Thick dark beeches and darker oaks waved over them; the gigantic reliques of the great forest of Drumsheugh, beneath whose shade in the days of other years, the savage wolf, the stately elk, the bristly boar, and the magnificent white bull of ancient Caledonia, had roamed in all the glory of unbounded freedom, on the site now occupied by the Scottish capital.
The blustering wind of March swept through their leafless branches, and whirled the last year's leaves along the lonely and grass-grown avenue, a turn of which brought the detachment at once in front of the mansion.
The Wrytes-house, or Castle of Bruntisfield, was a high and narrow edifice, built in that striking and peculiar style of architecture which has again become so common—the old Scottish. It was several stories in height, and had steep corbie-stoned gables with little round turrets at every angle, a lofty circular tower terminating in a slated spire, numerous dormer windows, the acute gablets of which were surmounted by thistles, rosettes, crescents, and stars. Every casement was strongly grated, and the tall fantastic outline of the mansion rose from the old woodlands against the murky sky in a dark opaque mass, as the soldiers passed the barbican gate, and found themselves close to the oak-door, which closed the central tower.
The night was still and dark; at times a red star gleamed tremulously amid the flying vapour, or a ray of moonlight cast a long and silvery line of radiance across the beautiful sheet of water to the eastward. The turret-vanes, and old ancestral oaks creaked mournfully in the rising wind, and the venerable rooks that occupied their summits croaked and screamed in concert.
"A noble old mansion!" said Walter Fenton; "and if tradition says truly, was built by our gallant James IV. for one of his frail fair ones."
"It dates as far back as the days of the first Stuart, and men say, Walter, that its founder was William de Napier, a stark warrior of King Robert II.; but fair though the mansion, and broad the lands around it, the greedy gleds of our council-board will soon rend all piecemeal. Soldiers, blow your matches, and give all who attempt to escape a prick of the hog's-bristle."
The musqueteers cautiously surrounded the lofty edifice, resistance to the death being an every-day occurrence—but the windows remained dark, and the vast old manor-house exhibited no sign of life, save where between the half-parted shutters of a thickly-grated window a ray of flaky light streamed into the obscurity without. To this opening the curious macer immediately applied his legal eye, and cried in a loud whisper,
"Look ye here, Sirs, and behauld the godly Maister Ichabod himsel' sitting in the cosiest neuk o' the ingle between the auld lady and her kinswoman. Hech! a gallows'-looking buckie he is as ever skirled a psalm in the muirlands, or testified at the Bowfoot, wi' a St. Johnstoun cravat round his whaislin craig."
"Silence!" said Fenton in an agitated voice, as, clutching the haft of his poniard, he applied his face to the barred window; "silence, wretch, or I will trounce thee!" and the scowling macer could perceive that his colour came and went, and that his eye sparkled with vivacity as he took a rapid survey of the apartment. "Fool, fool!" he muttered, as a cracked voice was heard singing
"I like ane owle in desart am,
That nichtlie there doth moan;
I like unto ane sparrow am,
On the house-top alone."