This was her first night in the tomb—in that old and desolate burying-ground, among the weedy graves, the mossy headstones, and remains of the mouldering dead.
It seemed to Kenneth that she must be very cold and very lonely there. The conviction was a bitter one, that she, so young, so beautiful, so golden-haired—who had yet so much of this world about her—should be lying there abandoned to decay, with no one beside her—among the ghastly dead, and not as usual in her bed, in the little tapestried room which her own dear hands had industriously decorated, and which Kenneth knew so well. The idea had something in it frightful and unnatural.
It seemed as if she must still be living! Kenneth could not realise her death. But there was an appalling recollection of a convulsed face, a mouth flowing with blood, a grave, a coffin, a shovelling of earth, a batting down of sods, a trampling of feet, and a sound of lamentation.
She was in her cold and sequestered grave for the first time, with the midnight dew descending upon the grass that covered her.
The pale trooper shuddered, and, turning his horse, galloped furiously down the opposite side of the hill, on his mission of vengeance.
* * * *
At this time the hereditary commissary of the Isles under James VI., Archibald seventh Earl of Argyle, and nineteenth chief of his race, a youth only twenty years of age, with the royal standard displayed, and half authorised by the king, was levying war against the Catholics of Scotland; but principally against his own enemies, the Earls of Huntly and Errol, who were the heads of the Roman faction. As the old ballad says—
"Macallum Mhor came frae the west, with many a bow and brand,
To waste the Rinnes he thought it best, the Earl of Huntly's land."
Suddenly assembling 12,000 men, a force which included the hardy islesmen of Sir Lauchlan M'Lean, the M'Intoshes under their chief, the Grants of Urquhart under Gartenbeg, a lesser baron of the clan; the M'Gregors and M'Neils under Barra, and the whole tribe of Campbell, whose fighting force was never under 5000 claymores, together with all whom a thirst for plunder, or feudal malice against the clan Gordon, could induce to join him, Argyle marched through Badenoch in hostile array, with pipes sounding and banners displayed. Repulsed by the MacPhersons, a brave and military tribe who had thrown themselves into the strong fortress of Ruthven, he poured down between the dark pine-woods of Strathspey, in the territory of the Grants, and encamping at Drimnin, upon the beautiful banks of the Avon—the winding river—summoned the Forbeses, the Frazers, the Dunbars, and the M'Kenzies to his standard; but there one solitary horseman alone joined him—Kenneth Logie of Culbleine.
George Earl of Huntly, and Francis Earl of Errol, great constable of Scotland, and hereditary leader of the feudal cavalry, the two nobles on whom this warlike torrent had burst from the northern and western hills, were in no way dismayed; for though steady and unflinching Catholics (and as such suspected of having corresponded with the Spaniards, when their Armada was fitted out against our old hereditary enemies), they knew that James VI., far from being inimical to the Romish cause, was only constrained by popular clamour, and the Reformed clergy, to levy war against them. They knew well that in secret he was friendly to the faith for which his mother—the poor victim of accumulated treasons—perished; and that though he had sent Argyle, an impetuous and inexperienced youth, against them, he would by no means take the field in person. They also knew that the Grants of Gartenbeg, the Campbells of Lochnell, and other Catholic families, who followed the banner of Argyle, with whom they reckoned blood, could not feel warmly in his cause; and thus, never doubting that God would give the victory to the cross which they carried on their ensigns, those brave Lords of Huntly and of Errol took the field with confidence.