As It Was Told To Me

Three Short Stories by Sir Walter Scott

My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror

The Two Drovers

Wandering Willie’s Tale

Introduction by Daniel Cook

Published by ASLS, 2021

ASLS acknowledges the assistance of the Scottish Government in publishing this volume

Table of Contents

Introduction

My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror

The Two Drovers

Wandering Willie’s Tale

Endnotes

Other resources

INTRODUCTION

DANIEL COOK

Sir Walter Scott’s experiments in short fiction began as early as 1811, before he published his first novel, but his most enduring pieces were all produced in the 1820s. First printed in a handsome Christmas gift-book, The Keepsake for 1829, ‘My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror’ mixes a tale of reckless romance with supernatural theatrics. Shortly before this, Scott produced a collection of shorter fiction, Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), from which we take ‘The Two Drovers’. A spiky story in which the simmering rivalry between a Highlander and a Yorkshireman leads to manslaughter, ‘The Two Drovers’ offers a slow-burn exposé of national conflict. ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ comes from Redgauntlet (1824), which remains one of the world’s most popular historical novels set in Scotland. A Gothic storyteller by trade, Willie weaves a tale around the grisly death of a despotic laird, Sir Robert, and the mystery of missing money. A hellish underworld, a demonic monkey, a biased narrator: such things make the text wildly unpredictable.

My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror

Our storyteller, Aunt Margaret, is a charming old lady for whom the modern world is moving too fast. Thoughts of death reassure rather than frighten her. Such a calm temperament shapes her aesthetic, which, to adopt her words, we might call the mild supernatural: ‘All that is indispensable for the enjoyment of the milder feeling of supernatural awe is, that you should be susceptible of the slight shuddering which creeps over you’, she says. A lively imagination can affect and even titillate our perception of an everyday domestic object such as an unilluminated mirror at night: ‘That space of inky darkness seems to be a field for Fancy to play her revels in’. With the story proper under way, after substantial scene-setting, the reader will bear in mind the aunt’s reticence about the mirror. We will not see the titular mirror again for some time, however, let alone the mild supernaturalism for which we have been primed. Instead, the aunt opens in a completely different genre, one for which we have also been prepped: character sketches from a long-gone society. One such figure is Sir Philip Forester, a late-seventeenth-century love-rat who married Jemmie Falconer, the meek younger sister of the headstrong Lady Bothwell.

Growing bored, Sir Philip joins the military overseas. Reminding him that he is now a husband and a father, Lady Bothwell inadvertently raises our expectations: surely the reckless man will die in battle. Ending there, with Lady Forester’s agitation representing the sufferings of war widows, the story would be effective. But the antiquated tale of libertine arrogance is about to become something else entirely. Lady Bothwell and her sister make inquiries of the army’s headquarters. They soon learn that Sir Philip was no longer there. The cause remains unknown. At the same time, the mysterious Baptista Damiotti arrives in Edinburgh. Rumours circulate about the Italian doctor’s use of ‘unlawful arts’, that he could conjure up live action images of absent people. With her sister, Lady Forester seeks out his premises. Aunt Margaret’s ominous, atmospheric description of the scene would not look out of place in a Gothic novel: ‘The two ladies found themselves in a small vestibule, illuminated by a dim lamp, and having, when the door was closed, no communication with the external light or air’. (The homely aunt had warned us ahead of time that a slight shuddering would creep over us.) Dressed in medical garb, Damiotti nevertheless acts like a showy magician. Led into a large room, where human skulls and books add to the deathly ambience, the sisters are most struck by a tall and broad mirror. Gazing into it, they become mesmerised. Our immediate question seems unanswerable: is this mere puppetry, or does the Paduan Doctor channel supernatural forces? Is he a scientist or an artist? Is this a tale of terror or scientific theatre?

When the image settles, the women witness a bridal scene. They see an extremely beautiful girl, aged no more than sixteen, and, to their alarm, Sir Philip. Wringing her hands and casting her eyes to heaven, Lady Forester cannot be comforted. Besides, a letter soon arrives in which it is confirmed that Captain Falconer had stumbled across Sir Philip’s bigamous nuptials. Since the letter (a basic element of earlier romance fiction) solves the mystery of the absent husband, we might wonder if the magic mirror serves little more purpose than as a Gothic gimmick aimed at titillating Scott’s longstanding readership. Or, viewed the other way around, we might wonder if the story has become a parable about the ultimate triumph of the word over image in the art of storytelling. Why is the aunt telling this sort of story to her nephew? Is it a cautionary tale above love and life? If so, what’s the moral exactly? Or is it merely a curious anecdote from a bygone age? Why do we tell stories at all?

The Two Drovers

Like the previous short story, ‘The Two Drovers’ depicts a Scottish way of life on its way out. An ancient profession, droving (escorting livestock to and from the market, often over very long distances) would soon be rendered obsolete with the expansion of the railway. Setting off to the market one day, the Highland drover Robin Oig McCombich is suddenly interrupted by an elderly fortune teller, a spaewife (another old-fashioned profession). Robin humours her, making mocking gestures to the crowd, even when she gravely says she sees in a vision ‘Blood, blood—Saxon blood’ on his hands. As a concession to her agitated talk, the drover reluctantly agrees to leave his dirk – a type of long-bladed dagger – with another drover, Hugh Morrison. (Ironically, this concession to the auld ways will ultimately cause the drover’s death; had he ignored the spaewife, he would have been tried for the lesser crime of manslaughter.) Morrison, a Lowlander, annoys Robin with some anti-Highland banter, but rather than waste any more time, our hero heads to Falkirk on business.

A young Yorkshireman called Harry Wakefield enters the scene. Keen on boxing, a uniquely English pastime according to Walter Scott, Wakefield embodies Old England’s merry yeomanry (another outdated figure). Not only do our drovers have different temperaments, they have always struggled to communicate properly. Robin is a Gaelic speaker who gets by in English, while Wakefield refuses to speak any Gaelic. Instead, they bond over music. All seems well. Once in Cumberland (modern-day Cumbria), however, a misunderstanding over resting fields separately rented for their cattle brings hostilities to the surface. Later that day, in the pub, Wakefield proposes an exchange of punches and then moving on. Robin rejects the proposal; he knows his sporting limitations. Besides, he considers boxing to be ungentlemanly, and instead suggests broadswords. The English patrons erupt with laughter. Robin mutters a Gaelic curse to himself. Unable to understand him, Wakefield knocks down the outsider with ease. Seeking satisfaction for himself, and even for his own nation, Robin fetches his dirk. Battle will recommence on a small, two-man scale.

When Robin returns to the pub with his weapon, barely two hours after being knocked out, his confrontation with Wakefield comes swiftly. ‘You, Harry Waakfelt, showed me to-day how the Saxon churls fight’, Robin says; ‘I show you now how the Highland Dunniè-wassel fights’. With those words delivered, he plunges the dirk into the Englishman’s chest with such force the heart splits open. Rather than flee, he willingly gives himself up for arrest. The narrator then takes us to the murder trial in Carlisle, hardly a neutral place. At first, the audience—presumably made up almost entirely of English people, as in the pub—express clear prejudice against ‘a crime so un-English’. Even if the judge wished to consider the cultural relativism of the case, in respect to the Highlander’s customs, he can only try Robin for murder, not manslaughter. Robin is guilty. There are no heroes here.

Wandering Willie’s Tale

Although grounded in recent Scottish history, ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ focuses on two made-up figures: Sir Robert Redgauntlet, a seventeenth-century anti-covenanting royalist, and Steenie Steenson, the storyteller’s grandfather, a hardened survivor of wars and rebellions. Dropping off his fees and waiting for his legal documentation one day, Steenie watches in shock as his landlord, Sir Robert, drops dead:

Terribly the Laird roared for cauld water to his feet, and wine to cool his throat; and, Hell, hell, hell, and its flames, was aye the word in his mouth. They brought him water, and when they plunged his swoln feet into the tub, he cried out it was burning; and folk say that it did bubble and sparkle like a seething cauldron. He flung the cup at Dougal’s head, and said he had given him blood instead of burgundy; and, sure aneugh, the lass washed clottered blood aff the carpet the neist day.

Willie’s delivery mingles the dramatic and the speculative, the actual and the figurative (‘folk say that it did bubble and sparkle like a seething cauldron’). He uses rapidly transformative language (‘they plunged his swoln feet into the tub’, almost as if the feet swell before our eyes). The verbs could hardly be more insistent (roared, plunged, cried, flung), which is further underscored by the quiet grimness of the servant later washing clotted blood off the carpet. (The carpet-cleaning also confirms the grisly truth: ‘sure aneugh’ it was not wine in the glass, but rather boiling blood.) Steenie scarpers. (How can we trust his account now, if he wasn’t there?)

Seeking to settle the affairs of the estate, the new laird, Sir John, calls every tenant to meet with him. Switching to theatrical dialogue (with their names marked out on the page like actors’ prompts), Willie ramps up the tension of the ensuing scene. The new landlord does not believe that Steenie had paid his father: ‘Sir John. “I have little doubt ye borrowed the money, Steenie. It is the payment that I want to have some proof of”’. Harangued, Steenie blurts out an unkind response to Sir John’s demands for an answer. Where is the money? ‘“In hell, if you will have my thoughts of it,” said my guidsire, driven to extremity,—“in hell! with your father, his jackanape, and his silver whistle”’. (His flippant remark will become a reality soon enough.) Steenie flees, yet again.

Riding home through a dreary wood Steenie meets a mysterious, ominous figure. The stranger proposes a journey into hell, where they might get a new receipt from the late laird. Foolhardily or bravely, Steenie agrees. Gnashing its teeth, after failing to soften Steenie’s resolve to stay with him, the unsettled ghost of Sir Robert finally hands him the receipt he came for. The tenant takes his newly acquired proof to the current laird, who looks it over carefully. Sir John quickly realises that the signed receipt post-dates his father’s death. Rightly outraged by what he construes to be a poorly judged joke at his family’s expense, Sir John threatens Steenie. When the tenant promises to tell the landlord about the improbable meeting with the late laird, Sir John paused, and asks for full details. Never had Steenie’s storytelling skills been so important. It works: Sir John is convinced enough to at least investigate further. (If he is lying, the tenant will have a red-hot iron driven through his tongue, a damning fate for any taleteller.) They investigate: Sir John ‘entered at the turret door, where his body stopped the only little light that was in the bit turret’. Willie continues the account: ‘Something flees at him wi’ a vengeance, maist dang him back ower—bang gaed the knight’s pistol, and Hutcheon, that held the ladder, and my guidsire that stood beside him, hears a loud skelloch’.

The action is slight: Sir John merely climbs a ladder, gets spooked, and fires his weapon. But ever the master storyteller, Willie creates tension. Sir John has shot Major Weir, the puckish monkey, whose body he flings down. He also found the missing money. Making amends to Steenie, Sir John considers the situation to be happily resolved. He finally tosses the recovered receipt, our only proof for the tale’s veracity, into the fire. We might wonder if Steenie’s account has been censored by Sir John in some way. After all, Willie says that ‘Sir John made up his story about the jackanape as he liked himsell; and some believe till this day there was no more in the matter than the filching nature of the brute’. Has Steenie, or perhaps Willie, left something out of our version, beyond Sir John’s casual killing of the monkey? Perhaps the whole thing is a complete fabrication: is Major Weir the villain or a victim of prejudice? Conversely, does that short episode make up the basic story that Sir John has been telling to gossipy neighbours? Does he reshape events to save his family’s honour? Some unnamed folk in the text think as much. Who do we believe? Are narrators ever reliable?

MY AUNT MARGARET’S MIRROR

INTRODUCTION

The species of publication which has come to be generally known by the title of Annual, being a miscellany of prose and verse, equipped with numerous engravings, and put forth every year about Christmas, had flourished for a long while in Germany before it was imitated in this country by an enterprising bookseller, a German by birth, Mr. Ackermann. The rapid success of his work, as is the custom of the time, gave birth to a host of rivals, and, among others, to an Annual styled The Keepsake, the first volume of which appeared in 1828, and attracted much notice, chiefly in consequence of the very uncommon splendour of its illustrative accompaniments. The expenditure which the spirited proprietors lavished on this magnificent volume is understood to have been not less than from ten to twelve thousand pounds sterling!

Various gentlemen of such literary reputation that any one might think it an honour to be associated with them had been announced as contributors to this Annual, before application was made to me to assist in it; and I accordingly placed with much pleasure at the Editor’s disposal a few fragments, originally designed to have been worked into the Chronicles of the Canongate, besides a manuscript drama, the long-neglected performance of my youthful days—‘The House of Aspen.’

The Keepsake for 1828 included, however, only three of these little prose tales, of which the first in order was that entitled ‘My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror.’ By way of introduction to this, when now included in a general collection of my lucubrations, I have only to say that it is a mere transcript, or at least with very little embellishment, of a story that I remembered being struck with in my childhood, when told at the fireside by a lady of eminent virtues and no inconsiderable share of talent, one of the ancient and honourable house of Swinton. She was a kind of relation of my own, and met her death in a manner so shocking—being killed, in a fit of insanity, by a female attendant who had been attached to her person for half a lifetime—that I cannot now recall her memory, child as I was when the catastrophe occurred, without a painful reawakening of perhaps the first images of horror that the scenes of real life stamped on my mind.

This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the superstitious, and was pleased, among other fancies, to read alone in her chamber by a taper fixed in a candle-stick which she had had formed out of a human skull. One night this strange piece of furniture acquired suddenly the power of locomotion, and, after performing some odd circles on her chimney-piece, fairly leaped on the floor, and continued to roll about the apartment. Mrs. Swinton calmly proceeded to the adjoining room for another light, and had the satisfaction to penetrate the mystery on the spot. Rats abounded in the ancient building she inhabited, and one of these had managed to ensconce itself within her favourite memento mori. Though thus endowed with a more than feminine share of nerve, she entertained largely that belief in supernaturals, which in those times was not considered as sitting ungracefully on the grave and aged of her condition; and the story of the Magic Mirror was one for which she vouched with particular confidence, alleging indeed that one of her own family had been an eye-witness of the incidents recorded in it.

‘I tell the tale as it was told to me.’

Stories enow of much the same cast will present themselves to the recollection of such of my readers as have ever dabbled in a species of lore to which I certainly gave more hours, at one period of my life, than I should gain any credit by confessing.

AUGUST 1831.

AUNT MARGARET’S MIRROR

‘There are times

When Fancy plays her gambols, in despite

Even of our watchful senses—when in sooth

Substance seems shadow, shadow substance seems—

When the broad, palpable, and mark’d partition

’Twixt that which is and is not seems dissolved,

As if the mental eye gain’d power to gaze

Beyond the limits of the existing world.

Such hours of shadowy dreams I better love

Than all the gross realities of life.’ Anonymous.

My Aunt Margaret was one of that respected sisterhood upon whom devolve all the trouble and solicitude incidental to the possession of children, excepting only that which attends their entrance into the world. We were a large family, of very different dispositions and constitutions. Some were dull and peevish—they were sent to Aunt Margaret to be amused; some were rude, romping, and boisterous—they were sent to Aunt Margaret to be kept quiet, or rather that their noise might be removed out of hearing: those who were indisposed were sent with the prospect of being nursed—those who were stubborn, with the hope of their being subdued by the kindness of Aunt Margaret’s discipline;—in short, she had all the various duties of a mother, without the credit and dignity of the maternal character. The busy scene of her various cares is now over—of the invalids and the robust, the kind and the rough, the peevish and pleased children, who thronged her little parlour from morning to night, not one now remains alive but myself, who, afflicted by early infirmity, was one of the most delicate of her nurslings, yet, nevertheless, have outlived them all.

It is still my custom, and shall be so while I have the use of my limbs, to visit my respected relation at least three times a-week. Her abode is about half a mile from the suburbs of the town in which I reside, and is accessible, not only by the high-road, from which it stands at some distance, but by means of a greensward footpath leading through some pretty meadows. I have so little left to torment me in life, that it is one of my greatest vexations to know that several of these sequestered fields have been devoted as sites for building. In that which is nearest the town, wheelbarrows have been at work for several weeks in such numbers, that, I verily believe, its whole surface, to the depth of at least eighteen inches, was mounted in these monotrochs at the same moment, and in the act of being transported from one place to another. Huge triangular piles of planks are also reared in different parts of the devoted messuage; and a little group of trees that still grace the eastern end, which rises in a gentle ascent, have just received warning to quit, expressed by a daub of white paint, and are to give place to a curious grove of chimneys.

It would, perhaps, hurt others in my situation to reflect that this little range of pasturage once belonged to my father (whose family was of some consideration in the world), and was sold by patches to remedy distresses in which he involved himself in an attempt by commercial adventure to redeem his diminished fortune. While the building scheme was in full operation, this circumstance was often pointed out to me by the class of friends who are anxious that no part of your misfortunes should escape your observation. ‘Such pasture-ground!—lying at the very town’s end—in turnips and potatoes, the parks would bring £20 per acre; and if leased for building— O, it was a gold mine!—And all sold for an old song out of the ancient possessor’s hands!’ My comforters cannot bring me to repine much on this subject. If I could be allowed to look back on the past without interruption, I could willingly give up the enjoyment of present income and the hope of future profit to those who have purchased what my father sold. I regret the alteration of the ground only because it destroys associations, and I would more willingly (I think) see the Earl’s Closes in the hands of strangers, retaining their silvan appearance, than know them for my own, if torn up by agriculture, or covered with buildings. Mine are the sensations of poor Logan:—

‘The horrid plough has rased the green

Where yet a child I strayed;

The axe has fell’d the hawthorn screen,

The schoolboy’s summer shade.’

I hope, however, the threatened devastation will not be consummated in my day. Although the adventurous spirit of times short while since passed gave rise to the undertaking, I have been encouraged to think that the subsequent changes have so far damped the spirit of speculation that the rest of the woodland footpath leading to Aunt Margaret’s retreat will be left undisturbed for her time and mine. I am interested in this, for every step of the way, after I have passed through the green already mentioned, has for me something of early remembrance:—There is the stile at which I can recollect a cross child’s-maid upbraiding me with my infirmity as she lifted me coarsely and carelessly over the flinty steps, which my brothers traversed with shout and bound. I remember the suppressed bitterness of the moment, and, conscious of my own inferiority, the feeling of envy with which I regarded the easy movements and elastic steps of my more happily formed brethren. Alas! these goodly barks have all perished on life’s wide ocean, and only that which seemed so little seaworthy, as the naval phrase goes, has reached the port when the tempest is over. Then there is the pool, where, manoeuvring our little navy, constructed out of the broad water-flags, my elder brother fell in, and was scarce saved from the watery element to die under Nelson’s banner. There is the hazel copse also, in which my brother Henry used to gather nuts, thinking little that he was to die in an Indian jungle in quest of rupees.

There is so much more of remembrance about the little walk, that—as I stop, rest on my crutch-headed cane, and look round with that species of comparison between the thing I was and that which I now am—it almost induces me to doubt my own identity; until I find myself in face of the honeysuckle porch of Aunt Margaret’s dwelling, with its irregularity of front, and its odd, projecting latticed windows, where the workmen seem to have made it a study that no one of them should resemble another in form, size, or in the old-fashioned stone entablature and labels which adorn them. This tenement, once the manor house of the Earl’s Closes, we still retain a slight hold upon; for, in some family arrangements, it had been settled upon Aunt Margaret during the term of her life. Upon this frail tenure depends, in a great measure, the last shadow of the family of Bothwell of Earl’s Closes, and their last slight connection with their paternal inheritance. The only representative will then be an infirm old man, moving not unwillingly to the grave, which has devoured all that were dear to his affections.

When I have indulged such thoughts for a minute or two, I enter the mansion, which is said to have been the gate-house only of the original building, and find one being on whom time seems to have made little impression; for the Aunt Margaret of to-day bears the same proportional age to the Aunt Margaret of my early youth that the boy of ten years old does to the man of (by’r Lady!) some fifty-six years. The old lady’s invariable costume has doubtless some share in confirming one in the opinion that time has stood still with Aunt Margaret.

The brown or chocolate-coloured silk gown, with ruffles of the same stuff at the elbow, within which are others of Mechlin lace—the black silk gloves, or mitts; the white hair combed back upon a roll; and the cap of spotless cambric, which closes around the venerable countenance—as they were not the costume of 1780, so neither were they that of 1826; they are altogether a style peculiar to the individual Aunt Margaret. There she still sits, as she sat thirty years since, with her wheel or the stocking, which she works by the fire in winter and by the window in summer; or, perhaps, venturing as far as the porch in an unusually fine summer evening. Her frame, like some well-constructed piece of mechanics, still performs the operations for which it had seemed destined—going its round with an activity which is gradually diminished, yet indicating no probability that it will soon come to a period.

The solicitude and affection which had made Aunt Margaret the willing slave to the inflictions of a whole nursery, have now for their object the health and comfort of one old and infirm man, the last remaining relative of her family, and the only one who can still find interest in the traditional stores which she hoards, as some miser hides the gold which he desires that no one should enjoy after his death.

My conversation with Aunt Margaret generally relates little either to the present or to the future. For the passing day we possess as much as we require, and we neither of us wish for more; and for that which is to follow, we have, on this side of the grave, neither hopes, nor fears, nor anxiety. We therefore naturally look back to the past, and forget the present fallen fortunes and declined importance of our family in recalling the hours when it was wealthy and prosperous.

With this slight introduction, the reader will know as much of Aunt Margaret and her nephew as is necessary to comprehend the following conversation and narrative.

Last week, when, late in a summer evening, I went to call on the old lady to whom my reader is now introduced, I was received by her with all her usual affection and benignity, while, at the same time, she seemed abstracted and disposed to silence. I asked her the reason. ‘They have been clearing out the old chapel,’ she said; ‘John Clayhudgeons having, it seems, discovered that the stuff within—being, I suppose, the remains of our ancestors—was excellent for top-dressing the meadows.’

Here I started up with more alacrity than I have displayed for some years; but sat down while my aunt added, laying her hand upon my sleeve, ‘The chapel has been long considered as common ground, my dear, and used for a penfold, and what objection can we have to the man for employing what is his own to his own profit? Besides, I did speak to him, and he very readily and civilly promised that if he found bones or monuments, they should be carefully respected and reinstated; and what more could I ask? So, the first stone they found bore the name of Margaret Bothwell, 1585, and I have caused it to be laid carefully aside, as I think it betokens death, and having served my namesake two hundred years, it has just been cast up in time to do me the same good turn. My house has been long put in order, as far as the small earthly concerns require it; but who shall say that their account with, Heaven is sufficiently revised?’

‘After what you have said, aunt,’ I replied, ‘perhaps I ought to take my hat and go away; and so I should, but that there is on this occasion a little alloy mingled with your devotion. To think of death at all times is a duty—to suppose it nearer from the finding an old gravestone is superstition; and you, with your strong, useful common sense, which was so long the prop of a fallen family, are the last person whom I should have suspected of such weakness.’

‘Neither would I deserve your suspicions, kinsman,’ answered Aunt Margaret, ‘if we were speaking of any incident occurring in the actual business of human life. But for all this, I have a sense of superstition about me, which I do not wish to part with. It is a feeling which separates me from this age, and links me with that to which I am hastening; and even when it seems, as now, to lead me to the brink of the grave, and bid me gaze on it, I do not love that it should be dispelled. It soothes my imagination, without influencing my reason or conduct.’

‘I profess, my good lady,’ replied I, ‘that had any one but you made such a declaration, I should have thought it as capricious as that of the clergyman, who, without vindicating his false reading, preferred, from habit’s sake, his old Mumpsimus to the modern Sumpsimus.’

‘Well,’ answered my aunt, ‘I must explain my inconsistency in this particular by comparing it to another. I am, as you know, a piece of that old-fashioned thing called a Jacobite; but I am so in sentiment and feeling only, for a more loyal subject never joined in prayers for the health and wealth of George the Fourth, whom God long preserve! But I dare say that kind-hearted sovereign would not deem that an old woman did him much injury if she leaned back in her arm-chair, just in such a twilight as this, and thought of the high-mettled men whose sense of duty called them to arms against his grandfather; and how, in a cause which they deemed that of their rightful prince and country,

“They fought till their hands to the broadsword were glued,

They fought against fortune with hearts unsubdued.”

Do not come at such a moment, when my head is full of plaids, pibrochs, and claymores, and ask my reason to admit what, I am afraid, it cannot deny—I mean, that the public advantage peremptorily demanded that these things should cease to exist. I cannot, indeed, refuse to allow the justice of your reasoning; but yet, being convinced against my will, you will gain little by your motion. You might as well read to an infatuated lover the catalogue of his mistress’s imperfections; for when he has been compelled to listen to the summary, you will only get for answer that “he lo’es her a’ the better.”’

I was not sorry to have changed the gloomy train of Aunt Margaret’s thoughts, and replied in the same tone, ‘Well, I can’t help being persuaded that our good King is the more sure of Mrs. Bothwell’s loyal affection, that he has the Stuart right of birth as well as the Act of Succession in his favour.’

‘Perhaps my attachment, were its source of consequence, might be found warmer for the union of the rights you mention,’ said Aunt Margaret; ‘but, upon my word, it would be as sincere if the King’s right were founded only on the will of the nation, as declared at the Revolution. I am none of your jure divino folks.’

‘And a Jacobite notwithstanding.’

‘And a Jacobite notwithstanding; or rather, I will give you leave to call me one of the party which, in Queen Anne’s time, were called, Whimsicals, because they were sometimes operated upon by feelings, sometimes by principle. After all, it is very hard that you will not allow an old woman to be as inconsistent in her political sentiments as mankind in general show themselves in all the various courses of life; since you cannot point out one of them in which the passions and prejudices of those who pursue it are not perpetually carrying us away from the path which our reason points out.’

‘True, aunt; but you are a wilful wanderer, who should be forced back into the right path.’

‘Spare me, I entreat you,’ replied Aunt Margaret. ‘You remember the Gaelic song, though I dare say I mispronounce the words—

“Hatil mohatil, na dowski mi.”

(I am asleep, do not waken me.)

I tell you, kinsman, that the sort of waking dreams which my imagination spins out, in what your favourite Wordsworth calls “moods of my own mind,” are worth all the rest of my more active days. Then, instead of looking forwards, as I did in youth, and forming for myself fairy palaces, upon the verge of the grave I turn my eyes backward upon the days and manners of my better time; and the sad, yet soothing recollections come so close and interesting, that I almost think it sacrilege to be wiser or more rational or less prejudiced than those to whom I looked up in my younger years.’

‘I think I now understand what you mean,’ I answered, ‘and can comprehend why you should occasionally prefer the twilight of illusion to the steady light of reason.’

‘Where there is no task,’ she rejoined, ‘to be performed, we may sit in the dark if we like it—if we go to work, we must ring for candles.’

‘And amidst such shadowy and doubtful light,’ continued I, ‘imagination frames her enchanted and enchanting visions, and sometimes passes them upon the senses for reality.’

‘Yes,’ said Aunt Margaret, who is a well-read woman, ‘to those who resemble the translator of Tasso,

“Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind

Believed the magic wonders which he sung.”

It is not required for this purpose that you should be sensible of the painful horrors which an actual belief in such prodigies inflicts—such a belief, now-a-days, belongs only to fools and children. It is not necessary that your ears should tingle and your complexion change, like that of Theodore at the approach of the spectral huntsman. All that is indispensable for the enjoyment of the milder feeling of supernatural awe is, that you should be susceptible of the slight shuddering which creeps over you when you hear a tale of terror—that well-vouched tale which the narrator, having first expressed his general disbelief of all such legendary lore, selects and produces, as having something in it which he has been always obliged to give up as inexplicable. Another symptom is a momentary hesitation to look round you, when the interest of the narrative is at the highest; and the third, a desire to avoid looking into a mirror when you are alone in your chamber for the evening. I mean such are signs which indicate the crisis, when a female imagination is in due temperature to enjoy a ghost story. I do not pretend to describe those which express the same disposition in a gentleman.’

‘That last symptom, dear aunt, of shunning the mirror seems likely to be a rare occurrence amongst the fair sex.’

‘You are a novice in toilet fashions, my dear cousin. All women consult the looking-glass with anxiety before they go into company; but when they return home, the mirror has not the same charm. The die has been cast—the party has been successful or unsuccessful in the impression which she desired to make. But, without going deeper into the mysteries of the dressing-table, I will tell you that I myself, like many other honest folks, do not like to see the blank, black front of a large mirror in a room dimly lighted, and where the reflection of the candle seems rather to lose itself in the deep obscurity of the glass than to be reflected back again into the apartment, That space of inky darkness seems to be a field for Fancy to play her revels in. She may call up other features to meet us, instead of the reflection of our own; or, as in the spells of Hallowe’en, which we learned in childhood, some unknown form may be seen peeping over our shoulder. In short, when I am in a ghost-seeing humour, I make my handmaiden draw the green curtains over the mirror before I go into the room, so that she may have the first shock of the apparition, if there be any to be seen, But, to tell you the truth, this dislike to look into a mirror in particular times and places has, I believe, its original foundation in a story which came to me by tradition from my grandmother, who was a party concerned in the scene of which I will now tell you.’

THE MIRROR

Chapter I.

You are fond (said my aunt) of sketches of the society which has passed away. I wish I could describe to you Sir Philip Forester, the ‘chartered libertine’ of Scottish good company, about the end of the last century. I never saw him indeed; but my mother’s traditions were full of his wit, gallantry, and dissipation. This gay knight flourished about the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. He was the Sir Charles Easy and the Lovelace of his day and country: renowned for the number of duels he had fought, and the successful intrigues which he had carried on. The supremacy which he had attained in the fashionable world was absolute; and when we combine it with one or two anecdotes, for which, ‘if laws were made for every degree,’ he ought certainly to have been hanged, the popularity of such a person really serves to show, either that the present times are much more decent, if not more virtuous, than they formerly were, or that high breeding then was of more difficult attainment than that which is now so called, and consequently entitled the successful professor to a proportional degree of plenary indulgences and privileges. No beau of this day could have borne out so ugly a story as that of Pretty Peggy Grindstone, the miller’s daughter at Sillermills—it had well-nigh made work for the Lord Advocate. But it hurt Sir Philip Forester no more than the hail hurts the hearthstone. He was as well received in society as ever, and dined with the Duke of A—— the day the poor girl was buried. She died of heartbreak. But that has nothing to do with my story.

Now, you must listen to a single word upon kith, kin, and ally; I promise you I will not be prolix. But it is necessary to the authenticity of my legend that you should know that Sir Philip Forester, with his handsome person, elegant accomplishments, and fashionable manners, married the younger Miss Falconer of King’s-Copland. The elder sister of this lady had previously become the wife of my grandfather, Sir Geoffrey Bothwell, and brought into our family a good fortune. Miss Jemima, or Miss Jemmie Falconer, as she was usually called, had also about ten thousand pounds sterling—then thought a very handsome portion indeed.

The two sisters were extremely different, though each had their admirers while they remained single. Lady Bothwell had some touch of the old King’s-Copland blood about her. She was bold, though not to the degree of audacity, ambitious, and desirous to raise her house and family; and was, as has been said, a considerable spur to my grandfather, who was otherwise an indolent man, but whom, unless he has been slandered, his lady’s influence involved in some political matters which had been more wisely let alone. She was a woman of high principle, however, and masculine good sense, as some of her letters testify, which are still in my wainscot cabinet.

Jemmie Falconer was the reverse of her sister in every respect. Her understanding did not reach above the ordinary pitch, if, indeed, she could be said to have attained it. Her beauty, while it lasted, consisted, in a great measure, of delicacy of complexion and regularity of features, without any peculiar force of expression. Even these charms faded under the sufferings attendant on an ill-assorted match. She was passionately attached to her husband, by whom she was treated with a callous yet polite indifference, which, to one whose heart was as tender as her judgment was weak, was more painful perhaps than absolute ill-usage. Sir Philip was a voluptuary—that is, a completely selfish egotist—whose disposition and character resembled the rapier he wore, polished, keen, and brilliant, but inflexible and unpitying. As he observed carefully all the usual forms towards his lady, he had the art to deprive her even of the compassion of the world; and useless and unavailing as that may be while actually possessed by the sufferer, it is, to a mind like Lady Forester’s, most painful to know she has it not.

The tattle of society did its best to place the peccant husband above the suffering wife. Some called her a poor, spiritless thing, and declared that, with a little of her sister’s spirit, she might have brought to reason any Sir Philip whatsoever, were it the termagant Falconbridge himself. But the greater part of their acquaintance affected candour, and saw faults on both sides—though, in fact, there only existed the oppressor and the oppressed. The tone of such critics was—‘To be sure, no one will justify Sir Philip Forester, but then we all know Sir Philip, and Jemmie Falconer might have known what she had to expect from the beginning. What made her set her cap at Sir Philip?—He would never have looked at her if she had not thrown herself at his head, with her poor ten thousand pounds. I am sure, if it is money he wanted, she spoiled his market. I know where Sir Philip could have done much better.—And then, if she would have the man, could not she try to make him more comfortable at home, and have his friends oftener, and not plague him with the squalling children, and take care all was handsome and in good style about the house? I declare I think Sir Philip would have made a very domestic man, with a woman who knew how to manage him.’

Now these fair critics, in raising their profound edifice of domestic felicity, did not recollect that the corner-stone was wanting, and that to receive good company with good cheer, the means of the banquet ought to have been furnished by Sir Philip, whose income (dilapidated as it was) was not equal to the display of the hospitality required, and at the same time to the supply of the good knight’s menus plaisirs. So, in spite of all that was so sagely suggested by female friends, Sir Philip carried his good-humour everywhere abroad, and left at home a solitary mansion and a pining spouse.

At length, inconvenienced in his money affairs, and tired even of the short time which he spent in his own dull house, Sir Philip Forester determined to take a trip to the Continent, in the capacity of a volunteer. It was then common for men of fashion to do so; and our knight perhaps was of opinion that a touch of the military character, just enough to exalt, but not render pedantic, his qualities as a beau garçon, was necessary to maintain possession of the elevated situation which he held in the ranks of fashion.

Sir Philip’s resolution threw his wife into agonies of terror; by which the worthy baronet was so much annoyed, that, contrary to his wont, he took some trouble to soothe her apprehensions, and once more brought her to shed tears, in which sorrow was not altogether unmingled with pleasure. Lady Bothwell asked, as a favour, Sir Philip’s permission to receive her sister and her family into her own house during his absence on the Continent. Sir Philip readily assented to a proposition which saved expense, silenced the foolish people who might have talked of a deserted wife and family, and gratified Lady Bothwell, for whom he felt some respect, as for one who often spoke to him, always with freedom and sometimes with severity, without being deterred either by his raillery or the prestige of his reputation.

A day or two before Sir Philip’s departure, Lady Bothwell took the liberty of asking him, in her sister’s presence, the direct question, which his timid wife had often desired, but never ventured, to put to him:—

‘Pray, Sir Philip, what route do you take when you reach the Continent?’

‘I go from Leith to Helvoet by a packet with advices.’

‘That I comprehend perfectly,’ said Lady Bothwell dryly; ‘but you do not mean to remain long at Helvoet, I presume, and I should like to know what is your next object.’

‘You ask me, my dear lady,’ answered Sir Philip, ‘a question which I have not dared to ask myself. The answer depends on the fate of war. I shall, of course, go to headquarters, wherever they may happen to be for the time; deliver my letters of introduction; learn as much of the noble art of war as may suffice a poor interloping amateur; and then take a glance at the sort of thing of which we read so much in the Gazette.’

‘And I trust, Sir Philip,’ said Lady Bothwell, ‘that you will remember that you are a husband and a father; and that, though you think fit to indulge this military fancy, you will not let it hurry you into dangers which it is certainly unnecessary for any save professional persons to encounter.’

‘Lady Bothwell does me too much honour,’ replied the adventurous knight, ‘in regarding such a circumstance with the slightest interest. But to soothe your flattering anxiety, I trust your ladyship will recollect that I cannot expose to hazard the venerable and paternal character which you so obligingly recommend to my protection, without putting in some peril an honest fellow, called Philip Forester, with whom I have kept company for thirty years, and with whom, though some folks consider him a coxcomb, I have not the least desire to part.’

‘Well, Sir Philip, you are the best judge of your own affairs. I have little right to interfere—you are not my husband.’

‘God forbid!’—said Sir Philip hastily; instantly adding, however, ‘God forbid that I should deprive my friend Sir Geoffrey of so inestimable a treasure.’

‘But you are my sister’s husband,’ replied the lady; ‘and I suppose you are aware of her present distress of mind—’

‘If hearing of nothing else from morning to night can make me aware of it,’ said Sir Philip, ‘I should know something of the matter.’

‘I do not pretend to reply to your wit, Sir Philip,’ answered Lady Bothwell; ‘but you must be sensible that all this distress is on account of apprehensions for your personal safety.’

‘In that case, I am surprised that Lady Bothwell, at least, should give herself so much trouble upon so insignificant a subject.’

‘My sister’s interest may account for my being anxious to learn something of Sir Philip Forester’s motions; about which, otherwise, I know he would not wish me to concern myself. I have a brother’s safety too to be anxious for.’

‘You mean Major Falconer, your brother by the mother’s side:—What can he possibly have to do with our present agreeable conversation?’

‘You have had words together, Sir Philip,’ said Lady Bothwell.

‘Naturally; we are connections,’ replied Sir Philip, ‘and as such have always had the usual intercourse.’

‘That is an evasion of the subject,’ answered the lady. ‘By words, I mean angry words, on the subject of your usage of your wife.’

‘If,’ replied Sir Philip Forester, ‘you suppose Major Falconer simple enough to intrude his advice upon me, Lady Bothwell, in my domestic matters, you are indeed warranted in believing that I might possibly be so far displeased with the interference as to request him to reserve his advice till it was asked.’

‘And being on these terms, you are going to join the very army in which my brother Falconer is now serving?’

‘No man knows the path of honour better than Major Falconer,’ said Sir Philip. ‘An aspirant after fame, like me, cannot choose a better guide than his footsteps.’

Lady Bothwell rose and went to the window, the tears gushing from her eyes.

‘And this heartless raillery,’ she said, ‘is all the consideration that is to be given to our apprehensions of a quarrel which may bring on the most terrible consequences? Good God! of what can men’s hearts be made, who can thus dally with the agony of others?’

Sir Philip Forester was moved; he laid aside the mocking tone in which he had hitherto spoken.

‘Dear Lady Bothwell,’ he said, taking her reluctant hand, ‘we are both wrong—you are too deeply serious; I, perhaps, too little so. The dispute I had with Major Falconer was of no earthly consequence. Had anything occurred betwixt us that ought to have been settled par voie du fait, as we say in France, neither of us are persons that are likely to postpone such a meeting. Permit me to say, that were it generally known that you or my Lady Forester are apprehensive of such a catastrophe, it might be the very means of bringing about what would not otherwise be likely to happen. I know your good sense, Lady Bothwell, and that you will understand me when I say that really my affairs require my absence for some months. This Jemima cannot understand. It is a perpetual recurrence of questions, why can you not do this, or that, or the third thing? and, when you have proved to her that her expedients are totally ineffectual, you have just to begin the whole round again. Now, do you tell her, dear Lady Bothwell, that you are satisfied. She is, you must confess, one of those persons with whom authority goes farther than reasoning. Do but repose a little confidence in me, and you shall see how amply I will repay it.’

Lady Bothwell shook her head, as one but half satisfied. ‘How difficult it is to extend confidence, when the basis on which it ought to rest has been so much shaken! But I will do my best to make Jemima easy; and further, I can only say that for keeping your present purpose I hold you responsible both to God and man.’

‘Do not fear that I will deceive you,’ said Sir Philip. ‘The safest conveyance to me will be through the general post-office, Helvoetsluys, where I will take care to leave orders for forwarding my letters. As for Falconer, our only encounter will be over a bottle of Burgundy; so make yourself perfectly easy on his score.’

Lady Bothwell could not make herself easy; yet she was sensible that her sister hurt her own cause by taking on, as the maidservants call it, too vehemently, and by showing before every stranger, by manner, and sometimes by words also, a dissatisfaction with her husband’s journey that was sure to come to his ears, and equally certain to displease him. But there was no help for this domestic dissension, which ended only with the day of separation.

I am sorry I cannot tell, with precision, the year in which Sir Philip Forester went over to Flanders; but it was one of those in which the campaign opened with extraordinary fury, and many bloody, though indecisive, skirmishes were fought between the French on the one side and the Allies on the other. In all our modern improvements, there are none, perhaps, greater than in the accuracy and speed with which intelligence is transmitted from any scene of action to those in this country whom it may concern. During Marlborough’s campaigns, the sufferings of the many who had relations in, or along with, the army were greatly augmented by the suspense in which they were detained for weeks after they had heard of bloody battles, in which, in all probability, those for whom their bosoms throbbed with anxiety had been personally engaged. Amongst those who were most agonized by this state of uncertainty was the—I had almost said deserted—wife of the gay Sir Philip Forester. A single letter had informed her of his arrival on the Continent—no others were received. One notice occurred in the newspapers, in which Volunteer Sir Philip Forester was mentioned as having been entrusted with a dangerous reconnaissance, which he had executed with the greatest courage, dexterity, and intelligence, and received the thanks of the commanding officer. The sense of his having acquired distinction brought a momentary glow into the lady’s pale cheek; but it was instantly lost in ashen whiteness at the recollection of his danger. After this, they had no news whatever, neither from Sir Philip, nor even from their brother Falconer. The case of Lady Forester was not indeed different from that of hundreds in the same situation; but a feeble mind is necessarily an irritable one, and the suspense which some bear with constitutional indifference or philosophical resignation, and some with a disposition to believe and hope the best, was intolerable to Lady Forester, at once solitary and sensitive, low-spirited, and devoid of strength of mind, whether natural or acquired.

Chapter II.

As she received no further news of Sir Philip, whether directly or indirectly, his unfortunate lady began now to feel a sort of consolation even in those careless habits which had so often given her pain. ‘He is so thoughtless,’ she repeated a hundred times a day to her sister, ‘he never writes when things are going on smoothly. It is his way. Had anything happened, he would have informed us.’

Lady Bothwell listened to her sister without attempting to console her. Probably she might be of opinion that even the worst intelligence which could be received from Flanders might not be without some touch of consolation; and that the Dowager Lady Forester, if so she was doomed to be called, might have a source of happiness unknown to the wife of the gayest and finest gentleman in Scotland. This conviction became stronger as they learned from inquiries made at headquarters that Sir Philip was no longer with the army; though whether he had been taken or slain in some of those skirmishes which were perpetually occurring, and in which he loved to distinguish himself, or whether he had, for some unknown reason or capricious change of mind, voluntarily left the service, none of his countrymen in the camp of the Allies could form even a conjecture. Meantime his creditors at home became clamorous, entered into possession of his property, and threatened his person, should he be rash enough to return to Scotland. These additional disadvantages aggravated Lady Bothwell’s displeasure against the fugitive husband; while her sister saw nothing in any of them, save what tended to increase her grief for the absence of him whom her imagination now represented—as it had before marriage—gallant, gay, and affectionate.

About this period there appeared in Edinburgh a man of singular appearance and pretensions. He was commonly called the Paduan Doctor, from having received his education at that famous university. He was supposed to possess some rare receipts in medicine, with which, it was affirmed, he had wrought remarkable cures. But though, on the one hand, the physicians of Edinburgh termed him an empiric, there were many persons, and among them some of the clergy, who, while they admitted the truth of the cures and the force of his remedies, alleged that Doctor Baptista Damiotti made use of charms and unlawful arts in order to obtain success in his practice. The resorting to him was even solemnly preached against, as a seeking of health from idols, and a trusting to the help which was to come from Egypt. But the protection which the Paduan Doctor received from some friends of interest and consequence enabled him to set these imputations at defiance, and to assume, even in the city of Edinburgh, famed as it was for abhorrence of witches and necromancers, the dangerous character of an expounder of futurity. It was at length rumoured that, for a certain gratification, which of course was not an inconsiderable one, Doctor Baptista Damiotti could tell the fate of the absent, and even show his visitors the personal form of their absent friends, and the action in which they were engaged at the moment. This rumour came to the ears of Lady Forester, who had reached that pitch of mental agony in which the sufferer will do anything, or endure anything, that suspense may be converted into certainty.

Gentle and timid in most cases, her state of mind made her equally obstinate and reckless, and it was with no small surprise and alarm that her sister, Lady Bothwell, heard her express a resolution to visit this man of art, and learn from him the fate of her husband. Lady Bothwell remonstrated on the improbability that such pretensions as those of this foreigner could be founded in anything but imposture.

‘I care not,’ said the deserted wife, ‘what degree of ridicule I may incur; if there be any one chance out of a hundred that I may obtain some certainty of my husband’s fate, I would not miss that chance for whatever else the world can offer me.’

Lady Bothwell next urged the unlawfulness of resorting to such sources of forbidden knowledge.

‘Sister,’ replied the sufferer, ‘he who is dying of thirst cannot refrain from drinking even poisoned water. She who suffers under suspense must seek information, even were the powers which offer it unhallowed and infernal. I go to learn my fate alone, and this very evening will I know it; the sun that rises to-morrow shall find me, if not more happy, at least more resigned.’

‘Sister,’ said Lady Bothwell, ‘if you are determined upon this wild step, you shall not go alone. If this man be an impostor, you may be too much agitated by your feelings to detect his villainy. If, which I cannot believe, there be any truth in what he pretends, you shall not be exposed alone to a communication of so extraordinary a nature. I will go with you, if indeed you determine to go. But yet reconsider your project, and renounce inquiries which cannot be prosecuted without guilt, and perhaps without danger.’

Lady Forester threw herself into her sister’s arms, and, clasping her to her bosom, thanked her a hundred times for the offer of her company, while she declined with a melancholy gesture the friendly advice with which it was accompanied.

When the hour of twilight arrived, which was the period when the Paduan Doctor was understood to receive the visits of those who came to consult with him, the two ladies left their apartments in the Canongate of Edinburgh, having their dress arranged like that of women of an inferior description, and their plaids disposed around their faces as they were worn by the same class; for in those days of aristocracy the quality of the wearer was generally indicated by the manner in which her plaid was disposed, as well as by the fineness of its texture. It was Lady Bothwell who had suggested this species of disguise, partly to avoid observation as they should go to the conjurer’s house, and partly in order to make trial of his penetration, by appearing before him in a feigned character. Lady Forester’s servant, of tried fidelity, had been employed by her to propitiate the Doctor by a suitable fee, and a story intimating that a soldier’s wife desired to know the fate of her husband; a subject upon which, in all probability, the sage was very frequently consulted.

To the last moment, when the palace clock struck eight, Lady Bothwell earnestly watched her sister, in hopes that she might retreat from her rash undertaking; but as mildness, and even timidity, is capable at times of vehement and fixed purposes, she found Lady Forester resolutely unmoved and determined when the moment of departure arrived. Ill satisfied with the expedition, but determined not to leave her sister at such a crisis, Lady Bothwell accompanied Lady Forester through more than one obscure street and lane, the servant walking before, and acting as their guide. At length he suddenly turned into a narrow court, and knocked at an arched door which seemed to belong to a building of some antiquity. It opened, though no one appeared to act as porter; and the servant, stepping aside from the entrance, motioned the ladies to enter. They had no sooner done so than it shut, and excluded their guide. The two ladies found themselves in a small vestibule, illuminated by a dim lamp, and having, when the door was closed, no communication with the external light or air. The door of an inner apartment, partly open, was at the farther side of the vestibule.

‘We must not hesitate now, Jemima,’ said Lady Bothwell, and walked forwards into the inner room, where, surrounded by books, maps, philosophical utensils, and other implements of peculiar shape and appearance, they found the man of art.

There was nothing very peculiar in the Italian’s appearance. He had the dark complexion and marked features of his country, seemed about fifty years old, and was handsomely but plainly dressed in a full suit of black clothes, which was then the universal costume of the medical profession. Large wax-lights, in silver sconces, illuminated the apartment, which was reasonably furnished. He rose as the ladies entered, and, notwithstanding the inferiority of their dress, received them with the marked respect due to their quality, and which foreigners are usually punctilious in rendering to those to whom such honours are due.

Lady Bothwell endeavoured to maintain her proposed incognito, and, as the Doctor ushered them to the upper end of the room, made a motion declining his courtesy, as unfitted for their condition. ‘We are poor people, sir,’ she said; ‘only my sister’s distress has brought us to consult your worship whether—’

He smiled as he interrupted her—‘I am aware, madam, of your sister’s distress, and its cause; I am aware, also, that I am honoured with a visit from two ladies of the highest consideration—Lady Bothwell and Lady Forester. If I could not distinguish them from the class of society which their present dress would indicate, there would be small possibility of my being able to gratify them by giving the information which they come to seek.’

‘I can easily understand—’ said Lady Bothwell.

‘Pardon my boldness to interrupt you, milady,’ cried the Italian; ‘your ladyship was about to say that you could easily understand that I had got possession of your names by means of your domestic. But in thinking so, you do injustice to the fidelity of your servant, and, I may add, to the skill of one who is also not less your humble servant—Baptista Damiotti.’

‘I have no intention to do either, sir,’ said Lady Bothwell, maintaining a tone of composure, though somewhat surprised; ‘but the situation is something new to me. If you know who we are, you also know, sir, what brought us here.’

‘Curiosity to know the fate of a Scottish gentleman of rank, now, or lately, upon the Continent,’ answered the seer. ‘His name is Il Cavaliero Philippo Forester, a gentleman who has the honour to be husband to this lady, and, with your ladyship’s permission for using plain language, the misfortune not to value as it deserves that inestimable advantage.’

Lady Forester sighed deeply, and Lady Bothwell replied,—

‘Since you know our object without our telling it, the only question that remains is, whether you have the power to relieve my sister’s anxiety?’

‘I have, madam,’ answered the Paduan scholar; ‘but there is still a previous inquiry. Have you the courage to behold with your own eyes what the Cavaliero Philippo Forester is now doing? or will you take it on my report?’

‘That question my sister must answer for herself,’ said Lady Bothwell.

‘With my own eyes will I endure to see whatever you have power to show me,’ said Lady Forester, with the same determined spirit which had stimulated her since her resolution was taken upon this subject.

‘There may be danger in it.’

‘If gold can compensate the risk,’ said Lady Forester, taking out her purse.

‘I do not such things for the purpose of gain,’ answered the foreigner; ‘I dare not turn my art to such a purpose. If I take the gold of the wealthy, it is but to bestow it on the poor; nor do I ever accept more than the sum I have already received from your servant. Put up your purse, madam; an adept needs not your gold.’

Lady Bothwell, considering this rejection of her sister’s offer as a mere trick of an empiric, to induce her to press a larger sum upon him, and willing that the scene should be commenced and ended, offered some gold in turn, observing that it was only to enlarge the sphere of his charity.

‘Let Lady Bothwell enlarge the sphere of her own charity,’ said the Paduan, ‘not merely in giving of alms, in which I know she is not deficient, but in judging the character of others; and let her oblige Baptista Damiotti by believing him honest, till she shall discover him to be a knave. Do not be surprised, madam, if I speak in answer to your thoughts rather than your expressions; and tell me once more whether you have courage to look on what I am prepared to show?’

‘I own, sir,’ said Lady Bothwell, ‘that your words strike me with some sense of fear; but whatever my sister desires to witness, I will not shrink from witnessing along with her.’

‘Nay, the danger only consists in the risk of your resolution failing you. The sight can only last for the space of seven minutes; and should you interrupt the vision by speaking a single word, not only would the charm be broken, but some danger might result to the spectators. But if you can remain steadily silent for the seven minutes, your curiosity will be gratified without the slightest risk; and for this I will engage my honour.’

Internally Lady Bothwell thought the security was but an indifferent one; but she suppressed the suspicion, as if she had believed that the adept, whose dark features wore a half-formed smile, could in reality read even her most secret reflections. A solemn pause then ensued, until Lady Forester gathered courage enough to reply to the physician, as he termed himself, that she would abide with firmness and silence the sight which he had promised to exhibit to them. Upon this, he made them a low obeisance, and saying he went to prepare matters to meet their wish, left the apartment. The two sisters, hand in hand, as if seeking by that close union to divert any danger which might threaten them, sat down on two seats in immediate contact with each other—Jemima seeking support in the manly and habitual courage of Lady Bothwell; and she, on the other hand, more agitated than she had expected, endeavouring to fortify herself by the desperate resolution which circumstances had forced her sister to assume. The one perhaps said to herself that her sister never feared anything; and the other might reflect that what so feeble-minded a woman as Jemima did not fear, could not properly be a subject of apprehension to a person of firmness and resolution like her own.

In a few moments the thoughts of both were diverted from their own situation by a strain of music so singularly sweet and solemn that, while it seemed calculated to avert or dispel any feeling unconnected with its harmony, increased, at the same time, the solemn excitation which the preceding interview was calculated to produce. The music was that of some instrument with which they were unacquainted; but circumstances afterwards led my ancestress to believe that it was that of the harmonica, which she heard at a much later period in life.

When these heaven-born sounds had ceased, a door opened in the upper end of the apartment, and they saw Damiotti, standing at the head of two or three steps, sign to them to advance. His dress was so different from that which he had worn a few minutes before, that they could hardly recognize him; and the deadly paleness of his countenance, and a certain stern rigidity of muscles, like that of one whose mind is made up to some strange and daring action, had totally changed the somewhat sarcastic expression with which he had previously regarded them both, and particularly Lady Bothwell. He was barefooted, excepting a species of sandals in the antique fashion; his legs were naked beneath the knees; above them he wore hose, and a doublet of dark crimson silk close to his body; and over that a flowing loose robe, something resembling a surplice, of snow-white linen. His throat and neck were uncovered, and his long, straight, black hair was carefully combed down at full length.

As the ladies approached at his bidding, he showed no gesture of that ceremonious courtesy of which he had been formerly lavish. On the contrary, he made the signal of advance with an air of command; and when, arm in arm, and with insecure steps, the sisters approached the spot where he stood, it was with a warning frown that he pressed his finger to his lips, as if reiterating his condition of absolute silence, while, stalking before them, he led the way into the next apartment.

This was a large room, hung with black, as if for a funeral. At the upper end was a table, or rather a species of altar, covered with the same lugubrious colour, on which lay divers objects resembling the usual implements of sorcery. These objects were not indeed visible as they advanced into the apartment; for the light which displayed them, being only that of two expiring lamps, was extremely faint. The master—to use the Italian phrase for persons of this description—approached the upper end of the room, with a genuflection like that of a Catholic to the crucifix, and at the same time crossed himself. The ladies followed in silence, and arm in arm. Two or three low broad steps led to a platform in front of the altar, or what resembled such. Here the sage took his stand, and placed the ladies beside him, once more earnestly repeating by signs his injunctions of silence. The Italian then, extending his bare arm from under his linen vestment, pointed with his forefinger to five large flambeaux, or torches, placed on each side of the altar. They took fire successively at the approach of his hand, or rather of his finger, and spread a strong light through the room. By this the visitors could discern that, on the seeming altar, were disposed two naked swords laid crosswise; a large open book, which they conceived to be a copy of the Holy Scriptures, but in a language to them unknown; and beside this mysterious volume was placed a human skull. But what struck the sisters most was a very tall and broad mirror, which occupied all the space behind the altar, and, illumined by the lighted torches, reflected the mysterious articles which were laid upon it.

The master then placed himself between the two ladies, and, pointing to the mirror, took each by the hand, but without speaking a syllable. They gazed intently on the polished and sable space to which he had directed their attention. Suddenly the surface assumed a new and singular appearance. It no longer simply reflected the objects placed before it, but, as if it had self-contained scenery of its own, objects began to appear within it, at first in a disorderly, indistinct, and miscellaneous manner, like form arranging itself out of chaos; at length, in distinct and defined shape and symmetry. It was thus that, after some shifting of light and darkness over the face of the wonderful glass, a long perspective of arches and columns began to arrange itself on its sides, and a vaulted roof on the upper part of it, till, after many oscillations, the whole vision gained a fixed and stationary appearance, representing the interior of a foreign church. The pillars were stately, and hung with scutcheons; the arches were lofty and magnificent; the floor was lettered with funeral inscriptions. But there were no separate shrines, no images, no display of chalice or crucifix on the altar. It was, therefore, a Protestant church upon the Continent. A clergyman dressed in the Geneva gown and band stood by the communion table, and, with the Bible opened before him, and his clerk awaiting in the background, seemed prepared to perform some service of the church to which he belonged.

At length, there entered the middle aisle of the building a numerous party, which appeared to be a bridal one, as a lady and gentleman walked first, hand in hand, followed by a large concourse of persons of both sexes, gaily, nay richly, attired. The bride, whose features they could distinctly see, seemed not more than sixteen years old, and extremely beautiful. The bridegroom, for some seconds, moved rather with his shoulder towards them, and his face averted; but his elegance of form and step struck the sisters at once with the same apprehension. As he turned his face suddenly, it was frightfully realized, and they saw, in the gay bridegroom before them, Sir Philip Forester. His wife uttered an imperfect exclamation, at the sound of which the whole scene stirred and seemed to separate.

‘I could compare it to nothing,’ said Lady Bothwell, while recounting the wonderful tale, ‘but to the dispersion of the reflection offered by a deep and calm pool, when a stone is suddenly cast into it, and the shadows become dissipated and broken.’ The master pressed both the ladies’ hands severely, as if to remind them of their promise, and of the danger which they incurred. The exclamation died away on Lady Forester’s tongue, without attaining perfect utterance, and the scene in the glass, after the fluctuation of a minute, again resumed to the eye its former appearance of a real scene, existing within the mirror, as if represented in a picture, save that the figures were movable instead of being stationary.

The representation of Sir Philip Forester, now distinctly visible in form and feature, was seen to lead on towards the clergyman that beautiful girl, who advanced at once with diffidence and with a species of affectionate pride. In the meantime, and just as the clergyman had arranged the bridal company before him, and seemed about to commence the service, another group of persons, of whom two or three were officers, entered the church. They moved, at first, forward, as though they came to witness the bridal ceremony; but suddenly one of the officers, whose back was towards the spectators, detached himself from his companions, and rushed hastily towards the marriage party, when the whole of them turned towards him, as if attracted by some exclamation which had accompanied his advance. Suddenly the intruder drew his sword; the bridegroom unsheathed his own, and made towards him; swords were also drawn by other individuals, both of the marriage party and of those who had last entered. They fell into a sort of confusion, the clergyman, and some elder and graver persons, labouring apparently to keep the peace, while the hotter spirits on both sides brandished their weapons. But now, the period of the brief space during which the soothsayer, as he pretended, was permitted to exhibit his art, was arrived. The fumes again mixed together, and dissolved gradually from observation; the vaults and columns of the church rolled asunder, and disappeared; and the front of the mirror reflected nothing save the blazing torches and the melancholy apparatus placed on the altar or table before it.

The doctor led the ladies, who greatly required his support, into the apartment from whence they came, where wine, essences, and other means of restoring suspended animation, had been provided during his absence. He motioned them to chairs, which they occupied in silence; Lady Forester, in particular, wringing her hands, and casting her eyes up to heaven, but without speaking a word, as if the spell had been still before her eyes.

‘And what we have seen is even now acting?’ said Lady Bothwell, collecting herself with difficulty.

‘That,’ answered Baptista Damiotti, ‘I cannot justly, or with certainty, say. But it is either now acting, or has been acted during a short space before this. It is the last remarkable transaction in which the Cavalier Forester has been engaged.’

Lady Bothwell then expressed anxiety concerning her sister, whose altered countenance and apparent unconsciousness of what passed around her excited her apprehensions how it might be possible to convey her home.

‘I have prepared for that,’ answered the adept. ‘I have directed the servant to bring your equipage as near to this place as the narrowness of the street will permit. Fear not for your sister, but give her, when you return home, this composing draught, and she will be better to-morrow morning. Few,’ he added in a melancholy tone, ‘leave this house as well in health as they entered it. Such being the consequence of seeking knowledge by mysterious means, I leave you to judge the condition of those who have the power of gratifying such irregular curiosity. Farewell, and forget not the potion.’

‘I will give her nothing that comes from you,’ said Lady Bothwell; ‘I have seen enough of your art already. Perhaps you would poison us both to conceal your own necromancy. But we are persons who want neither the means of making our wrongs known, nor the assistance of friends to right them.’

‘You have had no wrongs from me, madam,’ said the adept. ‘You sought one who is little grateful for such honour. He seeks no one, and only gives responses to those who invite and call upon him. After all, you have but learned a little sooner the evil which you must still be doomed to endure. I hear your servant’s step at the door, and will detain your ladyship and Lady Forester no longer. The next packet from the Continent will explain what you have already partly witnessed. Let it not, if I may advise, pass too suddenly into your sister’s hands.’

So saying, he bid Lady Bothwell good-night. She went, lighted by the adept, to the vestibule, where he hastily threw a black cloak over his singular dress, and opening the door, entrusted his visitors to the care of the servant. It was with difficulty that Lady Bothwell sustained her sister to the carriage, though it was only twenty steps distant. When they arrived at home, Lady Forester required medical assistance. The physician of the family attended, and shook his head on feeling her pulse.

‘Here has been,’ he said, ‘a violent and sudden shock on the nerves. I must know how it has happened.’

Lady Bothwell admitted they had visited the conjurer, and that Lady Forester had received some bad news respecting her husband, Sir Philip.

‘That rascally quack would make my fortune, were he to stay in Edinburgh,’ said the graduate; ‘this is the seventh nervous case I have heard of his making for me, and all by effect of terror.’ He next examined the composing draught which Lady Bothwell had unconsciously brought in her hand, tasted it, and pronounced it very germain to the matter, and what would save an application to the apothecary. He then paused, and looking at Lady Bothwell very significantly, at length added, ‘I suppose I must not ask your ladyship anything about this Italian warlock’s proceedings?’

‘Indeed, doctor,’ answered Lady Bothwell, ‘I consider what passed as confidential; and though the man may be a rogue, yet, as we were fools enough to consult him, we should, I think, be honest enough to keep his counsel.’

‘May be a knave—come,’ said the doctor, ‘I am glad to hear your ladyship allows such a possibility in anything that comes from Italy.’

‘What comes from Italy may be as good as what comes from Hanover, doctor. But you and I will remain good friends; and that it may be so, we will say nothing of Whig and Tory.’

‘Not I,’ said the doctor, receiving his fee, and taking his hat; ‘a Carolus serves my purpose as well as a Willielmus. But I should like to know why old Lady Saint Ringan, and all that set, go about wasting their decayed lungs in puffing this foreign fellow.’

‘Ay—you had best set him down a Jesuit, as Scrub says.’ On these terms they parted.

The poor patient—whose nerves, from an extraordinary state of tension, had at length become relaxed in as extraordinary a degree—continued to struggle with a sort of imbecility, the growth of superstitious terror, when the shocking tidings were brought from Holland which fulfilled even her worst expectations.

They were sent by the celebrated Earl of Stair, and contained the melancholy event of a duel betwixt Sir Philip Forester and his wife’s half-brother, Captain Falconer, of the Scotch-Dutch, as they were then called, in which the latter had been killed. The cause of quarrel rendered the incident still more shocking. It seemed that Sir Philip had left the army suddenly, in consequence of being unable to pay a very considerable sum which he had lost to another volunteer at play. He had changed his name, and taken up his residence at Rotterdam, where he had insinuated himself into the good graces of an ancient and rich burgomaster, and, by his handsome person and graceful manners, captivated the affections of his only child, a very young person, of great beauty, and the heiress of much wealth. Delighted with the specious attractions of his proposed son-in-law, the wealthy merchant—whose idea of the British character was too high to admit of his taking any precaution to acquire evidence of his condition and circumstances—gave his consent to the marriage. It was about to be celebrated in the principal church of the city, when it was interrupted by a singular occurrence.

Captain Falconer having been detached to Rotterdam to bring up a part of the brigade of Scottish auxiliaries, who were in quarters there, a person of consideration in the town, to whom he had been formerly known, proposed to him for amusement to go to the high church to see a countryman of his own married to the daughter of a wealthy burgomaster. Captain Falconer went accordingly, accompanied by his Dutch acquaintance, with a party of his friends, and two or three officers of the Scotch brigade. His astonishment may be conceived when he saw his own brother-in-law, a married man, on the point of leading to the altar the innocent and beautiful creature upon whom he was about to practise a base and unmanly deceit. He proclaimed his villainy on the spot, and the marriage was interrupted, of course. But against the opinion of more thinking men, who considered Sir Philip Forester as having thrown himself out of the rank of men of honour, Captain Falconer admitted him to the privilege of such, accepted a challenge from him, and in the rencounter received a mortal wound. Such are the ways of Heaven, mysterious in our eyes. Lady Forester never recovered the shock of this dismal intelligence.

*

‘And did this tragedy,’ said I, ‘take place exactly at the time when the scene in the mirror was exhibited?’

‘It is hard to be obliged to maim one’s story,’ answered my aunt, ‘but to speak the truth, it happened some days sooner than the apparition was exhibited.’

‘And so there remained a possibility,’ said I, ‘that by some secret and speedy communication the artist might have received early intelligence of that incident.’

‘The incredulous pretended so,’ replied my aunt.

‘What became of the adept?’ demanded I.

‘Why, a warrant came down shortly afterwards to arrest him for high treason, as an agent of the Chevalier St. George; and Lady Bothwell, recollecting the hints which had escaped the doctor, an ardent friend of the Protestant succession, did then call to remembrance that this man was chiefly proné among the ancient matrons of her own political persuasion. It certainly seemed probable that intelligence from the Continent, which could easily have been transmitted by an active and powerful agent, might have enabled him to prepare such a scene of phantasmagoria as she had herself witnessed. Yet there were so many difficulties in assigning a natural explanation, that, to the day of her death, she remained in great doubt on the subject, and much disposed to cut the Gordian knot by admitting the existence of supernatural agency.’

‘But, my dear aunt,’ said I, ‘what became of the man of skill?’

‘Oh, he was too good a fortune-teller not to be able to foresee that his own destiny would be tragical if he waited the arrival of the man with the silver greyhound upon his sleeve. He made, as we say, a moonlight flitting, and was nowhere to be seen or heard of. Some noise there was about papers or letters found in the house; but it died away, and Doctor Baptista Damiotti was soon as little talked of as Galen or Hippocrates.’

‘And Sir Philip Forester,’ said I, ‘did he too vanish for ever from the public scene?’

‘No,’ replied my kind informer. ‘He was heard of once more, and it was upon a remarkable occasion. It is said that we Scots, when there was such a nation in existence, have, among our full peck of virtues, one or two little barley-corns of vice. In particular, it is alleged that we rarely forgive, and never forget, any injuries received; that we make an idol of our resentment, as poor Lady Constance did of her grief, and are addicted, as Burns says, to “nursing our wrath to keep it warm.” Lady Bothwell was not without this feeling; and, I believe, nothing whatever, scarce the restoration of the Stewart line, could have happened so delicious to her feelings as an opportunity of being revenged on Sir Philip Forester for the deep and double injury which had deprived her of a sister and of a brother. But nothing of him was heard or known till many a year had passed away.

‘At length—it was on a Fastern’s E’en (Shrovetide) assembly, at which the whole fashion of Edinburgh attended, full and frequent, and when Lady Bothwell had a seat amongst the lady patronesses, that one of the attendants on the company whispered into her ear that a gentleman wished to speak with her in private.

‘“In private? and in an assembly-room?—he must be mad. Tell him to call upon me to-morrow morning.”

‘“I said so, my lady,” answered the man, “but he desired me to give you this paper.”

‘She undid the billet, which was curiously folded and sealed. It only bore the words, “On business of life and death,” written in a hand which she had never seen before. Suddenly it occurred to her that it might concern the safety of some of her political friends. She therefore followed the messenger to a small apartment where the refreshments were prepared, and from which the general company was excluded. She found an old man, who, at her approach, rose up and bowed profoundly. His appearance indicated a broken constitution, and his dress, though sedulously rendered conforming to the etiquette of a ballroom, was worn and tarnished, and hung in folds about his emaciated person. Lady Bothwell was about to feel for her purse, expecting to get rid of the supplicant at the expense of a little money, but some fear of a mistake arrested her purpose. She therefore gave the man leisure to explain himself.

‘“I have the honour to speak with the Lady Bothwell?”

‘“I am Lady Bothwell; allow me to say that this is no time or place for long explanations.—What are your commands with me?”

‘“Your ladyship,” said the old man, “had once a sister.”

‘“True; whom I loved as my own soul.”

‘“And a brother.”

‘“The bravest, the kindest, the most affectionate!” said Lady Bothwell.

‘“Both these beloved relatives you lost by the fault of an unfortunate man,” continued the stranger.

‘“By the crime of an unnatural, bloody-minded murderer,” said the lady.

‘“I am answered,” replied the old man, bowing, as if to withdraw.

‘“Stop, sir, I command you,” said Lady Bothwell.—“Who are you that, at such a place and time, come to recall these horrible recollections? I insist upon knowing.”

‘“I am one who intends Lady Bothwell no injury, but, on the contrary, to offer her the means of doing a deed of Christian charity, which the world would wonder at, and which Heaven would reward; but I find her in no temper for such a sacrifice as I was prepared to ask.”

‘“Speak out, sir; what is your meaning?” said Lady Bothwell.

‘“The wretch that has wronged you so deeply,” rejoined the stranger, “is now on his death-bed. His days have been days of misery, his nights have been sleepless hours of anguish—yet he cannot die without your forgiveness. His life has been an unremitting penance—yet he dares not part from his burden while your curses load his soul.”

‘“Tell him,” said Lady Bothwell sternly, “to ask pardon of that Being whom he has so greatly offended, not of an erring mortal like himself. What could my forgiveness avail him?”

‘“Much,” answered the old man. “It will be an earnest of that which he may then venture to ask from his Creator, lady, and from yours. Remember, Lady Bothwell, you too have a death-bed to look forward to; Your soul may—all human souls must—feel the awe of facing the judgment-seat, with the wounds of an untented conscience, raw, and rankling—what thought would it be then that should whisper, ‘I have given no mercy, how then shall I ask it?’ ”

‘“Man, whosoever thou mayest be,” replied Lady Bothwell, “urge me not so cruelly. It would be but blasphemous hypocrisy to utter with my lips the words which every throb of my heart protests against. They would open the earth and give to light the wasted form of my sister—the bloody form of my murdered brother—forgive him?—Never, never!”

‘“Great God!” cried the old man, holding up his hands, “is it thus the worms which Thou hast called out of dust obey the commands of their Maker? Farewell, proud and unforgiving woman. Exult that thou hast added to a death in want and pain the agonies of religious despair; but never again mock Heaven by petitioning for the pardon which thou hast refused to grant.”

‘He was turning from her.

‘“Stop,” she exclaimed; “I will try; yes, I will try to pardon him.”

‘“Gracious lady,” said the old man, “you will relieve the over-burdened soul which dare not sever itself from its sinful companion of earth without being at peace with you. What do I know—your forgiveness may perhaps preserve for penitence the dregs of a wretched life.”

‘“Ha!” said the lady, as a sudden light broke on her, “it is the villain himself!” And grasping Sir Philip Forester—for it was he, and no other—by the collar, she raised a cry of “Murder, murder! seize the murderer!”

‘At an exclamation so singular, in such a place, the company thronged into the apartment; but Sir Philip Forester was no longer there. He had forcibly extricated himself from Lady Bothwell’s hold, and had run out of the apartment, which opened on the landing-place of the stair. There seemed no escape in that direction, for there were several persons coming up the steps, and others descending. But the unfortunate man was desperate. He threw himself over the balustrade, and alighted safely in the lobby, though a leap of fifteen feet at least, then dashed into the street, and was lost in darkness. Some of the Bothwell family made pursuit, and had they come up with the fugitive they might perhaps have slain him; for in those days men’s blood ran warm in their veins. But the police did not interfere, the matter most criminal having happened long since, and in a foreign land. Indeed it was always thought that this extraordinary scene originated in a hypocritical experiment, by which Sir Philip desired to ascertain whether he might return to his native country in safety from the resentment of a family which he had injured so deeply. As the result fell out so contrary to his wishes, he is believed to have returned to the Continent, and there died in exile.’

So closed the tale of the MYSTERIOUS MIRROR.

THE TWO DROVERS

Chapter I.

It was the day after Doune Fair when my story commences. It had been a brisk market; several dealers had attended from the northern and midland counties in England, and English money had flown so merrily about as to gladden the hearts of the Highland farmers. Many large droves were about to set off for England, under the protection of their owners, or of the topsmen whom they employed in the tedious, laborious, and responsible office of driving the cattle for many hundred miles, from the market where they had been purchased, to the fields or farmyards where they were to be fattened for the shambles.

The Highlanders in particular are masters of this difficult trade of driving, which seems to suit them as well as the trade of war. It affords exercise for all their habits of patient endurance and active exertion. They are required to know perfectly the drove-roads, which lie over the wildest tracts of the country, and to avoid as much as possible the highways, which distress the feet of the bullocks, and the turnpikes, which annoy the spirit of the drover; whereas on the broad green or grey track which leads across the pathless moor, the herd not only move at ease and without taxation, but, if they mind their business, may pick up a mouthful of food by the way. At night the drovers usually sleep along with their cattle, let the weather be what it will; and many of these hardy men do not once rest under a roof during a journey on foot from Lochaber to Lincolnshire. They are paid very highly, for the trust reposed is of the last importance, as it depends on their prudence, vigilance, and honesty whether the cattle reach the final market in good order, and afford a profit to the grazier. But as they maintain themselves at their own expense, they are especially economical in that particular. At the period we speak of, a Highland drover was victualled for his long and toilsome journey with a few handfulls of oatmeal and two or three onions, renewed from time to time, and a ram’s horn filled with whisky, which he used regularly, but sparingly, every night and morning. His dirk, or skene-dhu, (that is, black-knife), so worn as to be concealed beneath the arm, or by the folds of the plaid, was his only weapon, excepting the cudgel with which he directed the movements of the cattle. A Highlander was never so happy as on these occasions. There was a variety in the whole journey, which exercised the Celt’s natural curiosity and love of motion. There were the constant change of place and scene, the petty adventures incidental to the traffic, and the intercourse with the various farmers, graziers, and traders, intermingled with occasional merry-makings, not the less acceptable to Donald that they were void of expense;— and there was the consciousness of superior skill; for the Highlander, a child amongst flocks, is a prince amongst herds, and his natural habits induce him to disdain the shepherd’s slothful life, so that he feels himself nowhere more at home than when following a gallant drove of his country cattle in the character of their guardian.

Of the number who left Doune in the morning, and with the purpose we have described, not a Glunamie of them all cocked his bonnet more briskly, or gartered his tartan hose under knee over a pair of more promising spiogs, (legs), than did Robin Oig M‘Combich, called familiarly Robin Oig, that is young, or the Lesser, Robin. Though small of stature, as the epithet Oig implies, and not very strongly limbed, he was as light and alert as one of the deer of his mountains. He had an elasticity of step which, in the course of a long march, made many a stout fellow envy him; and the manner in which he busked his plaid and adjusted his bonnet argued a consciousness that so smart a John Highlandman as himself would not pass unnoticed among the Lowland lasses. The ruddy cheek, red lips, and white teeth set off a countenance which had gained by exposure to the weather a healthful and hardy rather than a rugged hue. If Robin Oig did not laugh, or even smile frequently—as, indeed, is not the practice among his countrymen—his bright eyes usually gleamed from under his bonnet with an expression of cheerfulness ready to be turned into mirth.

The departure of Robin Oig was an incident in the little town, in and near which he had many friends, male and female. He was a topping person in his way, transacted considerable business on his own behalf, and was entrusted by the best farmers in the Highlands, in preference to any other drover in that district. He might have increased his business to any extent had he condescended to manage it by deputy; but except a lad or two, sister’s sons of his own, Robin rejected the idea of assistance, conscious, perhaps, how much his reputation depended upon his attending in person to the practical discharge of his duty in every instance. He remained, therefore, contented with the highest premium given to persons of his description, and comforted himself with the hopes that a few journeys to England might enable him to conduct business on his own account, in a manner becoming his birth. For Robin Oig’s father, Lachlan M‘Combich (or son of my friend, his actual clan surname being M‘Gregor), had been so called by the celebrated Rob Roy, because of the particular friendship which had subsisted between the grandsire of Robin and that renowned cateran. Some people even said that Robin Oig derived his Christian name from one as renowned in the wilds of Loch Lomond as ever was his namesake Robin Hood in the precincts of merry Sherwood. ‘Of such ancestry,’ as James Boswell says, ‘who would not be proud?’ Robin Oig was proud accordingly; but his frequent visits to England and to the Lowlands had given him tact enough to know that pretensions which still gave him a little right to distinction in his own lonely glen, might be both obnoxious and ridiculous if preferred elsewhere. The pride of birth, therefore, was like the miser’s treasure—the secret subject of his contemplation, but never exhibited to strangers as a subject of boasting.

Many were the words of gratulation and good-luck which were bestowed on Robin Oig. The judges commended his drove, especially Robin’s own property, which were the best of them. Some thrust out their snuff-mulls for the parting pinch, others tendered the doch-an-dorrach, or parting cup. All cried, ‘Good-luck travel out with you and come home with you. Give you luck in the Saxon market—brave notes in the leabhar-dhu,’ (black pocket-book), ‘and plenty of English gold in the sporran’ (pouch of goat-skin).

The bonny lasses made their adieus more modestly, and more than one, it was said, would have given her best brooch to be certain that it was upon her that his eye last rested as he turned towards the road.

Robin Oig had just given the preliminary ‘Hoo-hoo!’ to urge forward the loiterers of the drove, when there was a cry behind him:—

‘Stay, Robin—bide a blink. Here is Janet of Tomahourich—auld Janet, your father’s sister.’

‘Plague on her, for an auld Highland witch and spaewife,’ said a farmer from the Carse of Stirling; ‘she’ll cast some of her cantrips on the cattle.’

‘She canna do that,’ said another sapient of the same profession. ‘Robin Oig is no the lad to leave any of them without tying Saint Mungo’s knot on their tails, and that will put to her speed the best witch that ever flew over Dimayet upon a broomstick.’

It may not be indifferent to the reader to know that the Highland cattle are peculiarly liable to be taken, or infected, by spells and witchcraft, which judicious people guard against by knitting knots of peculiar complexity on the tuft of hair which terminates the animal’s tail.

But the old woman who was the object of the farmer’s suspicion seemed only busied about the drover, without paying any attention to the drove. Robin, on the contrary, appeared rather impatient of her presence.

‘What auld-world fancy,’ he said, ‘has brought you so early from the ingle-side this morning, Muhme? I am sure I bid you good-even, and had your God-speed, last night.’

‘And left me more siller than the useless old woman will use till you come back again, bird of my bosom,’ said the sibyl. ‘But it is little I would care for the food that nourishes me, or the fire that warms me, or for God’s blessed sun itself, if aught but weel should happen to the grandson of my father. So let me walk the deasil round you, that you may go safe out into the far foreign land, and come safe home.’

Robin Oig stopped, half embarrassed, half laughing, and signing to those around that he only complied with the old woman to soothe her humour. In the meantime, she traced around him, with wavering steps, the propitiation, which some have thought has been derived from the Druidical mythology. It consists, as is well known, in the person who makes the deasil walking three times round the person who is the object of the ceremony, taking care to move according to the course of the sun. At once, however, she stopped short, and exclaimed, in a voice of alarm and horror, ‘Grandson of my father, there is blood on your hand.’

‘Hush, for God’s sake, aunt!’ said Robin Oig. ‘You will bring more trouble on yourself with this Taishataragh’ (second sight) ‘than you will be able to get out of for many a day.’

The old woman only repeated, with a ghastly look, ‘There is blood on your hand, and it is English blood. The blood of the Gael is richer and redder. Let us see—let us—’

Ere Robin Oig could prevent her, which, indeed, could only have been by positive violence, so hasty and peremptory were her proceedings, she had drawn from his side the dirk which lodged in the folds of his plaid, and held it up, exclaiming, although the weapon gleamed clear and bright in the sun, ‘Blood, blood—Saxon blood again. Robin Oig M‘Combich, go not this day to England!’

‘Prutt, trutt,’ answered Robin Oig, ‘that will never do neither—it would be next thing to running the country. For shame, Muhme—give me the dirk. You cannot tell by the colour the difference betwixt the blood of a black bullock and a white one, and you speak of knowing Saxon from Gaelic blood. All men have their blood from Adam, Muhme. Give me my skene-dhu, and let me go on my road. I should have been half way to Stirling brig by this time. Give me my dirk, and let me go.’

‘Never will I give it to you,’ said the old woman—‘Never will I quit my hold on your plaid—unless you promise me not to wear that unhappy weapon.’

The women around him urged him also, saying few of his aunt’s words fell to the ground; and as the Lowland farmers continued to look moodily on the scene, Robin Oig determined to close it at any sacrifice.

‘Well, then,’ said the young drover, giving the scabbard of the weapon to Hugh Morrison, ‘you Lowlanders care nothing for these freats. Keep my dirk for me. I cannot give it you, because it was my father’s; but your drove follows ours, and I am content it should be in your keeping, not in mine.— Will this do, Muhme?’

‘It must,’ said the old woman—‘that is, if the Lowlander is mad enough to carry the knife.’

The strong Westlandman laughed aloud.

‘Goodwife,’ said he, ‘I am Hugh Morrison from Glenae, come of the Manly Morrisons of auld lang syne, that never took short weapon against a man in their lives. And neither needed they. They had their broadswords, and I have this bit supple’—showing a formidable cudgel; ‘for dirking ower the board, I leave that to John Highlandman.—Ye needna snort, none of you Highlanders, and you in especial, Robin. I’ll keep the bit knife, if you are feared for the auld spaewife’s tale, and give it back to you whenever you want it.’

Robin was not particularly pleased with some part of Hugh Morrison’s speech; but he had learned in his travels more patience than belonged to his Highland constitution originally, and he accepted the service of the descendant of the Manly Morrisons without finding fault with the rather depreciating manner in which it was offered.

‘If he had not had his morning in his head, and been but a Dumfries-shire hog into the boot, he would have spoken more like a gentleman. But you cannot have more of a sow than a grumph. It’s shame my father’s knife should ever slash a haggis for the like of him.’

Thus saying, (but saying it in Gaelic), Robin drove on his cattle, and waved farewell to all behind him. He was in the greater haste, because he expected to join at Falkirk a comrade and brother in profession, with whom he proposed to travel in company.

Robin Oig’s chosen friend was a young Englishman, Harry Wakefield by name, well known at every northern market, and in his way as much famed and honoured as our Highland driver of bullocks. He was nearly six feet high, gallantly formed to keep the rounds at Smithfield, or maintain the ring at a wrestling match; and although he might have been overmatched, perhaps, among the regular professors of the Fancy, yet, as a yokel or rustic, or a chance customer, he was able to give a bellyful to any amateur of the pugilistic art. Doncaster races saw him in his glory, betting his guinea, and generally successfully; nor was there a main fought in Yorkshire, the feeders being persons of celebrity, at which he was not to be seen if business permitted. But though a sprack lad, and fond of pleasure and its haunts, Harry Wakefield was steady, and not the cautious Robin Oig M‘Combich himself was more attentive to the main chance. His holidays were holidays indeed; but his days of work were dedicated to steady and persevering labour. In countenance and temper, Wakefield was the model of Old England’s merry yeomen, whose clothyard shafts, in so many hundred battles, asserted her superiority over the nations, and whose good sabres, in our own time, are her cheapest and most assured defence. His mirth was readily excited; for, strong in limb and constitution, and fortunate in circumstances, he was disposed to be pleased with every thing about him, and such difficulties as he might occasionally encounter were, to a man of his energy, rather matter of amusement than serious annoyance. With all the merits of a sanguine temper, our young English drover was not without his defects. He was irascible, sometimes to the verge of being quarrelsome; and perhaps not the less inclined to bring his disputes to a pugilistic decision, because he found few antagonists able to stand up to him in the boxing ring.

It is difficult to say how Harry Wakefield and Robin Oig first became intimates, but it is certain a close acquaintance had taken place betwixt them, although they had apparently few common subjects of conversation or of interest, so soon as their talk ceased to be of bullocks. Robin Oig, indeed, spoke the English language rather imperfectly upon any other topics but stots and kyloes, and Harry Wakefield could never bring his broad Yorkshire tongue to utter a single word of Gaelic. It was in vain Robin spent a whole morning, during a walk over Minch Moor, in attempting to teach his companion to utter, with true precision, the shibboleth Llhu, which is the Gaelic for a calf. From Traquair to Murder Cairn, the hill rung with the discordant attempts of the Saxon upon the unmanageable monosyllable, and the heartfelt laugh which followed every failure. They had, however, better modes of awakening the echoes; for Wakefield could sing many a ditty to the praise of Moll, Susan, and Cicely, and Robin Oig had a particular gift at whistling interminable pibrochs through all their involutions, and what was more agreeable to his companion’s southern ear, knew many of the northern airs, both lively and pathetic, to which Wakefield learned to pipe a bass. Thus, though Robin could hardly have comprehended his companion’s stories about horse-racing, and cock-fighting, or fox-hunting, and although his own legends of clan-fights and creaghs, varied with talk of Highland goblins and fairy folk, would have been caviare to his companion, they contrived, nevertheless to find a degree of pleasure in each other’s company, which had for three years back induced them to join company and travel together, when the direction of their journey permitted. Each, indeed, found his advantage in this companionship; for where could the Englishman have found a guide through the Western Highlands like Robin Oig M‘Combich? and when they were on what Harry called the right side of the Border, his patronage, which was extensive, and his purse, which was heavy, were at all times at the service of his Highland friend, and on many occasions his liberality did him genuine yeoman’s service.

Chapter II.

Were ever two such loving friends!—

How could they disagree?

Oh, thus it was, he loved him dear,

And thought how to requite him,

And having no friend left but he,

He did resolve to fight him. DUKE UPON DUKE.

The pair of friends had traversed with their usual cordiality the grassy wilds of Liddesdale, and crossed the opposite part of Cumberland, emphatically called The Waste. In these solitary regions the cattle under the charge of our drovers derived their subsistence chiefly by picking their food as they went along the drove-road, or sometimes by the tempting opportunity of a start and owerloup, or invasion of the neighbouring pasture, where an occasion presented itself. But now the scene changed before them. They were descending towards a fertile and enclosed country, where no such liberties could be taken with impunity, or without a previous arrangement and bargain with the possessors of the ground. This was more especially the case, as a great northern fair was upon the eve of taking place, where both the Scotch and English drover expected to dispose of a part of their cattle, which it was desirable to produce in the market rested and in good order. Fields were therefore difficult to be obtained, and only upon high terms. This necessity occasioned a temporary separation betwixt the two friends, who went to bargain, each as he could, for the separate accommodation of his herd. Unhappily it chanced that both of them, unknown to each other, thought of bargaining for the ground they wanted on the property of a country gentleman of some fortune, whose estate lay in the neighbourhood. The English drover applied to the bailiff on the property, who was known to him. It chanced that the Cumbrian Squire, who had entertained some suspicions of his manager’s honesty, was taking occasional measures to ascertain how far they were well founded, and had desired that any enquiries about his enclosures, with a view to occupy them for a temporary purpose, should be referred to himself. As however, Mr. Ireby had gone the day before upon a journey of some miles distance to the northward, the bailiff chose to consider the check upon his full powers as for the time removed, and concluded that he should best consult his master’s interest, and perhaps his own, in making an agreement with Harry Wakefield. Meanwhile, ignorant of what his comrade was doing, Robin Oig, on his side, chanced to be overtaken by a good-looking smart little man upon a pony, most knowingly hogged and cropped, as was then the fashion, the rider wearing tight leather breeches, and long-necked bright spurs. This cavalier asked one or two pertinent questions about markets and the price of stock. So Robin, seeing him a well-judging civil gentleman, took the freedom to ask him whether he could let him know if there was any grass-land to be let in that neighbourhood, for the temporary accommodation of his drove. He could not have put the question to more willing ears. The gentleman of the buckskins was the proprietor, with whose bailiff Harry Wakefield had dealt, or was in the act of dealing.

‘Thou art in good luck, my canny Scot,’ said Mr. Ireby, ‘to have spoken to me, for I see thy cattle have done their day’s work, and I have at my disposal the only field within three miles that is to be let in these parts.’

‘The drove can pe gang two, three, four miles very pratty weel indeed’—said the cautious Highlander; ‘put what would his honour pe axing for the peasts pe the head, if she was to tak the park for twa or three days?’

‘We won’t differ, Sawney, if you let me have six stots for winterers, in the way of reason.’

‘And which peasts wad your honour pe for having?’

‘Why—let me see—the two black—the dun one—yon doddy—him with the twisted horn—the brockit—How much by the head?’

‘Ah,’ said Robin, ‘your honour is a shudge—a real shudge. I couldna have set off the pest six peasts petter mysel’—me that ken them as if they were my pairns, puir things.’

‘Well, how much per head, Sawney?’ continued Mr. Ireby.

‘It was high markets at Doune and Falkirk,’ answered Robin.

And thus the conversation proceeded, until they had agreed on the prix juste for the bullocks, the Squire throwing in the temporary accommodation of the enclosure for the cattle into the boot, and Robin making, as he thought, a very good bargain, provided the grass was but tolerable. The Squire walked his pony alongside of the drove, partly to show him the way, and see him put into possession of the field, and partly to learn the latest news of the northern markets.

They arrived at the field, and the pasture seemed excellent. But what was their surprise when they saw the bailiff quietly inducting the cattle of Harry Wakefield into the grassy Goshen which had just been assigned to those of Robin Oig M‘Combich by the proprietor himself! Squire Ireby set spurs to his horse, dashed up to his servant, and learning what had passed between the parties, briefly informed the English drover that his bailiff had let the ground without his authority, and that he might seek grass for his cattle wherever he would, since he was to get none there. At the same time he rebuked his servant severely for having transgressed his commands, and ordered him instantly to assist in ejecting the hungry and weary cattle of Harry Wakefield, which were just beginning to enjoy a meal of unusual plenty, and to introduce those of his comrade, whom the English drover now began to consider as a rival.

The feelings which arose in Wakefield’s mind would have induced him to resist Mr. Ireby’s decision; but every Englishman has a tolerably accurate sense of law and justice, and John Fleecebumpkin, the bailiff, having acknowledged that he had exceeded his commission, Wakefield saw nothing else for it than to collect his hungry and disappointed charge, and drive them on to seek quarters elsewhere. Robin Oig saw what had happened with regret, and hastened to offer to his English friend to share with him the disputed possession. But Wakefield’s pride was severely hurt, and he answered disdainfully, ‘Take it all, man—take it all; never make two bites of a cherry. Thou canst talk over the gentry, and blear a plain man’s eye. Out upon you, man. I would not kiss any man’s dirty latchets for leave to bake in his oven.’

Robin Oig, sorry but not surprised at his comrade’s displeasure, hastened to entreat his friend to wait but an hour till he had gone to the Squire’s house to receive payment for the cattle he had sold, and he would come back and help him to drive the cattle into some convenient place of rest, and explain to him the whole mistake they had both of them fallen into. But the Englishman continued indignant: ‘Thou hast been selling, hast thou? Ay, ay; thou is a cunning lad for kenning the hours of bargaining. Go to the devil with thyself, for I will ne’er see thy fause loon’s visage again—thou should be ashamed to look me in the face.’

‘I am ashamed to look no man in the face,’ said Robin Oig, something moved; ‘and, moreover, I will look you in the face this blessed day, if you will bide at the Clachan down yonder.’

‘Mayhap you had as well keep away,’ said his comrade; and turning his back on his former friend, he collected his unwilling associates, assisted by the bailiff, who took some real and some affected interest in seeing Wakefield accommodated.

After spending some time in negotiating with more than one of the neighbouring farmers, who could not, or would not, afford the accommodation desired, Henry Wakefield at last, and in his necessity, accomplished his point by means of the landlord of the alehouse at which Robin Oig and he had agreed to pass the night, when they first separated from each other. Mine host was content to let him turn his cattle on a piece of barren moor, at a price little less than the bailiff had asked for the disputed enclosure; and the wretchedness of the pasture, as well as the price paid for it, were set down as exaggerations of the breach of faith and friendship of his Scottish crony. This turn of Wakefield’s passions was encouraged by the bailiff, (who had his own reasons for being offended against poor Robin, as having been the unwitting cause of his falling into disgrace with his master), as well as by the innkeeper, and two or three chance guests, who stimulated the drover in his resentment against his quondam associate—some from the ancient grudge against the Scots, which, when it exists anywhere, is to be found lurking in the Border counties, and some from the general love of mischief, which characterises mankind in all ranks of life, to the honour of Adam’s children be it spoken. Good John Barleycorn also, who always heightens and exaggerates the prevailing passions, be they angry or kindly, was not wanting in his offices on this occasion, and confusion to false friends and hard masters was pledged in more than one tankard.

In the meanwhile Mr. Ireby found some amusement in detaining the northern drover at his ancient hall. He caused a cold round of beef to be placed before the Scot in the butler’s pantry, together with a foaming tankard of home-brewed, and took pleasure in seeing the hearty appetite with which these unwonted edibles were discussed by Robin Oig M‘Combich. The Squire himself lighting his pipe, compounded between his patrician dignity and his love of agricultural gossip, by walking up and down while he conversed with his guest.

‘I passed another drove,’ said the Squire, ‘with one of your countrymen behind them. They were something less beasts than your drove—doddies most of them. A big man was with them. None of your kilts, though, but a decent pair of breeches. D’ye know who he may be?’

‘Hout aye; that might, could, and would be Hughie Morrison. I didna think he could hae peen sae weel up. He has made a day on us; but his Argyleshires will have wearied shanks. How far was he pehind?’

‘I think about six or seven miles,’ answered the Squire, ‘for I passed them at the Christenbury Crag, and I overtook you at the Hollan Bush. If his beasts be leg-weary, he will be maybe selling bargains.’

‘Na, na, Hughie Morrison is no the man for pargains— ye maun come to some Highland body like Robin Oig hersell for the like of these. Put I maun pe wishing you goot night, and twenty of them, let alane ane, and I maun down to the Clachan to see if the lad Harry Waakfelt is out of his humdudgeons yet.’

The party at the alehouse were still in full talk, and the treachery of Robin Oig still the theme of conversation, when the supposed culprit entered the apartment. His arrival, as usually happens in such a case, put an instant stop to the discussion of which he had furnished the subject, and he was received by the company assembled with that chilling silence which, more than a thousand exclamations, tells an intruder that he is unwelcome. Surprised and offended, but not appalled by the reception which he experienced, Robin entered with an undaunted and even a haughty air, attempted no greeting, as he saw he was received with none, and placed himself by the side of the fire, a little apart from a table at which Harry Wakefield, the bailiff, and two or three other persons, were seated. The ample Cumbrian kitchen would have afforded plenty of room, even for a larger separation.

Robin thus seated, proceeded to light his pipe, and call for a pint of twopenny.

‘We have no twopence ale,’ answered Ralph Heskett the landlord; ‘but as thou find’st thy own tobacco, it’s like thou mayst find thy own liquor too—it’s the wont of thy country, I wot.’

‘Shame, goodman,’ said the landlady, a blithe, bustling housewife, hastening herself to supply the guest with liquor. ‘Thou knowest well enow what the strange man wants, and it’s thy trade to be civil, man. Thou shouldst know, that if the Scot likes a small pot, he pays a sure penny.’

Without taking any notice of this nuptial dialogue, the Highlander took the flagon in his hand, and addressing the company generally, drank the interesting toast of ‘Good markets’ to the party assembled.

‘The better that the wind blew fewer dealers from the north,’ said one of the farmers, ‘and fewer Highland runts to eat up the English meadows.’

‘Saul of my pody, put you are wrang there, my friend,’ answered Robin, with composure; ‘it is your fat Englishmen that eat up our Scots cattle, puir things.’

‘I wish there was a summat to eat up their drovers,’ said another; ‘a plain Englishman canna make bread within a kenning of them.’

‘Or an honest servant keep his master’s favour but they will come sliding in between him and the sunshine,’ said the bailiff.

‘If these pe jokes,’ said Robin Oig, with the same composure, ‘there is ower mony jokes upon one man.’

‘It is no joke, but downright earnest,’ said the bailiff. ‘Harkye, Mr. Robin Ogg, or whatever is your name, it’s right we should tell you that we are all of one opinion, and that is, that you, Mr. Robin Ogg, have behaved to our friend Mr. Harry Wakefield here, like a raff and a blackguard.’

‘Nae doubt, nae doubt,’ answered Robin, with great composure; ‘and you are a set of very pretty judges, for whose prains or pehaviour I wad not gie a pinch of sneeshing. If Mr. Harry Waakfelt kens where he is wranged, he kens where he may be righted.’

‘He speaks truth,’ said Wakefield, who had listened to what passed, divided between the offence which he had taken at Robin’s late behaviour, and the revival of his habitual feelings of regard.

He now rose, and went towards Robin, who got up from his seat as he approached, and held out his hand.

‘That’s right, Harry—go it—serve him out,’ resounded on all sides—‘tip him the nailer—show him the mill.’

‘Hold your peace all of you, and be——,’ said Wakefield; and then addressing his comrade, he took him by the extended hand, with something alike of respect and defiance. ‘Robin,’ he said, ‘thou hast used me ill enough this day; but if you mean, like a frank fellow, to shake hands, and take a tussle for love on the sod, why I’ll forgie thee, man, and we shall be better friends than ever.’

‘And would it not pe petter to pe cood friends without more of the matter?’ said Robin; ‘we will be much petter friendships with our panes hale than proken.’

Harry Wakefield dropped the hand of his friend, or rather threw it from him.

‘I did not think I had been keeping company for three years with a coward.’

‘Coward pelongs to none of my name,’ said Robin, whose eyes began to kindle, but keeping the command of his temper. ‘It was no coward’s legs or hands, Harry Waakfelt, that drew you out of the fords of Frew, when you was drifting ower the plack rock, and every eel in the river expected his share of you.’

‘And that is true enough, too,’ said the Englishman, struck by the appeal.

‘Adzooks!’ exclaimed the bailiff—‘sure Harry Wakefield, the nattiest lad at Whitson Tryste, Wooler Fair, Carlisle Sands, or Stagshaw Bank, is not going to show white feather? Ah, this comes of living so long with kilts and bonnets—men forget the use of their daddles.’

‘I may teach you, Master Fleecebumpkin, that I have not lost the use of mine,’ said Wakefield, and then went on. ‘This will never do, Robin. We must have a turn-up, or we shall be the talk of the country-side. I’ll be d——d if I hurt thee— I’ll put on the gloves gin thou like. Come, stand forward like a man.’

‘To be peaten like a dog,’ said Robin; ‘is there any reason in that? If you think I have done you wrong, I’ll go before your shudge, though I neither know his law nor his language.’

A general cry of ‘No, no—no law, no lawyer! a bellyful and be friends,’ was echoed by the bystanders.

‘But,’ continued Robin, ‘if I am to fight, I have no skill to fight like a jackanapes, with hands and nails.’

‘How would you fight then?’ said his antagonist; ‘though I am thinking it would be hard to bring you to the scratch anyhow.’

‘I would fight with proadswords, and sink point on the first plood drawn—like a gentlemans.’

A loud shout of laughter followed the proposal, which indeed had rather escaped from poor Robin’s swelling heart, than been the dictate of his sober judgment.

‘Gentleman, quotha!’ was echoed on all sides, with a shout of unextinguishable laughter; ‘a very pretty gentleman, God wot.—Canst get two swords for the gentleman to fight with, Ralph Heskett?’

‘No, but I can send to the armoury at Carlisle, and lend them two forks, to be making shift with in the meantime.’

‘Tush, man,’ said another, ‘the bonny Scots come into the world with the blue bonnet on their heads, and dirk and pistol at their belt.’

‘Best send post,’ said Mr. Fleecebumpkin, ‘to the Squire of Corby Castle, to come and stand second to the gentleman.’

In the midst of this torrent of general ridicule, the Highlander instinctively griped beneath the folds of his plaid.

‘But it’s better not,’ he said in his own language. ‘A hundred curses on the swine-eaters, who know neither decency nor civility!’

‘Make room, the pack of you,’ he said, advancing to the door.

But his former friend interposed his sturdy bulk, and opposed his leaving the house; and when Robin Oig attempted to make his way by force, he hit him down on the floor, with as much ease as a boy bowls down a nine-pin.

‘A ring, a ring!’ was now shouted, until the dark rafters, and the hams that hung on them, trembled again, and the very platters on the bink clattered against each other. ‘Well done, Harry’—‘Give it him home, Harry’—‘Take care of him now—he sees his own blood!’

Such were the exclamations, while the Highlander, starting from the ground, all his coldness and caution lost in frantic rage, sprung at his antagonist with the fury, the activity, and the vindictive purpose of an incensed tiger-cat. But when could rage encounter science and temper? Robin Oig again went down in the unequal contest; and as the blow was necessarily a severe one, he lay motionless on the floor of the kitchen. The landlady ran to offer some aid, but Mr. Fleecebumpkin would not permit her to approach.

‘Let him alone,’ he said, ‘he will come to within time, and come up to the scratch again. He has not got half his broth yet.’

‘He has got all I mean to give him, though,’ said his antagonist, whose heart began to relent towards his old associate; ‘and I would rather by half give the rest to yourself, Mr. Fleece-bumpkin, for you pretend to know a thing or two, and Robin had not art enough even to peel before setting to, but fought with his plaid dangling about him.—Stand up, Robin, my man! All friends now; and let me hear the man that will speak a word against you, or your country, for your sake.’

Robin Oig was still under the dominion of his passion, and eager to renew the onset; but being withheld on the one side by the peacemaking Dame Heskett, and on the other, aware that Wakefield no longer meant to renew the combat, his fury sunk into gloomy sullenness.

‘Come, come, never grudge so much at it, man,’ said the brave-spirited Englishman, with the placability of his country; ‘shake hands, and we will be better friends than ever.’

‘Friends!’ exclaimed Robin Oig with strong emphasis— ‘friends!—Never. Look to yourself, Harry Waakfelt.’

‘Then the curse of Cromwell on your proud Scots stomach, as the man says in the play, and you may do your worst, and be d——d; for one man can say nothing more to another after a tussle, than that he is sorry for it.’

On these terms the friends parted. Robin Oig drew out, in silence, a piece of money, threw it on the table, and then left the alehouse. But turning at the door, he shook his hand at Wakefield, pointing with his forefinger upwards, in a manner which might imply either a threat or a caution. He then disappeared in the moonlight.

Some words passed after his departure, between the bailiff, who piqued himself on being a little of a bully, and Harry Wakefield, who, with generous inconsistency, was now not indisposed to begin a new combat in defence of Robin Oig’s reputation, ‘although he could not use his daddles like an Englishman, as it did not come natural to him.’ But Dame Heskett prevented this second quarrel from coming to a head by her peremptory interference. ‘There should be no more fighting in her house,’ she said; ‘there had been too much already.—And you, Mr. Wakefield, may live to learn,’ she added, ‘what it is to make a deadly enemy out of a good friend.’

‘Pshaw, dame! Robin Oig is an honest fellow, and will never keep malice.’

‘Do not trust to that—you do not know the dour temper of the Scots, though you have dealt with them so often. I have a right to know them, my mother being a Scot.’

‘And so is well seen on her daughter,’ said Ralph Heskett.

This nuptial sarcasm gave the discourse another turn. Fresh customers entered the tap-room or kitchen, and others left it. The conversation turned on the expected markets, and the report of prices from different parts both of Scotland and England—treaties were commenced, and Harry Wakefield was lucky enough to find a chap for a part of his drove, and at a very considerable profit; an event of consequence more than sufficient to blot out all remembrances of the unpleasant scuffle in the earlier part of the day. But there remained one party from whose mind that recollection could not have been wiped away by the possession of every head of cattle betwixt Esk and Eden.

This was Robin Oig M‘Combich.—‘That I should have had no weapon,’ he said, ‘and for the first time in my life! Blighted be the tongue that bids the Highlander part with the dirk. The dirk—ha! the English blood! My Muhme’s word! When did her word fall to the ground?’

The recollection of the fatal prophecy confirmed the deadly intention which instantly sprang up in his mind.

‘Ha! Morrison cannot be many miles behind; and if it were an hundred, what then?’

His impetuous spirit had now a fixed purpose and motive of action, and he turned the light foot of his country towards the wilds, through which he knew, by Mr. Ireby’s report, that Morrison was advancing. His mind was wholly engrossed by the sense of injury—injury sustained from a friend; and by the desire of vengeance on one whom he now accounted his most bitter enemy. The treasured ideas of self-importance and self-opinion—of ideal birth and quality, had become more precious to him, (like the hoard to the miser) because he could only enjoy them in secret. But that hoard was pillaged, the idols which he had secretly worshipped had been desecrated and profaned. Insulted, abused, and beaten, he was no longer worthy, in his own opinion, of the name he bore, or the lineage which he belonged to—nothing was left to him—nothing but revenge; and as the reflection added a galling spur to every step, he determined it should be as sudden and signal as the offence.

When Robin Oig left the door of the alehouse, seven or eight English miles at least lay betwixt Morrison and him. The advance of the former was slow, limited by the sluggish pace of his cattle; the latter left behind him stubble-field and hedgerow, crag and dark heath, all glittering with frost-rime in the broad November moonlight, at the rate of six miles an hour. And now the distant lowing of Morrison’s cattle is heard; and now they are seen creeping like moles in size and slowness of motion on the broad face of the moor; and now he meets them—passes them, and stops their conductor.

‘May good betide us,’ said the Westlander.—‘Is this you, Robin M‘Combich, or your wraith?’

‘It is Robin Oig M‘Combich,’ answered the Highlander, ‘and it is not. But never mind that, put pe giving me the skene-dhu.’

‘What! you are for back to the Highlands! The devil! Have you selt all off before the fair? This beats all for quick markets!’

‘I have not sold—I am not going north—maype I will never go north again. Give me pack my dirk, Hugh Morrison, or there will pe words petween us.’

‘Indeed, Robin, I’ll be better advised before I gie it back to you; it is a wanchancy weapon in a Highlandman’s hand, and I am thinking you will be about some barns-breaking.’

‘Prutt, trutt! let me have my weapon,’ said Robin Oig impatiently.

‘Hooly and fairly,’ said his well-meaning friend. ‘I’ll tell you what will do better than these dirking doings—Ye ken Highlander, and Lowlander, and Border-men are a’ ae man’s bairns when you are over the Scots dyke. See, the Eskdale callants, and fighting Charlie of Liddesdale, and the Lockerby lads, and the four Dandies of Lustruther, and a wheen mair grey plaids, are coming up behind; and if you are wranged, there is the hand of a Manly Morrison, we’ll see you righted, if Carlisle and Stanwix baith took up the feud.’

‘To tell you the truth,’ said Robin Oig, desirous of eluding the suspicions of his friend, ‘I have enlisted with a party of the Black Watch, and must march off to-morrow morning.’

‘Enlisted! Were you mad or drunk? You must buy yourself off. I can lend you twenty notes, and twenty to that, if the drove sell.’

‘I thank you—thank ye, Hughie; but I go with good-will the gate that I am going. So the dirk—the dirk!’

‘There it is for you then, since less wunna serve. But think on what I was saying.—Waes me, it will be sair news in the braes of Balquidder that Robin Oig M‘Combich should have run an ill gate, and ta’en on.’

‘Ill news in Balquidder, indeed!’ echoed poor Robin. ‘But Cot speed you, Hughie, and send you good marcats. Ye winna meet with Robin Oig again, either at tryste or fair.’

So saying, he shook hastily the hand of his acquaintance, and set out in the direction from which he had advanced, with the spirit of his former pace.

‘There is something wrang with the lad,’ muttered the Morrison to himself; ‘but we will maybe see better into it the morn’s morning.’

But long ere the morning dawned, the catastrophe of our tale had taken place. It was two hours after the affray had happened, and it was totally forgotten by almost every one, when Robin Oig returned to Heskett’s inn. The place was filled at once by various sorts of men, and with noises corresponding to their character. There were the grave low sounds of men engaged in busy traffic, with the laugh, the song, and the riotous jest of those who had nothing to do but to enjoy themselves. Among the last was Harry Wakefield, who, amidst a grinning group of smock-frocks, hobnailed shoes, and jolly English physiognomies, was trolling forth the old ditty,—

‘What though my name be Roger,

Who drives the plough and cart—’

when he was interrupted by a well-known voice saying in a high and stern voice, marked by the sharp Highland accent, ‘Harry Waakfelt—if you be a man stand up!’

‘What is the matter?—what is it?’ the guests demanded of each other.

‘It is only a d——d Scotsman,’ said Fleecebumpkin, who was by this time very drunk, ‘whom Harry Wakefield helped to his broth to-day, who is now come to have his cauld kail het again.’

‘Harry Waakfelt,’ repeated the same ominous summons, ‘stand up, if you be a man!’

There is something in the tone of deep and concentrated passion, which attracts attention and imposes awe, even by the very sound. The guests shrunk back on every side, and gazed at the Highlander as he stood in the middle of them, his brows bent, and his features rigid with resolution.

‘I will stand up with all my heart, Robin, my boy, but it shall be to shake hands with you, and drink down all unkindness. It is not the fault of your heart, man, that you don’t know how to clench your hands.’

By this time he stood opposite to his antagonist, his open and unsuspecting look strangely contrasted with the stern purpose, which gleamed wild, dark, and vindictive in the eyes of the Highlander.

‘ ’Tis not thy fault, man, that, not having the luck to be an Englishman, thou canst not fight more than a school-girl.’

‘I can fight,’ answered Robin Oig sternly, but calmly, ‘and you shall know it. You, Harry Waakfelt, showed me to-day how the Saxon churls fight—I show you now how the Highland Dunniè-wassel fights.’

He seconded the word with the action, and plunged the dagger, which he suddenly displayed, into the broad breast of the English yeoman, with such fatal certainty and force that the hilt made a hollow sound against the breast-bone, and the double-edged point split the very heart of his victim. Harry Wakefield fell and expired with a single groan. His assassin next seized the bailiff by the collar, and offered the bloody poniard to his throat, whilst dread and surprise rendered the man incapable of defence.

‘It were very just to lay you peside him,’ he said, ‘but the blood of a pase pick-thank shall never mix on my father’s dirk, with that of a brave man.’

As he spoke, he cast the man from him with so much force that he fell on the floor, while Robin, with his other hand, threw the fatal weapon into the blazing turf-fire.

‘There,’ he said, ‘take me who likes—and let fire cleanse blood if it can.’

The pause of astonishment still continuing, Robin Oig asked for a peace-officer, and a constable having stepped out, he surrendered himself to his custody.

‘A bloody night’s work you have made of it,’ said the constable.

‘Your own fault,’ said the Highlander. ‘Had you kept his hands off me twa hours since, he would have been now as well and merry as he was twa minutes since.’

‘It must be sorely answered,’ said the peace-officer.

‘Never you mind that—death pays all debts; it will pay that too.’

The horror of the bystanders began now to give way to indignation, and the sight of a favourite companion murdered in the midst of them, the provocation being, in their opinion, so utterly inadequate to the excess of vengeance, might have induced them to kill the perpetrator of the deed even upon the very spot. The constable, however, did his duty on this occasion, and with the assistance of some of the more reasonable persons present, procured horses to guard the prisoner to Carlisle, to abide his doom at the next assizes. While the escort was preparing, the prisoner neither expressed the least interest, nor attempted the slightest reply. Only, before he was carried from the fatal apartment, he desired to look at the dead body, which, raised from the floor, had been deposited upon the large table (at the head of which Harry Wakefield had presided but a few minutes before, full of life, vigour, and animation), until the surgeons should examine the mortal wound. The face of the corpse was decently covered with a napkin. To the surprise and horror of the bystanders, which displayed itself in a general Ah! drawn through clenched teeth and half-shut lips, Robin Oig removed the cloth, and gazed with a mournful but steady eye on the lifeless visage, which had been so lately animated that the smile of good-humoured confidence in his own strength, of conciliation at once and contempt towards his enemy, still curled his lip. While those present expected that the wound, which had so lately flooded the apartment with gore, would send forth fresh streams at the touch of the homicide, Robin Oig replaced the covering with the brief exclamation—‘He was a pretty man!’

My story is nearly ended. The unfortunate Highlander stood his trial at Carlisle. I was myself present, and as a young Scottish lawyer, or barrister at least, and reputed a man of some quality, the politeness of the Sheriff of Cumberland offered me a place on the bench. The facts of the case were proved in the manner I have related them; and whatever might be at first the prejudice of the audience against a crime so un-English as that of assassination from revenge, yet when the rooted national prejudices of the prisoner had been explained, which made him consider himself as stained with indelible dishonour, when subjected to personal violence—when his previous patience, moderation, and endurance were considered—the generosity of the English audience was inclined to regard his crime as the wayward aberration of a false idea of honour rather than as flowing from a heart naturally savage, or perverted by habitual vice. I shall never forget the charge of the venerable judge to the jury, although not at that time liable to be much affected either by that which was eloquent or pathetic.

‘We have had,’ he said, ‘in the previous part of our duty’ (alluding to some former trials), ‘to discuss crimes which infer disgust and abhorrence, while they call down the well-merited vengeance of the law. It is now our still more melancholy task to apply its salutary though severe enactments to a case of a very singular character, in which the crime (for a crime it is, and a deep one) arose less out of the malevolence of the heart, than the error of the understanding—less from any idea of committing wrong, than from an unhappily perverted notion of that which is right. Here we have two men, highly esteemed, it has been stated, in their rank of life, and attached, it seems, to each other as friends, one of whose lives has been already sacrificed to a punctilio, and the other is about to prove the vengeance of the offended laws; and yet both may claim our commiseration at least, as men acting in ignorance of each other’s national prejudices, and unhappily misguided rather than voluntarily erring from the path of right conduct.

‘In the original cause of the misunderstanding, we must in justice give the right to the prisoner at the bar. He had acquired possession of the enclosure, which was the object of competition, by a legal contract with the proprietor, Mr. Ireby; and yet, when accosted with reproaches undeserved in themselves, and galling, doubtless, to a temper at least sufficiently susceptible of passion, he offered notwithstanding, to yield up half his acquisition, for the sake of peace and good neighbourhood, and his amicable proposal was rejected with scorn. Then follows the scene at Mr. Heskett the publican’s, and you will observe how the stranger was treated by the deceased, and, I am sorry to observe, by those around, who seem to have urged him in a manner which was aggravating in the highest degree. While he asked for peace and for composition, and offered submission to a magistrate, or to a mutual arbiter, the prisoner was insulted by a whole company, who seem on this occasion to have forgotten the national maxim of ‘fair play;’ and while attempting to escape from the place in peace, he was intercepted, struck down, and beaten to the effusion of his blood.

‘Gentlemen of the Jury, it was with some impatience that I heard my learned brother who opened the case for the crown give an unfavourable turn to the prisoner’s conduct on this occasion. He said the prisoner was afraid to encounter his antagonist in fair fight, or to submit to the laws of the ring; and that therefore, like a cowardly Italian, he had recourse to his fatal stiletto, to murder the man whom he dared not meet in manly encounter. I observed the prisoner shrink from this part of the accusation with the abhorrence natural to a brave man; and as I would wish to make my words impressive when I point his real crime, I must secure his opinion of my impartiality by rebutting everything that seems to me a false accusation. There can be no doubt that the prisoner is a man of resolution—too much resolution. I wish to Heaven that he had less—or, rather that he had had a better education to regulate it.

‘Gentlemen, as to the laws my brother talks of, they may be known in the bull-ring, or the bear-garden, or the cock-pit, but they are not known here. Or, if they should be so far admitted as furnishing a species of proof that no malice was intended in this sort of combat, from which fatal accidents do sometimes arise, it can only be so admitted when both parties are in pari casu, equally acquainted with, and equally willing to refer themselves to, that species of arbitrament. But will it be contended that a man of superior rank and education is to be subjected, or is obliged to subject himself, to this coarse and brutal strife, perhaps in opposition to a younger, stronger, or more skilful opponent? Certainly even the pugilistic code, if founded upon the fair play of Merry Old England, as my brother alleges it to be, can contain nothing so preposterous. And, gentlemen of the jury, if the laws would support an English gentleman, wearing, we will suppose, his sword, in defending himself by force against a violent personal aggression of the nature offered to this prisoner, they will not less protect a foreigner and a stranger, involved in the same unpleasing circumstances. If, therefore, gentlemen of the jury, when thus pressed by a vis major, the object of obloquy to a whole company, and of direct violence from one at least, and, as he might reasonably apprehend, from more, the panel had produced the weapon which his countrymen, as we are informed, generally carry about their persons, and the same unhappy circumstance had ensued which you have heard detailed in evidence, I could not in my conscience have asked from you a verdict of murder. The prisoner’s personal defence might indeed, even in that case, have gone more or less beyond the Moderamen inculpatae tutelae, spoken of by lawyers; but the punishment incurred would have been that of manslaughter, not of murder. I beg leave to add that I should have thought this milder species of charge was demanded in the case supposed, notwithstanding the statute of James I. cap. 8, which takes the case of slaughter by stabbing with a short weapon, even without malice prepense, out of the benefit of clergy. For this statute of stabbing, as it is termed, arose out of a temporary cause; and as the real guilt is the same, whether the slaughter be committed by the dagger, or by sword or pistol, the benignity of the modern law places them all on the same, or nearly the same, footing.

‘But, gentlemen of the jury, the pinch of the case lies in the interval of two hours interposed betwixt the reception of the injury and the fatal retaliation. In the heat of affray and chaude mêlée, law, compassionating the infirmities of humanity, makes allowance for the passions which rule such a stormy moment—for the sense of present pain, for the apprehension of further injury, for the difficulty of ascertaining with due accuracy the precise degree of violence which is necessary to protect the person of the individual, without annoying or injuring the assailant more than is absolutely necessary. But the time necessary to walk twelve miles, however speedily performed, was an interval sufficient for the prisoner to have recollected himself; and the violence with which he carried his purpose into effect, with so many circumstances of deliberate determination, could neither be induced by the passion of anger, nor that of fear. It was the purpose and the act of predetermined revenge, for which law neither can, will, nor ought to have sympathy or allowance.

‘It is true, we may repeat to ourselves, in alleviation of this poor man’s unhappy action, that his case is a very peculiar one. The country which he inhabits was, in the days of many now alive, inaccessible to the laws, not only of England, which have not even yet penetrated thither, but to those to which our neighbours of Scotland are subjected, and which must be supposed to be, and no doubt actually are, founded upon the general principles of justice and equity which pervade every civilized country. Amongst their mountains, as among the North American Indians, the various tribes were wont to make war upon each other, so that each man was obliged to go armed for his own protection. These men, from the ideas which they entertained of their own descent and of their own consequence, regarded themselves as so many cavaliers or men-at-arms, rather than as the peasantry of a peaceful country. Those laws of the ring, as my brother terms them, were unknown to the race of warlike mountaineers; that decision of quarrels by no other weapons than those which nature has given every man must to them have seemed as vulgar and as preposterous as to the Noblesse of France. Revenge, on the other hand, must have been as familiar to their habits of society as to those of the Cherokees or Mohawks. It is indeed, as described by Bacon, at bottom a kind of wild untutored justice; for the fear of retaliation must withhold the hands of the oppressor where there is no regular law to check daring violence. But though all this may be granted, and though we may allow that, such having been the case of the Highlands in the days of the prisoner’s fathers, many of the opinions and sentiments must still continue to influence the present generation, it cannot, and ought not, even in this most painful case, to alter the administration of the law, either in your hands, gentlemen of the jury, or in mine. The first object of civilisation is to place the general protection of the law, equally administered, in the room of that wild justice which every man cut and carved for himself, according to the length of his sword and the strength of his arm. The law says to the subjects, with a voice only inferior to that of the Deity, ‘Vengeance is mine.’ The instant that there is time for passion to cool, and reason to interpose, an injured party must become aware that the law assumes the exclusive cognisance of the right and wrong betwixt the parties, and opposes her inviolable buckler to every attempt of the private party to right himself. I repeat that this unhappy man ought personally to be the object rather of our pity than our abhorrence, for he failed in his ignorance, and from mistaken notions of honour. But his crime is not the less that of murder, gentlemen, and, in your high and important office, it is your duty so to find. Englishmen have their angry passions as well as Scots; and should this man’s action remain unpunished, you may unsheath, under various pretences, a thousand daggers betwixt the Land’s-End and the Orkneys.’

The venerable Judge thus ended what, to judge by his apparent emotion, and by the tears which filled his eyes, was really a painful task. The jury, according to his instructions, brought in a verdict of Guilty; and Robin Oig M‘Combich, alias M‘Gregor, was sentenced to death, and left for execution, which took place accordingly. He met his fate with great firmness, and acknowledged the justice of his sentence. But he repelled indignantly the observations of those who accused him of attacking an unarmed man. ‘I give a life for the life I took,’ he said, ‘and what can I do more?’[1]

WANDERING WILLIE’S TALE

Ye maun have heard of Sir Robert Redgauntlet of that Ilk, who lived in these parts before the dear years. The country will lang mind him; and our fathers used to draw breath thick if ever they heard him named. He was out wi’ the Hielandmen in Montrose’s time; and again he was in the hills wi’ Glencairn in the saxteen hundred and fifty-twa; and sae when King Charles the Second came in, wha was in sic favour as the Laird of Redgauntlet? He was knighted at Lonon court, wi’ the king’s ain sword; and being a red-hot prelatist, he came down here, rampauging like a lion, with commissions of lieutenancy (and of lunacy, for what I ken) to put down a’ the Whigs and Covenanters in the country. Wild wark they made of it; for the Whigs were as dour as the Cavaliers were fierce, and it was which should first tire the other. Redgauntlet was ay for the strong hand; and his name is kend as wide in the country as Claverhouse’s or Tam Dalyell’s. Glen, nor dargle, nor mountain, nor cave, could hide the puir hill-folk when Redgauntlet was out with bugle and bloodhound after them, as if they had been sae mony deer. And troth when they fand them, they didna mak muckle mair ceremony than a Hielandman wi’ a roebuck—it was just, ‘Will ye tak the test?’—if not, ‘Make ready—present—fire!’—and there lay the recusant.

Far and wide was Sir Robert hated and feared. Men thought he had a direct compact with Satan—that he was proof against steel—and that bullets happed aff his buff-coat like hailstanes from a hearth—that he had a mear that would turn a hare on the side of Carrifra-gawns[2]—and muckle to the same purpose, of whilk mair anon. The best blessing they wared on him was, ‘Deil scowp wi’ Redgauntlet!’ He wasna a bad master to his ain folk, though, and was weel aneugh liked by his tenants; and as for the lackies and troopers that raid out wi’ him to the persecutions, as the Whigs caa’d those killing times, they wad hae drunken themsells blind to his health at ony time.

Now you are to ken that my gudesire lived on Redgauntlet’s grund—they ca’ the place Primrose Knowe. We had lived on the grund, and under the Redgauntlets, since the riding days, and lang before. It was a pleasant bit; and I think the air is callerer and fresher there than onywhere else in the country. It’s a’ deserted now; and I sat on the broken door-cheek three days since, and was glad I couldna see the plight the place was in; but that’s a’ wide o’ the mark. There dwelt my gudesire, Steenie Steenson, a rambling, rattling chiel’ he had been in his young days, and could play weel on the pipes; he was famous at ‘Hoopers and Girders’—a’ Cumberland couldna, touch him at ‘Jockie Lattin’—and he had the finest finger for the back-lilt between Berwick and Carlisle. The like o’ Steenie wasna the sort that they made Whigs o’. And so he became a Tory, as they ca’ it, which we now ca’ Jacobites, just out of a kind of needcessity, that he might belang to some side or other. He had nae ill will to the Whig bodies, and liked little to see the blude rin, though, being obliged to follow Sir Robert in hunting and hoisting, watching and warding, he saw muckle mischief, and maybe did some, that he couldna avoid.

Now Steenie was a kind of favourite with his master, and kend a’ the folks about the castle, and was often sent for to play the pipes when they were at their merriment. Auld Dougal MacCallum, the butler, that had followed Sir Robert through gude and ill, thick and thin, pool and stream, was specially fond of the pipes, and ay gae my gudesire his gude word wi’ the Laird; for Dougal could turn his master round his finger.

Weel, round came the Revolution, and it had like to have broken the hearts baith of Dougal and his master. But the change was not a’thegether sae great as they feared, and other folk thought for. The Whigs made an unco crawing what they wad do with their auld enemies, and in special wi’ Sir Robert Redgauntlet. But there were ower mony great folks dipped in the same doings, to mak a spick and span new warld. So Parliament passed it a’ ower easy; and Sir Robert, bating that he was held to hunting foxes instead of Covenanters, remained just the man he was.[3] His revel was as loud, and his hall as weel lighted, as ever it had been, though maybe he lacked the fines of the nonconformists, that used to come to stock his larder and cellar; for it is certain he began to be keener about the rents than his tenants used to find him before, and they behoved to be prompt to the rent-day, or else the Laird wasna pleased. And he was sic an awsome body, that naebody cared to anger him; for the oaths he swore, and the rage that he used to get into, and the looks that he put on, made men sometimes think him a deevil incarnate.

Weel, my gudesire was nae manager—no that he was a very great misguider—but he hadna the saving gift, and he got twa terms’ rent in arrear. He got the first brash at Whitsunday put ower wi’ fair word and piping; but when Martinmas came, there was a summons from the grund-officer to come wi’ the rent on a day preceese, or else Steenie behoved to flit. Sair wark he had to get the siller; but he was weel-freended, and at last he got the haill scraped thegether—a thousand merks—the maist of it was from a neighbour they ca’d Laurie Lapraik—a sly tod. Laurie had walth o’ gear—could hunt wi’ the hound and rin wi’ the hare—and be Whig or Tory, saunt or sinner, as the wind stood. He was a professor in this Revolution warld, but he liked an orra sough of this warld, and a tune on the pipes weel aneugh at a bytime; and abune a’, he thought he had gude security for the siller he lent my gudesire ower the stocking at Primrose-Knowe.

Away trots my gudesire to Redgauntlet Castle wi’ a heavy purse and a light heart, glad to be out of the Laird’s danger. Weel, the first thing he learned at the castle was, that Sir Robert had fretted himsell into a fit of the gout, because he did not appear before twelve o’clock. It wasna a’thegether for sake of the money, Dougal thought; but because he didna like to part wi’ my gudesire aff the grund. Dougal was glad to see Steenie, and brought him into the great oak parlour, and there sat the Laird his leesome lane, excepting that he had beside him a great, ill-favoured jackanape, that was a special pet of his; a cankered beast it was, and mony an ill-natured trick it played—ill to please it was, and easily angered—ran about the haill castle, chattering and yowling, and pinching, and biting folk, specially before ill weather, or disturbances in the state. Sir Robert caa’d it Major Weir, after the warlock that was burnt;[4] and few folk liked either the name or the conditions of the creature—they thought there was something in it by ordinar—and my gudesire was not just easy in mind when the door shut on him, and he saw himself in the room wi’ naebody but the Laird, Dougal MacCallum, and the Major, a thing that hadna chanced to him before.

Sir Robert sat, or, I should say, lay, in a great armed chair, wi’ his grand velvet gown, and his feet on a cradle; for he had baith gout and gravel, and his face looked as gash and ghastly as Satan’s. Major Weir sat opposite to him, in a red laced coat, and the Laird’s wig on his head; and ay as Sir Robert girned wi’ pain, the jackanape girned too, like a sheep’s-head between a pair of tangs—an ill-faur’d, fearsome couple they were. The Laird’s buff-coat was hung on a pin behind him, and his broadsword and his pistols within reach; for he keepit up the auld fashion of having the weapons ready, and a horse saddled day and night, just as he used to do when he was able to loup on horseback, and away after ony of the hill-folk he could get speerings of. Some said it was for fear of the Whigs taking vengeance, but I judge it was just his auld custom—he wasna gien to fear onything. The rental-book, wi’ its black cover and brass clasps, was lying beside him; and a book of sculduddry sangs was put betwixt the leaves, to keep it open at the place where it bore evidence against the Goodman of Primrose Knowe, as behind the hand with his mails and duties. Sir Robert gave my gudesire a look, as if he would have withered his heart in his bosom. Ye maun ken he had a way of bending his brows, that men saw the visible mark of a horseshoe in his forehead, deep-dinted, as if it had been stamped there.

‘Are ye come light-handed, ye son of a toom whistle?’ said Sir Robert. ‘Zounds! if you are—’

My gudesire, with as gude acountenance as he could put on, made a leg, and placed the bag of money on the table wi’ a dash, like a man that does something clever. The Laird drew it to him hastily—‘Is it all here, Steenie, man?’

‘Your honour will find it right,’ said my gudesire.

‘Here, Dougal,’ said the Laird, ‘gie Steenie a tass of brandy downstairs, till I count the siller and write the receipt.’

But they werena weel out of the room, when Sir Robert gied a yelloch that garr’d the castle rock. Back ran Dougal—in flew the livery-men—yell on yell gied the Laird, ilk ane mair awfu’ than the ither. My gudesire knew not whether to stand or flee, but he ventured back into the parlour, where a’ was gaun hirdy-girdie—naebody to say ‘come in,’ or ‘gae out.’ Terribly the Laird roared for cauld water to his feet, and wine to cool his throat; and Hell, hell, hell, and its flames, was aye the word in his mouth. They brought him water, and when they plunged his swoln feet into the tub, he cried out it was burning; and folk say that it did bubble and sparkle like a seething cauldron. He flung the cup at Dougal’s head, and said he had given him blood instead of burgundy; and, sure aneugh, the lass washed clottered blood aff the carpet the neist day. The jackanape they caa’d Major Weir, it jibbered and cried as if it was mocking its master; my gudesire’s head was like to turn—he forgot baith siller and receipt, and downstairs he banged; but as he ran, the shrieks came faint and fainter; there was a deep-drawn shivering groan, and word gaed through the castle that the Laird was dead.

Weel, away came my gudesire, wi’ his finger in his mouth, and his best hope was that Dougal had seen the money-bag, and heard the Laird speak of writing the receipt. The young Laird, now Sir John, came from Edinburgh, to see things put to rights. Sir John and his father never gree’d weel. Sir John had been bred an advocate, and afterwards sat in the last Scots Parliament and voted for the Union, having gotten, it was thought, a rug of the compensations—if his father could have come out of his grave, he would have brained him for it on his awn hearth-stane. Some thought it was easier counting with the auld rough knight than the fair-spoken young ane—but mair of that anon.

Dougal MacCallum, poor body, neither grat nor grained, but gaed about the house looking like a corpse, but directing, as was his duty, a’ the order of the grand funeral. Now Dougal looked aye waur and waur when night was coming, and was aye the last to gang to his bed, whilk was in a little round just opposite the chamber of dais, whilk his master occupied while he was living, and where he now lay in state, as they caa’d it, weel-a-day! The night before the funeral, Dougal could keep his awn counsel nae langer; he came doun with his proud spirit, and fairly asked auld Hutcheon to sit in his room with him for an hour. When they were in the round, Dougal took ae tass of brandy to himsell, and gave another to Hutcheon, and wished him all health and lang life, and said that, for himsell, he wasna lang for this world; for that, every night since Sir Robert’s death, his silver call had sounded from the state chamber, just as it used to do at nights in his lifetime, to call Dougal to help to turn him in his bed. Dougal said that being alone with the dead on that floor of the tower (for naebody cared to wake Sir Robert Redgauntlet like another corpse) he had never daured to answer the call, but that now his conscience checked him for neglecting his duty; for, ‘though death breaks service,’ said MacCallum, ‘it shall never break my service to Sir Robert; and I will answer his next whistle, so be you will stand by me, Hutcheon.’

Hutcheon had nae will to the wark, but he had stood by Dougal in battle and broil, and he wad not fail him at this pinch; so down the carles sat ower a stoup of brandy, and Hutcheon, who was something of a clerk, would have read a chapter of the Bible; but Dougal would hear naething but a blaud of Davie Lindsay, whilk was the waur preparation.

When midnight came, and the house was quiet as the grave, sure enough the silver whistle sounded as sharp and shrill as if Sir Robert was blowing it, and up got the twa auld serving-men, and tottered into the room where the dead man lay. Hutcheon saw aneugh at the first glance; for there were torches in the room, which showed him the foul fiend, in his ain shape, sitting on the Laird’s coffin! Ower he cowped as if he had been dead. He could not tell how lang he lay in a trance at the door, but when he gathered himself, he cried on his neighbour, and getting nae answer, raised the house, when Dougal was found lying dead within twa steps of the bed where his master’s coffin was placed. As for the whistle, it was gaen anes and aye; but mony a time was it heard at the top of the house on the bartizan, and amang the auld chimneys and turrets where the howlets have their nests. Sir John hushed the matter up, and the funeral passed over without mair bogle-wark.

But when a’ was ower, and the Laird was beginning to settle his affairs, every tenant was called up for his arrears, and my gudesire for the full sum that stood against him in the rental-book. Weel, away he trots to the castle, to tell his story, and there he is introduced to Sir John, sitting in his father’s chair, in deep mourning, with weepers and hanging cravat, and a small walking rapier by his side, instead of the auld broadsword that had a hundredweight of steel about it, what with blade, chape, and basket-hilt. I have heard their communing so often tauld ower, that I almost think I was there mysell, though I couldna be born at the time. (In fact, Alan, my companion mimicked, with a good deal of humour, the flattering, conciliating tone of the tenant’s address, and the hypocritical melancholy of the Laird’s reply. His grandfather, he said, had, while he spoke, his eye fixed on the rental-book, as if it were a mastiff-dog that he was afraid would spring up and bite him.)

‘I wuss ye joy, sir, of the head-seat, and the white loaf, and the braid lairdship. Your father was a kind man to friends and followers; muckle grace to you, Sir John, to fill his shoon—his boots, I suld say, for he seldom wore shoon, unless it were muils when he had the gout.’

‘Aye, Steenie,’ quoth the Laird, sighing deeply, and putting his napkin to his een, ‘his was a sudden call, and he will be missed in the country; no time to set his house in order—weel prepared God-ward, no doubt, which is the root of the matter—but left us behind a tangled heap to wind, Steenie. Hem! hem! We maun go to business, Steenie; much to do, and little time to do it in.’

Here he opened the fatal volume. I have heard of a thing they call Doomsday-book—I am clear it has been a rental of back-ganging tenants.

‘Stephen,’ said Sir John, still in the same soft, sleekit tone of voice—‘Stephen Stevenson, or Steenson, ye are down here for a year’s rent behind the hand—due at last term.’

Stephen. ‘Please your honour, Sir John, I paid it to your father.’

Sir John. ‘Ye took a receipt, then, doubtless, Stephen; and can produce it?’

Stephen. ‘Indeed I hadna time, an it like your honour; for nae sooner had I set doun the siller, and just as his honour, Sir Robert, that’s gaen, drew it till him to count it, and write out the receipt, he was ta’en wi’ the pains that removed him.’

‘That was unlucky,’ said Sir John, after a pause. ‘But ye maybe paid it in the presence of somebody, I want but a talis qualis evidence, Stephen. I would go ower strictly to work with no poor man.’

Stephen. ‘Troth, Sir John, there was naebody in the room but Dougal MacCallum the butler. But, as your honour kens, he has e’en followed his auld master.’

‘Very unlucky again, Stephen,’ said Sir John, without altering his voice a single note. ‘The man to whom ye paid the money is dead—and the man who witnessed the payment is dead too—and the siller, which should have been to the fore, is neither seen nor heard tell of in the repositories. How am I to believe a’ this?’

Stephen. ‘I dinna, ken, your honour; but there is a bit memorandum note of the very coins; for, God help me! I had to borrow out of twenty purses; and I am sure that ilka man there set down will take his grit oath for what purpose I borrowed the money.’

Sir John. ‘I have little doubt ye borrowed the money, Steenie. It is the payment that I want to have some proof of.’

Stephen. ‘The siller maun be about the house, Sir John. And since your honour never got it, and his honour that was canna have taen it wi’ him, maybe some of the family may have seen it.’

Sir John. ‘We will examine the servants, Stephen; that is but reasonable.’

But lackey and lass, and page and groom, all denied stoutly that they had ever seen such a bag of money as my gudesire described. What was waur, he had unluckily not mentioned to any living soul of them his purpose of paying his rent. Ae quean had noticed something under his arm, but she took it for the pipes.

Sir John Redgauntlet ordered the servants out of the room, and then said to my gudesire, ‘Now, Steenie, ye see ye have fair play; and, as I have little doubt ye ken better where to find the siller than ony other body, I beg, in fair terms, and for your own sake, that you will end this fasherie; for, Stephen, ye maun pay or flit.’

‘The Lord forgie your opinion,’ said Stephen, driven almost to his wit’s end—‘I am an honest man.’

‘So am I, Stephen,’ said his honour; ‘and so are all the folks in the house, I hope. But if there be a knave amongst us, it must be he that tells the story he cannot prove.’ He paused, and then added, mair sternly, ‘If I understand your trick, sir, you want to take advantage of some malicious reports concerning things in this family, and particularly respecting my father’s sudden death, thereby to cheat me out of the money, and perhaps take away my character, by insinuating that I have received the rent I am demanding.—Where do you suppose this money to be?—I insist upon knowing.’

My gudesire saw everything look so muckle against him, that he grew nearly desperate—however, he shifted from one foot to another, looked to every corner of the room, and made no answer.

‘Speak out, sirrah,’ said the Laird, assuming a look of his father’s, a very particular ane, which he had when he was angry—it seemed as if the wrinkles of his frown made that selfsame fearful shape of a horse’s shoe in the middle of his brow;—‘Speak out, sir! I will know your thoughts;—do you suppose that I have this money?’

‘Far be it frae me to say so,’ said Stephen.

‘Do you charge any of my people with having taken it?’

‘I wad be laith to charge them that may be innocent,’ said my gudesire; ‘and if there be any one that is guilty, I have nae proof.’

‘Somewhere the money must be, if there is a word of truth in your story,’ said Sir John; ‘I ask where you think it is—and demand a correct answer?’

‘In hell, if you will have my thoughts of it,’ said my gudesire, driven to extremity, ‘in hell! with your father, his jackanape, and his silver whistle.’

Down the stairs he ran (for the parlour was nae place for him after such a word) and he heard the Laird swearing blood and wounds behind him, as fast; as ever did Sir Robert, and roaring for the baillie and the baron-officer.

Away rode my gudesire to his chief creditor (him they ca’d Laurie Lapraik) to try if he could make onything out of him; but when he tauld his story, he got but the worst word in his wame—thief, beggar, and dyvour, were the saftest terms; and to the boot of these hard terms, Laurie brought up the auld story of his dipping his hand in the blood of God’s saunts, just as if a tenant could have helped riding with the Laird, and that a laird like Sir Robert Redgauntlet. My gudesire was, by this time, far beyond the bounds of patience, and, while he and Laurie were at deil speed the liars, he was wanchancie aneugh to abuse Lapraik’s doctrine as weel as the man, and said things that gar’d folks’ flesh grue that heard them;—he wasna just himsell, and he had lived wi’ a wild set in his day.

At last they parted, and my gudesire was to ride hame through the wood of Pitmurkie, that is a’ fou of black firs, as they say. I ken the wood, but the firs may be black or white for what I can tell. At the entry of the wood there is a wild common, and on the edge of the common, a little lonely change-house, that was keepit then by an ostler-wife, they suld hae caa’d her Tibbie Faw, and there puir Steenie cried for a mutchkin of brandy, for he had had no refreshment the haill day. Tibbie was earnest wi’ him to take a bite of meat, but he couldna think o’t, nor would he take his foot out of the stirrup, and took off the brandy wholely at twa draughts, and named a toast at each:—the first was the memory of Sir Robert Redgauntlet, and might he never lie quiet in his grave till he had righted his poor bond-tenant; and the second was a health to Man’s Enemy, if he would but get him back the pock of siller, or tell him what came o’t, for he saw the haill world was like to regard him as a thief and a cheat, and he took that waur than even the ruin of his house and hauld.

On he rode, little caring where. It was a dark night turned, and the trees made it yet darker, and he let the beast take its ain road through the wood; when all of a sudden, from tired and wearied that it was before, the nag began to spring and flee, and stend, that my gudesire could hardly keep the saddle—Upon the whilk, a horseman, suddenly riding up beside him, said, ‘That’s a mettle beast of yours, freend; will you sell him?’—So saying, he touched the horse’s neck with his riding-wand, and it fell into its auld heigh-ho of a stumbling trot. ‘But his spunk’s soon out of him, I think,’ continued the stranger, ‘and that is like mony a man’s courage, that thinks he wad do great things till he come to the proof.’

My gudesire scarce listened to this, but spurred his horse, with ‘Gude e’en to you, freend.’

But it’s like the stranger was ane that doesna lightly yield his point; for, ride as Steenie liked, he was aye beside him at the selfsame pace. At last my gudesire, Steenie Steenson, grew half angry, and, to say the truth, half feared.

‘What is it that ye want with me, freend?’ he said. ‘If ye be a robber, I have nae money; if ye be a leal man, wanting company, I have nae heart to mirth or speaking; and if ye want to ken the road, I scarce ken it mysell.’

‘If you will tell me your grief,’ said the stranger, ‘I am one that, though I have been sair miscaa’d in the world, am the only hand for helping my freends.’

So my gudesire, to ease his ain heart, mair than from any hope of help, told him the story from beginning to end.

‘It’s a hard pinch,’ said the stranger; ‘but I think I can help you.’

‘If you could lend the money, sir, and take a lang day—I ken nae other help on earth,’ said my gudesire.

‘But there may be some under the earth,’ said the stranger. ‘Come, I’ll be frank wi’ you; I could lend you the money on bond, but you would maybe scruple my terms. Now, I can tell you, that your auld Laird is disturbed in his grave by your curses, and the wailing of your family, and if ye daur venture to go to see him, he will give you the receipt.’

My gudesire’s hair stood on end at this proposal, but he thought his companion might be some humoursome chield that was trying to frighten him, and might end with lending him the money. Besides, he was bauld wi’ brandy, and desperate wi’ distress; and he said he had courage to go to the gate of hell, and a step farther, for that receipt. The stranger laughed.

Weel, they rode on through the thickest of the wood, when, all of a sudden, the horse stopped at the door of a great house; and, but that he knew the place was ten miles off, my father would have thought he was at Redgauntlet Castle. They rode into the outer courtyard, through the muckle faulding yetts and aneath the auld portcullis; and the whole front of the house was lighted, and there were pipes and fiddles, and as much dancing and deray within as used to be at Sir Robert’s house at Pace and Yule, and such high seasons. They lap off, and my gudesire, as seemed to him, fastened his horse to the very ring he had tied him to that morning, when he gaed to wait on the young Sir John.

‘God!’ said my gudesire, ‘if Sir Robert’s death be but a dream!’

He knocked at the ha’ door, just as he was wont, and his auld acquaintance, Dougal MacCallum—just after his wont, too,—came to open the door, and said, ‘Piper Steenie, are ye there, lad? Sir Robert has been crying for you.’

My gudesire was like a man in a dream—he looked for the stranger, but he was gane for the time. At last he just tried to say, ‘Ha! Dougal Driveower, are ye living? I thought ye had been dead.’

‘Never fash yoursell wi’ me,’ said Dougal, ‘but look to yoursell; and see ye tak naething frae ony body here, neither meat, drink, or siller, except just the receipt that is your ain.’

So saying, he led the way out through halls and trances that were weel kenn’d to my gudesire, and into the auld oak parlour; and there was as much singing of profane sangs, and birling of red wine, and speaking blasphemy and sculduddry, as had ever been in Redgauntlet Castle when it was at the blithest.

But, Lord take us in keeping, what a set of ghastly revellers they were that sat around that table! My gudesire kenn’d mony that had long before gane to their place, for often had he piped to the most part in the hall of Redgauntlet. There was the fierce Middleton, and the dissolute Rothes, and the crafty Lauderdale; and Dalyell, with his bald head and a beard to his girdle; and Earlshall, with Cameron’s blude on his hand; and wild Bonshaw, that tied blessed Mr. Cargill’s limbs till the blude sprung; and Dunbarton Douglas, the twice-turned traitor baith to country and king. There was the Bluidy Advocate MacKenyie, who, for his worldly wit and wisdom had been to the rest as a god. And there was Claverhouse, as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks streaming down to his laced buff-coat, and his left hand always on his right spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made.[5] He sat apart from them all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty countenance; while the rest hallooed, and sang, and laughed, that the room rang. But their smiles were fearfully contorted from time to time; and their laugh passed into such wild sounds as made my gudesire’s very nails grow blue, and chilled the marrow in his banes.

They that waited at the table were just the wicked serving-men and troopers, that had done their work and cruel bidding on earth. There was the Lang Lad of the Nethertown, that helped to take Argyle; and the Bishop’s summoner, that they called the Deil’s Rattle-bag; and the wicked guardsmen in their laced coats; and the savage Highland Amorites, that shed blood like water; and many a proud serving-man, haughty of heart and bloody of hand, cringing to the rich, and making them wickeder than they would be; grinding the poor to powder, when the rich had broken them to fragments. And mony, mony mair were coming and ganging, a’ as busy in their vocation as if they had been alive.

Sir Robert Redgauntlet, in the midst of a’ this fearful riot, cried, wi’ a voice like thunder, on Steenie Piper to come to the board-head where he was sitting; his legs stretched out before him, and swathed up with flannel, with his holster pistols aside him, while the great broadsword rested against his chair, just as my gudesire had seen him the last time upon earth—the very cushion for the jackanape was close to him, but the creature itself was not there—it wasna its hour, it’s likely; for he heard them say as he came forward, ‘Is not the Major come yet?’ And another answered, ‘The jackanape will be here betimes the morn.’ And when my gudesire came forward, Sir Robert, or his ghaist, or the deevil in his likeness, said, ‘Weel, Piper, hae ye settled wi’ my son for the year’s rent?’

With much ado my father gat breath to say that Sir John would not settle without his honour’s receipt.

‘Ye shall hae that for a tune of the pipes, Steenie,’ said the appearance of Sir Robert—‘Play us up “Weel hoddled, Luckie”.’

Now this was a tune my gudesire learned frae a warlock, that heard it when they were worshipping Satan at their meetings, and my gudesire had sometimes played it at the ranting suppers in Redgauntlet Castle, but never very willingly; and now he grew cauld at the very name of it, and said, for excuse, he hadna his pipes wi’ him.

‘MacCallum, ye limb of Beelzebub,’ said the fearfu’ Sir Robert, ‘bring Steenie the pipes that I am keeping for him!’

MacCallum brought a pair of pipes might have served the piper of Donald of the Isles. But he gave my gudesire a nudge as he offered them; and looking secretly and closely, Steenie saw that the chanter was of steel, and heated to a white heat; so he had fair warning not to trust his fingers with it. So he excused himself again, and said he was faint and frightened, and had not wind aneugh to fill the bag.

‘Then ye maun eat and drink, Steenie,’ said the figure; ‘for we do little else here; and it’s ill speaking between a fou man and a fasting.’

Now these were the very words that the bloody Earl of Douglas said to keep the king’s messenger in hand, while he cut the head off MacLellan of Bombie, at the Threave Castle,[6] and that put Steenie mair and mair on his guard. So he spoke up like a man, and said he came neither to eat, or drink or make minstrelsy; but simply for his ain—to ken what was come o’ the money he had paid, and to get a discharge for it; and he was so stout-hearted by this time that he charged Sir Robert for conscience-sake—(he had no power to say the holy name)—and as he hoped for peace and rest, to spread no snares for him, but just to give him his ain.

The appearance gnashed its teeth and laughed, but it took from a large pocket-book the receipt, and handed it to Steenie. ‘There is your receipt, ye pitiful cur; and for the money, my dog-whelp of a son may go look for it in the Cat’s Cradle.’

My gudesire uttered mony thanks, and was about to retire when Sir Robert roared aloud, ‘Stop, though, thou sack-doudling son of a whore! I am not done with thee. HERE we do nothing for nothing; and you must return on this very day twelvemonth, to pay your master the homage that you owe me for my protection.’

My father’s tongue was loosed of a suddenty, and he said aloud, ‘I refer mysell to God’s pleasure, and not to yours.’

He had no sooner uttered the word than all was dark around him; and he sank on the earth with such a sudden shock, that he lost both breath and sense.

How lang Steenie lay there, he could not tell; but when he came to himsell, he was lying in the auld kirkyard of Redgauntlet parochine just at the door of the family aisle, and the scutcheon of the auld knight, Sir Robert, hanging over his head. There was a deep morning fog on grass and grave-stane around him, and his horse was feeding quietly beside the minister’s twa cows. Steenie would have thought the whole was a dream, but he had the receipt in his hand, fairly written and signed by the auld Laird; only the last letters of his name were a little disorderly, written like one seized with sudden pain.

Sorely troubled in his mind, he left that dreary place, rode through the mist to Redgauntlet Castle, and with much ado he got speech of the Laird.

‘Well, you dyvour bankrupt,’ was the first word, ‘have you brought me my rent?’

‘No,’ answered my gudesire, ‘I have not; but I have brought your honour Sir Robert’s receipt for it.’

‘How, sirrah?—Sir Robert’s receipt!—You told me he had not given you one.’

‘Will your honour please to see if that bit line is right?’

Sir John looked at every line, and at every letter, with much attention; and at last, at the date, which my gudesire had not observed,—‘From my appointed place,’ he read, ‘this twenty-fifth of November.’—‘What! That is yesterday!—Villain, thou must have gone to hell for this!’

‘I got it from your honour’s father—whether he be in heaven or hell, I know not,’ said Steenie.

‘I will delate you for a warlock to the Privy Council!’ said Sir John. ‘I will send you to your master, the devil, with the help of a tar-barrel and a torch!’

‘I intend to delate mysell to the Presbytery,’ said Steenie, ‘and tell them all I have seen last night, whilk are things fitter for them to judge of than a borrel man like me.’

Sir John paused, composed himsell, and desired to hear the full history; and my gudesire told it him from point to point, as I have told it you—word for word, neither more nor less.

Sir John was silent again for a long time, and at last he said, very composedly, ‘Steenie, this story of yours concerns the honour of many a noble family besides mine; and if it be a leasing-making, to keep yourself out of my danger, the least you can expect is to have a red-hot iron driven through your tongue, and that will be as bad as scauding your fingers wi’ a red-hot chanter. But yet it may be true, Steenie; and if the money cast up, I will not know what to think of it.— But where shall we find the Cat’s Cradle? There are cats enough about the old house, but I think they kitten without the ceremony of bed or cradle.’

‘We were best ask Hutcheon,’ said my gudesire; ‘he kens a’ the odd corners about as weel as—another serving-man that is now gane, and that I wad not like to name.’

Aweel, Hutcheon, when he was asked, told them, that a ruinous turret, lang disused, next to the clock-house, only accessible by a ladder, for the opening was on the outside, and far above the battlements, was called of old the Cat’s Cradle.

‘There will I go immediately,’ said Sir John; and he took (with what purpose, Heaven kens) one of his father’s pistols from the hall-table, where they had lain since the night he died, and hastened to the battlements.

It was a dangerous place to climb, for the ladder was auld and frail, and wanted ane or twa rounds. However, up got Sir John, and entered at the turret door, where his body stopped the only little light that was in the bit turret. Something flees at him wi’ a vengeance, maist dang him back ower—bang gaed the knight’s pistol, and Hutcheon, that held the ladder, and my gudesire that stood beside him, hears a loud skelloch. A minute after, Sir John flings the body of the jackanape down to them, and cries that the siller is fund, and that they should come up and help him. And there was the bag of siller sure aneugh, and mony orra things besides, that had been missing for mony a day. And Sir John, when he had riped the turret weel, led my gudesire into the dining-parlour, and took him by the hand and spoke kindly to him, and said he was sorry he should have doubted his word, and that he would hereafter be a good master to him to make amends.

‘And now, Steenie,’ said Sir John, ‘although this vision of yours tend, on the whole, to my father’s credit, as an honest man, that he should, even after his death, desire to see justice done to a poor man like you, yet you are sensible that ill-dispositioned men might make bad constructions upon it, concerning his soul’s health. So, I think, we had better lay the haill dirdum on that ill-deedie creature, Major Weir, and say naething about your dream in the wood of Pitmurkie. You had taken ower mickle brandy to be very certain about onything; and, Steenie, this receipt’ (his hand shook while he held it out),—‘it’s but a queer kind of document, and we will do best, I think, to put it quietly in the fire.’

‘Od, but for as queer as it is, it’s a’ the voucher I have for my rent,’ said my gudesire, who was afraid, it may be, of losing the benefit of Sir Robert’s discharge.

‘I will bear the contents to your credit in the rental-book, and give you a discharge under my own hand,’ said Sir John, ‘and that on the spot. And, Steenie, if you can hold your tongue about this matter, you shall sit, from this term downward, at an easier rent.’

‘Mony thanks to your honour,’ said Steenie, who saw easily in what corner the wind was; ‘doubtless I will be comformable to all your honour’s commands; only I would willingly speak wi’ some powerful minister on the subject, for I do not like the sort of soumons of appointment whilk your honour’s father’—

‘Do not call the phantom my father!’ said Sir John, interrupting him.

‘Weel, then, the thing that was so like him,’ said my gudesire; ‘he spoke of my coming back to see him this time twelvemonth, and it’s a weight on my conscience.’

‘Aweel, then,’ said Sir John, ‘if you be so much distressed in mind, you may speak to our minister of the parish; he is a douce man, regards the honour of our family, and the mair that he may look for some patronage from me.’

Wi’ that, my father readily agreed that the receipt should be burnt, and the Laird threw it into the chimney with his ain hand. Burn it would not for them, though; but away it flew up the lum, wi’ a lang train of sparks at its tail, and a hissing noise like a squib.

My gudesire gaed down to the Manse, and the minister, when he had heard the story, said it was his real opinion that though my gudesire had gaen very far in tampering with dangerous matters, yet, as he had refused the devil’s arles (for such was the offer of meat and drink) and had refused to do homage by piping at his bidding, he hoped, that if he held a circumspect walk hereafter, Satan could take little advantage by what was come and gane. And, indeed, my gudesire, of his ain accord, lang foreswore baith the pipes and the brandy—it was not even till the year was out, and the fatal day past, that he would so much as take the fiddle, or drink usquebaugh or tippeny.

Sir John made up his story about the jackanape as he liked himsell; and some believe till this day there was no more in the matter than the filching nature of the brute. Indeed, ye’ll no hinder some to threap that it was nane o’ the Auld Enemy that Dougal and my gudesire saw in the Laird’s room, but only that wanchancy creature, the Major, capering on the coffin; and that, as to the blawing on the Laird’s whistle that was heard after he was dead, the filthy brute could do that as weel as the Laird himsell, if no better. But Heaven kens the truth, whilk first came out by the minister’s wife, after Sir John and her ain gudeman were baith in the moulds. And then my gudesire, wha was failed in his limbs, but not in his judgement or memory—at least nothing to speak of—was obliged to tell the real narrative to his friends, for the credit of his good name. He might else have been charged for a warlock.[7]

ENDNOTES

The Two Drovers

Endnote—Robert Donn’s Poems.

I cannot dismiss this story without resting attention for a moment on the light which has been thrown on the character of the Highland Drover since the time of its first appearance, by the account of a drover poet, by name Robert Mackay, or, as he was commonly called, Rob Donn—that is, Brown Robert—and certain specimens of his talents, published in the ninetieth number of the Quarterly Review. The picture which that paper gives of the habits and feelings of a class of persons with which the general reader would be apt to associate no ideas but those of wild superstition and rude manners, is in the highest degree interesting, and I cannot resist the temptation of quoting two of the songs of this hitherto unheard-of poet of humble life. They are thus introduced by the reviewer:—

‘Upon one occasion, it seems, Rob’s attendance upon his master’s cattle business detained him a whole year from home, and at his return he found that a fair maiden to whom his troth had been plighted of yore had lost sight of her vows, and was on the eve of being married to a rival (a carpenter by trade), who had profited by the young drover’s absence. The following song was composed during a sleepless night, in the neighbourhood of Creiff, in Perthshire, and the home sickness which it expresses appears to be almost as much that of the deer-hunter as of the loving swain.

‘Easy is my bed, it is easy,

But it is not to sleep that I incline;

The wind whistles northwards, northwards,

And my thoughts move with it.

More pleasant were it to be with thee

In the little glen of calves,

Than to be counting of droves

In the enclosures of Creiff.

Easy is my bed, &c.

‘Great is my esteem of the maiden

Towards whose dwelling the north wind blows;

She is ever cheerful, sportive, kindly,

Without folly, without vanity, without pride.

True is her heart—were I under hiding,

And fifty men in pursuit of my footsteps,

I should find protection, when they surrounded me most closely,

In the secret recess of that shieling.

Easy is my bed, &c.

‘Oh for the day for turning my face homeward,

That I may see the maiden of beauty:—

Joyful will it be to me to be with thee,

Fair girl with the long heavy locks!

Choice of all places for deer-hunting

Are the brindled rock and the ridge!

How sweet at evening to be dragging the slain deer

Downwards along the piper’s cairn!

Easy is my bed, &c.

‘Great is my esteem for the maiden

Who parted from me by the west side of the enclosed field;

Late yet again will she linger in that fold,

Long after the kine are assembled.

It is I myself who have taken no dislike to thee,

Though far away from thee am I now.

It is for the thought of thee that sleep flies from me;

Great is the profit to me of thy parting kiss!

Easy is my bed, &c.

‘Dear to me are the boundaries of the forest;

Far from Creiff is my heart;

My remembrance is of the hillocks of sheep,

And the heath of many knolls.

Oh for the red-streaked fissures of the rock,

Where in spring time the fawns leap;

Oh for the crags towards which the wind is blowing—

Cheap would be my bed to be there!

Easy is my bed, &c.

‘The following describes Rob’s feelings on the first discovery of his damsel’s infidelity. The airs of both these pieces are his own, and, the Highland ladies say, very beautiful.

‘Heavy to me is the shieling, and the hum that is in it,

Since the ear that was wont to listen is now no more on the watch.

Where is Isabel, the courteous, the conversable, a sister in kindness?

Where is Anne, the slender-browed, the turret-breasted, whose glossy hair pleased me when yet a boy?

Heich! What an hour was my returning!

Pain such as that sunset brought, what availeth me to tell it?

‘I traversed the fold, and upward among the trees—

Each place, far and near, wherein I was wont to salute my love.

When I looked down from the crag, and beheld the fair-haired stranger dallying with his bride,

I wished I had never revisited the glen of my dreams.

Such things came into my heart as that sun was going down,

A pain of which I shall never be rid, what availeth me to tell it?

‘Since it has been heard that the carpenter had persuaded thee,

My sleep is disturbed—busy is foolishness within me at midnight.

The kindness that has been between us, I cannot shake off that memory in visions;

Thou callest me not to thy side; but love is to me for a messenger.

There is strife within me, and I toss to be at liberty;

And ever the closer it clings, and the delusion is growing to me as a tree.

‘Anne, yellow-haired daughter of Donald, surely thou knowest not how it is with me—

That it is old love, unrepaid, which has worn down from me my strength;

That when far from thee, beyond many mountains, the wound in my heart was throbbing,

Stirring, and searching for ever, as when I sat beside thee on the turf.

Now, then, hear me this once, if for ever I am to be without thee,

my spirit is broken—give me one kiss ere I leave this land!

‘Haughtily and scornfully the maid looked upon me:—

Never will it be work for thy fingers to unloose the band from my curls.

Thou hast been absent a twelvemonth, and six were seeking me diligently;

Was thy superiority so high that there should be no end of abiding for thee?

Ha! Ha! Ha! Hast thou at last become sick?

Is it love that is to give death to thee? Surely the enemy has been in no haste.

‘But how shall I hate thee, even though towards me thou hast become cold?

When my discourse is most angry concerning thy name in thine absence,

Of sudden thine image, with its old dearness, comes visibly into my mind,

And a secret voice whispers that love will yet prevail!

And I become surety for it anew, darling,

And it springs up at that hour lofty as a tower.’

‘Rude and bald as these things appear in a verbal translation, and rough as they might possibly appear, even were the originals intelligible, we confess we are disposed to think they would of themselves justify Dr. Mackay (their Editor) in placing this herdsman-lover among the true sons of song.’—Quarterly Review, No. XC., July 1831.

Wandering Willie’s Tale

Endnote 1.—The Persecutors

The personages here mentioned are most of them characters of historical fame; but those less known and remembered may be found in the tract entitled, ‘The Judgment and Justice of God Exemplified, or, a Brief Historical Account of some of the Wicked Lives and Miserable Deaths of some of the most remarkable Apostates and Bloody Persecutors, from the Reformation till after the Revolution.’ This constitutes a sort of postscript or appendix to John Howie of Lochgoin’s ‘Account of the Lives of the most eminent Scots Worthies.’ The author has, with considerable ingenuity, reversed his reasoning upon the inference to be drawn from the prosperity or misfortunes which befall individuals in this world, either in the course of their lives or in the hour of death. In the account of the martyrs’ sufferings, such inflictions are mentioned only as trials permitted by providence, for the better and brighter display of their faith, and constancy of principle. But when similar afflictions befell the opposite party, they are imputed to the direct vengeance of Heaven upon their impiety. If, indeed, the life of any person obnoxious to the historian’s censures happened to have passed in unusual prosperity, the mere fact of its being finally concluded by death, is assumed as an undeniable token of the judgement of Heaven, and, to render the conclusion inevitable, his last scene is generally garnished with some singular circumstances. Thus the Duke of Lauderdale is said, through old age but immense corpulence, to have become so sunk in spirits, ‘that his heart was not the bigness of a walnut.’

Endnote 2.—Lamentation for the Dead

I have heard in my youth some such wild tale as that placed in the mouth of the blind fiddler, of which, I think, the hero was Sir Robert Grierson of Lagg, the famous persecutor. But the belief was general throughout Scotland that the excessive lamentation over the loss of friends disturbed the repose of the dead, and broke even the rest of the grave. There are several instances of this in tradition, but one struck me particularly, as I heard it from the lips of one who professed receiving it from those of a ghost-seer. This was a Highland lady, named Mrs. C—— of B———, who probably believed firmly in the truth of an apparition which seems to have originated in the weakness of her nerves and strength of her imagination. She had been lately left a widow by her husband, with the office of guardian to their only child. The young man added to the difficulties of his charge by an extreme propensity for a military life, which his mother was unwilling to give way to, while she found it impossible to repress it. About this time the Independent Companies, formed for the preservation of the peace of the Highlands, were in the course of being levied; and as a gentleman named Cameron, nearly connected with Mrs. C——, commanded one of those companies, she was at length persuaded to compromise the matter with her son, by permitting him to enter this company in the capacity of a cadet, thus gratifying his love of a military life without the dangers of foreign service, to which no one then thought these troops were at all liable to be exposed, while even their active service at home was not likely to be attended with much danger. She readily obtained a promise from her relative that he would be particular in his attention to her son and therefore concluded she had accommodated matters between her son’s wishes and his safety in a way sufficiently attentive to both. She set off to Edinburgh to get what was awanting for his outfit, and shortly afterwards received melancholy news from the Highlands. The Independent Company into which her son was to enter had a skirmish with a party of caterans engaged in some act of spoil, and her friend the captain being wounded, and out of the reach of medical assistance, died in consequence. This news was a thunderbolt to the poor mother, who was at once deprived of her kinsman’s advice and assistance, and instructed by his fate of the unexpected danger to which her son’s new calling exposed him. She remained also in great sorrow for her relative, whom she loved with sisterly affection. These conflicting causes of anxiety, together with her uncertainty, whether to continue or change her son’s destination, were terminated in the following manner:—

The house in which Mrs. C—— resided in the old town of Edinburgh, was a flat or story of a land accessible, as was then universal, by a common stair. The family who occupied the story beneath were her acquaintances, and she was in the habit of drinking tea with them every evening. It was accordingly about six o’clock, when, recovering herself from a deep fit of anxious reflection, she was about to leave the parlour in which she sat in order to attend this engagement. The door through which she was to pass opened, as was very common in Edinburgh, into a dark passage. In this passage, and within a yard of her when she opened the door, stood the apparition of her kinsman, the deceased officer, in his full tartans, and wearing his bonnet. Terrified at what she saw, or thought she saw, she closed the door hastily, and, sinking on her knees by a chair, prayed to be delivered from the horrors of the vision. She remained in that posture till her friends below tapped on the door, to intimate that tea was ready. Recalled to herself by the signal, she arose, and, on opening the apartment door, again was confronted by the visionary Highlander, whose bloody brow bore token, on this second appearance, to the death he had died. Unable to endure this repetition of her terrors, Mrs. C—— sank on the door in a swoon. Her friends below, startled with the noise, came upstairs, and, alarmed at the situation in which they found her, insisted on her going to bed and taking some medicine, in order to compose what they took for a nervous attack. They had no sooner left her in quiet, than the apparition of the soldier was once more visible in the apartment. This time she took courage and said, ‘In the name of God, Donald, why do you haunt one who respected and loved you when living?’ To which he answered readily, in Gaelic, ‘Cousin, why did you not speak sooner? My rest is disturbed by your unnecessary lamentation—your tears scald me in my shroud. I come to tell you that my untimely death ought to make no difference in your views for your son; God will raise patrons to supply my place and he will live to the fullness of years, and die honoured and at peace.’ The lady of course followed her kinsman’s advice and as she was accounted a person of strict veracity, we may conclude the first apparition an illusion of the fancy, the final one a lively dream suggested by the other two.

OTHER RESOURCES

An ASLS Teaching Note on ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ and ‘The Two Drovers’ – download from

https://bit.ly/scott-teaching-note

A talk by Professor Alison Lumsden on ‘My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror’ and ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’, given at the 2016 ASLS Schools Conference – watch online at

https://bit.ly/ali-lumsden-talk

Selected Short Stories of Sir Walter Scott, with an Introduction by Ronnie Renton and an Essay by David Cecil – available from Kennedy & Boyd at

https://bit.ly/k-and-b

Notes

[←1]

See Endnote—Robert Donn’s Poems.

[←2]

A precipitous side of a mountain in Moffatdale.

[←3]

The caution and moderation of King William III, and his principles of unlimited toleration, deprived the Cameronians of the opportunity they ardently desired, to retaliate the injuries which they had received during the reign of prelacy, and purify the land, as they called it, from the pollution of blood. They esteemed the Revolution, therefore, only a half measure, which neither comprehended the rebuilding the Kirk in its full splendour, nor the revenge of the death of the Saints on their persecutors.

[←4]

A celebrated wizard, executed at Edinburgh for sorcery and other crimes.

[←5]

See Endnote 1.

[←6]

The reader is referred for particulars to Pitscottie’s History of Scotland.

[←7]

See Endnote 2.

Table of Contents

Introduction

My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror

The Two Drovers

Wandering Willie’s Tale

Endnotes

Other resources