The coast of Fife looked close and gloomy, the headlands were drenched in foam; the fir woods and deeply caverned shore of Kilconquhar were black and dreary; the sun became fiery and red, while the wind came in hollow, sudden, and furious gusts, an the vessels ran into the broad and beautiful Bay of Largo, and came to anchor abreast of the little town, which was then thriving under the fatherly care of the noble merchant-skipper, and was protected by the strong castle he had built with the royal permission, on becoming the king's chief admiral, and being made a knight and baron of Parliament.
As the summer sky was darkening fast, and some of the ships were injured in their hulls, Sir Andrew ordered all the hammocks to be stowed below; the culverins to be double-breeched, the deadlights to be shipped, and the sheet anchors to be let go, as the vessels had to ride on an ebb and lee tide. He then conveyed Lady Margaret and her two English attendants, with Howard, Miles Furnival, and all the gentlemen of their squadron, ashore, and conducted them to his Castle of Largo, the gates of which were barely closed behind them, before the summer storm burst forth with all its fury, and its drenching rain that sowed the sea and smoked along the shore, while the chill east wind, swayed the heavy woods and made the ships careen in the bay, as it swept round each bare headland, and the rifted nesses of Fife.
"Truly Horace was right," sighed Father Zuill, as he saw the squadron straining on their cables, "when he said that 'he who ventured first to sea had a soul of triple brass!'"
CHAPTER XLV.
ST. ANTHONY'S BELL.
"The gruntil of St. Anthony's sow,
Quhilk bore his holy bell."—SIR D. LINDESAY.
Next day it became known among all the ports on both sides of the Forth, that Admiral Wood had won another victory—that his three favourite followers, Mathieson, Barton of Leith, and Falconer of Bo'ness, had escaped without scaith, and the bells in more than a hundred steeples rang joyously, while the ships hoisted all their colours and streamers in the roadstead, at the Hope, and in the harbours.
In the house of Barton, the insurgent nobles held a deep carouse, and drank the Rhenish and Malvoisie of the umquhile Sir Andrew with a relish all the greater that it cost them nothing. Among the company were four persons, at least, who would rather have hailed a disastrous defeat than this unexpected victory.
These were the Lords Home and Hailes—who had great hopes that their troublesome rivals might have been sent to a better world; but chiefly Sir Patrick Gray and Sir James Shaw, with others of their servile and infamous faction, who were thunderstruck by the intelligence; for they had never doubted, when the Admiral dropped down the river with two vessels only, that he was running into the jaws of destruction. But it is strange that Wood, in all his naval battles, had to contend against great odds, yet never once was beaten. And now the cosmopolitans of the English faction trembled, as they remembered their bond with Henry, and feared that unless the lips of Margaret Drummond were sealed for ever, their projects would all be revealed to Rothesay, of whom, boy as he was, they knew enough to be assured of a terrible retribution.
Lord Drummond—that irascible old patrician—had peremptorily warned his daughters Euphemia and Sybilla to prepare for being espoused by Home and Hailes, whose new patents of nobility, he believed, would be issued as soon as the king's flight—his murder was yet unknown—was ascertained, and as soon as Rothesay was proclaimed king. Their uncle, the Dean of Dunblane—a facile priest, in all things subservient to his brother as chief of the clan Drummond, and, like most Scottish churchmen of that age, bent solely on the aggrandizement of his family,—was to perform the ceremony, which was fixed to take place on an early day. And as the venerable dean had long since been abstracted from all human sympathies, and become a mere mummy in a cassock and scapular, the poor girls had now no hope in anything, and no resource but their tears, which were likely to avail them little; for in Scotland, in those days, the rights of women were as little known, or nearly as ill defined, as among the Asiatics in the present; for cruel coercion and abduction at the sword's point were of daily occurrence, as the criminal records show, until the middle of the last century.