Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/54

50 will call on the Selbys to mount and strike for their ancient lord and their lost inheritance.' Something of this matter had been passing in my own mind, but the temper of the Selbys ever required more to be repressed than encouraged, and so I endeavoured to manage thee, poor Walter Selby!" She sighed while she named the name of him who had guided and gladdened her youth, and, in a tone low and almost inaudible, she addressed herself to the image which her affections had thus charmed into life: "I saw thee, thou last and thou bravest of all the Selbys, with thy banner spread, thy sword bright, and thy long golden locks waving on thy shoulders, when the barriers of Preston were lost and won, and the gallant laird of Ashiestiel fought like a brother by thy side. Oh, that this last bright picture were all I remembered of thee! But can the heart of woman, though her head be grey, forget that she saw those long locks which made the dames sigh, waving, soiled and bloody, on the gates of Carlisle. There is much done in this world must be answered for in the next, and this cruel and remorseless deed is one." She looked while she spoke as if her wild and agitated fancy had given motion to the picture which she drew of her lover; her face changed, and her eyes, from beneath their moist and depressed lids, became fixed and frozen, like stars in a winter night. This passed away with a smothered groan and a moving of her hand over her bosom: she again resumed her narrative. Truly,' said I, 'my froward cousin, thou art the best soldier our poor prince could peril his cause with—thou canst make a pedlar churl into a deep-plodding politician, capable of overturning a throne; and his pack, filled with shreds of lace and remnants of ribbon, into a magazine of weapons fit for furnishing an army. What will thy most wise head make of these dubious sibyl verses which this mysterious politician of thine has been doling out for thy especial instruction?' 'By the rood, my witty Eleanor,' said Walter Selby, 'I shall win a battle, and wed thee in revenge for this. But thinkest thou not that the box, which has endowed that round white neck of thine with a cross and rosary of gold, and wood still more precious, may not contain things equally curious and strange? Some golden information this pedlar—since pedlar thou wilt have him—carries in his looks; I wish I could find the way to extract it.' The stranger, as if guessing by our looks and our whispers what was passing between us, proceeded to