"Hollo, fellow!" he cried imperiously, "keep out of my horse's way—dost want thy bones broken!" and giving a keen but casual glance at the dejected wanderer, he spurred onward to the city.
Suddenly he reined up so sharply as almost to pull his pawing steed back upon its strained and bending haunches.
"'Tis he!" exclaimed the proud lord, as he thought aloud. "By the great father of confusion 'tis he! How could I mistake, though truly, poor devil, these last five years have sadly changed him. But on what fool's errand comes he here? By all the furies, I knew his lachrymose visage in a moment, though the despatches of Dalrymple of Stair, to our Lords of Council, had in some sort prepared me for his return, and for what?—to organize a plot for James's restoration. Poor fool! Infatuated in love as in politics. He believes in the faith of women and the word of Kings; let us see how they will avail him tonight."
He smiled scornfully, and twisted the heavy dark mustachios which he still cherished with more than Mahommedan veneration. Alternately sad and bitter thoughts swelled within him as he remembered the joyous revelry of King Charles's days, and the tyranny he could then exercise over all nonconformists, and the hunting and hosting-dragooning and drinking of the Covenanting wars; then came feelings of jealousy and revenge that, as they blazed up in his proud breast, bore all before them.
"How dares he now to prowl before my own gates? Gadso! if my Lady Lilian sees him once, there will be a pretty disturbance. A shipload of devils will be nothing to it. The girl will die, and my own house will become too hot to hold me. D——nation! too well have I seen the secret passion that has preyed upon her gentle and affectionate heart—the grief—the deep consuming grief that all my magnificent presents and gentle blandishments have failed to soothe. A thousand curses on this upstart beggar, and a thousand more on the mother of mischief, who has raised him up again to cross my path! By what power hath he escaped war and woe, and storm and every danger again to thwart and come in the way of Clermistonlee, whose purposes were never yet foiled by man, or woman either? 'S death! the time has come when the cord of the doomster, or the axe of the maiden, must rid me for ever of this old source of dark forebodings and secret inquietude. Ho, for a guard and a warrant of Council, and then Sir Walter Fenton, Knight Banneret, the Jacobite spy, Chevalier of St. Louis, ex-private soldier, and soi-disant ensign to the Lord Dunbarton, may look to himself! Ha, ha!" and dashing spurs into his horse he galloped madly into the city.
CHAPTER XX.
THE BUBBLE BURST.
To linger when the sun of life,
The beam that gilt its path is gone—
To feel the aching bosom's strife,
When Hope is dead, but Love lives on.
ANONYMOUS.
Meanwhile, without recognising Clermistonlee, and not aware that he had been recognized by him, poor Walter, who was of that temperament which is easily raised and depressed, turned away from the gate, crushed beneath the load of a thousand fears at the sight of so gay a cavalier caracoling down the avenue of Bruntisfield.
His heart was overcharged with melancholy reflections. "I have been away for five years—in all that time we have never heard of each other. Oh, what if she should have deemed me dead!"