It is probable that the tone and firmness assumed by the Bailie in his last speech was better suited to make an impression on the hard heart of his kinswoman than the tone of supplication he had hitherto assumed, as gems can be cut with steel, though they resist softer metals. She commanded us both to be placed before her. “Your name,” she said to me, “is Osbaldistone?—the dead dog, whose death you have witnessed, called you so.”
“My name is Osbaldistone,” was my answer.
“Rashleigh, then, I suppose, is your Christian name?” she pursued.
“No,—my name is Francis.”
“But you know Rashleigh Osbaldistone,” she continued. “He is your brother, if I mistake not,—at least your kinsman and near friend.”
“He is my kinsman,” I replied, “but not my friend. We were lately engaged together in a rencontre, when we were separated by a person whom I understand to be your husband. My blood is hardly yet dried on his sword, and the wound on my side is yet green. I have little reason to acknowledge him as a friend.”
“Then,” she replied, “if a stranger to his intrigues, you can go in safety to Garschattachin and his party without fear of being detained, and carry them a message from the wife of the MacGregor?”
I answered that I knew no reasonable cause why the militia gentlemen should detain me; that I had no reason, on my own account, to fear being in their hands; and that if my going on her embassy would act as a protection to my friend and servant, who were here prisoners, “I was ready to set out directly.” I took the opportunity to say, “That I had come into this country on her husband's invitation, and his assurance that he would aid me in some important matters in which I was interested; that my companion, Mr. Jarvie, had accompanied me on the same errand.”
“And I wish Mr. Jarvie's boots had been fu' o' boiling water when he drew them on for sic a purpose,” interrupted the Bailie.
“You may read your father,” said Helen MacGregor, turning to her sons, “in what this young Saxon tells us—Wise only when the bonnet is on his head, and the sword is in his hand, he never exchanges the tartan for the broad-cloth, but he runs himself into the miserable intrigues of the Lowlanders, and becomes again, after all he has suffered, their agent—their tool—their slave.”