Long and deep was the sorrow of the old and lonely Malcolm, who returned to his grim and gloomy tower among the woods of Dunfermline, and committing the care of the kingdom to Dunbar, the justiciar of Lothian, Duncan, the chancellor, and Nicholas, the secretary, he gave himself up to grief and contemplation, prayer, and long communings with Gregory the Bishop of Saint Andrew's, who made him found and endow thirteen chapels to St. Mary, in thirteen different districts; a proceeding which, if it failed to ease the mind of the king, at least eased his treasurer of all the superfluous cash in his exchequer.
CHAPTER LXII.
STORY CONTINUED—"ERIS-SKENE!"
"Horsed on a speckled steed, Biserta's king
Traversed the extended line from wing to wing
To close the loose array he gave command—
Ten thousand lances flamed in every band;
And twice five squadrons in the van of war."—RONCISVALLES.
Now, when too late, the bereaved king thought he could willingly have bestowed his Cora upon even the humble huntsman, and believed he could happily have seen her the wife of Mac Ian, or of any honest man who would love her as she deserved to be loved; but now he had lost her in a moment, and in a manner so terrible that it seemed like a judgment direct from the hand of Heaven upon him, for his pride and severity; for, thought he,—
"I may control the bodies of my subjects, or those of my children, but God hath given me no power over the hearts or consciences of either. Woe is me! for the brightest diamond has fallen from my crown, and never more will my old bosom swell while she strikes her harp to the 'Battle of Cattraeth,' or never more will she soothe me to sleep with the low sad song of 'The Owl,' when the north wind soughs down the leafless glen, and the frozen lynn hangs owre the beetling craig like the beard on an auld carles chin. Oh, Cora! Cora!"
And the old king kept poor Cora's harp in his bed-chamber, and often in the stillness of midnight he wept, while his thin and wrinkled hands wandered among the strings, and woke their old familiar sounds again and again, till her voice seemed to mingle with them.
Now it happened that although her Arabian steed was drowned, the princess, by some blessed miracle of Providence, escaped; for she had been caught in her descent by one of the spouts or boiling streams that ascended upward from the bottom of the den, and unseen among the clouds of light and vapoury spray was flung far over a ledge of rocks into the smoother water beyond; and while the king, her sire, and all his bearded thanes, in their steel caps and iron lurichs, were beating their breasts, calling upon all the saints, and fixing their eyes upon the hazy horrors of the gulf below the lynn, she was swept gently onward, in a dream as it were; and then the hands of some one seemed to buoy her up; then she felt herself conveyed into a dark and shady chasm of rock, overhung by a gorgeous mass of wild-roses and ivy, honeysuckle and sweetbrier; and there, upon a bank of daisies and violets, kind hands laid her gently down—a hot breath came upon her cheek, as some one tenderly parted her soft and wet dishevelled hair from her chilled and pallid cheek; and after remaining long insensible, she opened her eyes to meet the enraptured face of the bold Mac Ian Rua, for he it was who had saved her.
No other leech than love was necessary to bring the half-drowned princess to life. Her heart soon beat with joy, and amid the double raptures of her escape and reunion with her lover, she forgot the sorrow of her bereaved father, and the terror of her friends on the summit of the cascade, from which she had been so awfully precipitated and so miraculously saved; and for the fleeting hours of that soft summer day till the sun sank behind the hills of Lanarkshire, she listened to the adventures of her banished lover, and heard him repeat a hundred times over all he had endured in danger, absence, doubt, and grief, while hovering in disguise near the court of the king; how he had accompanied her step by step from the palace in Fife to the banks of the Clyde; and how by the goodness of Heaven he had chanced to be at hand, and ready to save her from a death so terrible, by plunging boldly into the fierce and seething flood beyond the waterfall.
Love, like death, levels all distinctions,—and indeed he knows of none; thus, the daughter of the king assured Mac Ian that her passion was yet unchanged; and laving their clasped hands in the water that flowed at their feet—that perilous water from which Cora had so wondrously escaped—after the old fashion of Scottish lovers, they vowed to be leal and true, and wished that if one deserted or forgot the other, that God and the saints might so desert and forget the faithless and untrue.