which she had risen, and retreating a few steps, repeated hastily “Sir William Ashton is perfectly safe and will be here instantly. Do not make yourself anxious on his account: Fate has singularly preserved him. You, madam, are exhausted, and must not think of rising until you have some assistance more suitable than mine.”
Lucy, whose senses were by this time more effectually collected, was naturally led to look at the stranger with attention. There was nothing in his appearance which should have rendered him unwilling to offer his arm to a young lady who required support, or which could have induced her to refuse his assistance; and she could not help thinking, even in that moment, that he seemed cold and reluctant to offer it. A shooting-dress of dark cloth intimated the rank of the wearer, though concealed in part by a large and loose cloak of a dark brown colour. A montero cap and a black feather drooped over the wearer’s brow, and partly concealed his features, which, so far as seen, were dark, regular, adn full of majestic, though somewhat sullen, expression. Some secret sorrow, or the brooding spirit of some moody passion, had quenched the light and ingenuous vivacity of youth in a countenance singularly fitted to display both, and it was not easy to gaze on the stranger without a secret impression either of pity or awe, or at least of doubt and curiosity allied to both.
The impression which we have necessarily been long in describing, Lucy felt in the glance of a moment, and had no sooner encountered the keen black eyes of the stranger than her own were bent on the ground with a mixture of bashful embarrassment and fear. Yet there was a necessity to speak, or at last she thought so, and in a fluttered accent she began to mention her wonderful escape, in which she was sure that the stranger must, under Heaven, have been her father’s protector and her own.
He seemed to shrink from her expressions of gratitude, while he replied abruptly, “I leave you, madam,” the deep melody of his voice rendered powerful, but not harsh, by something like a severity of tone – “I leave you to the protection of those to whom it is possible you may have this day been a guardian angel.”
Lucy was surprised at the ambiguity of his language, and, with a feeling of artless and unaffected gratitude, began to deprecate the idea of having intended to give her deliverer any offence, as if such a thing had been possible. “I have been unfortunate,” she said, “in endeavouring to express my thanks – I am sure it must be so, though I cannot recollect what I said; but would you but stay till my father – till the Lord Keeper comes; would you only permit him to pay you his thanks, and to inquire your name?”
“My name is unnecessary,” answered the stranger; “your father – I would rather say Sir William Ashton – will learn it soon enough, for all the pleasure it is likely to afford him.”
“You mistake him,” said Lucy, earnestly; “he will be grateful for my sake and for his own. You do not know my father, or you are deceiving me with a story of his safety, when he has already fallen a victim to the fury of that animal.”
When she had caught this idea, she started from the ground and endeavoured to press towards the avenue in which the accident had taken place, while the stranger, though he seemed to hesitate between the desire to assist and the wish to leave her, was obliged, in common humanity, to oppose her both by entreaty and action.
“On the word of a gentleman, madam, I tell you the truth; your father is in perfect safety; you will expose yourself to injury if you venture back where the herd of wild cattle grazed. If you will go” – for, having once adopted the idea that her father was still in danger, she pressed forward in spite of him – “if you WILL go, accept my arm, though I am not perhaps the person who can with most propriety offer you support.”
But, without heeding this intimation, Lucy took him at his word. “Oh, if you be a man,” she said – “if you be a gentleman, assist me to find my father! You shall not leave me – you must go with me; he is dying perhaps while we are talking here!”
Then, without listening to excuse or apology, and holding fast by the stranger’s arm, though unconscious of anything save the support which it gave, and without which she could not have moved, mixed with a vague feeling of preventing his escape from her, she was urging, and almost dragging, him forward when Sir William Ashton came up, followed by the female attendant of blind Alice, and by two woodcutters, whom he had summoned from their occupation to his assistance. His joy at seeing his daughter safe overcame the surprise with which he would at another time have beheld her hanging as familiarly on the arm of a stranger as she might have done upon his own.
“Lucy, my dear Lucy, are you safe? – are you well?” were the only words that broke from him as he embraced her in ecstasy.
“I am well, sir, thank God! and still more that I see you so; but this gentleman,” she said, quitting his arm and shrinking from him, “what must he think of me?” and her eloquent blood, flushing over neck and brow, spoke how much she was ashamed of the freedom with which she had craved, and even compelled, his assistance.
“This gentleman,” said Sir William Ashton, “will, I trust, not regret the trouble we have given him, when I assure him of the gratitude of the Lord Keeper for the greatest service which one man ever rendered to another – for the life of my child – for my own life, which he has saved by his bravery and presence of mind. He will, I am sure, permit us to request – ” “Request nothing of ME, my lord,” said the stranger, in a stern and peremptory tone; “I am the Master of Ravenswood.”
There was a dead pause of surprise, not unmixed with less pleasant feelings. The Master wrapt himself in his cloak, made a haughty inclination toward Lucy, muttering a few words of courtesy, as indistinctly heard as they seemed to be reluctantly uttered, and, turning from them, was immediately lost in the thicket.
“The Master of Ravenswood!” said the Lord Keeper, when he had recovered his momentary astonishment. “Hasten after him – stop him – beg him to speak to me for a single moment.”
The two foresters accordingly set off in pursuit of the stranger. They speedily reappeared, and, in an embarrassed and awkward manner, said the gentleman would not return.
The Lord Keeper took one of the fellows aside, and questioned him more closely what the Master of Ravenswood had said.
“He just said he wadna come back,” said the man, with the caution of a prudent Scotchman, who cared not to be the bearer of an unpleasant errand.
“He said something more, sir,” said the Lord Keeper, “and I insist on knowing what it was.”
“Why, then, my lord,” said the man, looking down, “he said – But it wad be nae pleasure to your lordship to hear it, for I dare say the Master meant nae ill.”
“That’s none of your concern, sir; I desire to hear the very words.”
“Weel, then,” replied the man, “he said, ‘Tell Sir William Ashton that the next time he and I forgather, he will nto be half sae blythe of our meeting as of our parting.’”
“Very well, sir,” said the Lord Keeper, “I believe he alludes to a wager we have on our hawks; it is a matter of no consequence.”
He turned to his daughter, who was by this time so much recovered as to be able to walk home. But the effect, which the various recollections connected with a scene so terrific made upon a mind which was susceptible in an extreme degree, was more permanent than the injury which her nerves had sustained. Visions of terror, both in sleep and in waking reveries, recalled to her the form of the furious animal, and the dreadful bellow with which he accompanied his career; and it was always the image of the Master of Ravenswood, with his native nobleness of countenance and form, that seemed to interpose betwixt her and assured death. It is, perhaps, at all times dangerous for a young person to suffer recollection to dwell repeatedly, and with too much complacency, on the same individual; but in Lucy’s situation it was almost unavoidable. She had never happened to see a young man of mien and features so romantic and so striking as young Ravenswood; but had she seen an hundred his equals or his superiors in those particulars, no one else would have been linked to her heart by the strong associations of remembered danger and escape, of gratitude, wonder, and curiosity. I say curiosity, for it is likely that the singularly restrained and unaccommodating manners of the Master of Ravenswood, so much at variance with the