"Spoken like yoursel—like the wild Randal Clermont o' 1670. But what do ye propose?"
"To carry off Lilian and make a Highland wedding of it—ha, ha!"
"Hee, hee! abduction, reif, and felony, anent whilk see the acts of the seventh parliament of James V. and James VI. Parliament twenty-first, chapter fourth—hee, hee! these would bear hard on your case, my birkie."
"Pshaw! am not I, too, a Lord of the Parliament? so, friend Mersington, reserve this musty jargon for the Hall of the Tolbooth. How often hath a Scottish baron with his band ridden to its threshold with jack and spear, and while his trumpets blew defiance at the Cross, laughed the fulminations of the three estates to scorn!"
"Ye mean mad Bothwell, with his thousand spears; but Clermistonlee, wi' his man Juden, would cut a sorry figure riding up the gate on the same errand."
"But the mere abduction of a girl?"
"It canna be sae bad in law, as abducting that dour auld carle, Durie the Lord President, whom a mosstrooping loon, by orders o' Traquair, carried off bodily, across his saddlebow, frae the dreary Figget whins, and warded for sax calendar months in the vault o' a Border peel. For my part, I have hated the name o' womankind since my Lady Mersington had me fined a thousand merks Scots, for that damned conventicle whilk, in my absence, she held on my lands. But Gude be thanked, I had my vengeance, by having her banished the liberties of the city, for hearing that Recusant runion Ichabod Bummel preach, whilk rid me and a' Bess Wynd o' her eternal clack. Faith, Clermistonlee, ye are welcome to abduct her, gif ye please, he, he!"
"I thank you, gossip, but beg to decline," said Clermistonlee, draining his tankard of sack; "but to show thee, most learned senator, the value and veneration I bear those acts you have just cited, I shall this very night carry off Lilian Napier, whom, my spies inform me to be concealed somewhere to the south of the town. O, by all the devils, I'll easily find the place. My blood's up; I will make my fortune to-night, or mar it for ever."
His sallow cheek glowed, his dark eye flashed, and taking a very handsome pair of pistols from the mantelpiece, he began to load them with great deliberation having previously summoned his faithful rascal Juden, by furiously ringing a handbell.
"What's in the wind now, my Lord?" he asked, rubbing his eyes, having been abruptly summoned from an afternoon nap.