountable.
Skirting the green hill of Carberry, he reached the banks of the brawling and beautiful Esk, then a deeper and a broader river than now. He boldly swam his horse through it near Edmondstone Edge, and spurred over the then open wastes known as the mains of Sheriff Hall, where on the purple muir lay the green ridges and trenches of a Roman camp, with a gallows-tree—an old and thunder-riven oak, on which hung the bony fragments of one malefactor and the recently-executed body of another, who had been doomed to death by the Douglasses of Dalkeith. Down the steep slope from Newton-kirk he rode heedlessly, and passed the grey and ancient Ramparts of Craigmillar, where, with beacon and culverin, barred gate and moated wall, old Sir Symon Preston of that ilk, was preparing for the coming strife; then giving his horse the reins, he let him wander on, or crop the grass by the solitary way; for Florence was buried in sad thoughts, yet his eyes failed not to linger from time to time on the distant outline of the capital, upheaved upon its ridge of rock, all rugged, broken, and fantastic; the castle, spires, and every clustered mass of building, like the beetling brows of Salisbury and Arthur's bare round cone, tinted by the deep red of the western sun—a tint that seemed the brighter when contrasted with the fields of yellow corn that swayed their full ripe ears in the foreground, and the green masses of oak foliage that covered all the burghmuir in the middle distance of that lovely landscape.
From the hill which is crowned by the ancient village of Kirkliberton, he rode slowly on till he reached Kilmartin, a little cell or chapel in a sequestered part of the eastern flank of the broom-covered hills of Braid. It was a plain edifice with lancet windows, and had a cross on its gable; it was of great antiquity, having been built by a baron of Mortonhall, who had gone to the Holy Land, and who, when lying wounded by a poisoned arrow, on the shore at Galilee, had made a vow to found a cell, if he ever saw his native land again. Two aged sycamores cast a sombre shadow over a few green graves which lay within the low, half-ruined wall that enclosed the precincts. Those grass-covered mounds marked the last resting-places of various hermits who had succeeded Father Martin, who though locally canonized as a saint, is now forgotten (at least his history is only known to ourselves), and who, like him, had occupied the little cottage close by the chapel, and had drawn the element of baptism from the spring of pure water that sparkled as it poured in the sunshine over a ledge of whin rock, and gurgled in torquoise-blue between the ripe corn-rigs, and under the yellow broom-bells, to join the Burn of Braid.
The story of Father Martin is somewhat singular. Among the five thousand military pilgrims from Scotland, who accompanied David Earl of Garioch to Palestine, there was a citizen of Edinburgh, named Martin Oliver. In the year 1191 he found himself with the army of Richard of England, then besieging Ptolmais. Having been guilty of some crime, Oliver, to avoid punishment, deserted to the Saracens, and became, outwardly, a renegade to his religion. Tormented day and night by his conscience, he endured the utmost misery, and on his knees vowed to atone to God for his crime. One day when posted as a sentinel on the outworks of the town, he perceived not far from him a Christian soldier, in whom he recognized a comrade, one of Earl David's band, named John Durward, whom he addressed in the Scottish tongue, telling him that he was weary of life, and longed to atone for his pretended apostasy. A communication was thus kept up from time to time, and on a certain night, Martin Oliver introduced the Scottish Crusaders "into a part of the city." The English followed, and Ptolmais was immediately captured. So says Hector Boethius, and Maimbourg, in his "Histoire des Croisades," adds, that assuredly the Christian princes had a sure intelligencer within the town. Oliver returned to his native land, and in a hermitage amid the lonely hills of Braid he passed his days in prayer and penance for his apostasy, and to atone for serving the enemies of God, in a city where the true cross was said to be destroyed.