Meanwhile the Dutch drums beat merrily up for recruits, which poured to the banner of the invader on all hands, and horses were brought to mount the cavalry and drag the artillery.
All was lost!
The unhappy king, deserted nearly by all, found none near him to whom he could apply for consolation or advice, or in whom he could confide. By the instigation of Lady Churchill, even his daughter, the Princess Anne, left him, and retired to Nottingham. On finding himself now, when in the utmost extremity of distress, abandoned by a favourite daughter, whom he had ever treated with the utmost affection and tenderness, James raised his eyes and hands to heaven, and bursting into a passion of tears,—
"God help me!" he exclaimed, in the greatest agony of spirit; "God help me now, for even my own children, in my distress, have forsaken me!"
* * * *
CHAPTER XVII.
THE GUISARDS.
O mother, thus to fret is vain—
My loss must needs be borne;
Death, death is now mine only gain—
Would I had ne'er been born.
God's mercies cease to flow—
Woe to me, poor one, woe!
BURGER'S LEONORA.
Walter had now been absent many weeks, and the constant fears expressed by Lady Grisel, with all the querulous and tedious prolixity of age, in no way tended to soothe the anxiety of Lilian. She was excessively superstitious, though guileless, kind, and simple, and daily saw terrible omens of impending ill. Black corbies flapped their wings incessantly on the steep gables, and the dead-bell was never done ringing in the cranies of the old house. Strange sounds rumbled behind the wainscoting, shrouds guttered in the candles, coffins fell out of the embers, and the indefatigable death-watch rang the live-long night in the recesses of her old tester bed. Her kindly-meant, but ominous insinuations, and her dreams of stricken fields and riderless horses, nearly drove Lilian to distraction, while old Elsie Elshender, who had been admitted to her confidence, failed not to make matters worse by shaking her palsied head mysteriously, and saying—
"It boded ill-luck to be betrothit wi' a dead woman's ring."