The Countess of Moray had come from Tarnawa to meet her Lord. Sir Patrick Hepborne, the younger, eagerly sought an opportunity of having private conversation with her, hoping to have some explanation of the strange disappearance of his page. But the noble lady, maintaining the same distance towards him she had so mysteriously used, seemed rather disposed to shun the subject; and it was not until Hepborne had prefaced his inquiry with a full exposition of all he suspected, and all he knew, regarding the Lady Eleanore de Selby and the Lady Beatrice, and that she really saw where his heart was sincerely fixed, that she would consent to betray the secret she possessed. Hepborne was then assured that his page Maurice de Grey was no other than the Lady Beatrice.
Believing that Hepborne loved her, she had looked with joy to other meetings with him; she had been filled with anxiety when she heard of the encounter between him and Sir Rafe Piersie; and she was exulting in his triumph over that knight [[482]]at the very moment they came to tell her of his departure. She hastened to a window overlooking the Tweed, where she beheld the boat that was wafting him to Scotland. It was then, when she thought herself deserted, that she really felt that she loved. Almost unconscious of what she did, she waved her scarf. He replied not to the signal. Again and again she waved, and in vain she stretched her eyeballs to catch a return of the sign. The boat touched the strand; he sprang on shore, and leaped into his saddle. Again in despair she waved; the signal was returned, and that faint sign from the Scottish shore was to her as the twig of hope. So intense had been her feelings that she sank down overpowered by them. Recovering herself, she again gazed from the window. The ferry-boat had returned, and was again moored on the English side. She cast her eyes across to the spot where she had last beheld Sir Patrick. The animating figures were now gone—some yellow gravel, a green bank, a few furze bushes, and a solitary willow, its slender melancholy spray waving in the breeze, were all that appeared, and her chilled and forsaken heart was left as desolate as the scene.
It was at this time that she was called on by friendship to dismiss her own griefs, that she might actively assist the high-spirited Eleanore de Selby. By the result of Sir Rafe Piersie’s visit, that lady was relieved from his addresses; but they were immediately succeeded by the strange proposals of her infatuated father, when deluded by the machinations of the Wizard Ancient. All her tears and all her eloquence were thrown away, and so perfect was Sir Walter’s subjection to the will of the impostor that even his temper was changed, and his affection for his daughter swallowed up, by his anxiety to avert the fate that threatened. Such coercion to a union so disgusting might have roused the spirit of resistance in the most timid female bosom; but Eleanore de Selby, who was high and hot tempered, resolved at once to fly from such persecution; and, taking a solemn vow of secrecy from the Lady Beatrice, she made her the confidant of a recent attachment which had arisen between her and a certain knight whom she had met at a tilting match held at Newcastle a short time before, when she was on a visit to an aunt who resided there. The Lady Eleanore informed her friend that her lover was Sir Hans de Vere, a knight of Zealand, kinsman to the King’s banished favourite the Duke of Ireland, who had lately come from abroad, and who looked to gain the same high place in King Richard’s affections which the Duke himself had filled. From him she had received a visit unknown to her father, and it [[483]]was the parting of the lovers after that meeting which had so filled Hepborne with jealousy. In the urgency of her affairs she implored her friend to aid her schemes, which were immediately carried into effect by means of the Minstrel.
Having thus been gradually, though unwillingly, drawn to be an accomplice in the Lady Eleanore’s plans, Beatrice felt that she could not stay behind to expose herself to the rage of the bereft father. Having assisted her friend, therefore, to escape, she accompanied her, in male attire, to the place where her lover waited for her at some distance from Norham. There she parted, with many tears, from the companion of her youth, having received from her the emerald ring which Sir Patrick Hepborne afterwards became possessed of. Her own depression of spirits, occasioned by Sir Patrick’s unaccountable desertion of her, had determined her to seek out some convent, where she might find a temporary, if not a permanent retreat. Under the protection of old Adam of Gordon, therefore, she crossed the Tweed into Scotland. There he procured her a Scottish guide to conduct her to North Berwick, where he had a relation among the Cistertian nuns, and thither she was proceeding at the time she met Hepborne in the grove by the side of the Tyne.
When Sir Patrick addressed her she felt so much fluttered that it was some time before she could invent a plausible account of herself; and when he proposed to her to become his page, love triumphed over her better judgment, and she could not resist the temptation of an offer that held out so fair an opportunity of knowing more of him, and of trying the state of his heart. As to the latter she became convinced, by some of those conversations we have detailed, that she had been cruelly deceived, and that she had in reality no share in it. She heard him passionately declare his inextinguishable love for the Lady Eleanore de Selby, and when he said that he had seen too much of her for his peace of mind, she naturally enough concluded that they had met together on some former occasion. She became unhappy at her own imprudence in so rashly joining his party, and was anxious to avail herself of the first opportunity of escaping from one whose heart never could be hers. The Countess of Moray’s kindness to her as Maurice de Grey induced her to discover herself to that lady. She earnestly entreated that she might remain concealed, and that Sir Patrick might not be informed. It was the Lady Jane de Vaux who laid the plan for deceiving him about the departure of his page, and she and the Countess of Moray could not resist indulging in tormenting one whom they believed to have wantonly sported with the affections of [[484]]the Lady Beatrice, and who had consequently suffered deeply in the good opinion of both.
The Minstrel, who, to do away suspicion, had returned to Norham immediately after the escape of the ladies, no sooner learned from the guide the change which had taken place in Beatrice’s plans, and that she had gone to Tarnawa, than he determined to follow her thither, under pretence of going to the tournament. Having learned from him that her benefactor, Sir Walter de Selby, had been overwhelmed with affliction for the loss of his daughter, of whose fate he was yet ignorant, and that he had also grievously complained of her own desertion of him, she was filled with remorse, and determined to return to him immediately, and to brave all his reproaches; but indisposition, arising from the trying fatigue of body and the mental misery she had undergone, prevented her setting out until several days after the departure of the Earl of Moray and his knights for Aberdeen. Hepborne could now no longer doubt of the attachment of the Lady Beatrice. The thought that he had ignorantly thrown away a heart so valuable as that which his intercourse with his page had given him ample opportunity to know, was a source of bitter distress to him. His spirits fled, he loathed society, and he industriously shunned the huntings, hawkings, dancings, and masquings that were going merrily forward in honour of his friend’s nuptials with his sister the Lady Isabelle.
But Assueton was not so selfishly occupied in his own joys as not to be struck with the change in his beloved Hepborne. He besought him to unbosom the secret sorrow that was so evidently preying on his mind, and Sir Patrick, who had hitherto generously concealed it, that he might not poison the happiness in which he could not participate, at last yielded to the entreaty, and told him all. Sir John had but little of comfort to offer: the subject was one that hardly admitted of any. He saw that the only way in which friendship could be useful was by rousing him to do something that might actively divert his melancholy.
Sir David de Lindsay having returned from his captivity in England, had lately arrived at Hailes, where Sir William de Dalzel and Sir John Halyburton had remained, to witness Assueton’s marriage. They were now about to proceed to London, to make good the pledge given to Lord Welles. Hepborne would have fain excused himself from the engagement he had so cheerfully made with them at Tarnawa, but Assueton contrived to pique his chivalric spirit, and at length succeeded in inducing him to become one of the party. Sir John even [[485]]offered to accompany his friend, but Hepborne would by no means permit him to leave his newly-married Lady.