“Ha! what!” cried the Wolfe, “by the beard of my grandfather, but I see him not; dost thou, Sir Patrick? Nay, by St. Andrew, there is no Franciscan there, alive or dead; for now I can see even to the bottom of the ell-depth of clear water that covereth the pavement. Hey! what! by’r Lady, but it is passing strange. Knave,” cried he, turning to the jailor, who appeared to be as much confounded as the Earl and his guest, “didst thou see him lodged here yesternight with thine own eyes?”
“I did put him down myself with a rope, so please thee, my noble Lord,” said the man. The rest were called, and they all declared they had assisted in lowering him, and in replacing the stone over the mouth of the vault, and all were equally petrified to see that the prisoner was gone.
“By all the powers of Tartarus,” cried the Wolfe, “but this passeth all marvel! Of a truth, the devil himself must have assisted the carrion corby; and, by my beard, but I did suspect that he was more the servant of hell than of heaven, as he dared to call himself. Ha! well, if the wizard caitiff do fall into my hands again, by all the fiends, but he shall be tried with fire next, sith he can so readily escape from water.”
Sir Patrick was not less astonished than the rest of those who beheld the miracle. He thought of the strange and unaccountable appearance of the Franciscan to the page, which he now readily believed to have been real, and he [[251]]shuddered at the narrow escape which the boy had made from murder.
The news of the friar having vanished from the Water Pit Vault soon spread like wildfire through the Castle, and many and various were the opinions concerning it. Some few there were who secretly in their own minds set it down as a miraculous deliverance worked in favour of the Franciscan, to defeat the impiety and sacrilege of the Wolfe of Badenoch, who had dared to order violent hands to be laid on a holy man; but the greater part, who were of the same stamp with their master, thought as he did; and some of them even went so far as firmly to believe that the Franciscan was in reality no monk, but the devil himself, disguised under the sanctified garb of a friar. The boldness he had displayed, and the sudden and irresistible halt he had made, in defiance of the power of the sturdy knaves who were dragging him away, confirmed them in their notions. Nay, many of them even declared that at that moment they had actually observed his cloven foot, pointed from under the long habit, and thrust like iron prongs into the flag-stones of the banqueting hall.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
The Wolfe of Badenoch and the Earl of Moray.
The Wolfe of Badenoch having once made up his mind to accompany Sir Patrick Hepborne to the tournament of St. John’s, allowed but little time to be lost by his people in preparation; and his sons and their attendants, with his own splendid retinue, were speedily assembled on the lawn beyond the land sconce. Hepborne’s more moderate cortège was also quickly mustered there, and in less than an hour the two leaders were at the head of their united trains, marching off with bugles sounding, and banners and pennons flying.
Leaving the lake by the same route by which Sir Patrick had approached it, they travelled northwards through the apparently ceaseless forest, that varied only in the undulations of the surface it grew upon, and in the trees it produced. The pines were very soon, in a great measure, exchanged for magnificent birches and oaks, spreading themselves far and wide over the country, and forming the vast forest of Drummyn. There they skirted the Findhorn, which thundered through the romantic chasm, yawning between confined and precipitous [[252]]crags, until they found themselves on the summit of a bold cliff overhanging the river, from the base of which it swept in one grand and broad line through the centre of a beautiful plain of about a mile in diameter, dividing it from south to north into two nearly equal parts. These were the Meads of St. John, and there the stream seemed gladly to slumber in a comparatively gentle current, after its boisterous and laborious passage downwards from its native mountains. Ledges of rock did indeed push themselves here and there from its enamelled margins, and served to diversify them, as did those groups of wide-spreading oaks of enormous growth, forming in most places a broad bowery fringe to either shore; but there was nothing to disturb the perfect continuity and level of the grassy surface of the meadows, except one or two bosky groves, carelessly planted by the hand of nature. The high banks retreating on both sides, to bend round and embrace the Meads, presented an irregularity of form and slope; while the forest, extending itself everywhere over the upper grounds, sent down some of its most magnificent representatives to grace their sides. About a mile or more to the left, perched on a gentle eminence, arose the venerable Castle of Tarnawa, looking far and wide over its woody domain. Towards the northern extremity of the Eastern Mead, stood the little chapel dedicated to St. John the Baptist, giving name to the lovely valley that now stretched in rich verdure beneath their eyes; and over the farther boundaries of the meadows appeared the fertile plain of Forres, the broad expanse of the Frith, and the distant mountain-range beyond.