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And Raffles was smiling in my face as he held the door wide for my escape. "You told me a lie!" I gasped in whispers. "I did nothing of the sort," he replied. "The furniture's the furniture of Hector Carruthers; but the house is the house of Lord Lochmaben. Look here!" He had stooped, and was smoothing out the discarded envelope of a telegram.
In memory of this circumstance, the crest of the family of Kirkpatrick is a hand grasping a dagger distilling gouts of blood; the motto, "I mak sikkar." Before the catastrophe was known in the convent, Bruce and his friends had left it some time, and were far on their road to Lochmaben.
It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet waving down the way to Lochmaben gate.
Sir Ralph Lattimer, the second in command, was killed in the first onset; and Lord Percy himself, after fighting as became his brave house, fled, covered with wounds, toward Alnwick. Lochmaben Castle.
Bruce understood the hint, and galloped off with his horse's shoes turned backward, so as to baffle pursuit. He came safely, on the fifth day, to his own border castle of Lochmaben, where he found his brother Edward. Keeping watch, they seized a messenger on his way to the English court, bearing letters from Comyn, which explained to Bruce what the peril had been, and who the traitor.
After the Byland surprise, Harclay, the new Earl of Carlisle, the victor of Boroughbridge, and the warden of the marches, dismissed his troops, sought out Bruce at Lochmaben, and made an arrangement with him, by which it was resolved that a committee of six English and six Scottish magnates should be empowered to conclude peace between the two countries on the basis of recognising him as King of Scots.
The king himself now entered Galloway and reduced the four remaining strongholds held by the English there the castles of Butele, Dalswinton, Lochmaben, and Tibbers. He then proceeded to Dumfries, which he forced to surrender, and entered it as the victorious King of Scotland, just seven years after the time when he had commenced the war by expelling the English justiciary.
It rolled away like mist before the sun, and he was easily engaged in a keen and animated dissertation about Lochleven trout, and sea trout, and river trout, and bull trout, and char, which never rise to a fly, and par, which some suppose infant salmon, and herlings, which frequent the Nith, and vendisses, which are only found in the Castle-Loch of Lochmaben; and he was hurrying on with the eager impetuosity and enthusiasm of a young sportsman, when he observed that the smile with which the Queen at first listened to him died languidly away, and that, in spite of her efforts to suppress them, tears rose to her eyes.
The squalid hue of famine had left every face, and each smiling countenance, beaming with health, security, and gratitude, told Wallace more emphatically than a thousand tongues, the wisdom of the means he had used to regenerate his country. Maxwell had prepared the fortress of Lochmaben, once the residence of Bruce, for the reception of the regent.
"Lord Lochmaben," I read in pencil by the dim light; and the case was plain to me on the spot. My friends had let their house, furnished, as anybody but Raffles would have explained to me in the beginning. "All right," I said. "Shut the door." And he not only shut it without a sound, but drew a bolt that might have been sheathed in rubber.
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