The rascal who would not give cut and thrust for his country, as long as he had a breath to draw or a leg to stand on, should be tied neck and heels, without benefit of clergy, and thrown over Leith pier, to swim for his life like a mangy dog.—Mansie Wauch.
On looking through the screen of leaves which partially shrouded the mouth or entrance of their remarkable hiding-place, they saw the moonlight reflected from, the conical helmets, the globular cuirasses, and long polished gun-barrels of some ten or twelve arquebusiers, whom, by their black beards, swarthy countenances, and strange language, they knew to belong to Gamboa's Spanish band; and, indeed, that formidable Don himself, in a suit of black armour, profusely engraved with gold, spurred his horse rapidly after them from the river-side, and ascended the steep path that led to the ruined castle on the limestone cliff. With this party were a few green-doubleted English archers and billmen, who had with them several horses, linked together by halters; and these were laden with all kinds of trappings and household goods, too evidently the plunder of the village and castle of Roslin, the flames of which were now beginning to waver and sink. In short, this was evidently a party of foragers or devastators, who were returning to Edmondstone Edge, where the main body of Somerset's army were now encamped, and where his soldiers were making merry among the Scottish tents; but having, as I have said, heard voices in the echoing cave, or having discovered by means of a hound which accompanied them, that some unfortunate fugitives were concealed thereabout, the yet unsated lust of blood, or hope of plunder, made the Spaniards resolve to have them discovered, and killed or taken.
As they warily drew near, with the matches of their arquebuses burning, and in every half-drawn bow an arrow-pointed, Florence remembered the future safety of Madeline, the unobeyed orders of Arran; and the hopelessness of achieving either filled his heart again with sickness.
Perceiving nothing but the ivied face of the rock, and hearing no sound, the Spaniards uttered a shout, and came more hastily up the narrow path; then, most unhappily, Madeline, being unable to repress her alarm, uttered an exclamation, which, however low, reached the ears of Gamboa.
"Voto á tal!" he exclaimed; "there are women here—one, at least, and I shall watch her as Argus did Io, that is, if she proves as handsome."
"It may be a spirit guarding buried treasure," suggested one of his soldiers, shrinking back.
"And which dost thou shrink from, Gil Alvarez, the spirit or the treasure?" asked his leader. "I have heard of such things in Germany, and, by my beard and beads! this old place looketh like many a castle we have seen upon the Rhine and in the Schwarzwald. Push on, hombres! Diavolo! here are men-at-arms afraid of a few ivy-leaves!"
There was another shout from the Spaniards, and he who was named Gil Alvarez made a rush into the gloom that lay beyond the screen of ivy and wild roses; but he found himself encountered by unseen enemies, for at the same moment that Claude Hamilton wrenched away his arquebuse, Florence tore off his collar of bandoleers, and bestowed a sword-thrust into his open mouth, hurling him back, bleeding and senseless, upon his comrades below.
This was an immediate signal for a general assault.
Whiz came the long arrows, to shiver and splinter on the walls of rock; and with the flash of the arquebuses came their leaden bullets, to crash and flatten on the same place; and then both the English and Spaniards withdrew behind some masses of the fallen walls and the trunks of trees, to consider the best means of assailing those hidden defenders, of whose number and power they were ignorant.
"There are twenty charges of powder in the bandoleer," said Claude Hamilton, counting them in the dark, "and there are not above twenty of those cut-throats opposed to us. Your eye is keener, Fawside, and your hand more sure, than mine; take the arquebuse, and pick me off these fellows as fast as they show themselves. Two men to man this cavern-mouth are as good as a hundred; let us fight bravely, lad, for we know not but aid may come anon."
By the glitter of its beams on the polished armour of Gamboa's men, the bright moon showed with fatal distinctness where they nestled among the green hawthorns or behind the heaps of stones which had fallen from the old castle above; thus Florence, when he loaded and levelled by the silvery light without, felt that Madeline's safety, honour, her life perhaps, depended upon the precision of his aim.
He almost trembled as he selected an object; and Claude Hamilton could perceive that his face was pale, even in the usually ruddy light of the match, in which his polished mail seemed to glitter with a lambent glow, as his eye glared along the barrel. He fired; and the explosion, which made the cavern echo with seeming thunder, was followed by a cry of agony, and then an armed man was seen rolling down the slope towards the Esk.
"To thine arquebuse again, lad!" said Hamilton, sternly but cheerily, and with grim satisfaction; "thou hast given one of these tawny loons a shot in his stomach, and a weighty one, too; I warrant they go four, at least, to the Lanark pound. Couldst notch the helmet of that pernicious heretic Pedro Gamboa, think you? By St. Andrew! were he within reach of my hand I could spelder him by one stroke of my axe, yea, spelder him as I would a haddock!" he added, as another volley of shot and arrows whizzed and rattled on the rocks around them.
A second bullet from the arquebuse of Florence, followed by the cry of—
"Holy Virgin, I am a dead man!" announced that this time an English billman had fallen; and with a yell of rage his comrades rushed forward to storm the retreat of these hidden enemies. While Florence reloaded and blew the match of his arquebuse, Claude Hamilton with his two-handed sword manned the cavern mouth, and being on firm vantage ground (while the assailants required all their hands. feet, and energy, to clamber upward), he cut down three of them in succession with ease, and by a single thrust tossed a fourth nearly ten yards into the woody hollow below. In a minute more two others hac fallen, killed or wounded, under the deadly aim of Florence.
"How stands your bandoleer?" asked the laird of Preston, resting on his long sword.
"I have shots enough for them all at this rate."
"Good—by the black rood of Scotland, good! We'll beat them yet; level low and true—we fight for our lives!"
"Oh, laird of Preston," exclaimed Florence, in a voice to which emotion lent a chord that was soft and musical; "even in this hour of terror hear me. I fight only for Madeline, and for the love I bear her—a love beyond the grave—see that she is in safety."
"Thanks, my ancient enemy—may Heaven nerve your eye and hand!"
Florence fired again, and while the deep vaults and the rocky glen rang with a thousand echoes, a Spaniard fell, and was seen tossing his arms in the moonlight, as he shrieked on "the Holy of Holies" (el Santo de los Santos) to have pity upon him. On beholding the slaughter of his men, Gamboa uttered a dreadful oath in Spanish.
"Let us smoke forth these Scots!" he exclaimed.
"How, smoke them say you?" asked an Englishman, who proved to be no other than Master Patten, the future historian of the expedition, who rode up at that moment.
"Exactly," rejoined the Spaniard, who spoke the English language with great fluency: "many a brood of yellow Indians I have smoked out of their holes in Hispaniola and Tortuga. You know nothing of life in Cuba—but I do. There I have often roasted thirteen Indian devils alive on a Good Friday, in honour of our blessed Lord and the twelve Apostles. God smite ye, fellows! cut brushwood—bring fire—fill the cavern-mouth, and burn them as we would castanos in their shells."
This proposition, which made the blood of Florence run cold, was received with a loud hurrah, and relinquishing their arquebuses, the Spaniards drew their short swords, and together with the English billmen, proceeded to form piles and bundles of wood, by uprooting shrubs and bushes—cutting down small trees, and tearing branches from firs and beeches; and now, from the ruins of the old castle above (a place where they were secure from the arquebuse of Florence), they began to throw down vast heaps of this hastily-gathered fuel, together with an entire stack of straw, which they found near; and as these combustibles accumulated about the cavern-mouth, and gradually covered it up, excluding the moonlight and the external air, the imminence of their danger could no longer be concealed from the countess and the vicar; and to save them at least from so horrible a death, Florence proposed that a capitulation should be asked for.
"To capitulate is to be destroyed!" exclaimed Hamilton fiercely; "what hope of quarter have we from mercenaries like these?"
"To remain here is also to be destroyed, and by a death too dreadful for contemplation—suffocation in a dark pit," replied Florence, pressing Madeline to his breast closely and tenderly.
"Bring hither a lighted match; but, by the Holy of Holies," they heard the superstitious Don Pedro exclaiming; "I am loath to smother a woman at the close of a day of victory—a woman whose name may be Mary, too!"
"What matters it, whether her name be Mary or Maud—Giles or Joan?" asked Master Patten, staring in wonder through the bars of his helmet, and laughing the while.
"It matters much to me, Señor Inglese, for I was reared in Old Castile, and on the banks of the Ebro, where my mother taught me it was a sin to make love on a Friday, or to kiss a woman whose name was Mary on a day of fasting; for though I serve King Edward's banner, and fight against the Scots, I am nevertheless, thank Heaven! a good Catholic and a true Castilian, without the taint of Jew, infidel, or Morisco in my blood."
On hearing this, just as fire from a gunmatch was about to be put into the vast pile of fuel, over which the arquebusiers had sprinkled powder from their priming-flasks, the Vicar of Tranent rushed to the entrance of the grotto, and tearing aside the screen of ivy with one hand, waved a white handkerchief with the other, exclaiming,—
"Gloria tibi, Domine! we shall be saved! I am a priest, sir Spaniard, and in the name of our holy Church and of Him I serve, command you to spare me, and those who are with me!" A shout of derision from Patten's men was the sole reply to this.
"Command, quotha—what manner of ware have we here?" said one mockingly.
"A priest and a woman in that dark hole! holy father how farest thou?" said a second.
"By St. George, 'tis a rare one to eschew the world, the flesh, and the devil!" added a third.
"Shoot, shoot! Cogsbones—'twas no priest's hand that slew the best lad in Kendal," exclaimed Patten, "or handled his arquebuse like one of our men at Finsbury!" Two archers drew each an arrow to their heads; but Pedro de Gamboa interposed his drawn sword before them, exclaiming:
"Hold—hold, sirs. I will have naught to do with priests. I have seen enough in my time to prove that Heaven always avenges a sacrilege."
"What!" asked Patten; "hast any qualms about killing a scurvy shaveling—a Scot, too? Don Spaniard, you should have smelled the fires o' Smithfield in old King Harry's time. Go to! we are not now either in Old Castile or on the banks of the Ebro."
"Silence, Englishman!" replied the Spaniard gravely; "for though your land hath become as a land of heathens, and, to my sorrow, I serve it, I am a good Catholic, yet one, it may be, who is in the habit of swearing more by the saints than of praying to them. I am a soldier of fortune, yet I war not on priests or women, but simply on such as come armed against me; and 'tis the memory of what I was in Old Castile and on the banks of the Ebro that in an hour like this prevents me from slaying a priest of that Church in the faith of which my mother reared me. For one act of sacrilege and blasphemy I have seen nearly the whole population of a city perish in an hour."
"Fore George, this must have been in Old Castile!" said Patten, in a jibing tone.
"It was not," replied the Spaniard angrily, while his dark eyes flashed under the peak of his helmet. "But darest thou gibe me, Englishman—I, who have fought by the side of Cortes in Mexico, and by the order of Pizzaro slew Diego Almagro—I, who served with Velasquez in distant climes that are far away, in the lands of gold and silver, snow and fire, where the boasted red cross of your country has never yet been seen by sea or shore; but there I have seen that which this night forbids me to commit a sacrilege!"
In Spanish, he now commanded his soldiers to remove the pile of brushwood and straw that lay before the cavern-mouth; and while they obeyed with alacrity, he again turned sternly to Master Patten, and said,—
"Listen! In 1534 I was at San Iago de Guatemala, in old Mexico, and resided with a noble Spanish gentlewoman of the city, named Doña Maria de Castilia, or of Castile, for she came, like myself, from the sunny banks of the Ebro. In one week her husband was slain in battle and her children were destroyed by the Mexican savages from Petapa. Driven to frenzy by the loss of all she loved, she smote a priest who attempted to console her, and in his presence blasphemed Heaven, exclaiming, while she rent her garments,—
"'El Espiritu Santo, what more can it do to me now than has been done, save take away a miserable life which I regard not!'
"As she spoke, there was heard a dreadful rushing sound. For a time we knew not whether it came from heaven above or the earth beneath us; but anon there came also shouts of terror from a thousand tongues, and lo! from the old volcano, a mountain nine miles in height, which overhangs the city, there burst a mighty flood of water, which drowned this impious woman and many hundreds of the people, while streets and churches were alike overturned and swept away. A few persons escaped: among them I, by the speed of my horse: but the ruins of La Cividad Vieja still remain to attest how sacrilege may be punished. And now, as I vowed to perform at least one deed of charity to-day, if I escaped the battle scathless, I release this priest and those who are with him. Come forth, good father, and fear not; I pledge my word for your safety—I, Don Pedro de Gamboa."
The lofty air and determined manner of the Spaniard, together with the knowledge that his veterans were the more numerous and better-armed party, awed Master Patten and his petulant archers into silent acquiescence; and the old vicar, leading the countess by the hand, stepped forth into the moonlight, followed by Florence and Claude Hamilton.
"Is this your whole party, señor padre?" asked the Spanish captain, with a courteous salute.
"All; and in the name of Him I serve and the Church you still venerate, I crave their liberty with me."
"It is granted."
"Deo gratias, sir Spaniard."
"I am too good a Castilian, padre mio, to refuse aught to a priest or to a lady; and as neither you nor she can travel hence afoot, I give you here two of our captured nags. Go, reverend sir, and God speed you! If, between the night and morning, you can find time to say an Ave or Credo for one who has long since forgotten how to pray for himself, insert in your prayer the name of Pedro de Gamboa, the poor soldier of fortune. Adieu!"
In five minutes after this fortunate and sudden release our friends found themselves alone, and pursuing, by the most sequestered paths, as rapidly as possible, and lighted by the clear and brilliant moon, the way to Edinburgh; while the cavalier, with his party of arquebusiers and bowmen, with their train of horses and plunder, proceeded to Somerset's new halting-place on Edmondstone Edge.
The vicar and the countess were mounted; and on each side of the horse ridden by the latter, Florence and Claude Hamilton walked on foot as hastily as their iron trappings would permit them.