The trumpet brayed aloud, for the third time, its harsh summons, and the court-yard rang as the mailed horsemen leaped into their steel-cased saddles. The Countess of Moray was on the terrace with her maidens, waving many a sighing farewell to her gallant lord. The Earl gave the word, and, in company with his brothers-in-law the Earls of Fife and Caithness, his brother the Earl of Dunbar, the Earl of Douglas, Sir David Lindsay, Sir John Halyburton, the Lord of Dirleton, Sir Patrick Hepborne, and others, he rode forth at the Castle gate, followed by the whole column of march.
The troops which he headed were but a small portion of those whose attendance he could command as vassals, being only such horsemen as were ever ready to assemble at a moment’s notice, to attend him on any sudden emergency. They now served him as a guard of honour in his journey to the King, and the charge of summoning and mustering the great body of his feudal force, and of despatching them under their proper officers, to join him where he might afterwards direct, was left to his Countess to carry into effect. The cavalcade filed off with a noise like thunder through the gateway, and part of them forming upon the natural glacis beyond, halted until the train of baggage wains had fallen into the line immediately in rear of the horse litters, in which the ladies travelled, and then they closed into the rear of the line of march. The whole moved on slowly through the little hamlet, now silent and deserted, except by its weeping women, its old men, and its children, and then wound into the depth of the forest. An opening among the trees gave them again a view of Tarnawa, and many was the head that turned involuntarily round to look once more at its grey walls, some of them, perhaps, though they little thought so, for the last time.
Sir Patrick lifted up his eyes, raised his beaver, and turned them towards the Castle. He beheld a bevy of white figures grouped together on a bartizan, and white scarfs or handkerchiefs were waving. He smiled in secret as the imagination crossed him that the motion of these was like that which had flashed upon his eyes from the keep of Norham. But his fancy had dreamt so, and the vision having been once engendered, continued to haunt him as he rode at the head of his small troop. [[342]]
CHAPTER XLIX.
The Lord of Dirleton’s Tale—The Bishop of Moray and his Clergy.
The Earl of Moray led him and his little force through the Meads of St. John. That scene, lately so gay, was now considerably changed. Most of the pavilions on the hither meadow had been struck, and the knights who had occupied them had already left the ground with their people, whilst others waited to join the line of march. The temporary bridge was there to afford them a passage; but the demolition of the lists had been already begun under the superintendence of the pursuivants, and others of the heralds, to whom the property of the materials was an acknowledged perquisite. The inhabitants of the little town of tents and temporary huts were in humming motion, like a hive of bees that are about to swarm. All were preparing to depart with lamentations, their occupation being gone with the tournament that had assembled them; and pack-horses, and wains, and rude carts without wheels, that were dragged along the ground on the pointed extremities of the shafts projecting behind, were loaded with the utmost expedition.
The street of the burgh presented a different picture. Thither the news of the approaching war had not yet reached, and the townsmen rested with blackened hands and faces from their melancholy work of clearing out the burnt rubbish from the foundations of their houses, to gaze, and wonder, and speculate on the armed force. Loud were the cheers with which they greeted the Earl of Moray, and they were not tired with these manifestations of their gratitude to their generous lord until they had accompanied him for a considerable way beyond the eastern end of the town. At the distance of some five or six miles from Forres the Earl halted his men, just where the half-wooded and half-cultivated country gave place to a bare heath of considerable extent, and where the gentle breeze was permitted to come cool and unbroken against their throbbing temples, after they were relieved from the thraldom of their bassinets and morions; whilst the oaks that fringed the moor, and straggled into it in groups and single trees, enabled them to find sufficient shade from a now oppressive sun, to eat their morning’s meal in comfort.
A pavilion was pitched for the reception of the nobles, [[343]]knights, and ladies, and, after partaking of the refreshment that was provided under it, they wandered forth in parties to waste the time beneath the trees, until the horses should have been fed, and everything prepared for continuing the march. Sir Patrick Hepborne, having fallen into conversation with De Vaux, the old Lord of Dirleton, wandered slowly with him to a clump of trees at some distance, and they sat down together on an old oak that had fallen by natural decay from the little grove of gigantic trees that threw a shade over it. The place was sufficiently retired to promise security from interruption, and Hepborne longed much to obtain from his companion the distressing history to which he and his lady had alluded on the evening of their first meeting at Tarnawa. He felt it difficult, however, to hint at a subject of which he already knew enough to satisfy him, that it could not fail to be productive of painful emotions to his father’s old friend, and he would have left it untouched had not accident led to it.
“That blasted moor, where tree grows not,” observed the Lord of Dirleton, “and where, as thou see’st, the stunted heath itself can hardly find food for life, amid the barren sand of which its soil is composed, was cursed into sterility by the infernal caldron of the weird-hags who, by their hellish incantations, did raise a poisonous marsh-fire to mislead Macbeth; and did so drag him down from the path of honour and virtue, to perish in a sea of crimes his soul would once have shuddered at. See’st thou yonder huge cairn of stones? Some men say that it marks the very spot where the foul crones first met him, as, with his associate Banquo, he did return victorious from the overthrow of the Danes, who did invade Fife, and whose bravest leaders he sent to eternal repose in St. Colme’s Isle; it was there, I say, that tradition reporteth they did appear to him, when, with the flattering tongue of the great Tempter, they did salute him Thane of Glammis and of Cawdor, and alswa King hereafter.”