Book 3 Chapter 4 Thou Also False

As it was, he was divided in his mind, and it was the alternation of dark and bright moods which made his agony. Spring had only reached the Highlands as he rode southwards, but its first touches had made everything winsome and beautiful. While patches of snow lingered on the higher hills, and glittered in the sunlight, the grass in the hollows between the heather was putting on the first greenness of the season, and the heather was sprouting bravely; the burns were full-bodied with the melting snow from the higher levels and rushing with a pleasant noise to join the river. As he came down from the bare uplands at Dalnaspidal into the sheltered glen at Blair Castle, the trees made an arch of the most delicate emerald over his head, for the buds were beginning to open, and the wind blew gently upon his face.

The sight of habitations as he came nearer to the Lowlands, the sound of the horses' feet upon the road, the gayety of his band of troopers, the children playing before their humble cottages, the exhilarating air, and the hope of the season when winter was gone, told upon his heart and reënforced him. The despair of the night before, when he tossed to and fro upon a wretched bed or paced up and down before the farmhouse door, imagining everything that was horrible, passed away as a nightmare. Was there ever such madness as that he, John Graham, should be doubting his wife, Jean Cochrane, whom he had won from the midst of his enemies, and who had left her mother and her mother's house to be his bride? How brave she had been, how self-sacrificing, how uncomplaining, how proud in heart and high in spirit; she had given up the whole world for him; she was the bravest and purest of ladies. That his wife of those years of storm and the mother a few weeks ago of his child should forget her vows and her love, and condescend to a base intrigue; that she should meet a lover in the orchard where they often used to walk, where the blossom would now be opening on the trees, that Livingstone, whom he knew and counted in a sense a friend, though he held King William's commission now, and had not stood by the right side, should take the opportunity of his absence to seduce his wife! It was a hideous and incredible idea, some mad mistake which could be easily explained. Dundee, throwing off his black and brooding burden of thought, would touch his horse with the spur and gallop for a mile in gayety of heart and then ride on his way, singing some Cavalier song, till Grimond, who kept away from his master those days and rode among the troopers, would shake his head, and say to himself, "God grant he be not fey" (possessed). Dundee would continue in high spirits till the evening shadows began to fall, and then the other shadow would lengthen across his soul.