It was not for some time after they were gone, that Margaret Grahame ventured to seek the hiding-place of her first guest of the evening. There were two reasons for this delay. The first was to ensure the perfect safety of the latter, by allowing her late visiters to get to a secure distance; the other was one of a less definite and more perplexing nature. From some expressions which had dropped from the troopers in the course of their search, she had now no doubt that her concealed guest was no other than Robert Bruce.
It was under this impression, then, and under the feeling of reverential awe it inspired, that Margaret Grahame at length went to intimate to her concealed guest that the troopers were gone, and that he might now come forth from his hiding-place.
On the latter's stepping from his concealment, Margaret flung herself on her knees, and calling him her King, implored his pardon for the homely and familiar manner in which, in ignorance of his quality, she had treated him.
"So, my good dame," replied Bruce, smiling—for it was indeed he—and taking his hostess kindly by the hand, and raising her from her humble position, "so you have discovered me? These troopers have blabbed, I fancy. Well, my secret could not be in safer keeping, I feel assured, than in thine, my kind hostess. It is even so. I am Robert Bruce, and none other."
Overcome by the various and tumultuous feelings which the incident, altogether, was so well calculated to excite, Margaret Grahame burst into tears, and, raising the corner of her apron to her eyes, stood thus for some seconds without uttering a word.
Bruce, affected, even to the starting of a tear, took his hostess again by the hand, and, not without very evident emotion, said—"Come, my good dame, why those tears?"
"I canna richtly tell mysel, sir. I dinna ken. I canna help it. Maybe it is to see you in this plight—to see Scotland's chief without a single attendant, and glad o' the shelter o' sae lowly a roof as mine."
"Pho, pho, my kind hostess, and what is in that?" replied Bruce, in a cheering tone. "We must all rough it out as we best can in these times, king and cobbler, baron and beggar. Better days are coming, and we will then think of our present hardships only to laugh at them. As to attendants," he added, with a look of peculiar intelligence, "I am not, perhaps, so destitute of them as I may seem; although they are not, it may be, within calling at this moment. Half-an-hour's walk into the Torwood, however, and half-a-dozen blasts of this little horn would bring around me a band of as stalworth, nay, as brave hearts as Scotland can boast."
"God be thankit for that!" said Bruce's enthusiastic hostess. "Then there is hope yet."
"There is, there is. A day of reckoning is coming. But now, my good dame," he added, glancing at a little window, through which the dull, faint light of the breaking day had just begun to gleam, "I must take my departure. I must be at the mustering place an hour after daybreak." Saying this the redoubted warrior drew out a leathern purse, from whence he took several pieces of gold coin, which he vainly endeavoured to press on the acceptance of his hostess.