Travelling in the corner of a carrier's waggon, after sharing the proprietor's sour milk and home-baked bannocks, did not look very like it; but was not this simply the beginning of the end?
When again they met, how much would he have to tell Flora, commencing with the very first night of his departure, and that horrible adventure in the vault of Kilhenzie.
But how if she married the Master, with his sneering smile and cat-like eyes?
This fear chilled him certainly; but he felt trustful. Hope inspires fresh love as love inspires hope, for they must grow and flourish together; and so on and on he dreamed, until a sudden jolt of the waggon roughly roused him, and he found that it was just crossing "the auld brig o' Ayr," the four strong and lofty arches of which first spanned the stream when Alexander II. was king.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE QUEEN ANNE'S HEAD.
"Well, suppose life be a desert? There are halting-places and shades, and refreshing waters; let us profit by them for to-day. We know that we must march on when to-morrow comes, and tramp on our destiny onward."—THACKERAY.
Having amply satisfied the worthy carrier, Quentin quitted the waggon, and proceeded through the bustling, but then narrow, unpaved, and ill-lighted streets of Ayr, towards one of the principal inns, the Queen Anne's Head, the only ONe in the town with which he was familiar, as Lord Rohallion's carriage occasionally stopped there. It was a large, rambling, old-fashioned house, with a galleried court, ample stabling, low ceiled rooms; with dark oak panels, heavy dormant beams, and stone fire-places; wooden balconies projecting over stone piazzas, tall gables, and turret-like turnpike stairs; and a mouldered escutcheon over the entrance door showed that in palmier days it had been the town mansion of some steel-coated lesser baron.
Hotels were still unknown in the three bailiwicks of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunninghame; thus in the yard behind the Queen Anne's Head, the stage coach, his majesty's mail (whose scarlet-coated guard bore pistols, and a blunderbuss that might have frightened Bonaparte), the carrier's waggon, the farmer's gig, and the lumbering, old-fashioned coaches of my Lord Rohallion, or the Earls of Cassilis and Eglinton, with their wooden springs and stately hammercloths, might all be seen standing side by side. Though war rendered the continent a sealed book to the English, Sir Walter Scott's poems and novels had not as yet opened up all Scotland to the tourists of Europe and Cockneydom. The kingdom of the Jameses could not be "done" then as now, by Brown, Jones, and Robinson, with knapsack on back (with Black's Guide and Bradshaw's Table, tartan peg-tops and paper collars), in a fortnight by rail and steam; hence a traveller on foot, and portmanteau in hand, was apt to be considered in the rural districts as an English pedlar or worse. Indeed, Scotland and England were then very little changed from what they had been in the days of William and Mary, and but for worthy old James Watt they might have been so still.
"I'll be extravagant—I'll have a jovial dinner and a glass of wine," thought Quentin, who, though pale and weary, had the appetite of a young hawk, notwithstanding all his doubts and troubles. "Which way?" he inquired of a surly-looking waiter, who stood at the inn door, with a towel over his arm; but this official, instead of replying, very leisurely surveyed Quentin from head to foot, and then glanced superciliously at his portmanteau.