They
related to a secret and highly important commission beyond sea, which
could only be entrusted to a person of rank, talent, and perfect
confidence, and which, as it required great trust and reliance on the
envoy employed, could but not prove both honourable and advantageous to
him. We need not enter into the nature and purpose of this commission,
farther than to acquaint our readers that the charge was in prospect
highly acceptable to the Master of Ravenswood, who hailed with pleasure
the hope of emerging from his present state of indigence and inaction
into independence and honourable exertion.
While he listened thus eagerly to the details with which the Marquis
now thought it necessary to entrust him, the messenger who had been
despatched to the Tower of Wolf's Crag returned with Caleb Balderstone's
humble duty, and an assurance that "a' should be in seemly order, sic as
the hurry of time permitted, to receive their lordships as it behoved."
Ravenswood was too well accustomed to his seneschal's mode of acting and
speaking to hope much from this confident assurance.
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