Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/38

 7, 1860.] as Sir Raoul did, after he had once beheld her walking in the gloomy fir-wood, and singing and smiling to herself as she passed by.

To give the devil and Sir Raoul their due, he sought her first peacefully of her father, and it was only when die was civilly denied him, having been contracted in her cradle to an orphan cousin, reared with her in her father’s house, that Sir Raoul brought his peculiar forces to the charge, summoned horse, and sounded trumpet, and as the Wolf of Badenoch sat down with his clan, and starved and scared out the Countess of Mar in Kildrummie, so Sir Raoul without the smallest ceremony, invested his future father-in-law in his hold, and in coat of mail, and with gauntleted hand and spear in rest, bade him deliver up his young daughter, or perish in the adverse contest. It was no jesting matter, when lion-like, Sir Raouls inclined to roe-like Dovachs grazing on adjoining pastures.

Dovach’s father, a taciturn, gentle man of his era, was, nevertheless, resolute in bearing the brunt of his contumacy, and with moral courage defended himself as stoutly as the hottest and most brutal, and was slain at last leading a desperate sally through the sheds and outhouses with his daughter behind him, on his white horse. Some said it was Sir Raoul’s lance that pierced the harness somewhat rusty and disused, but it were hard to tell who dealt the fatal blows in the mêlée, though without doubt it was Sir Raoul’s gripe that arrested the flight of the old white horse, stiff as its master, but good blood in case of need, and pulled down the fainting girl, and carried her, lying so still, on his panting breast, of all places, into the small chapel, which his simple engines had half unroofed. Two days before, the cousin had been struck below the arm by an arrow on the wall. He was a still lad, like all Dovach’s race—the word went that she was indifferent to his unobtrusive regard, slighted his patient devotion; but she laboured all the same to pluck the arrow from his wound—that night, when the summer thunder and lightning were rolling and flashing over the host at the gate, and the sore-pressed company within—she held her hand on his heart long after it had ceased to beat; then she washed the body fair and clean, and smoothed the hair, soft and silken as her own, and commanded the priest, praying for the beleaguered family in their extremity, to forbear, and leaving the living to care for themselves, go sing masses for one departed soul, all through the night watches to the pearly dawn rising over the crumbling ruin and the blood-stains. That young body was not placed, like the laird’s, in honourable state before the altar in the chapel, it was thrown with the herd to choke up the draw-well ere the conquerors quitted the dismantled building, but Dovach saw it as plain as the sun above her, lying beside the corpse of her gray-headed father, and close to the bier where she stood, while the faltering priest hastily blessed her and her true bridegroom.

There was frozen, unheeding death present at these nuptials. There was a splash of blood upon the shaken wall, a pool of blood on the floor, where the wounded men had lain to confess and be assoilzied, blood half-dried on the bridegroom’s mailed feet, and half-wiped from his sword, blood on which she was fain to look with a fascinated gaze, on the very kirtle of the bride; but lightly would Sir Raoul have recked of these mischances had Dovach’s eyes been less stony, or her hand less cold. Dovach knelt of her own will, and spoke the responses with a free tongue, as her dead father would have had her, lest a worse thing should befall her. Sir Raoul carried her away that very night, his wedded wife, in triumph to his strong tower of Baikie, rising secure and prosperous by the glittering Isla water—lit up by the last sun-rays come out after the storm of yesterday, and gladdening a refreshed and blooming world—a wide contrast to the devastation and the silence, the degradation and decay they had left behind them.

Now, Sir Raoul said, she was all his own; soon would he teach her to forget her father’s desolate house, soon she would turn to him for companionship and caresses. Sir Raoul of Baikie had wooed as became him, he might not “sue with the deer.” If he had rendered her fatherless, he could swear like Richard Crookback, in generations to come, “’twas thy heavenly face that set me on,” and Dovach like poor, smitten, unstable Anne, would cry, and cover that face, and geck, and blush, and credit, and forgive him, because, you know, it was her face that was to blame, after all. But still remained Dovach, as when she lay like lead on his heaving corslet, and she foiled him by her very frailty. Yet she was not really frail—there is a mock, bullying courage, and there is true valour, let it vaunt with the dark Gascon, or rest mute and phlegmatic with the sandy-haired German; and there is veritable weakness in flippant forwardness, brazen audacity, raging fury, while there may be no feebleness in the slight woman who holds down the convulsed child—her heart’s darling, or tends the agonised man—the desire of her eyes, or stands on the deck of the wrecked ship, or once walked upon the scaffold with trembling limbs and quivering voice indeed, but as resolute to die for the truth, as any bull-necked, broad-fisted champion of error. Sir Raoul swore in wrath and mortification that these timid, undemonstrative tempers have no marrow for dourness; that he could have tamed a vixen, and silenced a shrew, and taught her to come to his hand in a week, or a month, but this fine, shy, subtle nature baffled him. Perhaps he was right; these frank, outspoken, coarser constitutions receive at the best caricatured, loose impressions, and give and take them perpetually. They express their very essence, and have done with it, borrowing the style and character of the next scene, circumstances, individuals, with whom they come in contact. Once the wrong is played out, these boisterous, fresh, not untrue for the time frames, bound as readily to the inflicter of the injury, as to any other. A lively, brawling woman, tearing her hair, and kept by force from laying violent hands on Sir Raoul, might have accepted her spouse in room of father and kinsman, and kissed him heartily, before the year was out—blotting out all his cruelties, identifying herself with his pettiest interests, serving him, cherishing him, perhaps taming him in the end, with a simplicity and a submission that God forbid any man should scorn.

But Dovach’s was a shrinking, intact, adhesive