Chapter 29

Out on ye, owls;
Nothing but songs of death?
RICHARD III.

More than three months had elapsed since the event narrated in the
last chapter, and it had been the precursor of others of still
greater importance, which will evolve themselves in the course of
our narrative. But, profess to present to the reader not a precise
detail of circumstances, according to their order and date, but a
series of pictures, endeavouring to exhibit the most striking
incidents before the eye or imagination of those whom it may
concern, we therefore open a new scene, and bring other actors
upon the stage.

Along a wasted tract of country, more than twelve miles distant
from the Garde Doloureuse, in the heat of a summer noon, which
shed a burning lustre on the silent valley, and the blackened
ruins of the cottages with which it had been once graced, two
travellers walked slowly, whose palmer cloaks, pilgrims' staves,
large slouched hats, with a scallop shell bound on the front of
each, above all, the cross, cut in red cloth upon their shoulders,
marked them as pilgrims who had accomplished their vow, and had
returned from that fatal bourne, from which, in those days,
returned so few of the thousands who visited it, whether in the
love of enterprise, or in the ardour of devotion.

The pilgrims had passed, that morning, through a scene of
devastation similar to, and scarce surpassed in misery by, those
which they had often trod during the wars of the Cross. They had
seen hamlets which appeared to have suffered all the fury of
military execution, the houses being burned to the ground; and in
many cases the carcasses of the miserable inhabitants, or rather
relics of such objects, were suspended on temporary gibbets, or on
the trees, which had been allowed to remain standing, only, it
would seem, to serve the convenience of the executioners. Living
creatures they saw none, excepting those wild denizens of nature
who seemed silently resuming the now wasted district, from which
they might have been formerly expelled by the course of
civilization. Their ears were no less disagreeably occupied than
their eyes. The pensive travellers might indeed hear the screams
of the raven, as if lamenting the decay of the carnage on which he
had been gorged; and now and then the plaintive howl of some dog,
deprived of his home and master; but no sounds which argued either
labour or domestication of any kind.

The sable figures, who, with wearied steps, as it appeared,
travelled through these scenes of desolation and ravage, seemed
assimilated to them in appearance. They spoke not with each other
--they looked not to each other--but one, the shorter of the pair,
keeping about half a pace in front of his