As she said this, she put her arm in her father’s to lead him away; but Walter looked about him with a suspicious and startled eye, and drew somewhat back.
“You must go instantly,” continued she, “there is no time so fit; and whatever you may see or hear, be not alarmed, but follow me, and do as I bid you.”
“Nane o’ your cantrips wi’ me, Kate,” said Walter—“I see your drift weel eneugh, but ye’ll find yoursel disappointit. I hae lang expectit it wad come to this; but I’m determined against it.”
“Determined against what, my dear father?”
“Ye want to mak a warlock o’ me, ye imp o’ mischief,” said Walter; “but I hae taen up my resolution there, an’ a’ the temptations o’ Satan sanna shake it. Nah! Gudefaith, auld Wat o’ the Chapelhope’s no gaun to be led away by the lug an’ the horn to the deil that gate.”
Katharine’s mien had a tint of majesty in it, but it was naturally serious. She scarcely ever laughed, and but seldom smiled; but when she did so, the whole soul of delight beamed in it. Her face was like a dark summer day, when the clouds are high and majestic, and the lights on the valley mellowed into beauty. Her smile was like a fairy blink of the sun shed through these clouds, than which, there is nothing in nature that I know of so enlivening and beautiful. It was irresistible;—and such a smile beamed on her benign countenance, when she heard her father’s wild suspicions expressed in such a blunt and ardent way; but it conquered them all—he went away with her rather abashed, and without uttering another word.
They walked arm in arm up by the side of the burn, and were soon out of sight of Nanny and the boys. Walter was busy all the way trying to form some conjecture what the girl meant, and what was to be the issue of this adventure, and began to suspect that his old friends, the Covenant-men, were some way or other connected with it; that it was they, perhaps, who had the power of raising those spirits by which his dwelling had been so grievously haunted, for he had heard wonderful things of them. Still there was no coindication of circumstances in any of the calculations that he was able to make, for his house had been haunted by Brownie and his tribe long ere he fell in with the fugitive Covenanters. None of them had ever given him the least hint about the matter, or the smallest key to it, which he believed they would have done; nor had he ever mentioned a word of his connection with them to one of his family, or indeed to any one living. Few were the words that past between the father and daughter in the course of that walk, but it was not of long duration.
They soon came to the precipitate linn on the South Grain, where the soldiers had been slain. Katharine being a little way before, began to scramble across the face of the rock by a path that was hardly perceptible. Walter called after her, “Where are ye gaun, Keatie? It’s impossible to win yont there—there’s no outgate for a mouse.”
“We will try,” answered she; “it is perhaps not so bad as it looks—Follow me—you have nothing to fear.”
Walter followed; for however much he was affrighted for brownies, and fairies, and dead corpses, and all these awful kind of things, he was no coward among rocks and precipices. They soon reached a little dass in the middle of the linn, or what an Englishman would call a small landing-place. Here she paused till her father reached her, and pointed out to him the singularity of their situation, with the burn roaring far below their feet, and the rock fairly overhanging them above.