"There is naebody in the House," answered Mary.
"Blut! that is the good tidings," ejaculated Hans, in joy. "Hurra, then, for the Castle!" And he dashed through the willows that overhung the burial-ground, where they stood.
On that night, three hours after, intelligence was said to have been given by Mary Lee to the procurator-fiscal of the stewartry, that the outlawed pirates lay in the sea bent at the banks of the Solway. A band of armed men repaired to the place, and Hans Gerstendorf and his men, among whom was Peter Fleming, no other than Hector Ashley, were seized and put in irons, and carried to the jail of Dumfries. The unhappy men were afterwards removed to the jail of Edinburgh, tried, and four of them, including Fleming, condemned to be executed on the sands of Leith, for the crime of piracy on the high seas. They were executed accordingly.
A new family came to occupy "The Castle"--far removed in relationship to the Ashleys. Mary Lee continued to live on, for many years, exhibiting the same peculiarities of character--the same silence--the same scorn of social relations. Her desire of revenge was satisfied--but that satisfaction was no more effectual, in its assuaging consequences, than revenge is generally found to be. It even added to her moroseness; for the evil which she had removed, had been the only good she ever enjoyed, and the thirst for revenge which she had indulged, when slaked by the blood of all her enemies, left her nothing to wish for in the world. She took no interest in passing events, and as she increased in years, her faculties decayed. Latterly, and towards the termination of her life, she fell into temporary fits of insanity--which, however, did not conceal from her all her sorrows, for her lucid intervals were periods of misery; all her recollections seemed painful as the searing-iron of a roused conscience; she never displayed a symptom of remorse for the dreadful vengeance she had taken on the head and house of her seducer; but the wild laugh would break out only to settle again in the stare of idiotcy. So much for our legend.
Great was the surprise of the peaceful congregation assembled in the little church of Ettleton, in Liddisdale, on a Sunday forenoon, somewhere about one hundred and fifty years since, to see the Lord of Hermitage come in amongst them, just as the service of the day had begun. A surprise this, not without good and sufficient cause; for, although the patron of the parish, and living in the immediate neighbourhood of the church just named, the Lord of Hermitage had not entered it for many a long year. Some of those present thought it not unlikely, that he had begun to repent of his ways, which were, indeed, evil--for a vicious, dissolute, and tyrannical man was he--dreaded and detested by all who knew him; and that his coming to church, on this occasion, was not improbably meant as a public intimation of his having commenced the work of reformation; and that it might, therefore, be looked upon as the first overt act of contrition. Others, incredulous of so sudden a conversion in a man so notorious for his wickedness, dreaded that his appearance, on this occasion, boded no good; although they could not conjecture, either, how any evil should arise from it.