She gave me a quick, strange look.
“Yet now do I not see you ready to ride and persecute in your turn?”
These words, from the daughter of Alexander Gordon of Earlstoun, who was scarcely yet liberate from the prison of Blackness, astonished me so much that I stood speechless.
“To persecute in my turn?” said I. “Nay, my dear mistress, I go to uphold the banner of Christ’s Kingdom against those that hate Him.”
Very scornfully she smiled.
“In my short life,” she said, “I’ve heard overmuch of such talk. I know to an ell how much it means. I have a mother, and she has friends and gossips. To me the triumph of what you call ‘the Kingdom’ means but two things—the Pharisee exalted and the bigot triumphant. Prince Jacob of Orange may supplant his father and take the crown; every canting Jack may fling away the white rose and shout for the Orange lily. But not I—not I?”
She flaunted a little white hand suddenly palm upward, like an apple blossom blown off the branch by the wind.
To say that I was astounded by this outbreak is to say little. It was like an earthquake, the trembling and resolving of solid land under my feet. Alexander Gordon’s child—“the Bull of Earlstoun’s” daughter—standing openly and boldly for the cause of those who had prisoned and, perhaps, tortured her father, and brought about the ruin of her house!
At last I managed to speak.
“You are a young maiden,” I said, as quietly as I could, “and you know nothing of the great occasions of state, the persecutions of twenty-five years, the blood shed on lonely hillsides, the deaths by yet wearier sickness, the burials under cloud of night of those who have suffered——!”