All who have visited—and who has not?—Roslin’s “proud chapelle,” are familiar with the legend of Sir William St Clair, and his venturous boast to the Bruce, that he would find, on peril of his head, a dog that would bring down the deer ere it could cross Glencorse burn;—how the trusty hound did redeem his own credit and his master’s life, by seizing the quarry in the very middle of the stream;—and how, in gratitude to the gentle saint by whose intercession this mighty feat was accomplished, he built a church on the bank of the stream, and dedicated it to Saint Catherine of the Howe. This virgin martyr was unfortunately no more successful than her sister saints in protecting her mansions from the desolating zeal of the earlier reformers. The church was destroyed by a fanatical mob, and nothing now remains to record the kindness of Catherine, and the gratitude of the “high Saint Clair,” but a few uneven grassy heaps of deeper green than the surrounding verdure, and the name of the neighbouring farm town, which is yet called Kirkton. At the time we are at present writing of, however, the roofless walls of the building, though gray with the ruin of a hundred years, were still almost entire, and the cemetery then and long after continued to be used by the neighbouring peasantry.
When Maurice reached the church, he found that the Lady Lilias had dismounted. He too alighted, and sought her in the interior. She was seated on a fallen stone, and the deep melancholy which now shadowed her fair countenance was more in unison with the sombre aspect of the place and of the hour, than he had expected to find it. She arose at his approach, and addressed him.
“You have something to tell me, Maurice, and you wished to do it alone. We have now an opportunity. What has befallen us?”
“Nay, fair Lily, why should you think so? Is not the thought that to-morrow we must part of itself sufficient to dull my spirit and sadden my countenance?”
“Pshaw! trifle not with me now. Your face has no secrets for one who has conned its ill-favoured features so frequently as I have done. Out with your secret! Elspeth will be with us forthwith.”
Maurice seemed for some moments undecided how he should act, but at length, with a look of no little embarrassment, replied,—
“Sweet Lilias, you shall be obeyed. You can only laugh at me; and thanks to your merry heart, that is a daily pastime of yours.”
“Nay, nay—say on; I will be as grave as Argyle.”
“Know then, that while I waited for you and Elspeth at the bottom of the glen, a remarkable thing befell me. I had alighted, and while Rupert was trying to pick a scanty meal among the bent, I flung myself on the ground, and endeavoured to beguile the time by thinking sometimes of you, and sometimes of King Charles.”
“How! sir cousin, I am not always the companion of your reveries, it seems, then? Heigho! to think what a change a single day’s matrimony has accomplished!”