“You shall see how staid I will be, and how cautious, my good friend,” said Graeme; “but, blessed Lady, what goodly house is that which is lying all in ruins so close to the city? Have they been playing at the Abbot of Unreason here, and ended the gambol by burning the church?”
“There again now,” replied his companion, “you go down the wind like a wild haggard, that minds neither lure nor beck--that is a question you should have asked in as low a tone as I shall answer it.”
“If I stay here long,” said Roland Graeme, “it is like I shall lose the natural use of my voice--but what are the ruins then?”
“The Kirk of Field,” said the falconer, in a low and impressive whisper, laying at the same time his finger on his lip; “ask no more about it--somebody got foul play, and somebody got the blame of it; and the game began there which perhaps may not be played out in our time.--Poor Henry Darnley! to be an ass, he understood somewhat of a hawk; but they sent him on the wing through the air himself one bright moonlight night.”
The memory of this catastrophe was so recent, that the page averted his eyes with horror from the scathed ruins in which it had taken place; and the accusations against the Queen, to which it had given rise, came over his mind with such strength as to balance the compassion he had begun to entertain for her present forlorn situation.
It was, indeed, with that agitating state of mind which arises partly from horror, but more from anxious interest and curiosity, that young Graeme found himself actually traversing the scene of those tremendous events, the report of which had disturbed the most distant solitudes in Scotland, like the echoes of distant thunder rolling among the mountains.
“Now,” he thought, “now or never shall I become a man, and bear my part in those deeds which the simple inhabitants of our hamlets repeat to each other, as if they were wrought by beings of a superior order to their own. I will know now, wherefore the Knight of Avenel carries his crest so much above those of the neighbouring baronage, and how it is that men, by valour and wisdom, work their way from the hoddin-gray coat to the cloak of scarlet and gold. Men say I have not much wisdom to recommend me; and if that be true, courage must do it; for I will be a man amongst living men, or a dead corpse amongst the dead.”