Lucy, whose senses were by this time more effectually collected, was naturally led to look at the stranger with attention. There was nothing in his appearance which should have rendered him unwilling to offer his arm to a young lady who required support, or which could have induced her to refuse his assistance; and she could not help thinking, even in that moment, that he seemed cold and reluctant to offer it. A shooting-dress of dark cloth intimated the rank of the wearer, though concealed in part by a large and loose cloak of a dark brown colour. A montero cap and a black feather drooped over the wearers brow, and partly concealed his features, which, so far as seen, were dark, regular, adn full of majestic, though somewhat sullen, expression. Some secret sorrow, or the brooding spirit of some moody passion, had quenched the light and ingenuous vivacity of youth in a countenance singularly fitted to display both, and it was not easy to gaze on the stranger without a secret impression either of pity or awe, or at least of doubt and curiosity allied to both.
The impression which we have necessarily been long in describing, Lucy felt in the glance of a moment, and had no sooner encountered the keen black eyes of the stranger than her own were bent on the ground with a mixture of bashful embarrassment and fear. Yet there was a necessity to speak, or at last she thought so, and in a fluttered accent she began to mention her wonderful escape, in which she was sure that the stranger must, under Heaven, have been her fathers protector and her own.
He seemed to shrink from her expressions of gratitude, while he replied abruptly, I leave you, madam, the deep melody of his voice rendered powerful, but not harsh, by something like a severity of tone I leave you to the protection of those to whom it is possible you may have this day been a guardian angel.
Lucy was surprised at the ambiguity of his language, and, with a feeling of artless and unaffected gratitude, began to deprecate the idea of having intended to give her deliverer any offence, as if such a thing had been possible. I have been unfortunate, she said, in endeavouring to express my thanks I am sure it must be so, though I cannot recollect what I said; but would you but stay till my father till the Lord Keeper comes; would you only permit him to pay you his thanks, and to inquire your name?
My name is unnecessary, answered the stranger; your father I would rather say Sir William Ashton will learn it soon enough, for all the pleasure it is likely to afford him.
You mistake him, said Lucy, earnestly; he will be grateful for my sake and for his own. You do not know my father, or you are deceiving me with a story of his safety, when he has already fallen a victim to the fury of that animal.
When she had caught this idea, she started from the ground and endeavoured to press towards the avenue in which the accident had taken place, while the stranger, though he seemed to hesitate between the desire to assist and the wish to leave her, was obliged, in common humanity, to oppose her both by entreaty and action.
On the word of a gentleman, madam, I tell you the truth; your father is in perfect safety; you will expose yourself to injury if you venture back where the herd of wild cattle grazed. If you will go for, having once adopted the idea that her father was still in danger, she pressed forward in spite of him if you WILL go, accept my arm, though I am not perhaps the person who can with most propriety offer you support.
But, without heeding this intimation, Lucy took him at his word. Oh, if you be a man, she said if you be a gentleman, assist me to find my father! You shall not leave me you must go with me; he is dying perhaps while we are talking here!
Then, without listening to excuse or apology, and holding fast by the strangers arm, though unconscious of anything save the support which it gave, and without which she could not have moved, mixed with a vague feeling of preventing his escape from her, she was urging, and almost dragging, him forward when Sir William Ashton came up, followed by the female attendant of blind Alice, and by two woodcutters, whom he had summoned from their occupation to his assistance. His joy at seeing his daughter safe overcame the surprise with which he would at another time have beheld her hanging as familiarly on the arm of a stranger as she might have done upon his own.
Lucy, my dear Lucy, are you safe? are you well? were the only words that broke from him as he embraced her in ecstasy.
I am well, sir, thank God! and still more that I see you so; but this gentleman, she said, quitting his arm and shrinking from him, what must he think of me? and her eloquent blood, flushing over neck and brow, spoke how much she was ashamed of the freedom with which she had craved, and even compelled, his assistance.
This gentleman, said Sir William Ashton, will, I trust, not regret the trouble we have given him, when I assure him of the gratitude of the Lord Keeper for the greatest service which one man ever rendered to another for the life of my child for my own life, which he has saved by his bravery and presence of mind. He will, I am sure, permit us to request Request nothing of ME, my lord, said the stranger, in a stern and peremptory tone; I am the Master of Ravenswood.
There was a dead pause of surprise, not unmixed with less pleasant feelings. The Master wrapt himself in his cloak, made a haughty inclination toward Lucy, muttering a few words of courtesy, as indistinctly heard as they seemed to be reluctantly uttered, and, turning from them, was immediately lost in the thicket.
The Master of Ravenswood! said the Lord Keeper, when he had recovered his momentary astonishment. Hasten after him stop him beg him to speak to me for a single moment.
The two foresters accordingly set off in pursuit of the stranger. They speedily reappeared, and, in an embarrassed and awkward manner, said the gentleman would not return.
The Lord Keeper took one of the fellows aside, and questioned him more closely what the Master of Ravenswood had said.
He just said he wadna come back, said the man, with the caution of a prudent Scotchman, who cared not to be the bearer of an unpleasant errand.
He said something more, sir, said the Lord Keeper, and I insist on knowing what it was.
Why, then, my lord, said the man, looking down, he said But it wad be nae pleasure to your lordship to hear it, for I dare say the Master meant nae ill.
Thats none of your concern, sir; I desire to hear the very words.
Weel, then, replied the man, he said, Tell Sir William Ashton that the next time he and I forgather, he will nto be half sae blythe of our meeting as of our parting.
Very well, sir, said the Lord Keeper, I believe he alludes to a wager we have on our hawks; it is a matter of no consequence.
He turned to his daughter, who was by this time so much recovered as to be able to walk home. But the effect, which the various recollections connected with a scene so terrific made upon a mind which was susceptible in an extreme degree, was more permanent than the injury which her nerves had sustained. Visions of terror, both in sleep and in waking reveries, recalled to her the form of the furious animal, and the dreadful bellow with which he accompanied his career; and it was always the image of the Master of Ravenswood, with his native nobleness of countenance and form, that seemed to interpose betwixt her and assured death. It is, perhaps, at all times dangerous for a young person to suffer recollection to dwell repeatedly, and with too much complacency, on the same individual; but in Lucys situation it was almost unavoidable. She had never happened to see a young man of mien and features so romantic and so striking as young Ravenswood; but had she seen an hundred his equals or his superiors in those particulars, no one else would have been linked to her heart by the strong associations of remembered danger and escape, of gratitude, wonder, and curiosity. I say curiosity, for it is likely that the singularly restrained and unaccommodating manners of the Master of Ravenswood, so much at variance with the natural expression of his features and grace of his deportment, as they excited wonder by the contrast, had their effect in riveting her attention to the recollections. She knew little of Ravenswood, or the disputes which had existed betwixt her father and his, and perhaps could in her gentleness of mind hardly have comprehended the angry and bitter passions which they had engendered. But she knew that he was come of noble stem; was poor, though descended from the noble and the wealthy; and she felt that she could sympathise with the feelings of a proud mind, which urged him to recoil from the proffered gratitude of the new proprietors of his fathers house and domains. Would he have equally shunned their acknowledgments and avoided their intimacy, had her fathers request been urged more mildly, less abruptly, and softened with the grace which women so well know how to throw into their manner, when they mean to mediate betwixt the headlong passions of the ruder sex? This was a perilous question to ask her own mind perilous both in the idea and its consequences.
Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is true, absence, change of scene and new faces, might probably have destroyed the illusion in her instance, as it has done in many others; but her residence remained solitary, and her mind without those means of dissipating her pleasing visions. This solitude was chiefly owing to the absence of Lady Ashton, who was at this time in Edinburgh, watching the progress of some state-intrigue; the Lord Keeper only received society out of policy or ostentation, and was by nature rather reserved and unsociable; and thus no cavalier appeared to rival or to obscure the ideal picture of chivalrous excellence which Lucy had pictured to herself in the Master of Ravenswood.
While Lucy indulged in these dreams, she made frequent visits to old blind Alice, hoping it would be easy to lead her to talk on the subject which at present she had so imprudently admitted to occupy so large a portion of her thoughts. But Alice did not in this particular gratify her wishes and expectations. She spoke readily, and with pathetic feeling, concerning the family in general, but seemed to observe an especial and cautious silence on the subject of the present representative. The little she said of him was not altogether so favourable as Lucy had anticipated. She hinted that he was of a stern and unforgiving character, more ready to resent than to pardon injuries; and Lucy combined, with great alarm, the hints which she now dropped of these dangerous qualities with Alices advice to her father, so emphatically given, to beware of Ravenswood.
But that very Ravenswood, of whom such unjust suspicions had been entertained, had, almost immediately after they had been uttered, confuted them by saving at once her fathers life and her own. Had he nourished such black revenge as Alices dark hints seemed to indicate, no deed of active guilt was necessary to the full gratification of that evil passion. He needed but to have withheld for an instant his indispensable and effective assistance, and the object of his resentment must have perished, without any direct aggression on his part, by a death equally fearful and certain. She conceived, therefore, that some secret prejudice, or the suspicions incident to age and misfortune, had led Alice to form conclusions injurious to the character, and irreconcilable both with the generous conduct and noble features, of the Master of Ravenswood. And in this belief Lucy reposed her hope, and went on weaving her enchanted web of fairy tissue, as beautiful and transient as the film of the gossamer when it is pearled with the morning dew and glimmering to the sun.
Her father, in the mean while, as well as the Master of Ravenswood, were making reflections, as frequent though more solid than those of Lucy, upon the singular event which had taken place. The Lord Keepers first task, when he returned home, was to ascertain by medical advice that his daughter had sustained no injury from the dangerous and alarming situation in which she had been placed. Satisfied on this topic, he proceeded to revise the memoranda which he had taken down from the mouth of the person employed to interrupt the funeral service of the late Lord Ravenswood. Bred to casuistry, and well accustomed to practise the ambidexter ingenuity of the bar, it cost him little trouble to soften the features of the tumult which he had been at first so anxious to exaggerate. He preached to his colleagues of the privy council the necessity of using conciliatory measures with young men, whose blood and temper were hot, and their experience of life limited. He did not hesitate to attribute some censure to the conduct of the officer, as having been unnecessarily irritating.
These were the contents of his public despatches. The letters which he wrote to those private friends into whose management the matter was likely to fall were of a yet more favourable tenor. He represented that lenity in this case would be equally politic and popular, whereas, considering the high respect with which the rites of interment are regarded in Scotland, any severity exercised against the Master of Ravenswood for protecting those of his father from interruption, would be on all sides most unfavourably construed. And, finally, assuming the language of a generous and high-spirited man, he made it his particular request that this affair should be passed over without severe notice. He alluded with delicacy to the predicament in which he himself stood with young Ravenswood, as having succeeded in the long train of litigation by which the fortunes of that noble house had been so much reduced, and confessed it would be most peculiarly acceptable to his own feelings, could he find in some sort to counterbalance the disadvantages which he had occasioned the family, though only in the prosecution of his just and lawful rights. He therefore made it his particular and personal request that the matter should have no farther consequences, an insinuated a desire that he himself should have the merit of having put a stop to it by his favourable report and intercession. It was particularly remarkable that, contrary to his uniform practice, he made no special communication to Lady Ashton upon the subject of the tumult; and although he mentioned the alarm which Lucy had received from one of the wild cattle, yet he gave no detailed account of an incident so interesting and terrible.
There was much surprise among Sir William Ashtons political friends and colleagues on receiving letters of a tenor so unexpected. On comparing notes together, one smiled, one put up his eyebrows, a third nodded acquiescence in the general wonder, and a fourth asked if they were sure these were ALL the letters the Lord Keeper had written on the subject. It runs strangely in my mind, my lords, that none of these advices contain the root of the matter.
But no secret letters of a contrary nature had been received, although the question seemed to imply the possibility of their existence.
Well, said an old grey-headed statesman, who had contrived, by shifting and trimming, to maintain his post at the steerage through all the changes of course which the vessel had held for thirty years, I thought Sir William would hae verified the auld Scottish saying, As soon comes the lambs skin to market as the auld tups.
We must please him after his own fashion, said another, though it be an unlooked-for one.
A wilful man maun hae his way, answered the old counsellor.
The Keeper will rue this before year and day are out, said a third; the Master of Ravenswood is the lad to wind him a pirn.
Why, what would you do, my lords, with the poor young fellow? said a noble Marquis present. The Lord Keeper has got all his estates; he has not a cross to bless himself with.
On which the ancient Lord Turntippet replied,
If he hasna gear to fine,
He ha shins to pine.
And that was our way before the Revolution: Lucitur cum persona, qui luere non potest cum crumena. Hegh, my lords, thats gude law Latin.
I can see no motive, replied the Marquis, that any noble lord can have for urging this matter farther; let the Lord Keeper have the power to deal in it as he pleases.
Agree, agree remit to the Lord Keeper, with any other person for fashions sake Lord Hirplehooly, who is bed-ridden one to be a quorum. Make your entry in the minutes, Mr. Clerk. And now, my lords, there is that young scattergood the Laird of Bucklaws fine to be disposed upon. I suppose it goes to my Lord Treasurer?
Shame be in my meal-poke, then, exclaimed the Lord Turntippet, and your hand aye in the nook of it! I had set that down for a bye-bit between meals for mysell.