“You robber dogs!” I exclaimed, wilfully mistaking the purpose of their disturbance, “if you do not instantly quit the house I will fire my blunderbuss through the door.”

“Fire a fule’s bauble!” said Andrew Fairservice; “it’s Mr. Clerk Jobson, with a legal warrant—”

“To search for, take, and apprehend,” said the voice of that execrable pettifogger, “the bodies of certain persons in my warrant named, charged of high treason under the 13th of King William, chapter third.”

And the violence on the door was renewed. “I am rising, gentlemen,” said I, desirous to gain as much time as possible—“commit no violence—give me leave to look at your warrant; and, if it is formal and legal, I shall not oppose it.”

“God save great George our King!” ejaculated Andrew. “I tauld ye that ye would find nae Jacobites here.”

Spinning out the time as much as possible, I was at length compelled to open the door, which they would otherwise have forced.

Mr. Jobson entered, with several assistants, among whom I discovered the younger Wingfield, to whom, doubtless, he was obliged for his information, and exhibited his warrant, directed not only against Frederick Vernon, an attainted traitor, but also against Diana Vernon, spinster, and Francis Osbaldistone, gentleman, accused of misprision of treason. It was a case in which resistance would have been madness; I therefore, after capitulating for a few minutes’ delay, surrendered myself a prisoner.

I had next the mortification to see Jobson go straight to the chamber of Miss Vernon, and I learned that from thence, without hesitation or difficulty, he went to the room where Sir Frederick had slept. “The hare has stolen away,” said the brute, “but her form is warm—the greyhounds will have her by the haunches yet.”

A scream from the garden announced that he prophesied too truly. In the course of five minutes, Rashleigh entered the library with Sir Frederick Vernon and his daughter as prisoners. “The fox,” he said, “knew his old earth, but he forgot it could be stopped by a careful huntsman—I had not forgot the garden gate, Sir Frederick—or, if that title suits you better, most noble Lord Beauchamp.”

“Rashleigh,” said Sir Frederick, “thou art a detestable villain!”

“I better deserved the name, Sir Knight, or my Lord, when, under the direction of an able tutor, I sought to introduce civil war into the bosom of a peaceful country. But I have done my best,” said he, looking upwards, “to atone for my errors.”

I could hold no longer. I had designed to watch their proceedings in silence, but I felt that I must speak or die. “If hell,” I said, “has one complexion more hideous than another, it is where villainy is masked by hypocrisy.”

“Ha! my gentle cousin,” said Rashleigh, holding a candle towards me, and surveying me from head to foot; “right welcome to Osbaldistone Hall!—I can forgive your spleen—It is hard to lose an estate and a mistress in one night; for we shall take possession of this poor manor-house in the name of the lawful heir, Sir Rashleigh Osbaldistone.”

While Rashleigh braved it out in this manner, I could see that he put a strong force upon his feelings, both of anger and shame. But his state of mind was more obvious when Diana Vernon addressed him. “Rashleigh,” she said, “I pity you—for, deep as the evil is which you have laboured to do me, and the evil you have actually done, I cannot hate you so much as I scorn and pity you. What you have now done may be the work of an hour, but will furnish you with reflection for your life—of what nature I leave to your own conscience, which will not slumber for ever.”