CHAPTER XXXV

A VOLUNTEER SIXTY YEARS SINCE

On hearing the unwelcome sound of the drum, Major Melville hastily opened a sashed door, and stepped out upon a sort of terrace which divided his house from the high-road from which the martial music proceeded.  Waverley and his new friend followed him, though probably he would have dispensed with their attendance.  They soon recognized in solemn march, first, the performer upon the drum; secondly, a large flag of four compartments, on which were inscribed the words covenants, religion, king, KINGDOMES.  The person who was honoured with this charge was followed by the commander of the party, a thin, dark, rigid-looking man, about sixty years old.  The spiritual pride, which in mine Host of the Candlestick mantled in a sort of supercilious hypocrisy, was, in this man’s face, elevated and yet darkened by genuine and undoubting fanaticism.  It was impossible to behold him without imagination placing him in some strange crisis, where religious zeal was the ruling principle.  A martyr at the stake, a soldier in the field, a lonely and banished wanderer consoled by the intensity and supposed purity of his faith under every earthly privation; perhaps a persecuting inquisitor, as terrible in power as unyielding in adversity; any of these seemed congenial characters to this personage.  With these high traits of energy, there was something in the affected precision and solemnity of his deportment and discourse, that bordered upon the ludicrous; so that, according to the mood of the spectator’s mind, and the light under which Mr. Gilfillan presented himself, one might have feared; admired, or laughed at him.  His dress was that of a west-country peasant, of better materials indeed than that of the lower rank, but in no respect affecting either the mode of the age, or of the Scottish gentry at any period.  His arms were a broadsword and pistols, which, from the antiquity of their appearance, might have seen the rout of Pentland, or Bothwell Brigg.

As he came up a few steps to meet Major Melville, and touched solemnly, but slightly, his huge and overbrimmed blue bonnet, in answer to the Major, who had courteously raised a small triangular gold-laced hat, Waverley was irresistibly impressed with the idea that he beheld a leader of the Roundheads of yore in conference with one of Marlborough’s captains.

The group of about thirty armed men who followed this gifted commander, was of a motley description.  They were in ordinary Lowland dresses, of different colours, which, contrasted with the arms they bore, gave them an irregular and mobbish appearance; so much is the eye accustomed to connect uniformity of dress with the military character.  In front were a few who apparently partook of their leader’s enthusiasm; men obviously to be feared in a combat where their natural courage was exalted by religious