It was a time of the deepest mental agony. A century seemed to have elapsed since the morning. His thoughts were all chaos and confusion, save one, which was terrible and distinct enough,—that he stood by the threshold of his father's house, a stranger, a wanderer, and there was no hand to grasp his, no voice to bid him welcome. After lingering long, he turned sorrowfully from the tower, to awaken some of the peasantry at the clachan. On re-passing the ruined gate, he saw, what had before escaped his observation,—a large ticket or board nailed to the grass-grown wall of the barbican. He approached, and by the light of the moon read the following—
"NOTICE.
"Any person or persons found trespassing on the lands of Rosemount Tower, will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law, by the Proprietor, Zachary Macquabester, Esq., of Rosemount.
"N.B.—Informers will be handsomely rewarded, on applying to Mr. Macquibble, writer, Spy-gate, Perth."
The place swam around him.
"Rosemount Tower! The Proprietor, confound him!" exclaimed Ronald, bursting into fury, "and is it come to this?"
With a heart sick and sore with disappointment, grief, and mortified pride, he descended to the little street of thatched cottages named the Clachan. Here all was silence and desolation too. In some places the roofs had fallen in, and rafters stuck through the thatch, like ribs through the skin of a skeleton: the chimneys had fallen down, and the doors and windows were gone. The hamlet was in ruins. The household fires had been quenched; and as he surveyed the deserted place, he became painfully aware that his people—those among whom his race had moved as demi-gods—were gone forth, and that the place of their birth, and which held the bones of their forefathers, knew them no longer.
The glen, which in his boyhood had maintained two hundred men in what seemed ease and competence to a people so primitive, was now desert and waste. The mountains, the wood, and the water were still there, as they had been in the days of Fingal; but the people had passed away, and Ronald Stuart, to whom the Gaëlic sobriquet,—Ronald an deigh nam finn, might now be truly applied, departed slowly and sadly from Lochisla.
He did not weep—he was too tough a soldier for that,—and therefore could not experience the calm feeling of resignation and relief given to an overcharged bosom by a gush of hot, salt tears; but, with a heart bursting with fierce feelings and sad remembrances, he departed from the valley just as the waning moon sank behind the darkening mountains. He rode slowly at first; but anon he drove his sharp spurs into the flanks of his horse, and rode towards Inchavon at break-neck speed, as if he would flee from his own thoughts, and leave his sorrows far behind him. But the first gush of gloom and disappointment having somewhat subsided, he strove to calm his agitated spirit, and he derived some consolation in the timely recollection that, although Lowland innovation might have expatriated the people of Lochisla, his father might yet be alive. Eager to learn some tidings, he galloped along with the speed of the wind, outstripping the gathering storm.
"Ha! here is Inchavon at last! Dear Alice will explain to me all this strange mystery."