"'Sblood—act, then!"
"How now, my lord—your highness—gentlemen, what is astir?" asked Sir Patrick Gray, stepping out of a daggermaker's shop at that moment; "beware, sirs—and up with your swords; remember that it is an act of treason to draw within four miles of the king or the lord high constable, and both are now in our burgh of bonnie Dundee."
"Damn the constable, and the burgh of Dundee to boot! My daughter Margaret has been carried off by violence; there hath been hership and hamesücken overnight, Sir Patrick, and as a knight and gentleman, and moreover as the king's good soldier, I claim your assistance."
"Carried off!—the beautiful Margaret!" exclaimed Gray, with well-feigned astonishment; "by St. Mirran! there hath been foul play, then; for alas, my lord, as last night I rode along the beach to Broughty, I heard shrill cries, as from a woman on the water."
"Kyrie Eleison!" ejaculated the prince, trembling, and growing paler than death, at the terrible thoughts this information suggested, and he wept aloud.
"Some of James's courtly minions——" began Gray.
"Have been at work here," interrupted Lord Drummond, passionately; "thinkest thou so, too? Then the king shall do me justice, or this right hand, which has so often fenced his father's throne, shall be the first to thrust a lighted torch under it now. Come with me, sirs," he added, hurling his long sword into its sheath of crimson velvet; "come with me, the king is now in council."
As they hurried up the wynd, taking the bewildered Rothesay with them, they heard the clatter of many hoofs, and saw the Earl of Angus, sheathed in complete armour, and attended by not less than five hundred spearmen on horseback, all heavily accoutred, pass at a hard gallop along the Nethergaitt, towards the king's residence.
"Now, what may this portend?" asked Carnock and Ballock together, with surprise.
"Heaven only knows," said Gray, laughing under his thick beard; "but the Douglasses never mount without good cause, be assured, sirs. How this plot thickens," thought he, as he looked towards the dim blue sea; "and how readily this muleheaded old lord, who hath no ideas of his own, adopts the good or evil suggestions of other. Now, Sauchie and I have them all, like puppets, in our grasp! But I would fain see the mouth of yonder fellow, Borthwick, stopped with earth for ever!"