Almost could Walter Gordon have wept in his saddle to think of his wrongs, and death seemed a sweet thing to him beside the fickle favors of any woman. He bethought him of his cousin Will with something of a pitying smile.
"Poor fool!" he said to himself; "he is married. He thinks himself happy. How much better had it been to live for glory!"
But even as he battered himself into a conviction of his own rooted indifference to the things of love, he began to wonder how long his present adventure would detain him. Could he be back in time on the morrow to hear the first trip of a light foot on the stairs in Zaandpoort Street, as she came from her sleeping-room, fresh as though God had made her all anew that morning?
For this is a quality of the wisdom of man, that thinking upon a maid ofttimes makes it vain—especially if the man be very brave or very wise, and the maid exceeding fair. Gradually, however, the changing clatter of the dozen hoofs behind Lochinvar forced itself upon his hearing, and he remembered that he was not alone.
He turned to his followers, and, curbing his horse a little, waited for them to come up. They ranged themselves two on one side of him and one on the other. Lochinvar eyed them with surprising disfavor.
"You are surely the last scourings of the camp," he said, brusquely, for it was too little his habit to beat about the bush; "what may you have been doing with yourselves? You could not all three have been made so unhallowedly ugly as that. After all, God is a good God, and kind to the evil and to the good."
The fellow on Lochinvar's left was a great red-faced man with an immense scar, where (as it appeared) one side of his face had been cut away wellnigh to the cheek-bone—a wound which had healed unevenly in ridges and weals, and now remained of a deep plum-color.
"What is your name?" said Lochinvar to this man.
"I am called Haxo the Bull," he answered, "and I am of the retinue of my Lord of Barra."
"And how came you by your English?" asked Lochinvar.