engagement of the young people should have been taken, and conjured the Master to remember he had never given any encouragement thereunto; and observed that, as a transaction inter minores, and without concurrence of his daughter's natural curators, the engagement was inept, and void in law. This precipitate measure, he added, had produced a very bad effect upon Lady Ashton's mind, which it was impossible at present to remove. Her son, Colonel Douglas Ashton, had embraced her prejudices in the fullest extent, and it was impossible for Sir William to adopt a course disagreeable to them without a fatal and irreconcilable breach in his family; which was not at present to be thought of. Time, the great physician, he hoped, would mend all.
In a postscript, Sir William said something more explicitly, which seemed to intimate that, rather than the law of Scotland should sustain a severe wound through his sides, by a reversal of the judgment of her supreme courts, in the case of the barony of Ravenswood, through the intervention of what, with all submission, he must term a foreign court of appeal, he himself would extrajudically consent to considerable sacrifices.
From Lucy Ashton, by some unknown conveyance, the Master received the following lines: 'I received yours, but it was at the utmost risk; do not attempt to write again till better times. I am sore beset, but I will be true to my word, while the exercise of my reason is vouchsafed to me. That you are happy and prosperous is some consolation, and my situation requires it all.' The note was signed 'L.A.'
This letter filled Ravenswood with the most lively alarm. He made many attempts, notwithstanding her prohibition, to convey letters to Miss Ashton, and even to obtain an interview; but his plans were frustrated, and he had only the mortification to learn that anxious and effectual precautions had been taken to prevent the possibility of their correspondence. The Master was the more distressed by these circumstances, as it became impossible to delay his departure from Scotland, upon the important mission which had been confided to him. Before his departure, he put Sir William Ashton's letter into the hands of the Marquis of A——, who observed with a smile, that Sir William's day of grace was past, and that he had now to learn which side of the hedge the sun had got to. It was with the greatest difficulty that Ravenswood extorted from the Marquis a promise that he would compromise the proceedings in Parliament, providing Sir William should be disposed to acquiesce in a union between him and Lucy Ashton.
'I would hardly,' said the Marquis, 'consent to your throwing away your birthright in this manner, were I not perfectly confident that Lady Ashton, or Lady Douglas, or whatever she calls herself, will, as Scotchmen say, keep her threep; and that her husband dares not contradict her.'
'But yet,' said the Master, 'I trust your lordship will consider my engagement as sacred.'
'Believe my word of honour,' said the Marquis, 'I would be a friend even to your follies; and having thus told you MY opinion, I will endeavour, as occasion offers, to serve you according to your own.'
The master of Ravenswood could but thank his generous kinsman and patron, and leave him full power to act in all his affairs. He departed from Scotland upon his mission, which, it was supposed, might detain him upon the continent for some months.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
TWELVE months had passed away since the Master of Ravenswood's departure for the continent, and, although his return to Scotland had been expected in a much shorter space, yet the affairs of his mission, or, according to a prevailing report, others of a nature personal to himself, still detained him abroad. In the mean time, the altered state of affairs in Sir William Ashton's family may be gathered from the following conversation which took place betwixt Bucklaw and his confidential bottle companion and dependant, the noted Captain Craigengelt. They were seated on either side of the huge sepulchral-looking freestone chimney in the low hall at Girnington. A wood fire blazed merrily in the grate; a round oaken table, placed between them, supported a stoup of excellent claret, two rummer glasses, and other good cheer; and yet, with all these appliances and means to boot, the countenance of the patron was dubious, doubtful, and unsatisfied, while the invention of his dependant was taxed to the utmost to parry what he most dreaded, a fit, as he called it, of the sullens, on the part of his protector. After a long pause, only interrupted by the devil's tattoo, which Bucklaw kept beating against the hearth with the toe of his boot, Craigengelt at last ventured to break silence. 'May I be double distanced,' said he, 'if ever I saw a man in my life have less the air of a bridegroom! Cut me out of feather, if you have not more the look of a man condemned to be hanged!'
'My kind thanks for the compliment,' replied Bucklaw; 'but I suppose you think upon the predicament in which you yourself are most likely to be placed; and pray, Captain Craigengelt, if it please your worship, why should I look merry, when I'm sad, and devilish sad too?'
'And that's what vexes me,' said Craigengelt. 'Here is this match, the best in the whole country, and which were so anxious about, is on the point of being concluded, and you are as sulky as a bear that has lost its whelps.'
'I do not know,' answered the Laird, doggedly, 'whether I should conclude or not, if it was not that I am too far forwards to leap back.'
'Leap back!' exclaimed Craigengelt, with a well-assumed air of astonishment, 'that would be playing the back-game with a witness! Leap back! Why, is not the girl's fortune——'
'The young lady's, if you please,' said Hayston, interrupting him.
'Well—well, no disrespect meant. Will Miss Ashton's tocher not weigh against any in Lothian?'
'Granted,' answered Bucklaw; 'but I care not a penny for her tocher; I have enough of my own.'
'And the mother, that loves you like her own child?'
'Better than some of her children, I believe,' said Bucklaw, 'or there would be little love wared on the matter.'
'And Colonel Sholto Douglas Ashton, who desires the marriage above all earthly things?'
'Because,' said Bucklaw, 'he expects to carry the county of —— through my interest.'
'And the father, who is as keen to see the match concluded as ever I have been to win a main?'
'Ay,' said Bucklaw, in the same disparaging manner, 'it lies with Sir William's policy to secure the next best match, since he cannot barter his child to save the great Ravenswood estate, which the English House of Lords are about to wrench out of his clutches.'
'What say you to the young lady herself?' said Craigengelt; 'the finest young woman in all Scotland, one that you used to be so fond of when she was cross, and now she consents to have you, and gives up her engagement with Ravenswood, you are for jibbing. I must say, the devil's in ye, when ye neither know what you would have nor what you would want.'
'I'll tell you my meaning in a word,' answered Bucklaw, getting up and walking through the room; 'I want to know what the devil is the cause of Miss Ashton's changing her mind so suddenly?'
'And what need you care,' said Craigengelt, 'since the change is in your favour?'
'I'll tell you what it is,' returned his patron, 'I never knew much of that sort of fine ladies, and I believe they may be as capricious as the devil; but there is something in Miss Ashton's change a devilish deal too sudden and too serious for a mere flisk of her own. I'll be bound, Lady Ashton understands every machine for breaking in the human mind, and there are as many as there are cannon-bit, martingales, and cavessons for young colts.'
'And if that were not the case,' said Craigengelt, 'how the devil should we ever get them into training at all?'
