True enough, nature meant her for a heartsome lass. Her hair was dark, and had a tangled look, as though lately caught in brambles or still thick with burrs. Her dark eyebrows and long lashes shaded the darkest of black-brown eyes. Her mouth was alive with sensibility. Every shade of feeling could play upon her face. Her dress was loose, and somewhat negligently worn; one never felt its presence or knew whether it were poor or fine. Her voice, though soft, was generally high-pitched, not like the whirl of wind through the trees, but like its sigh through the long grass, and came, perhaps, to the mountain girl from the effort to converse above the sound of these natural voices. There was a tremor in her voice sometimes, and, when she was taken unawares, a sidelong look in her eyes. There was something about her in these serious moods that laid hold of the imagination. She had surely a well of strength which had been given for her own support and the solace of others at some future moment, only too terrible. But not to-night, as she tripped along under the moonlight, did the consciousness of that moment overshadow her.
And what of Ralph, who strode solemnly by her side? A change had come over him of late. He spoke little, and never at all of the scenes he had witnessed in his long campaign—never of his own share in them. He had become at once an active and a brooding man. The shadow of a supernatural presence seemed to hang over everything. Tonight that shadow was blacker than before.
In the fulness of her joy Rotha had not marked the tone in which Ralph spoke when he gave her in a word all the new life that bounded in her veins. But that tone was one of sadness, and that word had seemed to drain away from veins of his some of the glad life that now pulsated in hers. Was it nothing that the outcast among men whom he alone, save this brave girl, had championed, had convinced him of his innocence? Nothing that the light of a glad morning had broken on the long night of the blithe creature by his side, and brightened her young life with the promise of a happier future?
“Look, Ralph, look at the withered sedge, all frost-covered!” said Rotha in her happiness, tripping up to his side, with a sprig newly plucked in her hand. Ralph answered her absently, and she rattled on to herself, “Rotha shall keep you, beautiful sedge! How you glisten in the moonlight!” Then the girl broke out with a snatch of an old Border ballad,—
Dacre's gane to the war, Willy,
Dacre's gane to the war;
Dacre's lord has crossed the ford,
And left us for the war.
“Poor father,” she said more soberly, “poor father; but he'll come back home now—come back to our own home again”; and then, unconscious of the burden of her song, she sang,—
Naworth's halls are dead, Willy,
Naworth's halls are dead;
One lonely foot sounds on the keep,
And that's the warder's tread.
The moon shone clearly; the tempest had lulled, and the silvery voice of the girl was all that could be heard above the distant rumble of the ghylls and the beat of Ralph's heavy footsteps. In a moment Rotha seemed to become conscious that her companion was sad as well as silent. How had this escaped her so long? she thought.
“But you don't seem quite so glad, Ralph,” she said in an altered tone, half of inquiry, half of gentle reproach, as of one who felt that her joy would have been the more if another had shared it.
“Don't I? Ah, but I am glad—that is, I'm glad your father won't need old Mattha's bull-grips,” he said, with an attempt to laugh at his own pleasantry.