ket open for the
convenience of passage. What he had most to apprehend, was the
slenderness of his garrison; for all the efforts of the steward were
unable to get more than nine men under arms, himself and Gudyill
included, so much more popular was the cause of the insurgents than that
of the government Major Bellenden, and his trusty servant Pike, made the
garrison eleven in number, of whom one-half were old men. The round dozen
might indeed have been made up, would Lady Margaret have consented that
Goose Gibbie should again take up arms. But she recoiled from the
proposal, when moved by Gudyill, with such abhorrent recollection of the
former achievements of that luckless cavalier, that she declared she
would rather the Castle were lost than that he were to be enrolled in the
defence of it. With eleven men, however, himself included, Major
Bellenden determined to hold out the place to the uttermost.

The arrangements for defence were not made without the degree of fracas
incidental to such occasions. Women shrieked, cattle bellowed, dogs
howled, men ran to and fro, cursing and swearing without intermission,
the lumbering of the old guns backwards and forwards shook the
battlements, the court resounded with the hasty gallop of messengers who
went and returned upon errands of importance, and the din of warlike
preparation was mingled with the sound of female laments.

Such a Babel of discord might have awakened the slumbers of the very
dead, and, therefore, was not long ere it dispelled the abstracted
reveries of Edith Bellenden. She sent out Jenny to bring her the cause of
the tumult which shook the castle to its very basis; but Jenny, once
engaged in the bustling tide, found so much to ask and to hear, that she
forgot the state of anxious uncertainty in which she had left her young
mistress. Having no pigeon to dismiss in pursuit of information when her
raven messenger had failed to return with it, Edith was compelled to
venture in quest of it out of the ark of her own chamber into the deluge
of confusion which overflowed the rest of the Castle. Six voices speaking
at once, informed her, in reply to her first enquiry, that Claver'se and
all his men were killed, and that ten thousand whigs were marching to
besiege the castle, headed by John Balfour of Burley, young Milnwood, and
Cuddie Headrigg. This strange association of persons seemed to infer the
falsehood of the whole story, and yet the general bustle in the Castle