Chapter I.

The Windy Wednesday.

Old persons in the midland counties of Scotland,
will often, by the winter’s fireside, on a stormy
night, astonish the younkers by their talk of a
day which they call The Windy Wodensday.
The exact date of this memorable day is not
easily fixed—nor is it of much importance. It
happened, however, when the year was in the
wane—when the gorgeous skies of autumn blacken
into winter—when spitting and snell winds begin
to whistle through leafless forests, and rave Vol. I. A A1v 2
through chimney canns—when the citizens of the
Old Town of Edinburgh hail once more shop
windows sparkling o’ nights, and welcome those
cressets hung in the third heavens, which may be
seen glancing cheerily from the high lattices that
cluster round the imperial steeple of old St. Giles.
—It was immediately after All Hallowday, the
season when the douce burghers of Edinburgh,
having cleared scores with Heaven for the approaching
winter, the godless generation of writers,
from the Tweed to the Spey, were free to
flock back once more to their towering homes in
the Old, and then almost the only town.

The wind held high mastery through the long
evening; but towards midnight violent and scudding
showers struggled with the hurricane; and,
in an hour afterwards, the spirit of the blast was
effectually cowed by heavy, rushing, downright
rain.

Among sundry other acts of grace, the amended
weather permitted two decent and responsible
burghers of Edinburgh to quit, in rather comfortable
trim, the snug harbourage of a well-frequented
tavern of those days, situated near the City
Cross, where, high and dry, amid the coil of the
elements, they had been celebrating an annual A2r 3
festival of the ancient and worshipful Incorporation
of Baxters.

It was now midnight, which the long-tongued
bell of St. Giles loudly proclaimed, careless of the
effect produced upon the startled ear of Deacon
Daigh, the elder and graver citizen. The younger
man was still of the humour to boast of “chirping
over his cups,” and of “hearing the chimes at
midnight.” He was, moreover, still a bachelor.

“Ten—eleven—twelve”—counted the worthy
Deacon, halting and gravely turning up his ear.
“Weel,—be thankit, there’s nae mair o’ye! Mrs.
Daigh, our wife, now, will threep it’s three o’ the
blessed morning,—and this the week after the
Town’s Sacrament.—Not that I’m an advocate
for late hours, Mr. Burlin; but as the younger
brethren saw it meet in the exercise o’ a sound
discretion to vote me into the chair, passing over
many of the craft, forbye yoursel’, Mr. Burlin,
far mair worthy o’ sic distinction, and far better
qualified for discharging the duties of office, it behooved
me to sit out the ploy jocosely, that decency
might mingle with our mirth,—as weel as to gi’e
countenance to you younger lads, or I would never
have stirred abroad on sic a judgment-like night,
—a night in which the windows o’ Heaven are A2v 4
opened,”—[here the worthy Deacon lapsed into a
fit of tipsy solemnity]—“the fountains o’ the
great deeps unsealed, and the Cowgate strand
rumbling like the Canon-Mills water in a Lammas
speat. This night-hawking is no my ordinary,
Benjie;—I may use that familiarity wi’ an
auld ’prentice. It is kenned weel that David
Daigh, or Deacon Daigh, as friends and weel-
wishers are pleased to style me, has not for thirty
years been three times out o’ his bed after the
Town-guard drum beat in at ten o’clock, except
at an orra time like this same night, or when
taking a chack o’ supper, or a chappin o’ ale and
a pie in a customer’s house, wi’ a friend like yoursel’.
No, Benjie,—frae the West Bow fit to the
Watergate Port, I’m known for a man of a sober
and steady walk, and—”

But here the united craftsmen, who for sundry
reasons felt that “two are better than one,” and
were, accordingly, stuck fast, arm in arm, like two
adhering three-pennies, came thundering down
upon the resounding causeway. Let it not, however,
be imagined, that this sudden loss of equilibrium
proceeded from any internal cause. The
younger man, indeed, maintained the perpendicular
with judge-like decorum, and even opposed A3r 5
an adequate resistance to the less steady
movements of his ancient master. But, besides
the violence of the weather, and being embarrassed
by the huge snuff-mull and other insignia and
bearings of the craft, now returning to their annual
slumber in the Deacon’s parlour-bunker press,
on entering that narrow dark defile, which in
those days lay between the Luckenbooths and the
low sheds, called Krames, which then stuck like
barnacles to a seventy-four round the stately pile
of St. Giles, some persons rapidly advancing in
the dark, with a hasty, and probably inadvertent
push, produced the above mentioned catastrophe.

“What mean ye by this, sirs?” cried Master
Burlin, angrily challenging the aggressors as he
scrambled to his feet.—“Ken ye, my masters,
wha ye are pushing and jundying that unchancy
gate? Are ye hurt, Deacon?”

“Lorde sake, Benjie, haud the lang tongue o’
ye!” earnestly whispered the still recumbent, but
peace-pursuing Deacon. “I wad na for a Yule
batch, or the langest score on my nick-sticks, (and
that’s the auld Leddy de Bruce’s,) ha’e my name
bandied, or my word heard, in a causey bruilzie at
this hour o’ the night. Pass on, worthy gentlemen. A3v 6
There is nae ill done but might ha’e been
waur.”

The strangers seemed disposed to make some
apology; but the barm of Master Burlin’s blood
raged the higher for the soft answer of his companion.

“Speak for yoursel’, Deacon Daigh,” cried he;
“but I’ll learn thae penny-page gentry how they
come thud against ’sponsible men. Ken ye, my
masters, wha ye speak to?”

Now, in the whole circle of categories, there is
not perhaps one more injudicious, or more calculated
to draw forth a saucy response than the above.

“How should we know?” cried Master Burlin,
champing his teeth in rage. “At the Cross o’
Edinburgh! to a burgess and freeman! Ha’e ye
the spirit of an oven cricket in ye, Deacon Daigh?
—Guard! Town-guard!” shouted the bold baxter,
and he actually attempted to collar his adversary.

“Lord sake, Benjie Burlin, let go the gentleman, A4r 7”
cried the Deacon, who had now regained
his legs, and stood wringing his hands in extremity.

The stranger very adroitly shook off the valiant
Burlin; and, tripping up his heels, again fairly laid
him sprawling on his back; while louder than before
the baxter shouted—“Guard! Town-guard!”
and the stranger, darting through the narrow pass,
followed the tall figure, which, noiseless as a ghost,
had glided past at the very commencement of the
fray.

“For the sake of peace keep a calm sough,
Benjie,” whispered the Deacon, bending over his
prostrate friend, and anxiously groping about to
recover the cognizance of the craft. “Will ye cry
up thae yellochin hieland deevils to mend the calamity?
Up stiffy—there’s a braw chield.”

Still the malcontent Burlin shouted—“Guard!”

“Lord’s sake, Benjie,”—and the Deacon clapped
his hand before the other’s mouth,—“what are
ye about? I’ll be ruined at a’ hands. Kirk and
Council! Shop and neighbourhood!—Nay, then,
I’ll just put in leg bail, and let the craft’s jewels
tak’ their chance wi’ ye. Better they be lost than
the jewel o’ my gude name,”—and off the Deacon
hobbled.

He had not advanced many paces when his A4v 8
steps were arrested by the abrupt return of the
muffled figure that had first shot bye. This
person must now have made a circuit through the
Parliament Close, for the place of encounter was
exactly at the door of the old jail.

“Don’t be alarmed, sir,” said he, and he civilly
apologized for the former accidental jostle. “There
is not a soul astir around your Cross on this wild
night,—not a caudie to be found, and my business
is urgent. Can you, sir, direct me to the house of
the well-known midwife, Mistress—Mistress”—
and he hesitated, as if memory failed.

“Wha but Luckie Metcalf, I’ll warrant,” said
the Deacon, now quite at home.

“Right—I strangely forgot,” said the stranger.

“Wha should it be but just Luckie Metcalf,
my next door neighbour!—the first turnpike stair
in our wynd—the Clam-shell land, signifying the
Palmer’s land, as Mr. Gideon Haliburton, a sticket
Seceder minister, tells me frae the Pilgrims’ palmerin
to the Holy Land lang syne. But what
am I palmerin here about, and your job standin’.
Come on, sir, we’ll get a lighted bowet at the
Guard-house. And here’s Mr. Burlin will lend a
hand. Ye maun forget and forgi’e, Benjie. It’s
a crying case the gentlemen are out on.”

A5r 9

The tardy appearance of the mercenaries, and
probably something in the tall and athletic figure
of the stranger, enforced this argument with the
malcontent Burlin. The proffered civility of the
bowet, or lantern, was declined; and they proceeded
in darkness in the direction of the Deacon’s
dwelling, the muffled stranger stalking on in silence,
like a troubled spirit abroad on dark and
midnight errands, Master Burlin sullen, and the
honest Deacon panting in haste, and yet making
the whole cost of conversation.

“Ye’ll be a stranger, I’m wotting,” said he.
A slight nod was doubtful response, but might be
construed into an affirmative. The Deacon, a
very good-natured man in his way, was not disposed
to be urgent. Indeed after the trades’ great
annual supper he was generally as much in the
humour of hearing his own tongue wag, as of
listening to the discourses of any other man; and
the high and haughty-looking stranger offered no
bar to this harmless gratification. After a glance
at the gudewife’s several lying-in jobs, the
Deacon, like a friendly man as he was, proceeded
to eulogize the skill of his neighbour.

“She’s a canny kimmer, Luckie Metcalf,” said
he, “and has seen mony a rig in her day. I ha’e A5v 10
heard her oure a dish o’ tea, or it may be something
stronger—for a wife in her line o’ business
wad need support bye your ordinary tea slops—
mak’ her brag o’ reckoning the best in Scotland
amang her bairns. There’s the Lord Parkha’s
leddy, and all the de Bruce family, and Mr. ―,
the great advocate. I mind as it were yesterday
o’ selling him a bap, as he gaed by the door ilka
day to the hie-school;—sirs, how things do come
about! He is for certain ane o’ Luckie’s clecking.
I was as near her lug as I am to you, sir, when
he made the grand speech again’ her that lost her
the tierce plea wi’ her step-bairns. ‘The de’il sned
the souple tongue o’ ye,’ quoth she, half laughing,
as his gown ga’e us a wap when he gaed bye us
into the robing room, sucking a sweet oranger,—
‘gif my shears had been in my hussey-case yon
morning, ye wad na hae played me this slippery
trick;’—for its bruited, sir, though I ay thought it
but a silly clatter, that the great Mr. ― was
like tongue-tacked for the first half hour o’ his life;
but that has been weel made up to him in a wonderful
speat o’ speech ever since syne, the words
bolt—bolting out, before the fifteen on the
bench, like sheeled peasefrae a mill happer.—But
here, in gude time, is our wynd.”

A6r 11

With prompt civility the Deacon mounted the
stairs, and sounded the customary alarum on the
door of Mrs. Metcalf, by running a loose iron ring
briskly over the serrated surface of an oddly fashioned
piece of iron garniture, a screaming, creaking
apparatus, intended to supply the place of a
modern knocker or door-bell.

“I shall trouble you no farther, sir,” said the
stranger, in a tone which spoke good night, almost
as plainly as the cold and dignified good
night that followed.

“Ye have got your travail for your pains, Deacon,
with that proud patch,” said the still sulky
Burlin.

“Ye may say sae Benjie,” replied the Deacon.
“But, what can he be man? Wrapped up in his
breachan, a velvet mask on his face, and pistols
and dagger in his belt. Saw ye the glint o’ them,
lad, as he wapped by? That high English tongue
has like too a twang of the hieland speech. I
wish gude may be meant.—But, Lord sake! now,
Benjie, dinna let my word be heard.”

The prudent Deacon, with his friend, now retreated
to the entrance of the steep lane, or wynd,
and knocked up his lass, resolving in his private
mind to lay this untimely alarm at his decent door A6v 12
to the account of the midwife’s customers, as from
experience he had reason to dread the long sharp
ears of his neighbour, Miss Jacobina Pingle, a
nervous maiden gentlewoman, who, in the tenth
story or top flat, exercised the calling of silk glovemender
and stocking-ingrafter, and, as he alleged,
neither slept night nor day; so that, though
she seldom stirred abroad, she was supposed to
know more of the secret history of the land than
any of the regular daily fixtures at the head of the
wynd.

Chapter II.

The Conflagration.

The worthy Deacon had scarcely for two hours
occupied the narrow sleeping place allotted him
by Mrs. Daigh—for on this night of flagrant
transgression he prudently declined the contest,
which he sometimes manfully maintained, for ample
verge,—when the family were aroused by the
rumbling rub-a-dub roll of the fire-drum.—
The pealing bells of gray St. Giles, the clatter
of a thousand feet, the hurtle and thundering of
the fire engines along the pavements, eager interrogatories,
abrupt answers, hoarse yells, shouts A7v 14
of “Fire! fire!” and all those signs of consternation
and alarm, mixed with the strange excitement
and nameless wanton delight, which a midnight
conflagration spreads through a populous city,
might perhaps have failed to draw our carousing
burgher from his pillow, had not the clamorous
terrors of Mrs. Daigh, about certain wooden tenements
in St. Mary’s Wynd, compelled him to activity.

“Our new conquest to be burnt,” said the
dame, “and me no infeft three days. But,
it’s a just judgment on you, David Daigh, for your
doings this night.—Miss Jacobina, frae her window,
is crying, she’s sure St. Mary’s Wynd’s on
fire.—‘Hech, sirs,’ I heard her saying wi’ a laugh,
‘and is the braw subject o’ our gude neighbours
to gae aff wi’ a lunt that gate.’—Spitefu ettercap!”

The idle crowd which had already assembled in
the street, completely choked up the direct approach
to the scene of the fire, and compelled the
Deacon to make a long circuit before he could distinctly
learn on what spot its ravages were going
forward. This he discovered to be in that hollow
which lies between the Calton Hill and the north
side of the ridge on which the Canongate extends,
and very near the grounds of Holyrood-house.

A8r 15

“It’s Cambuskenneth Lodge, Deacon,” said
Miss Jacobina, or, as she was familiarly called,
Miss Jacky Pingle, who, slip-shod and wrapped
in her red cardinal, stood the oracle of one of those
broken groups which filled the streets. “It’s an
auld prophecy, that it maun be thrice burnt, to purify
it o’ the red guilt of blood, the blood of the de
Bruce—naething can gainsay that.”

“I have heard o’ sic idle clavers,” replied the
Deacon, who had now surmounted his personal
concern, and was indifferent to all else.

“Idle clavers!” retorted Miss Jacobina, the
very pearlin’ edging of her night-cap vibrating
with indignation; for, like Horace Walpole’s fair
and provident friend, she kept a decent night-
cap to throw on in cases of fire—“Idle clavers!
I have heard my grand-aunt, Provost Falconer’s
dochter, Deacon,”—Miss Jacky looked round with
dignity,—“tell an hundred times how at the last
burning in the year 1679, the ghost of the Lady
de Bruce who got foul play in that dark house,
was seen towering over the flames, clasping her
bluidy winding sheet as she screamed aloud.

‘Ance burnt! Twice burnt!—When I come
again, I’ll fear ye a’!’

A8v 16

And look! see ye that neighbours. Is not she
come again?”

The black voluminous smoke, which had for
some time rolled its enormous coils from the huge
vomitory, now burst into jets and eddies of flame,
in which, at this instant, the eye of fancy or superstition
might have fashioned the outline of a
soaring female form, arrayed in the redundant drapery
of the time, or in the weeds of the sepulchre.

While the group feasted their eyes on this imaginary
and quickly shifting resemblance, the Deacon
felt his arm suddenly seized with the convulsive
grasp of a trembling hand, and, looking
round, saw his gossip, Mrs. Metcalf, with pale
visage, mouth distended, eyes starting from their
sockets, and every mark of horror and supernatural
dread.

“Help, neighbour Daigh,” she panted forth;
“help, for the love of Heaven—I am a gone
woman.”

“The de’il’s come owre the women folk the
night, wi’ their ghaists and their glamour. Ha’e
ye seen the Leddy de Bruce’s ghaist too?”

“Many a word lightly spoken has a heavy fall.
I have seen this night what flesh and blood will
not soon ourcast,” replied the midwife.

1 B1r 17

“Cambuskenneth Lodge burning, I’se warrant.
My moan is soon made for the auld black
ruckle. But the de Bruce’s were great patrons o’
yours, no doubt.”

“Cambuskenneth Lodge!” hoarsely screamed
the woman, clasping her hands.—“Said ye that
man? Then is my dream out! and the Lord
take to his mercy the innocent blood shed this
night, and in His ain time judge the foul unnatural
slayers.”

“Ou, the wife’s noddle is working like a new
set spunge!” cried the Deacon, as the woman
hung on his arm in a state approaching to insensibility.
“Miss Jacky, ha’e ye ony skill o’ this
gear? If I could get ane o’ thae hieland loons,
wi’ their sedan cheyres now, to yerk her hame, a
sup o’ brandy posset would reveeve her, and set
us a’ to rights.”

The maiden, her long ears in her neck, her
skinny lips compressed with very eagerness, seeing
or divining much more in the excessive agitation
of the midwife than was visible to the honest
Deacon, hastily advanced with offers of aid and
consolation. It appeared that her presence acted
as an immediate restorative or bracer; for Mrs.
Matcalf rallied, said “her dwalm had gone off,” Vol. I. B B1v 18
and proposed returning home with the assistance
of the Deacon’s arm.

“Aye, and welcome, Luckie; and troth I think
them on whose job ye gaed afoot, might have seen
ye hame at sic hours. And now I mind me—did
not I send ye a gay queer customer this same
morning?”

“Ye sent?” cried Miss Pingle.

“Some outlandish chap, I take it,” continued
the Deacon. “Made ye a gude job of it,
Luckie?” Mrs. Metcalf groaned.—“Now, Lord
sake, woman, forget that Cambuskenneth Lodge
and Leddy de Bruce’s ghaist! ’Od, I’se lay
her in a Red sea o’ plotty this blessed night; and,
leddies, ye shall baith help me.”

Neither the consolations of the baker, nor the
promise of his good cheer, could restore the spirits
of the woman, whom he now dragged rather
than led along.—Near that part of the Old City
wall, where the Kirk of Field is said to have
stood, the trio paused to look back on the still
blazing fire. The heavens in that point were
kindled to an intense fiery glow; but the first
stage of the combustion was over, and no fresh
fuel being supplied, the radiance gradually paled,
and finally blended with the blackness of the still B2r 19
early hour. A city so picturesque in situation
and architecture, touched with brilliant but fitful
illumination in every prominent point, from the
dusky brow of its overhanging castle, to the spires
and turrets of its dismantled palace, might have
awakened a transient sense of the beautiful, even
in those who had most reason to dread the progress
of the destructive element. But our douce
Deacon cared little for such matters: so, having
seen his fair companions safely bestowed in their
homes, he said “He would just streek himsel’ for
an hour by the side o’ Mrs. Daigh; as there were
fain fules enow to carry water buckets without
him, and the fire lay far frae St. Mary’s Wynd.”

At the hour of twelve next day, the usual complement
of breakfast rolls allotted to the midwife,
remained on the Deacon’s shelves uncalled for.
The discussions at the head of the wynd this morning
all hinged on last night’s fire.—Cambuskenneth
Lodge was one of those ancient hotels, which,
when the Court of Scotland was held at Holyrood,
had accommodated a family of high distinction,
one of the very few illustrious Scottish houses
which had long retained the Roman faith. But
the mansion had been untenanted for many years.
Its casements were dismantled—its paved court B2v 20
was chequered with nettles, docks, and grass, and
the roofs of the offices which ranged round three
sides of its high surrounding walls, were mostly fallen
in, so that the wonder grew how fire could have
reached a place so lonely and so isolated. The
Deacon, and the auditory whom his wisdom daily
enlightened on all subjects of passing interest, not
irrationally conjectured that some houseless vagrants
had clambered over the walls of the court,
and, either by accident, or to conceal their depredations,
had set fire to the massive structure,
which, according to tradition, had already been
twice burned down.

Mrs. Metcalf, the Deacon’s neighbour, could
have told another story; at least so conjectured
Miss Jacobina Pingle, who, on taking up a farthing
whig for her afternoon tea, announced the
alarming illness of that useful matron.

“The fever had flown to her brain,” Miss
Jacky said, “and she had raved all day of a
murdered leddy and a misguided wean, fire,
flames, and naked swords. Mr. Gideon Haliburton,
who lodged in her out-shot chalmer, had
passed two strucken hours locked up with her.
Pen, ink, and paper had been sent for; and it
was thought she had made a full confession and B3r 21
a clean breast.—Though it’s no to be thought,”
added Miss Jacky, “that a sticket seceder minister,
wha is but a dominie after a’, can gi’e that
comfort and clearance to the death-bed o’ a sinner
which could be drawn frae a godly placed minister
o’ the reformed Kirk of Scotland.”

“We are a’ sinners, Miss Jacky,” replied the
honest baker, with some sharpness; “but this is
heavy news ye bring of my worthy auld neighbour.”
And suspecting that the curious maiden
was bent on precognoscing himself, concerning
the events of the preceding night, he dexterously
slipped past her, and took his way to the scene of
the late conflagration.

The frame-work of society is so chequered and
interwoven—so held together by minute, and often
invisible links and filaments, that even in a very
large city the most dexterous address can hardly
keep free of some one of its many meshes. This
may daily be seen in the thousand little incidents
which conspire to bring hidden culprits to light,
and to reveal, in the brightness of noon-day, what
has been transacted in the darkness of midnight.
It was, however, but a transient light that the diligent
and judicious inquiries of the cautious Deacon
procured on this dark subject. A customer, B3v 22
who lived as far off as the Abbey-hill, had, at
midnight, on The Windy Wodensday, seen a close
carriage, followed by two muffled outriders, and
preceded by one, drive furiously up the north
back of the Canongate, and stop at, or near the
wicket gate of Cambuskenneth Lodge. A sedan
chair had been seen to wait for a full hour near the
North Loch, in which Mrs. Metcalf had probably
been conveyed, as, when found in an out-house of
the Lodge, it contained a letter addressed to that
excellent matron, in these laconic terms:

“The hour is twelve. Be punctual, and be
faithful; or dread the terrible vengeance of him
you wot of.”

This menacing epistle the Deacon, for the reasonable
price of a half-pint of brandy, obtained from
the highland chairman who had found it; but afterwards
on the request of Mr. Gideon Haliburton,
he gave it up to that unbeneficed divine, who had,
it was known, acted as ghostly confessor to the
midwife.

On the third day that good woman dies, as if to
spite Miss Jacky Pingle and the other gossips of
the wynd; and, though of unblemished reputation,
and even popular in her own neighbourhood,
shrewd suspicions came to be whispered of “a B4r 23
piece of money” given as a bribe to procure the
removal of an infant, whose existence either stood
in the way of some project of unlawful aggrandizement,
or was a stain on the honour of some noble
house.

Eight days afterwards, the Deacon’s servant-lass,
who had been permitted to visit her relations at the
neighbouring village of Cramond, reported, that
on the second morning after The Windy Wodensday,
an elderly woman, travel-worn and outlandish
in her look, was discovered resting on the
parapet of the bridge of Cramond, with a new-born
infant “mother naked of a’ christian cleeding,
save a grand satin mantle, and some wrappers of
fine napery.”

But maugre this information, Miss Pingle was
highly scandalized that the Deacon—“a man in
office,” as she said, “did not cause a search to be
made for the banes o’ the murdered bairn, whilk
would in all likelihood be found below the midwife’s
hearth-stane.”

The prudent Deacon pondered all these things.
That there was a mystery, and probably a guilty
one, he was satisfied. Whatever it might be, it
had produced little good to his frank, jolly, motherly
old neighbour—of whom he refused to
believe any thing sinister, much less cruel or atrocious B4v 24
—and it boded no advantage to himself. He
therefore resolved to observe silence as to his own
share of the mysterious warning forth, and so earnestly
implored Miss Pingle “no to let his word
be heard, or his name to come owre in sic a kittle
question,” that the shrewd maiden began to suspect
his share in the affair to be much deeper than he
was willing to avow. Notwithstanding the baker’s
precautions, the affair was very generally talked
of; and, among the memorabilia of The Windy
Wodensday, the mysterious burning of Cambuskenneth
Lodge, and the sudden death of “Luckie
Metcalf the howdie,” bore an important part.

Shortly after this, the midwife’s only relative,
a daughter advanced in life, married and left
Edinburgh; and her father confessor, the Reverend
Gideon Haliburton, was promoted to the
charge of a straggling hill-side flock, on the
south-western skirts of ―shire. Faithful
to the mysterious confidence placed in him by the
dying woman, he preserved entire silence on what
had passed, regardless alike of the open assaults and
secret minings of Miss Jacky Pingle, who indited
him to sundry tea-drinkings, and of the sly interrogatories
of the Chief of the Bakers.

“It was a dark providence,” he said; “and
the Lord would bring light out of it in His ain B5r 25
time. The less ye ken o’ sic matters, man, the
sounder will your sleep be. Keep well when you
are well; and follow your ain peaceful calling. I
went not out of my own road to pry into this
mystery. The will of Providence laid it at my
door.—May it be His will soon to remove the
charge; for to me it is a sore and a heavy.”

This whetter and damper—for these hints acted
as both—silenced, if they did not satisfy the Deacon.

26

Chapter III.

A Family Group.

It was nearly nineteen years from the memorable
night of The Windy Wodensday, and early
in a breezy bracing October morning, that Wolfe
Grahame, a young Scottish gentleman of an ancient
family in ―shire, prepared to leave
the home of his childhood and youth, to join a regiment
of horse, then stationed in the south-west
of Ireland, in which he had lately been promoted
to the rank of captain.

The servants had been astir at a very early hour
on the morning of a day so important to the family, B6r 27
as that on which the heir was to set out on a
perilous expedition; for Ireland was then in rebellion.
A profuse breakfast, served by a blazing
hearth, in a handsome and highly-ordered, though
old-fashioned wainscot parlour, only waited the appearance
of the master of the mansion, and of the
Reverend Gideon Haliburton, who, having obtained
leave of absence from a rather rebellious flock
to visit his relations in Gallowayshire, proposed to
give his company to his young friend and quondam
pupil as far as Portpatrick.

Wolfe Grahame, early left an orphan, had,
with the exception of the time spent at school and
the university, lived wholly, till he joined his regiment,
with his paternal uncle at Monkshaugh.
This estate had once been of considerable magnitude,
but it was now more remarkable for beauty
of scenery than extent of acres. Such
as it was, however, Wolfe was the heir apparent;
for his uncle, Mr. Robert Grahame, was
now a bachelor of threescore acknowledged, and
perhaps a few more debatable years; and had
every symptom of so remaining. While the
younger brother, the father of Wolfe, had been
buffeting with fortune in all the struggles and vicissitudes
of a man’s life, Mr. Robert Grahame, or B6v 28
Monkshaugh, as he was called, was wholly
brought up under the care of a peevish, sickly, but
doting mother, whose selfish teasing fondness might
probably have revolted a boy of more spirit and
better understanding; but this kindness he returned
with affection equal to her own, in kind and in degree.
Laughed at by the neighbourhood, the old
woman considered a plague, the young man a jest,
they formed a little world to each other, till their
mutual cares and coddlings became the main business,
as it was the chief delight, of their lives.

In childhood Master Robert had been remarkable
for those delicate pink cheeks, curling locks,
and black eyes of japan-lustre, which some
mothers value so highly in “pretty-behaved young
gentlemen” who keep their hair smooth, their
hands clean, their clothes untorn, and who never
fight, mount wild horses, nor go near the water.
And in Monkshaugh, as in others, “the boy was
father to the man.” The laird, now a little withered
old bachelor, still valued in himself the remains
of his boyish beauty, and piqued himself
inordinately on his gentle ’haviour, and his birth as
a Grahame, and a de Bruce.

As the eldest son of a Scottish family of the
second order of pretence, immemorial custom had B7r 29
dedicated young Monkshaugh to the study of law.
But nature, as will sometimes happen, may prove
too strong for custom; rebellious even against
Scottish “use and wont.” He obtained an advocate’s
gown, however; and the old lady read his
name in the almanack: but “he was too much
of the gentleman”—the old family doer informed
his mother—“to bather his head wi’ law;” which
he renounced accordingly—or which more properly
renounced him. But though Mr. Robert
Grahame, or Buckish Bob, as he was then called,
made little progress in cultivating the favour of
the eldest of the Black Graces, in other distinguished
walks he was more successful. For several
seasons he was a member of the Harmonic Society,
and could even to the present day scrape
“Je vous dirai, ma maman,” and two tunes and a
half of Corelli on the violoncello. He had also been
a director of St. Cecilia’s Hall when the inspired
votaress first “drew an angel down” upon Niddry
Street; and indisputably had the honour of opening
several balls in the George’s Square Assembly
Rooms with the most celebrated beauties and
toasts of the sixties. Mr. Robert Grahame had
also, in those times, been occasionally admitted to
the revels of the choice spirits of the Poker B7v 30
Club. But, eclat apart, he neither relished their
wine nor their wit. Even before his mother died
he was become too old for an acceptable dangler,
and all unfit, with his precise and maidenly habits,
for the tear and wear of manly society; so he retired
to his estate, to educate, he said, his brother’s
son—in fact, to superintend the hatching of his
Bantams, the preparation of his jellies, and above
all—for country gentlemen must have some paramount
pursuit—to watch the doings out of doors
and within of the newly enriched mushroom
family of his neighbour, Mr. Hutchen of Harletillum,
which, root, branch and off-sets, the Laird
detested, nay hated, in as far as an energetic and
decided sentiment could find harbourage in a
breast, not absolutely without gall but destitute of
great capacity of any kind. This Mr. Hutchen,
or “Hurcheon”—which last Monkshaugh said
was the true name—was originally a country attorney
and banker, and had been agent and trustee
for himself, when pecuniary involvements made
nursing necessary for his estate. He was also trustee
for the Lord de Bruce, a lunatic, and the kinsman
of Monkshaugh.

Monkshaugh had now ceased to visit town even
occasionally, and in all matters of taste, fashion, B8r 31
and wit, lived wholly in the past. Thus, every
little peculiarity gaining force in retirement, he
gradually lost the flattering appellation of Buckish
Bob, and, among his rustic neighbours and
servants, acquired the not less significant, and
more appropriate title of Auld Pernickitie—
originally bestowed by his favourite waiting gentleman,
gossip and privy counsellor, Francie, or
Francis Frisel,—who was himself, with equal propriety,
known in the household and country-side
by the nickname of The Whittret.

But though so precise in manners, and altogether,
it must be owned, rather a fiddling, insignificant
personage, Monkshaugh was so kind in
heart, and so inoffensive in conduct, that his servants
and tenants bore him considerable regard.
He was their property, their preserve, whom they
were unwilling to see any one ridicule, back-
bite or plunder, save themselves.

Wolfe Grahame, who too frequently was guilty
of violating the rigid decorums of his uncle’s
breakfast table, by clearing away before him,
right and left, in season and out of season, in the
grey dawn of this morning stalked across the parlour
with heavy measured steps, the breakfast unharmed,
his eyes cast down, his high and broad B8v 32
forehead clouded with thought, his finely curved
dark brows knit like those of a man in deep abstraction,
or one communing with himself on
some subject of painful and intense solicitude.
The absence of those who so long delayed the
parting meal, seemed unheeded by the young
man, who occasionally in his walk paused and
gazed through a window, which, deeply ensconced
in the thick walls of the old mansion, looked up
into a wooded glade, called the dean or den of
Ernescraig, and commanded a partial view of the
Pech’s Mount, a bold and rocky eminence, midway
up the mountains and jutting from their
sides, on which stood the Tower of Ernescraig, an
ancient stronghold of the Lords de Bruce.

Once as sighing deeply he turned his eyes from
this absorbing object of contemplation, he caught
the keen glance of the official in waiting evidently
watching his bearing, a strange struggle of mirth
and malice sparkling in the small twinkling eyes,
which, with the sharpness of bodkin points, peered
out from a shrew-mouse visage. Francie Frisel,
or the Whittret, as he was usually called from his
exceeding nimbleness and agility, was a dwarfed,
wizzened, elvish being, of the very smallest size
of the human species in stature and girth, Laps C1r 33
and Esquimaux not excluded. A century before
he might have been taken for Monkshaugh’s imp
or familiar, though there was indeed little danger
of the laird’s being burned for a wizard, even in
those superstitious times. The Whittret, if not a
real fairy man, of which there were shrewd suspicions
in the hamlet of Castleburn, was at least a
foundling reared in his master’s family. He held
a rather anomalous situation in the now reduced
household establishment, being in fact everything,
and nothing,—piper, butler, and gossip, as well as
the general obliging conveyancer of letters, parcels,
and all sorts of intelligence, from the royal
borough of Rookstown to every farm-toun, cottage,
and Ha’ house in the neighbourhood.

This man of many functions, thus caught in the
manner but no whit disconcerted, began to supply
the large and highly burnished brass-mounted
grate with fresh billets of birchwood, that sweetest
of fuel, and to cheer his labours by trolling
aloud the old ditty of—

“My bonny Lizzie Baillie, Your mother canna want ye; Sae let the trooper gang his lane, And carry his portmanty, &c. &c.”

In spite of serious displeasure a smile curled the Vol. I. C C1v 34
lip of Wolfe Grahame, who well knew that he was
himself the butt of this expostulatory lyric. He
once again paused in his walk, and, bending down,
pinched the shoulder of the stooping manikin.

“Frisel, thou art the most prying and impudent
varlet that ever ran loose working mischief in an
old house. What prevents me now from crushing
every bone in that shrimpish body of thine, which
I could so easily do?”

“No sae very easy as ye trow, Captain Wolfe.
First, there is your ain kind heart to prevent ye,—
forbye my skirling;—and a brave exploit it would
be for a captain o’ dragoons to break the banes o’
a puir singet creature like me. But I ken ye are
thinking ye saw ane in the Ernescraig wood, i’ the
grey o’ morning; but it might be my wraith,
or a howlet, or a wild cat. I’ll be sworn it was
a faithful silent creature, will ne’er blab to cause
skaith to you, far less to ony fair leddy.”

“Leave the room, sir,” cried Wolfe, in a voice
which forbade farther parley; and the Whittret
obeyed; but, by a gentle slam of the door, threw
down the gauntlet to his young master.

“And this,” thought Grahame, “is but a first
taste. Where is it all to end? My Elizabeth!
in what a fate has my rash love involved thee!” C2r 35
The young man again fell into meditation, and resumed
his measured walk.

The Whittret, it should be told, had no felonious
intent in watching his young master’s bearing,
farther than what arose from discontent, that
he who had so largely assisted in all former boyish
pranks, should be left out when mischief more
daring was going forward,—and that too, as he
suspected though erroneously, under the agency
of his rival, the redoubtable veteran trooper, Corporal
Fugal, who had been the attendant of
the Lord de Bruce, and also the instructor of
Wolfe Grahame in the management of his horse,
and in all other military and manly exercises.

Perched high in a window bunker of the kitchen,
his usual roost in good weather, his arms folded,
whistling and kicking his heels in cadence, the
Whittret was addresses by Effie Fechnie, a perpendicular
rigid maiden, with high shoulders,
flat chest, and long pinched visage set round with
close-lappet pinners, who had for thirty years
presided in the kitchen of Monkshaugh, and at
last obtained the brevet rank of housekeeper;
for the laird himself, without stinting her of the
emoluments, exercised all the real authority of the
office.

C2v 36

“Is the Laird no busket yet?” said she. “That
weary wig o’ his!”—The Laird’s morning toilet
was as tedious and elaborate as that of a French
lady of the old regime, before the guillotine taught
despatch in all affairs of the head.—“Nor Mr.
Gideon come either?—wi’ a pound of dirt at ilka
cloot, honest man, making a house like a midden.
The mutton-ham will be brandered black, and my
souple scones as teugh as the widdie.”

“And the widdie wring the craigs they are to
gang owre,” cried the Whittret, “for aught I
care.”

Effie stayed her manual operations at the dresser,
to gaze with wonderment on the enraged manikin.

“How long, Effie, have I, Francis Frisel or
Fraser, commonly called the Whittret, lived in
the service of the Laird of Monkshaugh and his
nevoy?”

“It may be better than twa-and-twenty year
since the tinklers drappet ye like a fairy-token,
at our back yett, yon morning,” said, Effie, drily.
“Ye might no be aboon a year o’ a Christian
bairn’s bouk; but as ye girned up in my face,
like a wee auld man, three score years wad na ha’e
matched the tongue o’ ye. Ye ha’e gotten your
bite and your sup about the toun ever since, except C3r 37
the year the Laird bound ye to Lowrie Labrod
the tailor,—and when ye took the pet and ran
off to ’list i’ the Loudons. Pity ye are o’ sic scrimp
stature, Francie, with your bauld soger-spirit.”

“Lang or short, the house o’ Monkshaugh has
seen the last o’ my service. I’m sworn to that!
Pernickitie has grown a perfect Nabal nigger.
When I came hame frae Rookstown yestreen,
after trailing a strucken hour, seeking that Court
leddies’ sticking plaister—de’il plaister him!—for
the plook on his chin that the house has been held
astir about, he ne’er had the grace to say, ‘gude
Francie—ill Francie, ha’e ye a mouth for a dram?’
but ‘how do I set it?’ And the young one, that
I could have spilled my reddest heart’s blude for,
colleaguin’ wi’ that auld blasting blunderbuss, Corporal
Fugal. Flesh and blude cannot thole this.
I’ll sing ballants, or rowly-powly, or set up in
the Wast-port, o’ Edinburgh wi’ my razors, and
shave hieland shearers at a groat to the de’il’s dizzen,
ere I be used this gate.”

“Ye’ll take pity on us yet,” said the maiden, with
provoking dryness, as she quietly proceeded with
her household duties; “and give us a day for repentance
and amendment, ere ye withdraw such a C3v 38
manful prop frae the tottering roof-tree of Monkshaugh.
But what think ye, Francie,—is the young
captain and the auld corporal laying their heads
thegither about that lassie de Bruce?—Weel, I
set my face clean against it. But whisht! There’s
Pernickitie’s genty footie tippy-tippying down
the back stair frae the blue chalmer. He has
toddled about fraw kitchen to ha’ this whole blessed
morning, like a hen seeking a nest, honest man.”

And now in unison with a cracked bell which
sounded the breakfast hour, was heard the thin and
somewhat affected voice of Monkshaugh, crying
“Francis—Francie Frisel.”

“Coming! coming, Monkshaugh,” cried Frisel.
“Hand me the clear tea-kettle, lass. As it
is the last day of my sojourn within these gates, I
need not affront auld Pernickitie, puir boddie,
afore a stranger like godly Gideon. But I swear
—witness for me Euphan Gideon—by the Black
Rood o’ Scotland, that I’ll be at the bottom of the
captain’s secret before I’m a day aulder! So gi’e
me the clear tea-kettle that’s crooning its matins
saw bonnily, and these piping hot flour scones.—
the froth is lying on that kipper like lammer beads.
Keep a bit warm to me, Effie; and ne’er let on
what I minted about a change. We may a’ change C4r 39
quarters belyve, if John Hurcheon get his will o’
us. And godly Gideon’s half-marrow had been
below the mools a lawfu’ time. Keep up your
heart lass! ye ken ye’re a crook-horned auld ewe
o’ his ain flock, and will ha’e a chance i’ this vacancy.
I’ll to the parlour!”

“Aye, ye have wit in your anger, Francie, to
take your word wi’ a warrant.—Right north side
o’ the hill man, (for Frisel was thought to be of
highland blood.) Gi’e the laird the warst word o’
your pack, and win farther ben wi’ him than this
honest, frugal, eident, faithfu’ servants, wha gi’e
him not eye-service as men pleasers.”

“True ye say, Effie,” interrupted Frisel, returning
for fresh supplies—“not eye-service, seeing ye
have but one worth reckoning on; and as for a
man-pleaser—Whew!” The Whittret made a
face and eyes, which, with upturned palms, spoke
on this point more forcibly than any form of
words could have done.

“Gae ye imp,” cried Effie; “your tongue is
nae scandal;” and after his departure, she thus soliloquized
—“weel may I groan, land and sair, for a
bit hole to ca’ my ain. Naething like ane’s ain
fireside; and its a dowie thing, and a dowf for our
minister who is but a handless man, to gang C4v 40
hame to toom walls and a cauld hearth-stane. And
there he comes riding gawsie on Jenny Geddes;
and no an ill-looking man either, to be pocky-
arred, and downright ugly.”

Slowly and at sober pace, Corporal Fugal at
the bridle, came on the long-backed, shambling,
down-looking, demure mare, which bore the huge,
lank, and bony bulk of the Reverend Gideon Haliburton.
Gideon alighted in the wide antique
court surrounded partly by old high walls, partly by
hawthorn and holly bushes mixed with gueldre-
roses and tall lilacs, and having a grotesque stonework
fountain covered by one fine spreading old
holly. From the parlour window, his host rubbing
hands like withered lilies sunk knuckle
deep in plaited cambric frills, surveyed the fresh
arrivals, steed and rider, not without some laudable
attempts at quizzing, which had a rather comical
effect in the eyes of Wolfe Grahame.

This same delightful propensity of quizzing,
omnipotent as love itself, pervades all earthly space
—all ranks of men. The inmates of Bedlam quiz
each other; and the art is as well understood, and
as keenly practised in the nightly haunts of the
sturdy beggar, as in the saloon of the prince.
Market-women and boat-scullers are adepts in C5r 41
quizzing; an Irish beggar will be found more
adroit in the practice than a modern critic, though
his chief aim is to quiz with smart effect.
The cockney quizzes the clown; the clown retorts
on the cockney. The player, whose regular trade
is quizzing, hits at all ranks of life; and all ranks
enjoy a quiz against the poor player “strutting
his hour.” Why then, might not the neat, well-
dressed, spruce little Laird of Monkshaugh quiz
the gaunt, uncouth, slovenly minister of the Sourholes,
without exciting the half-derisive smile of
Wolfe Grahame?

The gentlemen who now exchanged the compliments
of the morning, were the very antipodes
of each other; but they had one point of cordial
union—warm regard for the young man who was
this morning to leave them. Mr. Gideon had
long set down Monkshaugh in the tablets of his
mind as “an ill-less, gude-less, prinkie kind o’
prelatic boddie, who liked to claver about laced
cravats, Bristo’ buckles set in silver, and his rotten
forebears, a malignant race as a’ the Grahames
were;”—while Monkshaugh, on his side, was not at
all desirous of cultivating any particular intimacy
with a rough-spun, mean-born, uncouth, schismatic
person, who wore coarse shirts two in the week, and C5v 42
whom, in all their past intercourse, he had never
been able to impress with a due sense of his own
personal claims and family dignities.

The first greetings despatched, Monkshaugh
made a sly survey of the appointments of his visiter,
not without serious misgivings as to the
outward shews of the strange companion, voluntarily
chosen for some days by a very handsome
and well-equipped young officer of light dragoons.

The Reverend Gideon Haliburton was now in
his sixtieth year; but he, perhaps, looked older.
Tall, gaunt, in-kneed, and clumsily jointed, in
walking his right side was always in considerable
advance of the left, and the movements of the whole
man seemed impelled by some internal piece of unwieldy,
ill-oiled mechanism, which it required a
strong impulse to set in motion, but which once
set a-going, it appeared as difficult to arrest.
Cheek-bones, which went far to justify the aspersions
cast on the national physiognomy, a mouth,
cavernous and vast, and furnished with detached
streaky columns in suitable proportion,
large, noticeable eyes—colour, pepper and salt
mixture,—and grizzled powerful eye-brows, constituted,
together with a broad, expansive, furrowed
forehead, the coarse elements of a face which, nevertheless, C6r 43
wore an indescribable expression of the
agreeable and the benevolent. The outward
equipments of Gideon though gall and wormwood
to the laird of Monkshaugh, were such as, when
in decent order, very well suited his rank and profession.
A full suit of priests’-grey coarse cloth,
made with ample allowance of skirt, sleeve and
pocket flap—“made for his growing,” the Whittret
said—and not very often renewed, derived considerable
splendour from what the minister styled
“a vain superfluity” of black horn buttons, each
nearly the size of Monkshaugh’s Nankin-China
saucers, strong shoes an inch think in the sole,
home-knit ribbed stockings of coarse grey worsted
yarn, with black lackered shoe and knee buckles,
a small hat, certainly not a recent purchase, and an
immense grizzled wig, to which more than one grey
mare had contributed the flowing honours of her
tail, crowned and completed his ordinary costume.
And this obstinate wig, in defiance of the hints of
the Laird, and the handling of Frisel, would
at all times sit awry; and was, moreover, so constructed
as to offer behind an open field, in which
the craniologist might have pursued his favourite
speculations undisturbed. Indeed, the honest
man’s favourite attitude, or employment, when engaged C6v 44
in thought, was to curry his right knee
with one hand, while the other was, with equal diligence,
somewhere groping between the scalp and
the wig, which thus enjoyed almost a sinecure.

Monkshaugh, who would as soon have suffered
his little finger to be cut off as have appeared before
the stranger in dishabile, would undoubtedly have undergone
decapitation before he would have shone
forth in the garb of his reverend guest. He generally,
as on this morning, wore a cinnamon-coloured
full suit of the finest cloth, long worn, and often very
nicely brushed, no doubt, yet looking as if no such
implement as a brush had ever touched its glossy
nap. This dress was lined with a silk of the same
hue but rather lighter in the shade, and with
delicately fine snow-white linen, cambric frills,
plaited at breast and hands, of which no thread
looked awry, a small close-fitting, crisp, and well
powdered cauliflower wig, with little winglet curls,
and a slender queue, pearl-grey silk stockings,
well-japanned shoes of Spanish leather, ornamented,
not with those brilliantly set buckles which
stirred the gall of Gideon but with smaller ones
of gold, formed the neat, spruce, every-day costume
of Monkshaugh. Some time afterwards
when in Edinburgh, he parted with the queue, C7r 45
and then looked, his country friends said, like a
rat without the tail: Italian ferret came also to
be substituted for the sparkling shoe-buckles—innovations
which the Laird traced to the French revolution,
and detested even while he gave into them.

The strong, harsh, but manly voice of Gideon,
whether he powerfully uplifted the psalm to some
Presbyterian tune of orthodox discord, or pierced
the drowsy ears of the straggling out-posts at a
tent-preaching, was equally at variance as his
figure with the low and yet sharp tones of Monkshaugh’s
thin small voice; so that when the Laird
was in a fidgetty mood, the sonorous haughs, and
rumbling hems of Gideon, acted on his nerves like
an electric machine.

With one of those gurgling loud hems, Mr. Gideon,
at this moment, clashed himself down into
Monkshaugh’s chair of state and precedence, which
actually screamed under the unaccustomed pressure.
This place of dignity the Laird had occupied
ever since the decease of his lady mother, not
yielding it even to his own kinswoman, the daughter
of Lord de Bruce; and this violent usurpation
of his rights—this “pushing him from his stool,”
completed the civil enormities of Mr. Gideon. The C7v 46
Laird could form no conception of any degree of
ignorance or absence of mind, that could palliate so
flagrant a breach of all decorum and good-breeding.

Wolfe Grahame still gazing on the distant
tower, was unaware of this total perversion of the
economy of the breakfast table, till he perceived
the little petted face of his uncle. He looked to
Frisel, who in a twinkling arranged matters,—
first making a vain attempt to shove up Gideon,
and then shouting in his ear—“That’s the Laird’s
cheyre;” while Wolfe, with a more vigorous arm,
gave a fresh push and effected a dislodgement.

“Nay, but, nevoy Wolfe,” cried Monkshaugh,
his good-breeding taking alarm, “perhaps Mr. Gideon
meant to be kind enough to make tea. My
poor skill—”

“Skink your tea-water yoursel’, Monkshaugh,”
interrupted Gideon; “it sets you better. I have
sma’ skill o’ hussey-skep, or tea-drinking trinkum-
trankums; and little brow o’ them since I saw a
professing gentlewoman wha shall be nameless, of
whom I had hoped better things, ready to swerf,
as a weak woman will do if a mishap come owre
her wee ane, when, wi’ a bit wap o’ my coat-sleeve
here, in uttering a word o’ thanksgiving, her tea- C8r 47
tackle was coupit, and some bits o’ platters, no the
size o’ limpet shells, demolished.”

“I know them weel! the gudewife o’ Hungeremout’s
dolphin and dragon auld set,” said Monkshaugh.

“It matters little, Laird of Monkshaugh,” continued
Gideon, “whether the idol of the vain
unsanctified heart be a tea-cup, a weel-mousted
periwig, or the fair face of an enticing maiden.”

A little sniffle of the nostril and twitching of the
lip visible in Monkshaugh, seemed to appropriate
one part of this free speech; and the heightened
colour of Wolfe Grahame took home what remained.
This, however, was not Gideon’s usual style
of rebuke; and it was repented on the instant, at
least so far as the young man was concerned. He
broke the silence by saying—

“But let us fall to—‘Meat nor Mass never
hindered wark.’ That is a true saying, though
the Pope had made it. We have a long journey
before us; and ‘Tempis fugit,’ Wolfe, my auld
friend;—that is ‘Time and tide will no man bide,’
Monkshaugh.”

“I studied my humanities under Mr. Thomas
Ruddiman,” replied the Laird, pettishly.

“An able master, nathless,” said Gideon. “But C8v 48
fall to. We have a long journey, as I said;
though auld Janet is on her mettle this morning.”

“Auld Janet!” cried the Whittret, in well-
affected tones of astonishment,—for his tongue
had long enjoyed the privilege of the parlour.
“It’s no possible that the yauld mettlesome spanker,
on which ye rade down the loanings this
morning, is that auld, spavined, wind-galled, waul-
eyed jade, Jenny Geddes, whilk ye bought at
Auchtermuchty fair, because Tam Toutup, the
horse-couper, told ye she wad beck and cower on
her hunkers, as she wont in worthy Mr. Ebenezer
Snodgrass’s aught, if the gude man wanted to utter
a word o’ prayer by the way-side.”

There is perhaps no man whatever quite insensible
to flattery on the subject of his gun, his
hound, his boat, or his horse; nor was Mr. Gideon,
whose good faith in all he heard said
amounted to almost infantine credulity.

“Aye, but it is just Janet,” replied he, grinning
a gracious smile on the Whittret, “whilk,
as ye rightly remember, upon the death of Moderator,
the former brute, I bought of that rogue
Toutup, graceless loon! wha bragged to my
face, two weeks thereafter, how he had beflummed
me. Well—he has gone to his long reckoning, D1r 49
and Jenny is here yet,—and on the mend ye think,
Francie? Douce lass! I’m no disputing but she
may ha’e her ain bits o’ flings; but we are used to
them now; and she might fall into worse guiding.
So for the sake o’ her who is in a better place, and
who was aye kind to beast and body, we will e’en
toyte about thegither for a’ our time of a sinfu’
weary warld.”

The tawny eyes of Gideon glistened as he alluded
to his deceased wife; but such relentings of
nature he was accustomed to think a sinful repining
at Providence. “Worms of the dust, against
whom do we murmer!” he ejaculated; and added
more cheerily, “But it is a world o’ brave promise
to you, Captain Wolfe, my lad, this same morning;
—and if it be the will of Him, who laid
the foundations thereof, who made the cloud its
garment, and think darkness its swaddling band,
lang, lang may ye find it sae.”

There was so much of the philosophy of pure
single-heartedness about Gideon, that his simple
manner of receiving a joke against himself seldom
failed to blunt its edge, or even to turn it
against the heart of the inventor, provided there
was any human flesh in that part of the jester’s
anatomy. It did so now.

Vol. I. D D1v 50

“Now fiend ha’e me!” cried the Whittret, “if I
wad na rather meet yoursel’, minister, in the loanings
on auld shambling Jenny, than John Hurcheon
of Harletillum, on our Captain Wolfe’s
pacing ’Rabian, Saladin. De’il an he had broken
his neck the first time he crossed its back!”

“Mony thanks, wee man.—But oh! Francie, is
it meet to wish evil to your neighbour; or speidfu’
to bandy the name of that fallen spirit? It
likes him weel to be spoken of, man; ay, e’en in
idle jokes.”

“Wha?—the de’il?” cried Francie. “If I tak’
na my Maker’s name in vain, I may surely use a
little freedom wi’ the de’il’s, and wi’ his billy’s,
John Hurcheon?”

“And with your master’s presence?” said
Monkshaugh, who writhed under the free allusions
made to the sale of his nephew’s favourite
horse to his powerful and detested neighbour, from
a secret consciousness of the cause of that mortifying
transaction.

The endless fiddling preparations for breakfast
being at last arranged to his satisfaction, Monkshaugh
requested Mr. Gideon to say grace.

The Laird had a practice—no bad one by the
way—of boiling the eggs for breakfast in a small D2r 51
silver skillet, under his own eye; and when honoured
with the visits of the regular clergyman of
the parish, that judicious divine so managed his
benediction, that it was found quite as useful as a
sand-glass; for the eggs slipped in at the commencement,
were at the “amen” boiled to a
“single popple,” the Whittret said. It is impossible
for us to give our readers any adequate idea of
the importance of egg-boiling in the estimation of
Monkshaugh. Yet, although he had some faint
notion that Gideon might be a little discursive in
his devotions, he rashly committed the silver
skillet and the treasures it contained to his discretion;
a fatal confidence as it proved! for Gideon,
who never missed throwing in “a word in season,”
on this memorable era in the life of his friend,
Wolfe, launched forth in an unusual strain of
homely and touching eloquence; commencing
with the journey of the young patriarch into Padanaram,
next going down with Joseph into
Egypt, (by which time Monkshaugh began to
fidget,) and following the stripling shepherd of
Bethlem on his going forth, armed with a sling and
the stones of the brook, in the might of the Lord
of Hosts, against the gigantic Philistine; and
ending with the three children walking unscathed D2v 52
in the fiery furnace, and Daniel untouched in the
lion’s den—that is, the city of Dublin whither
Wolfe was now bound.

“My siller pannikin, Francie!” whispered the
Laird in agony to his domestic. But that worshipful
serving-man, bearing in mind divers well-earned
drams shabbily withheld, with upturned eyes
was wrapped in high devotion, deaf to the entreaty
of his master. So the eggs, begun by boiling, were
finished by a sort of roasting—thus adding yet
another to the three hundred ways which the
genius of the French has invented for cooking
eggs; and, worse still, the favourite silver utensil
was nearly converted into its original bullion.

The Laird, who, after the hint of “making idols
of China platters and mousted periwigs,” disdained
to snatch with his own hand the vessel from
destruction, was not however proof against this
fresh vexation; nor did he conceal his displeasure.
“Not that he minded the value of the
skillet, but it had been brought into the family
by the ‘fair Grace Drummond, called the flower
of Strathallan,’ and kept by the ladies of Monkshaugh
ever since, for mulling wine, and making
starch for their Valenciennes, Mechlin and Dresden
laces.”

D3r 53

“And the eggs,” quoth Frisel, “might do for
the bairns to dye, and row on the braes on Pasch
Sunday, Mr. Gideon.”

“Ay! and are they clean useless say ye,
Francie,” replied Gideon, a grim smile mantling
his long visage.—“O, but it’s like marrow to my
bones to get the whip hand o’ the flesh even in so
sma’ a matter as the boiling of an egg!” Monkshaugh
stared.

“Hand them this way,” said Gideon.—“And
as this clayey house of our tabernacle must be
maintained in some measure o’ strength, while our
Master has work for us to do, ye’ll fetch me an
oat cake from Effie, my wee man; and the back
o’ my hand to your dainty breads.—And see,
Monkshaugh, if your doo, or your sow, or your
dog, or your cat, will chuse the wheaten flour devices
of penny-leddies, baps and luggit-rows, before
our ain hamely country commodities. Nature
never errs in these her dumb bairns.”

“No—nor in a kindly Scot,” said Frisel.

Monkshaugh, who prided himself exceedingly
on the wheaten bread manufactured in his family,
became more and more petted, fancying Gideon
studiously affronted him.

“If this be so,” said Wolfe, smiling, “you D3v 54
ought to mortify the flesh upon the wheaten bread.”
And he pushed various sorts before Gideon.

“And I believe ye may be right, Wolfe, my
lad. It’s but a carnal longing this for aiten cakes
after all;” and pushing out his huge paw, he
drew towards him, as what he supposed the simplest
and least ostentatious sort of bread on the
table, the identical souple scone on which the
Laird had fixed his eyes and heart, and at one of
which he would have delicately picked for an hour,
though godly Gideon, folding them up like pancakes,
obeyed the adage, and made “but one bite
of a cherry.”—He afterwards so unconsciously
mortified the flesh, that rolls, baps, and breakfast
bread of all sizes and denominations, Scottish and
English, disappeared before him like snow in a
shower.

In utter consternation, Monkshaugh, forgetting
his displeasure, looked on by stealth, and at last
seriously alarmed, whispered his nephew—“He’ll
worry, Wolfe—he’ll worry—he’ll do himself a mischief!
—A’ the hard eggs!—I could not in a fortnight
eat so much, put breakfast, dinner, and supper
thegither.”

Wolfe smiled, but interfered not; and at last
Gideon called a halt, observing, that “He liked to D4r 55
rein in his appetite; and both as a man and a
Christian scorned dainty eaters, who held as much
sossing about the stuffing of one miserable craw
as might suffice for a bridal banquet.”

This was at once applied by the Laird to his
own elaborate preparation of a morsel of toast,
which he employed more time in buttering than
sufficed for Gideon to swallow unquestioning, at
least ten souple scones; but he considered an inuendo
proceeding from such a quarter as rather
complimentory to his superior delicacy and refinement,
and kept his recovered good humour.

The hour of departure was now come.—The
tramp of Gideon resounded through the parlour,
till roof and rafters dirled. Wolfe’s horse,
patted by the old trooper, Fugal, stood neighing
in the court, champing the bit; Jenny Geddes
emitted an emulous bray; and the maid-servants,
with tears ready to be shed. and clean aprons
equally ready to dry them, lined the low-browed,
arched stone hall of Monkshaugh.

Monkshaugh, who had trifled away the long
morning, was now driven to extremity. Orders
and counter-orders, moral counsels and prudential
warnings, economical hints and medical cautions,
were all huddled into the last ten minutes.

D4v 56

“Ye’ll make your man (ane of your own troop
will be kept wi’ least cost) keep an exact tally wi’
the washer-women—extortioning queans!—and
aboon a’ thing keep free of odd stockings. Dinna
forget your prayers at night when ye can help it;”
(Gideon groaned) “for ye ken that like myself
ye whiles sleep in on a morning.—It’s a trick o’
the name of Grahame, Mr. Gideon; and the alliance
o’ the de Bruce does not mend us, as we may
see by that lazy cuttie ’Lizbeth, who should have
been here long ere this time.—Ye have six new
Bandana napkins, nephew Wolfe, forbye the fourteen
auld anes. See that ye drop none of them
in the mess-room; for Major Holster tells me that
all is butter in the black dog’s halse that falls bye
there. And now, upon my blessing, Wolfe, try
to keep the night-cap on your head till morning.
Strangers will think ye were bred among runagate
hieland salvages, wi’ heads o’ hair like heather
cows, and no in a civilized lowland gentleman’s
house.―Take down the portmanty to the court,
Francie.—Servants need not hear a’ thing, Mr.
Gideon”—and turning to Wolfe—“Ye are not a
bairn now, nevoy; and ye ken weel that the clear
annual rent of Monkshaugh is not what it has
been. But ye have done—and I will tell it before D5r 57
the face of him it has pleased you to choose
for a friend—a generous and a kind part by your
auld uncle; and I’ll want or ye want I’ll reverse
the motto o’ our cousins, Mr. Gideon, now that
Wolfe’s credit and the family name have to be
maintained among the fremit.—No’ that I would
encourage extravagance; and ye ne’er were given
to drinking nor dicing more than beseems a gentleman.”
(Another long rumbling groan from
Gideon.) “I ha’e no fears on that score.—And
now, Wolfe Grahame upon my blessing, and as ye
wad not bring my grey hairs wi’ sorrow to the
grave—binna that I wear a periwig—I charge you
no to bring hame as a wife, to the house o’ Monkshaugh,
ony lang Irish Madam, i’ the place and
room of your grandmother, my ever honoured mother,
of blessed memory; for she never could
thole outlandish Irish leddies; they have na a
hereawa’ look.”

The only specimens, by the way, of the Irish
fair that the Laird had ever seen, were the tall
randy wife of Fugal, a true-bred leaguer lady;
and a Miss O’Brien, who had exhibited her stature
and other graces at a neighbouring fair, to
spectators at a groat a head.

Wolfe laughingly gave his uncle the desired D5v 58
pledge that he would neither woo nor wed lady
of the green island of song, short nor tall, dark
nor fair; and, Monkshaugh, mightily relieved,
passed to the most solemn business of the morning
—a coup-de-theatre, which he has reserved to
overwhelm his nephew, astonish the household,
and strike the irreverent seceder minister dumb
forever. This was neither more nor less than bestowing
on Wolfe, as a parting gift, an heir-loom
of which the family had indeed some reason to
be proud:—

“Hem, a-hem.—Call up Fugal, Francie, he’s
an auld soger; and look up the Pechs’ Path and
tell me what you see.”

The Laird compressed his thin lips, gave his
head a few little significant nods, rubbed his lily
hands, and altogether assumed a very imposing
air as he paraded the room.

“It’s merely a family trifle, the gift of a French
King, Mr. Gideon—an auld sword of the Lord
Robert de Bruce, our ancestor, which your pupil,
Leddy Elizabeth de Bruce, discovered lately among
some rubbish in the howlets’ tower of Ernescraig.”

Wolfe, though his mind was enchained to other
and dearer interests, could not be insensible to this
gift. The sword had been presented to the de D6r 59
Bruce by Henry the Fourth of France,—Henry
of Navarre, as Wolfe better liked to style him,—
and was in every way a gift worthy of the gallant
monarch who gave it, and the not less gallant soldier
on whom it was bestowed. It was a desirable
sort of credential for a young soldier who had to
make his own way in life, and who might often
encounter those who set more store by the present
affluence, than the past glory of families.

“I thought your fair disciple, Mr. Gideon, our
cousin, would have graced us with her presence this
morning,” said Monkshaugh, “and acted as ladye
love in arming her auld comrade here. Though
but a lassie she is a true de Bruce. Had you but
seen how grand the creature looked when she took
that old blade from where she had hung it in Ernescraig
hall, last year, as a proper gift for Wolfe,—
who is the representative of that branch of the family,
—winking as she unsheathed it too—for it’s
a bit cowardly lassie when her blood is not up.
‘Give this to my cousin Wolfe,’ quoth she, ‘and
tell him that Elizabeth de Bruce, with heart true
as this blade, bids him be faithful and prosperous.’”

“They have got better acquaint since then,”
whispered Frisel, so as only to be heard by Wolfe.

D6v 60

“She has the auld blood in her veins. Alas!
that such malady should follow it!” continued
Monkshaugh, looking saddened.

“Ay—that she has, wi’ reverence,” said the
Whittret, with his wonted ease, “red and warm.
We saw something o’ that when the bruit went
that our house was to clap up a mercenary marriage
with Juliana Hurcheon, for clearing aff her
father Harletillum’s bands over our land. And
yonder she comes, leaning on Monica Doran, her
bower-woman, as the auld ballands ca’t, with the
step of the Queen of Elfland, when all her court is
doing homage round her in a moonlight night i’
the merry merry May.”

Though Wolfe Grahame had good reason to believe
that the lady in question would not voluntarily
appear abroad on this morning, he started to his
feet and advanced to the window.

“I’m wrang; it’s but a gouden glint o’ the sun
among the birk bushes I mistook for her ’broidered
mantle,” said Frisel, looking from the window,
while Wolfe looked over his shoulder,—and then
he whispered, “Right i’ the main though.” But
dreading something sinister from the kindling brow
of Wolfe, the facetious Frisel ran down into the D7r 61
court, as if to look for the lady, and stood below
the open window carolling aloud— “‘Lord Thomas spoke a word, a word; Fair Annie took it ill; “I never would marry a sillerless bride, Against my friends their will.”’”

“We need wait no longer for Elizabeth,” said
Wolfe. “I daresay she has not recovered from
her headach of yesterday.—Uncle, I wait your
blessing.”

“Then take it, Wolfe, heartily, and from the
heart. And the sword—a-hem.” The Laird had
conned a speech—a maiden speech—nay delivered
it (as if in the cock-pit) to Frisel, on the former
day; but orators above all artists are liable to
evil chances.

“There was a time,” he began,—“There was a
time”—and he lifted the sword —“when, with the
generous rashness of youth,” (“That’s from the
Castleburn minister’s second prayer,” whispered
the Whittret to Effie and the maids who had clustered
round the door to view the pageant,) “I
might have entertained a passing wish to carry—
a-hem—this honoured weapon of the de Bruce.”—
(“A spindle and a whorle wad ha’e set ye better,”
whispered Francie.) “But the dolours and tears D7v 62
of my ever honoured mother—the umquhile leddy
o’ Monkshaugh and Kippencreery Wester—and
the interests o’ the house o’ Monkshaugh, destined
me to a mair peaceful life; and I now give, and
bestow, and devise this sword of the de Bruce to
you my nephew and presumptive heir, trusting
that the honoured weapon of a noble de Bruce
will never suffer disgrace in the honourable keeping
of a gallant Grahame—a-hem.”

During this, by far the most brilliant oratorical
display that the Laird had ever been known to
make—for as yet there were neither Celtic Societies,
nor Pitt nor Fox dinners, those hot-beds of
eloquence—Wolfe had been strongly tempted to
smile; but when he saw his poor, little, fidgetty,
kind old uncle’s eyes glisten with mingles vanity
and tenderness, his kindness checked the undutiful
tendency,—he took the sword with a low bow,
read the inscription on the blade—“Le Roy me
donne; de Bruce me porte,”—kissed the gift of
Elizabeth; and, while his red warm lip yet rested
on the steel, secretly vowed loyalty to the gift,
and love and fidelity to the giver.

“Be ye strong as Samson, valiant as David!”
burst forth Mr. Haliburton. “Be that weapon in
your hands the sword of the Lord and of Gideon!— D8r 63
And I fear not your bravery of spirit were but the
cause as clear to me. But this hounding out of
runagate sogers upon a miserable country, to slay,
burn, and spuilzie, is to me but a dark dispensation,
—Papist land as Ireland is. Our ain
brave auld Scotland, in her day of treading down
and humiliation, felt this scourge,—when the red
hand of the slayer was thrust into her peaceful bosom,
—yea, the purple hand of blood Cla―,
a-hem.”—Gideon had got on a very slippery ground
beneath the roof of a Grahame.

“Let us to the road my lad;” he said more
quietly, checking himself in good time. “Ye are
leaving the biding place o’ your forebears in peace
and credit; and in peace and credit may ye return
from that schene o’ mortal strife; wi’ neither
man’s blood, nor woman’s wail, to ascend to the
just and never-winking heavens against ye, in the
cries that pluck down vengeance.”

And now Farewells were said, and hands were
unclasped.—Monkshaugh wiped his eyes, and
gave fresh orders about the baggage; whispering—
“do not forget a half-crown the piece to the servant
queans, and a five shillings to Effie.”

Whether Wolfe stinted his bounty to this precise
sum we know not; but certain it is, that purchased D8v 64
blessings innumerable were showered upon
the young traveller as he passed the threshold of
his ancestors.

“And what do ye deserve at my hands, Master
Frisel?” said Wolfe, as the Whittret darted to
his bridle rein.

“O! maybe a five shillings; but it cannot be
less than a half-crown piece, to drink your health
in the Grahame Arms this blessed night.—Siller
never gathers mould in my pouch.”

“Confound your impudence!—But how am
I to get free of Mr. Gideon at the fords, for a
couple of hours?”

“Now, Captain, I see you ken my way.—Trust
me, and I’ll gang through fire and water for ye.”

“Well,—but with Mr. Gideon. Must I trust
to chance?”

“Na, na,—ye’ll trust to nae chance. By chance
a man breaks his shins. Corporal Fugal would leave
you to chance; but I’m Chance’s master. Trust
to me, Captain. When a man is on the ice it’s his
safety to keep moving.”

Chapter IV.

The Parting.

Monkshaugh and his maiden staff, conjunctly
and severally, now returned to their household duties,
and wiped away the tears of parting and the litter
left by honest Gideon’s cloots; while that divine
scambling on at a great pace for Jenny Geddes,
whose habits were much more deliberate than
those of her fiery and spirited name-mother, soon
overtook Wolfe and the Whittret who acted as
running footman. Soon too they lost sight, for Vol. I. E E1v 66
the time, of the pleasant abode, which, to the parting
eyes of Wolfe Grahame, had never looked,
through its embowering trees, half so peaceful and
beautiful, in its deep seclusion, as it did on this
morning.

Placed by the brink of the winding Oran, on a
flat at the opening gorge of the dean, and “bosomed
in tufted trees,” this sequestered nest lay apart
from the world of Strathoran, in unbroken tranquillity,
save in times of intestine turmoil such as
the present parting.

The mansion, built at various dates, was rambling,
irregular, and Janus-faced, perhaps inconvenient.
But as it rises before us now, through
the softening vista of years, with its venerable
grey roof, steep gables broken into corbie-steps,
awkward chimneys, sentry-box towerlets, out-shots
and in-shots, and adjuncts of all forms, wings
and winglets hastily clapped to in every direction,
when the successive ladies of Monkshaugh
got additions to their families, or the lairds an increase
to their wealth;—as we look back on it, we
think it might have won even a stranger’s admiration,
especially when seen in broken glimpses
through those stately gloves of elm and chestnut,
planted so close that they diffused, when in full E2r 67
leaf, an air of almost monastic gloom around the
good old house. This was not felt within however,
for there were several rooms in Monkshaugh’s
dwelling, looking back to the river or up into the
dell, light, cheerful, and of handsome proportions.
And those stately trees and continuous avenues
which diffused this air of soft gloom, were, moreover,
the pride of the successive proprietors, and
had, for time immemorial, given shelter to the most
flourishing colony of rooks in the whole strath. In
spring indeed, when those black-robed gentry are
so clamorous about ejectments and marriage-settlements,
the cawing around the old house became
perfectly deafening and intolerable; but one
would have missed it too; and then one needed
only to steal up into the dean among the birch and
and broom, or down to the river’s edge among the
low spreading aller and hazel bushes, to be instantly
free of the rookery din, listening only to the
low churn of those woodland warblers who so quietly
arrange all their love affairs with a sweet song.

Monkshaugh’s small estate lay near the centre,
and on the sunward side, of this romantic strath,
which, stretching nearly east and west, forms a
district called by the inhabitants The four
hill-side parishes. A screen of pastoral hills, E2v 68
lofty yet green as emerald to their very summits,
rose in sunward slopes and abrupt juttings behind
the variety of knoll and holm, pasture and woodland,
level spreads of cultivation and rough fallows, which
were picturesquely scattered, blended and grouped
in the open valley. In many places the hills were
furrowed by ravines and chasms; and those glades
and deans which, more or less clothed with natural
wood, winded far up into their recesses, sent
each down its tributary brooklet to join the Oran;
—the Oran, which, bounding and leaping from its
birth-place, somewhere far up among the convoluted
mountains at the head of the strath, like a
gamesome child in its play, gradually became
more gentle in its progress, till among the holms
of Monkshaugh, in “many a winding bout,” it
demurely glided on, gracefully waving its silver
links, like a young court beauty managing the
train of her birthday robes.

The Hill-side parishes had been forfeited
property, and were now broken into very small possessions.
The Aiks, The Cleuch, The Holm, The
Milnton, The Arns, and many other places, cot
or Grange, or Ha’-house of noticeable pretence,
lay scattered in the immediate vicinity of
Monkshaugh; but far above all, high, stately and E3r 69
apart, lord paramount of the strath, rose in its
pride the dark Tower of Ernescraig, the spot on
which the eyes of Wolfe Grahame were even yet
riveted with interest the most intense.

To avoid the hamlet of Castleburn, the travellers
were obliged to make the circuit of nearly the
whole arable part of Monkshaugh’s domain.
With the Whittret trotting or bounding on before,
to open stiles, or remove temporary fences,
they rode forward through brown fallows, sweet
close-cropt pastures, and green loanings:—verdure
and herbage, and bushes every where—and here
and there one of those magnificent chance-be-
dropt trees which gave so beautiful a character to
the small property. This fine embellishment it
owed, along with many others, to the good taste—
the prescient taste—of one of the family, who had
been educated abroad, had travelled much, and
who was known in its local traditions as The
Lord of Session. These noble trees were now
nearly of a century’s growth; and they had flourished
in a kindly soil. They lived in the memory
of every young person who left the strath; and
each individual and group had its distinctive appellation.
There were the Marquis’s Aik, so
named from the great Montrose—The Three E3v 70
Sisters—The Green Maidens—and The
Minister’s Bush, where a godly divine of the persecuting
times, who once had a cure of souls in the
parish, was wont at midnight to meet, after due
citation, the enemy of mankind, to do battle either
by the Word or the Sword, in defence of men’s
souls: so that each tree, if it wanted a Dryad,
still had its legend.

“The Minister’s Buss,” said Frisel, striking his
wand on the grotesque uptwisted roots of the hoary
tree, whose bent boughs kissed the turf.—“Ye
have often heard of him, Mr. Gideon? his name is
savoury in this parish yet. He saved soul
and body of auld John Yule’s father, who was
his man, and like a rash, venturesome fool, scooged
in the hollow hour of midnight among thae
branches, to hear what Satan could have to say
to a godly minister. When power was nae langer
given the Enemy to buffet the servant of the Lord,
who would not yield him an inch of dominion—
na, nor a hair’s breadth. ‘Will ye gi’e me the silly
bird in the bush then?’ said cunning Clootie,
wha, like the tax-man, is aye loath to gang aff toom-
handed.—‘The bird in the buss is no mine to give,’
the minister got power to say: ‘To his Maker I
commend him;’ and wi’ that the Enemy vanished, E4r 71
with a yell that shook the castle o’ Stirling, and
wakened the birds on The Bass; and auld John
Yule’s father drappit out o’ the tree like a clod,
clean dead at the minister’s fit for a time. We ne’er
have had the like o’ him till we got yoursel’, Mr.
Gideon. I trow auld John Yule’s father sought
nae mair listening. But think ye to bestow a
parting word on us the day, minister?”

Gideon, our excellent friend, was not wholly
insensible to flattery. He gave a kind of grunting
assent to the remark of the Whittret; and at
last fairly gave in to the proposal that they should
advance on Wolfe, after crossing the fords, and
drop a passing word of exhortation to the colliers
of Pitbauchlie, a generation which undoubtedly
required something of the kind.

The fords of Oran were passed. On the side
which they had now gained, the ground rose rapidly
by a winding path closed in by steep banks,
and twisting and twining back on itself, like a spiral
staircase, till clearing these banks, it unfolded
its maze on a jutting point in the ascent, which
gave Wolfe to see the entire sweep of his native
landscape, lying in the dewy freshness and soft repose
of the still early hour, as if to imprint its
farewell aspect on his heart, in lines which time E4v 72
was never to efface.—Here he paused to wait for
his companions.

Gideon had considerately eased Jenny of her
load, and was dragging her up, setting a stout
heart to a steep brae, earnestly engaged in conversation
with the Whittret.—“I shall ponder what
ye have propounded, Francie.—A fool may give a
wise man counsel,” he was heard to say—and then
standing by Frisel.—“A goodly heritage”—he
looked over in the direction of Monkshaugh—
“A goodly heritage, Captain Wolfe, by green
pastures and still waters.”

“I’m thinking Captain Wolfe’s thoughts are
ranging higher than the green holms o’ Monkshaugh,
and the silver links o’ Oran, this same
morning,” said Frisel.

“Praised be His name that has raised the
youth’s thoughts that same road, Francie!”

“To the Tower o’ Ernescraig yonder, minister”
—and Frisel laughed. “No need o’ an ingan for
the bonnie, blue, bleared een yonder this morning.”

“Sheugh! ye fule boddie,” cried Gideon, pitching
his manly leg over the back of Jenny Geddes.

“The minister has a bit o’ duty at Pitbauchlie,”
said Frisel demurely—“If ye wad just tarry
here a blink, and overtake us at your leisure, Captain. E5r 73”
—And the young man was by this management
left alone gazing on the Tower.

Steep and high where the mountain opened its
hollow bosom at the head of the dean, there started
sheer up a bluff promontory, called by the
country people “The Pechs’ Mount,” from its
artificial appearance. A narrow grassy isthmus
connected this abrupt promontory with the hills
behind; and on it, perched like an eagle’s nest
dallying with the storm, rose the Tower of Ernescraig.
The mountains’ sides closed darkly upon the
Tower; and yet in its height it was seen afar off in
all directions, predominating over the surrounding
country, like the spirit of fallen chivalry.—Ernescraig
Tower and the surrounding scenery, had
been fancifully, and not unaptly compared to the
bird from whence it took its name—to a falcon on
the swoop, ready to pounce on its prey. The
mountains, stretching out on each side, formed the
sweeping wings, the promontory, the body, and
the tower itself, the proud crest of the noble bird.
In days that were past this comparison might
have held in several other respects. At the grassy
neck or isthmus, which, like a natural bridge,
linked the Pechs’ Mount to the mountains, and
afforded a roundabout access, and the only safe
one to the Tower, the hill streams dashed E5v 74
down through the yawning chasms, whose fissures
and rents still shewed where the promontory had
been torn from the mountain’s side. After sweeping
round its base they united their waters, thus
forming a sort of natural moat. The place thus
strong by nature, had, in its prouder day, been carefully
fortified by art; but it was now fallen into
considerable decay. It had suffered in the wars
of Montrose; and had been surprised and spoiled
by private bands of the frontier gillie muhl dhu.
Yet so late as the year 17451745, it had afforded shelter
to the vicinage, upon an alarm of the approach
of the rebel army; for the people hereabout were
mostly whigs, though a few gallant Grahames and
dashing Drummonds still clung to the royal
name of James.

The Tower, like a mountain, hero turned its
back upon the quiet valley, and opposed its rough
front to battle with the stormy north. From the
high ground where our young traveller stood,
though the strath lay deep below, the edifice,
was, as the crow flies, at no great distance. Rising
in pride on its own mountain side, banners of
mist still floating round tower and battlement, it
hung to his ardent gaze, a brave picture on the
green walls of earth! He thought he could have
touched it—touched at least one little casement E6r 75
looking sunward and southward, over tower and
town, and all up and down that fair strath, even from
the place where the infant Oran had its birth in the
glens, to where, swollen to a rank river, it rushed
into the sea. As Wolfe still gazed and gazed, he
came at last to fancy that he could see the morning
air stir the streamers of ivy that hung around
the bower window, yea, stir the very tresses of a fair
head, resting mournfully upon the little palm of
one who had so often, and of late so anxiously,
watched his approach from that high lattice.

The imagination was resistless.—“I will return,
were it but from five minutes,” thought he; and
throwing his bridle to the Whittret, he darted
down the bank with the speed of a roe-buck.

“Ay, ay! I have lang jaloused,” muttered that
sagacious waiting gentleman, “what would be the
upshot of a’ this fishing, and shooting, and curdooing
i’ the dean woods. But see ye, my young
gentleman, if ’Lizbeth de Bruce’s brent brows and
jimpy waist will clear aff Harletillum’s band?—
Ours is a doomed house, that’s clear;—and yet,
its a jewe of a lassie.”

“Wha is?” said Gideon, whom he had now
overtaken.

“Wha but the Leddy ’Lizbeth de Bruce! to whom E6v 76
I never carried the value of a twalpenny lace for
her jimps but I was ordered something,—maybe
a tass o’ brandy, maybe a quaigh o’ ale,—maybe
baith. No that I mind the drink; but when a
leddy or gentleman holds me in remembrance it’s
like putting a respec’ on me; and I think ten
times mair o’t than it’s a’ worth.”

Gideon hemmed drily; and they jogged on
quietly together towards the collier town of Pitbauchlie,
where Wolfe was expected to join them.

The formal approach to Ernescraig Tower was
by the hamlet of Castleburn, from whence wound
up into the mountain gorge that narrow irregular
causeway, lying along the ridge of the ravine,
called the Pechs’ Path, which, together with the
Pechs’ Mount, was so named from their construction
being ascribed, by popular tradition, to the
Picts; though the learned and reverend Dr.
Draunt, in his Statistical Account of the Parish
of St. Serf, gives a very different etymology, deriving
the name from the Scottish verb to pech,
i.e. to puff and blow, as a fat man does on climbing
an ascent,—a derivation which the honest man’s
personal experience strongly confirmed. Not so
the experience of Wolfe Grahame, who darted
up the mount by a way even more steep and inaccessible E7r 77
than the ordinary ascent,—a path threading
the woods through the hollow of the ravine, by
which, for months past, he had been in the habit of
visiting the beautiful and lonely inhabitant of
the decayed fortress, his rashly made and fondly
loved, though unacknowledged wife!

From the chill and pale grey dawn, and long
before the faint shadowy light could have enabled
any other eye to discern distant objects, had this
young woman, kneeling at her high casement,
watched the fords of the Oran, and every partial
glimpse of the road which the breakings of the
ground or the opening trees permitted her to see—
to see him return home after he had left her, and
again, a weeping interval spent, to see him depart
“forever!”—as her sad heart whispered, and
sunk into deeper sadness;—for who ever parted,
for the first time, from the object of devoted, and
passionate, and engrossing affection, without feeling
that it must indeed be—forever! And to her
Wolfe Grahame was the engrossing object of every
affection, loved as they alone can love, who in life
have but one interest, one hope, and, in the fulness
of that, desire and wish for none other.

A solitary and unclaimed, but nevertheless a fair
and a happy child,—a solitary, unregarded, but, E7v 78
till now, a light-hearted and happy girl, the past
life of Elizabeth de Bruce had been one long midsummer
night’s dream. She had grown up in solitude
and freedom, her young imagination in the
clouds, but her heart on the dear green earth, finding,
in the thousand forms of loveliness and delight
scattered in her lonely path, objects to excite
her natural sensibility, and in the recollection that
all neglected as her existence had been, she was
not the less a de Bruce, enough to nourish in her
mind the self-respect and graceful pride of true
nobility: till Wolfe Grahame came, and a brighter
heaven and a yet greener earth unfolded, and the
pride of birth was forgotten in the dearer pride of
affection; for to be his was happier than even
her fondest brightest dreams, and now—she was
his.

Elizabeth had seen her lover cross the fords.
They had already parted. She “turned her eye
and wept:” and when she again looked up there
was no where to be seen that figure which her
vision could have singled out on the instant among
tens of thousands. His companions were slowly
crossing the moor. Chiding the inadvertence
which had thus lost sight of him while he might
still be seen, and, with love’s own superstition, E8r 79
shrinking from this disastrous omen, she was still
kneeling at her casement, carelessly wrapt in a
long white dressing-gown, the redundance of her
beautiful hair sweeping the floor, her brow resting
on her hands, chill, pale, and trembling, and in the
attitude of heart-struck abandonment, when her ear
even painfully true of late to the slightest sound,
caught the springy step, the light breathings,—
and, starting with an exclamation of transport, the
marble statue was on the instant touched into
life—warmed into a bright and glowing form.—
“He was come again! She would hear his
voice! Hear him bless her, and bid her be of
better cheer; and again and again vow to love her,
and think of her ‘every day of the hour.’ She
would again hang on ‘that nether lip,’ to touch
which she would have travelled barefoot to Palestine.”

“My Elizabeth! how is this! Cold, trembling,
half-dressed. I must chide you for this.”

“Trembling but not cold,” replied Elizabeth.
“But do then—stay and chide me.” And, in
tones yet softer, she whispered—“How kind was
this return! I shall part with you now with courage
so much firmer,—if it must be?—Nay, do
not shake your head. I will not talk so idly again. E8v 80
But you look so grave. Oh! surely you are come
to warn me of new evil. Tell it out then—I have
courage for it all.—They cannot unmarry me!”

“I trust not,” said Grahame, smiling and caressing
her. “Folly only—pure folly—brought
me back, Elizabeth.”

“Ah, rather dear, dear wisdom!” whispered
Elizabeth.

“I wished also to apprize you,” continued
Wolfe, “that I have prevailed with Mr. Gideon
to accompany me in a search of the woman who
certainly knows some of the strange mysteries connected
with your birth—with the conflagration I
mean of Cambuskenneth Lodge.”

“The disastrous star of my birth,” said Elizabeth.
“I know it is so. But have you seen my
nurse? She pines to see you.”

“Then I trust she means to speak out,” said
Wolfe. “How many perplexities could she not
unravel! how easily clear up the mystery of your
singular fate! But she is obdurate in her silence.
Well—be the issue what it may, fate itself cannot
now make you less fondly mine. There is hope
for us yet. Then smile on me once again before
I leave you, my own Elizabeth.”

A fond but silent embrace was interchanged, 1 F1r 81
and then followed much anxious domestic discourse,
with unavailing regrets, passionate adieus, and fond
and melancholy anticipations all intermixed.

“Should any emergency arise, my love, from
the state of my uncle’s affairs, or from our union,
you may rely for all aid and counsel on our friend
Gideon, safely and with propriety. He may not
quite understand you, but he loves you, and me for
your sake.—How many good hearts have you drawn
to me in giving me your own, Elizabeth!—He is an
honest and honourable man, though not exactly
after the fashion of this world’s honour; more
shame for it perhaps. And yet, Elizabeth, how
in this hour it wrings my heart to confide to another,
even to worthy Gideon, the dear privilege
of watching over your happiness!”

“Fear not for me,” whispered Elizabeth.—
“Fear not for me, while this generous wish is yours.
The love which makes me weak makes me strong
also. Ills and trials may await us both; but happiness
—mine—is safe—anchored here—in the
keeping of honour and affection;” and she rested
her head, as if in token of confidence, on the bosom
of her lover. But again the woman prevailed.
“Yet, O dearest, dearest! if I should live to fine
you changed—estranged. Let me not think of it.— Vol. I. F F1v 82
Nay, you shall not smile at my woman’s fears today.
Kneel with me rather here—where we have
a thousand times in fondness met and vowed affection
never-ending; and pray to our God to restore
us to each other with truth unimpaired, love
undiminished.”

They breathed this silent prayer on the altar of
each other’s lips.

“I can bear to part with you now,” whispered
Elizabeth.—“Nay, to send you hence.—Go then,
dearest and only friend of your poor Elizabeth;
and let us emulate each other in proving that
though the ties that bind us may have been rashly
formed, they were not made to be repented of.”

Pale, very pale, and shivering, but outwardly
calm, with a long silent embrace she glided out
of the arms that clasped her, sunk down and hid
her face where she had before knelt. And they
had parted! how again to meet in a world, whose
direst curse is wavering fidelity, or change, or
coldness of heart!

Wolfe took his way to the hamlet, where, in the
corner of the school green, there then stood,
looking as if it grew, the turf cabin of Monica
Doran, the nurse of Elizabeth; a widow who was
thought to have seen better days, and who used F2r 83
the pure English speech, or what the inhabitants
of Castleburn fancied such. Her original residence
was Ernescraig; but from the time that
Elizabeth was four years old Monica had lived in
Castleburn, in respected poverty, the jealousy
with which she was at first viewed having given
way before her kind and courteous manners,
and tried worth. The solitary matron had long
supported herself by needle-work, in which she was,
even on the admission of the erudite Monkshaugh,
profoundly skilled; but her sight had failed, and
she now lived by knitting, and by spinning flax to
a delicate fineness, unknown in that part of the
world, which she also made into thread, managing
herself the whole of the pretty, and petty manufac—
ture, of twisting, bleaching, &c. on the Oran side.

The circular hut of Monica was so small, that
but for a slender filament of blue smoke, scarcely
more voluminous than that which on a frosty
morning trailed through the dean woods after Corporal
Fugal’s tobacco pipe, and a single pane of
glass, the bright eye of the dwelling, it might have
been mistaken for a mossy hillock. A few yards
of garden-ground stored with pot-herbs, and those
herbs employed in the rural pharmacopeia, lay at
the right gable; and over this hung three grotesque F2v 84
elder bushes, growing by the brisk mill-lead, and
affording shade to the hovel, and arms and ammunition
to “the scholars.”

“The scholars” had been Goody Doran’s delightful
occupation for many of their quickly succeeding
generations. In her cabin refuge and
consolation was found in all the multifarious cases
of school-day hardship and distress. Her kind
expostulation made the trembling truant return to
his task; and, at her soothing, the good-natured
weeping dunce dried his tears and renewed his
efforts. In all cases of cut fingers, broken brows,
or sprained ancles, her unfee’d surgery was sovereign;
and the little ones demanded her cares and
kindness as their right, in the full confidence of
her love, and with a devoted submission to her
sway, which neither palmies, pandies, nor stendies,
nor yet the more refined modern fool’s cap
could have obtained. Day by day, the rough
shelves suspended from her low roof might be seen
loaded with the hard-boiled eggs, small bottles of
milk, and slices of cheese and oaten cakes, deposited
by “the scholars;” each ration rudely marked
with the initials of the little owner. These rations
were in summer quickly consumed beneath
Goody Doran’s bourtrees, in winter by her frugal, F3r 85
and yet cheerfully bright hearth. The scrupulous
integrity, unfailing kindness, and humble
dignity of manners which marked this old woman,
whose heart seemed instinct with the love of childhood,
made a deep impression on the memories of
many of those young creatures; and in after
life, with the recollection of school-day happiness,
rose the image of Goody Doran. Many substantial
marks of this kind recollection were tendered
to her; but they were declined with a spirit
which her neighbours sometimes called proud.
There are points on which every one has a right
to be proud. She never refused the aid of Elizabeth
de Bruce.

The heir of Monkshaugh, who rode to school
on a roan pony, the Whittret trotting by his
side with ample allowance for the mid-day refection,
might have been supposed above Monica’s
tender offices; yet his uncle’s horror of blood, and
still more of blood-stained garments, put even him
sometimes in her reverence; and though her
kindness like the sun shone equally on all, the
generosity and high spirit of this boy, displayed in
various little instances, made him an especial favourite,
during the few months that he attended
the village school.

F3v 86

As Wolfe approached the little tenement, once
so mighty in his imagination, now diminished to a
toy, yet corresponding exactly in all its proportions
to the clear image of his emory, he recalled,
together with Shenstone’s old Dame, the engaging
and very sweet picture of a country school,
given in the Memoirs of Marmontel—nature,
even in France!

“I could not leave the country without seeing
you, Monica,” said Wolfe, as soon as the old
woman, with her old-fashioned and superstitious
good-breeding, had laid aside her work and seen
her visiter seated to her liking.

“I have just come from your friend Elizabeth,”
he continued, “who informs me that you wished
to see me.—Odd enough, considering how you
have shunned my inquiries for many a month
back.”

“I shunned you then—and I desire to see you
now, Captain Wolfe Grahame,” said the old woman
impressively.—“And can you not divine the
cause? Have you not daringly mingled your fate
with the destiny to which I am bound.”

“Daringly, perhaps, but not presumptuously,”
said the young soldier with pride; “nor unsanctioned
by the mysterious being for whom you act. F4r 87
See you this scroll?”—and he shewed a letter—
“this—delivered to me in the dean wood by a
wandering mendicant woman, a part of your mysterious
machinery I doubt not?”

“That is not said like Captain Wolfe Grahame,”
replied the old woman.—“But was this scroll
seen by our Elizabeth.”

“Our Elizabeth!—Monica—if it is thus you
feel for her, and I doubt it not—why, why withhold
from me the means of doing her right?—
But this paper was not meant for the eye of Elizabeth,
though written, I cannot doubt it, by—
her mother.”

He fixed his eyes intensely on the old woman,
who started; and, as the colour mounted to her
faded cheek, exclaimed—“Her mother! Who
then told you that she had a living mother? The
Bride of de Bruce—does she live?”

“I cannot doubt that the mysterious being who
has for years supplied all the wants of Elizabeth,
anticipated all her wishes, loaded her with unvalued
luxuries,—her good genius as she fondly
styled her,—is a mother, and a fond one, though
years of silence and neglect have made Elizabeth
conclude that she lives no longer. Yet that she
lives this scroll is evidence: then why conceal F4v 88
her name from me? The unhappy wife of the
more unhappy de Bruce—has she never been acknowledged
as such? Do her own relations not
know her claims?”

“Alas, too well!” said the old woman. “But
in her own time she will reveal herself—that most
injured lady—the Bride of de Bruce! Then
tempt me no farther. I have not withstood the
tears of Elizabeth, looking in my face with the
very eyes of that mother, to yield to a stranger’s
prayer. But the day will come. It shall—it
must—I shall live to see it—when justice will be
done—the day for which I have travailed, and
longed, and prayed.—Was it for nothing that I,—
old, and withered, and feeble as I am, gave up
friends and native land, and lived among the
strange people of a strange faith?—and feared
that I might die among them,—without confession,
without pardon, almost without hope, burrowing
among these black walls, which nothing could
brighten save the smile of Heaven upon the discharge
of duty—perilling my soul’s salvation?—
Ah! not for nothing! Then tempt me no farther:
my troth-plight is in another’s keeping.”

“God forbid that I should urge you, Monica!”
said the young man, “though I still think you F5r 89
are influenced by very idle scruples. The mother
of Elizabeth has confided her to my care. Is the
trust less precious than that which I now solicit?
Read this:―but your eyes are dim. I shall read
for you.”—And he read a scroll which, without
signature or date, contained the following words:

“You love Elizabeth.
heart.—Dowerless and unfriended you have wooed
her for your bride.—Her mother gives her to you
—the child of misery, if not of shame—and
reckons every hour an age till she can bless the
union which will rescue Elizabeth from a fate
dark as that of her unhappy mother.”

“Unhappy indeed!” sighed the old woman.
“But you are going, Captain Grahame, to a land of
violence and blood;—of this I wished to warn you
—a land divided against itself—brother contending
in mortal strife against brother—and the cold
stranger trampling on both. Yet beware ye! and
if ye love Elizabeth, spare her kindred!”

“I knew, or I suspected as much,” said Grahame.
“And now, Monica, as you would perchance save
me from sin and remorse, give me some clew to the
maternal kindred of Elizabeth.”

“Wolfe Grahame, this is too much,” cried the
old woman, rising in increased agitation. “Go in F5v 90
peace! and God speed you, and shield you, and
deal with you as you shall deal by her to whom
my lees of life are dedicated.”

She waved her hand as if she wished him gone;
and Wolfe, returning her salutation, held on his
way; and was scarcely aroused from the reverie
into which this conversation had plunged him,
when he entered the collier village of Pitbauchlie,
two miles distant on the open moor.

And here great was his amusement, though his
wonder was not much, to see the Whittret, with a
serio-comic visage, mounting guard at a barn door,
over a tall tripod stool covered with a scanty
crumpled whity-brown towel, on which was placed
a pewter trencher with some halfpence strewed
over its surface, “few and far between,”—while
loud through the circumambient air rolled and
rumbled the voice of Gideon, in earnest exhortation.

“As I kenned na know lang ye might tarry,
Captain, I behooved to set him to preach,” said
Frisel, “to keep him in order and patience; but
we are weel through now: we have just a word to
gi’e to the auld generation, and a word to the
sinners,—a word o’ consolation, and a word o’ terror, F6r 91
—eighteen heads in all,—and we’ll after ye like
a shot. The congregation may be like six auld
wives, and three or four bairns,—so that is about
two heads and a half to ilk ane: for mysel’, I’m
as ye may see, attending the offering.” And he
cast his eye on the collected halfpence, of which
Gideon, bountiful in pious discourse, certainly
knew nothing; nor was it intended that he
should.

Chapter V.

Early Days.

Elizabeth de Bruce had been brought in her
second year to the old Tower of Ernescraig, by
Monica her nurse, she knew not from whence.
Her uneventful story from that period may be
best traced in her own recollections.

Elizabeth remembered herself from her third
year, a lonely child for whom no one seemed to
have any peculiar affection, save Monica Doran;
and after a time Monica left her; for Mr. Hutchen,
the agent of Lord de Bruce, thought the old
nurse a useless appendage to the Ernescraig establishment,
which thenceforward consisted only of F7r 93
an old man who took care of the place, and his
wife and daughter, who between them managed a
cow or two, and attended to the wants of the lonely
girl. Elizabeth had no distinct recollection of how
she had first learned the calamity of her father.
This knowledge appeared like intuition, for no
one, so far as she could remember, had ever spoken
to her of the unhappy condition of the Lord de
Bruce. He had indeed been deranged even from
the period of her birth, and was understood to be
now living abroad.

From year to year she lingered thus, removed
from the society of children, and nearly ignorant
of their common sports and occupations. Yet was
the life she led not without its own pleasures. The
spirit of young life was stirring in the solitary child.
Every bird, and animal, and flower, and plant,
was her companion, endowed by her fancy with
life and speech; and every well remembered beggar,
her friend and instructer, for good or ill as it
might happen. A store of ideas and images was
thus daily accumulating, gleaned from many furtive
sources, and from persons the most opposite
in habits and character. The tailor who marched
from grange to grange, followed by his apprentice
bearing “goose” and “labrod”, like the knight of old F7v 94
romance followed by his squire,—the lean lank
weaver, and the daily assemblage at the Towerburn
mill, were of the number of her instructers:
So were Goody Doran, the Whittret, and Corporal
Fugal Scrimmager, once her father’s servant.—
Monkshaugh, though dubious about her descent,
and far from satisfied with the mysterious marriage
of his noble kinsman, was nevertheless scandalized
at the shameful neglect of the little girl, and undertook
to fashion her manners, for which purpose
Elizabeth was at sundry times invited to drink tea
at his mansion; and in her eighth year was gravely
presented with a copy of Gregory’s Legacy, accompanied
by a suitable exhortation. She also
received so many cautions against loud speaking,
bursting into mirth or song, and careless bounding
up or down stairs, that Monkshaugh became a
tiresome resort; and Elizabeth soon preferred saying
her catechism to Mr. Haliburton to shewing
her sampler to the Laird.

The mother who had studied many, or indeed any
of the modern systems of education, might not
have been satisfied with the training of Elizabeth
in her tender years; but such it was. A store of
materials was thus collected to which her own mind
must give form, from which her own powers must F8r 95
extract either poison or nourishment. At five
years of age Elizabeth had travelled all undoubting
through the old, and now, we fear, almost exploded
legendary lore of the nursery,—wept over
the Babes of the Wood, while their sweet innocent
images haunted her as a real presence,—and
already admired him of the Bean, renowned and
beloved more than all the peers of Charlemagne,
admitting no rival to him in her affections, save
always the magnanimous vanquisher of the Red
Cow. How full of fancy,—how pregnant with enjoyment
was the old literature of the nursery!

If thus learned at five, by the age of seven
Elizabeth had a larger collection of old Irish and
Scottish ballads, each to its own tune—and that
often a very fine one—and of metrical and other
legends, than any individual in the Hill-side parishes
excepting Frisel, who a century or two earlier
might have figured as a Troubadour, or a Harper
at the least. The mill, the moss, the shelter
of the shepherd’s chequered grey plaid, which the
little girl did not disdain in summer, and the
rockings of the winter fireside, with a memory
singularly tenacious for whatever she loved, all
contribution to swell her traditionary stores. Yet
with all this liveliness of fancy and quickness of F8v 96
apprehension, Elizabeth had made so little progress
in useful learning, that at a “Diet of examen,”
held by Mr. Haliburton in the Tower Mill
—the only “diet,” Frisel said, that he dealt in—
her profound ignorance drew down the severe rebuke
of the minister.

The dark blue eyes, full of spirit and intelligence,
flashed through the profusion of beautiful ringlets
to which Fugel had transferred all the care he
formerly bestowed on the mane of her father’s
charger—flashed anger and defiance; and then
filled with passionate tears. Hiding her face on
her little arm Elizabeth sobbed out—

“Who is there in all the world to tell me my
lesson and my questions? I have no father—no
mother—and Goody Doran has left me.”

The appeal was felt by all present, and particularly
by Gideon, who soothed and caressed the
little maid in his own uncouth way—a very gentle
bear—and in fitting language told her on whose
care the orphan and the friendless may ever rely.
And Elizabeth wept on his bosom those tears
which rob sorrow of its sting.

But John Trann, the warder of the Tower,
found himself bound in self-defence to rebut part
of her statement.

1 G1r 97

“A bauld spirit,” said John—“I ha’e tried
to break her in, and targed her on The Single
Beuk divers rainy Lord’s nights; but there never
was a more rampant instance o’ the power of the
Enemy, and of indwellin’ corruption than in that
bonnie bairn, fair as is her face. Gi’e her Gil
Morice to the Greenwood, or The Young Tam
Lane, or sic profane blethers, minister, and she
will lilt them aff at a hearing, tune and words,
were they as lang as Chevy Chace; but for ae sentence
o’ the instruction which causeth not to err,
it wadna stick til her if ye wad fley her alive.”

“Nae wonder the bairns are boobies, when John
Trann turns dominie,” said the Whittret, sneeringly.

The doctrine of John was, however, well adapted
to the meridian of Gideon’s belief; so after an
application to the trustee, Mr. Hutchen, which did
not obtain even the courtesy of a reply, the little
girl was submitted to the joint tutelage of Gideon,
and Monica Doran, who, after a long and mysterious
absence, returned about this time in deep
mourning weeds, and settled in a hut by the village
school-house.

This formed a new era in the life of Elizabeth.
The bible was her first and only school-book; and Vol. I. G G1v 98
the preliminary drudgery being rapidly surmounted,
and her lively sensibility and imagination once
fairly excited—what a world of wonder, interest,
and delight, burst on her unfolding mind! Before
three months had elapsed, her young fancy was
dwelling by the fountain in the wilderness, with the
son of the bondswoman; or journeying forth in
hope with the youthful patriarch dreaming by his
ladder of vision; or going down into Egypt with his
beloved son. Those whose early progress in letters
has been smoothed and forwarded by all the trickery
and appliance of modern system, can hardly
comprehend how deeply the picturesque incidents
and varied characters of this most poetical of all
volumes, lay hold on the minds of those children
who have known no other literature.

Judith, and Jael, and Rachel, beautiful and
beloved, and so exquisitely womanly even in her
frailties, Elizabeth could not yet fully understand;
but there were other, and exhaustless sources of
delight. The infant Moses hid in the ark of
flags, and the little Hebrew maid watching afar off
the fate of the future lawgiver and champion of
the people of God,—the young shepherd of Bethlem,
“ruddy and of a fair countenance,”—the devoted
daughter of Jephthah,—and Josiah the pious G2r 99
infant King of Israel,—and Ruth the gentle
daughter of Naomi:—these were now the familiar
objects of the neglected child’s study, as she conned
not a task but enjoyed a treasure beneath the
bourtree bushes, dreaming of them all night as
well as all day, and investing her village acquaintances
with their several attributes and characters.
“Thus the foundations of her mind were laid.”

The life of Elizabeth contained very few adventures;
but every young life, however obscure,
has its own wonders, its own interests, its own
charm. She had, moreover, one real adventure to
which her memory clung with singular pertinacity,
though it had happened in her sixth year.

Elizabeth “lived i’ the sun,” and hardy and bold
as a gipsy’s brat, often made very distant excursions
into the hills and glades, from that season
when the birds first build their nests even till the
last nuts had dropped in the hazel copse, and the
sloes mellowed in the autumn frosts. Her frequent
lengthened absences gave little uneasiness to her
plodding guardians of the Tower, till once on a
July night evening closed in, the summer moon rose
with all the pale stars, and still the little girl came
not homeward. John Trann being very sleepy, observed G2v 100
to his alarmed womankind that “Leddy
’Lizbeth wad cast up sooner than a bow o’ meal,”
and went to bed. But the women less philosophic
alarmed the hamlet. The people rose in the zeal
of humanity; and pool and stream, dell and dingle,
were searched; and at last the truant girl was
found by Frisel sunk in soft moss, soundly sleeping
under a sheltering bush.

Elizabeth’s account of this adventure to Monica
Doran, was not a little singular. At noon of the
preceding day she had met a beggar or gipsy woman
in a red cloak, who with stories and apples
had allured her on to a wild scene in the hills,
called the Linns o’ Cleuch; and there introduced
her to a lady, resplendent, according to Elizabeth’s
history, as the Queen of Elfland, if not
that very Queen herself. With this lady she had
staid all day in a cave. She had given her fruit
and cake, and wept over her, and fondled her, and
taken her promise never to forget one who so dearly
loved her, and came thus to see her—never to
forget her when she should be far away. All this
Elizabeth affectionately promised, and wept in her
turn—wept herself to sleep. She remembered no
more till the Whittret awoke her; and the splendid
apparition was fled.

G3r 101

Monica Doran treated the whole as a natural
vision of sleep in the hills on a starry night, and
counselled her to the silent about it; and in a little
time it was forgotten in the hill-side district, or
only remembered by the superstitious as a fairy
adventure, into which the child had been nearly
entrapped. It was, however, in the main circumstance,
too striking ever to be forgotten by Elizabeth;
and, as she grew up, Monica Doran would
shake her reverend head, and sigh at the minute
accuracy of her description of the lady’s appearance.
Of this singular adventure of her childhood
she had often talked to Wolfe Grahame;
and in the previous season, they had twenty times
visited the the Linns o’ Cleuch, while Elizabeth
recounted anew every look, every gesture, every
well-remembered word of her whom, as she grew
up, she fondly called mother. But how—or why?
—Conjecture was vain.

Wolfe had also once dropped in, under some
feigned pretext, on the Saturday-night compotations,
at the Grahame Arms in Castleburn; and
adroitly led to this old tale.

“Weel do I mind it,” said John Trann, solemnly.
“But I think ye ordered in another
stoup o’ liquor, Captain?—Weel do I mind, that G3v 102
the bairn upon a time met the Queen of Elfland
about the Linns o’ Cleuch, and would not be holden
back; but ance wode, and ay waur—wad be aff
to fairy land—for sic was her weird—and lap and
flang like a rampant lion; so that ten men could
na hold her.”

“I was one of the ten myself,” said Fugal,
gravely. “I had just then left his Majesty’s
light hô’se; and can test it all for gospel truth.”

“There was a meeting o’ the Sourhole’s session
held,” continued John Trann, “and a day o’ fast
and humiliation appointed, that He might be pleased
to life the right hand o’ his wrath from the
house of de Bruce, and the bairn over whom the
Enemy had gotten power. And Mr. Gideon wrestled
lang and sair—no to name a humbler Christian
—inquiring into this controversy wi’ the house
o’ de Bruce; and got for answer, as I have
heard, that it was that sinfu’ rise on the penny-
mail o’ the Holm crafters, where I am tabernackling
even now; and that laying o’ cess on
the saumon waters, whilk, with the abundance
thereof, had flowed free to a’ mankind since the
days o’ the flood.”

This, and such like, was all the information
collected by Grahame, scarcely worth his stoups G4r 103
of liquor; and so long as the spigot flowed at his
bidding, he saw that he might drain intelligence
equally copious. But to return to the course of
our narrative.

When Elizabeth had been studying for nearly
two years, and had added to her stores of Biblical
lore such vagrant blossoms of English literature
as flourished in Mason’s Collection, another revolution
took place in her life.

Upon a sunshine holiday the phenomenon of a
carriage appeared at the door of the Grahame
Arms; and the alarmed landlord received the
rolling glory with as many bows as, fairly divided,
might have been at least one to each spoke of the
four wheels.

“It will be the Lord de Bruce.”—No, it was
the factor; and along the straggling street heads
were pushed out of every door in curiosity, and
drawn back in habitual terror and reverence of
the great name of Harletillum. It was, however,
only the factor’s lady, or more properly the Trustee’s
lady.

Mrs. John Hutchen of Harletillum, wife of
the present trustee, and daughter of the former
factor, was a garish and “rather good-looking”
woman—unquestionably a finely dressed one. She G4v 104
sent for Elizabeth. In haste was the blooming
face washed—in haste were the red Morocco
sharp-toed slippers and the long green Persian
sash put on, both the gift of Monkshaugh. The
white mode tippet was pinned above the whiter
cambric frock; and with bashful glee, led by Monica
Doran, whose agony of alarm she entirely
overlooked, Elizabeth obeyed the summons.

Mrs. John Hutchen saluted the daughter of
Lord de Bruce rather kindly, but took no notice
whatever of the venerable person who attended
her. She made the bashful girl take some wine;
and introduced her to Miss Juliana de Bruce Hutchen,
a young lady about her own age, who gave
her a sidelong, pouting, and scornful examination
from head to heel—or rather from slipper to bonnet
—which Elizabeth’s bright and saucy eyes repaid
with no lack of interest.

Elizabeth was then interrogated on her accomplishments,
and found was wofully wanting as she
had been at the memorable “Diet of examen”
three years before. She hung her head abashed
and awkward—all the brightness and flush of hope
with which she had entered the room eclipsed.
But it was expressly on gracious intent that Mrs.
Hutchen had come; so with her own thumbs she G5r 105
pushed in the finely curved shoulders of Elizabeth,
directed her how to point her toes,—as a climax
of goodness summoned her own maid to see
“how the dowdy creature could be fitted with decent
stays,” and made her stand up to measure
heights with Juliana.—All the blood of the de
Bruces rushed to the temples of Elizabeth; all
their pride raised the head and dilated the beautiful
light figure, which soared rather than stood
above that of Miss Juliana, in the natural grace
inseparable from its perfect formation.

“Umph!—Mind your carriage, Miss Juliana;
and you, Miss de Bruce, must be a good girl, and
I shall send you a nice new stays, and a nice new
governess to make you handsome and learn you
every thing.” And thus the female part of the
agency of the insane nobleman having discharged
its duty by the ladies connected with “the property,”
Mrs. Hutchen ascended her triumphal
car, and drove off in state, the landlord’s head vibrating
like a pendulum while the vehicle continued
in sight.

Monica Doran all this while spoke not; but
when she reached home she shed some tears,
which the little girls affectionately kissed off, voluntarily G5v 106
promising never to love any governess half
so well as her “own Goody Doran.”

Mrs. John Hutchen, heaven-directed, was more
lucky than wise in selecting a governess for the
daughter of Lord de Bruce. In due time apartments
were fitted up in the Tower, with comfort
and even elegance, and furnished with every customary
requisite for the mental or personal accomplishment
of the pupil.

Three years again passed away, a period of
application and discomfort, in which Elizabeth,
strictly debarred from all intercourse with her
nurse or the family of Monkshaugh, could do nothing
better than profit by the instructions of her
governess. This lady, of a character originally
cold and formal, was by this time hackneyed in
office; and rendered callous, selfish, and calculating
by the selfishness of her various employers.
Her understanding of her duties was a fixed thing;
so many hours a day to Italian, music, and French,
for so many guineas per annum, with a rigid and
unyielding enforcement of that petty code of petty
regulation for person, dress, demeanour, &c. instituted
in the fashionable boarding-school where
she had first been a half-boarder, and subsequently G6r 107
a teacher. A civil greeting daily to all members
of the family in which she might chance to be for
the time, and a more ceremonious leave-taking at
the termination of her engagement, with a fairly-
penned letter of acknowledgment afterwards transmitted
for all civilities received:—and thus she
made her heartless rounds, biennial or triennial,
with the character of “a safe discreet person in a
family, and one whose accent was faultless.”

Elizabeth tried to love her governess, but the
sentiment found nothing to feed upon; and in
her warm and enthusiastic nature how little
would have kept kindness alive! The governess
interfered with her visits to her former friends;
and then Elizabeth tried to hate her. But even
this sentiment found no aliment in the cold, quiet,
equable manners, thin lips, and lath-like figure of
her instructress. For the last two years they
went on better together. Elizabeth ceased to torment
and mortify by wanton and mischievous
pranks; and came to view her governess as a
machine which gave her lessons very correctly,
as she presumed, and diligently taught her the
names of tools, the uses of which it was left to her
own energies afterwards to direct and apply.

But again came another change. The governess G6v 108
was summoned away on one day’s notice; the
plate, the hangings, the musical instruments followed;
and the lonely girl was once more consigned
to her original solitude and destitution. She
was, however, also restored to her original independence,
with cultivated and enlarged capacities
of thought and occupation.

The succeeding period was a happy interval in
the life of Elizabeth; and yet nothing occurred
which a stranger could have noted as memorable.
She had her needlework, her lonely rambles among
the hills, and her social visits to the hamlet, the
marvels of old Fugal, who was the Munchaussen
of the district, and the old songs and legends of
Monica, in themselves a mine of enjoyment. She
had lost her best musical instruments; but she retained
all her musical capacities. Music is said to
be a social art—and in one sense it is so; but there
is music which is neither very social, nor at all under
the dominion of art—a gift of nature, a passion,
a feeling, solitary, heartfelt, the charmed soul
hanging on the murmurs of the lip as the rose is
fabled to listen to the song of the nightingale.
Elizabeth’s musical tastes, which made so much of
the enjoyment of her solitary life, were of Rousseau’s
third order. Her soul was instinct with G7r 109
melody—the murmurs of her infancy were musical,
and the wild warbling of her dreams more
touching than her most finished song. To her
ear all nature was one mighty instrument, of a
scale infinitely graduated but all attuned to harmony.
To listen was to enjoy—from the hoarse
breaking of the waves on the shore to the tinkle of
the summer rill—from the burst and swell and
long-rolling peal of the thunder cloud, to the faint
winter churm of the red-breast. Thus, though
the inexplicable order, or caprice of the family
agent had somewhat abridged one source of enjoyment,
it could not attaint her hereditary and indefeasible
right to nature’s gift. Her instruments
were away; but she could still, in the deep twilight
of her chamber, listen, soothed or rapt, to those
viewless harps of a thousand strings sounding in
the leafless woods below. But those purely natural
strains, the articulate breathings of passion
and sensibility, speaking a universal language, be
it in the glowing song of the Hindoo girl, or the
wild lament of the highland maid,—and above all,
the music “married to immortal verse,” claimed
a loftier place in her musical associations, and ministered
delight to a higher class of feelings. Thus
if Elizabeth sometimes pined in thought she had G7v 110
also very much to enjoy; and even in these her
most forlorn years, the scale of happiness fairly
preponderated.

The departure of the governess restored her to
the society of Monica, and of Monkshaugh, who
now benevolently fancied, that her lengthened visits
to himself must be of infinite use in polishing her
manners and cheering her spirits. Even Effie
Fechnie, won by the smile of arch and resistless
sweetness which played round the lip of Elizabeth,
came at last to forgive her old pranks, and to tolerate
her occasional visits in a place where she admitted
no female rival; and saw, without jealousy,
though not without reproof, the many idle hours
now loitered away in the book-closet adjoining the
family parlour, in the old tangled arbours of the
garden, or in the dean wood, with the secreted
volume.

A new and absorbing passion was now awakened
in Elizabeth, by the treasures of this sanctuary
of Monkshaugh’s literature. That gentleman’s
own weekday reading was chiefly confined to the
Book of Common Prayer, the Almanack, and
a System of Cookery, illustrated with plates and
enriched by a treatise on carving. But the taste
for polite letters had begun to revive in the fashionable G8r 111
circles of the Scottish metropolis, just about
the period that he had flourished as a beau, so that
he still retained a gentlemanly acquaintance with
the names of Shakspeare and Mr. Pope, and an
intimate acquaintance with the popular tea-table
miscellanies of the day, and with the elegant papers
of the Mirror and Lounger. He knew also that
young ladies, as a part of their education, ought
to read the Spectator abridged, and Clarissa Harlowe,
together with Fordyce’s Sermons. He even
sometimes vaunted to Elizabeth of having once
seen the Ayrshire ploughman in Bailie Creech’s
shop, in his celebrated top-boots, buck-skin breeches,
and buff waistcoat. The Laird, therefore, with
such pretensions to literature in his own person,
rather respected a moderate love of books as indicating
“a gentle” nature; and, due charges being
given of the bindings, allowed Elizabeth the unlimited
range of his stores.

Little did the old beau dream that the long
summer’s day, and the longer winter’s night, were
to be spent by the young enthusiast in the sweet
thraldom of pleasurable, if not profitable study,
till her only life lay among the phantoms and
creations of bookland—witching land!—that “with
tendrils strong as flesh and blood” the heart and G8v 112
fancy of the solitary girl were twining themselves
around those shadowy substances. But had he
been aware of this, Monkshaugh had an easy and
infallible way of accounting for every extravagance
in Elizabeth—the family malady—incipient madness
—or, at least, “a touch” of the de Bruce
family inheritance.

This new and powerful taste gradually withdrew
Elizabeth from the few rural intimacies of her
schooldays, and might soon have been carried to
pernicious excess, had it not been counteracted by
that “course of true love” which the generous
and impetuous temper of Wolfe Grahame, and
the idolizing affection of his mistress, compelled
to run smoothly, in defiance of every obstruction
offered by chilling experience and grey-beard wisdom.

Till the return of Wolfe Grahame in the previous
year, Elizabeth had met with no one being
that could understand or sympathize with her peculiar
feelings and new-born tastes; and they were
therefore scrupulously confined to her own bosom.
No creature could have looked more blithe of
heart or fancy free, even when the fever of romance
was running the highest.

The young people met, and with mutual pleasure1 H1r 113
renewed their early acquaintance; but their
talk was of any thing rather than books. There
is however a free-masonry among the genuine, and
therefore secret lovers of literature, by which,
without a word exchanged, without one critical
opinion delivered, they recognize each other. By
those occult signs, Elizabeth soon discovered that
Wolfe Grahame had drunk of the same enchanted
fountain—that they had loved the same Juliet,
wept the same “Gentle Ladye wedded to the
Moor.” Grahame had now indeed entered on
the rougher track of a man’s life, and, as he fancied,
forever abandoned the “primrose path;”
yet in the idleness of that long and beautiful summer,
it was with fresh delight that he returned to
dream and dally in it with Elizabeth. But this
calm and trustful life of careless delights could
not long last. There rose “a dream within the
dream,” and it speedily took substance and vitality;
so by the end of the season, what with the
little aids of long rambles among the hills, originally
prescribed for health and exercise by Monkshaugh,
and continued for no reason distinctly
rendered, glowing sun-sets fading into still sweeter
gloamings, melancholy songs and mirthful conversations,
frequent meetings, and, more dangerous Vol. I. H H1v 114
far, secret anticipations of meeting no more, the
half conscious lovers had gradually and imperceptibly
reached that dizzy verge on which the little
finger of Cupid becomes as mighty as the right
arm of a giant—from which retreat may still be
possible, but where it is as certain that the enforcement
of a feather—a breath—a word—an inarticulate
murmur, may suddenly precipitate the
hovering victim headlong and beyond recovery.

It was at this time that Wolfe, on a casual visit
to Ernescraig, surprised his solitary companion
in an agony of tears, reading, or attempting to read
a letter, which she threw aside on his appearance,
while she hastily strove to stifle every outward
symptom of grief. The effect of a woman’s tears
on a man, not previously hardened by a long course
of hysterics, is well understood—their effect on a
devoted heart cannot be so well comprehended; for
that must depend on what sort of heart the devoted
one is. If warm, young, ingenuous, generous, as
was Wolfe’s, the heart would probably, in such
circumstances, make short work with reflection.
With him there was no place for graceful reserve
—no pause for studied delicacy of address. The
griefs of Elizabeth were his; and, before one intelligible
word was uttered on either side, he had H2r 115
folded her unresisting form to his bosom as its
chosen place of refuge, and with his lip gathered
up the tears which now fell in brighter, warmer
showers, gushing over her cheeks as her heart
heaved beneath his clasp.

“How is this Elizabeth? Tell me—me—
your cousin—your friend—who would give life to
make you happy—whose life can know no happiness
but in your love!”

The blood which for an instant wholly deserted
the cheeks of the bewildered girl, returned in the
wildest tide. Her heart throbbed as if it would
have burst its prison, and she trembled exceedingly.
For another instant her head rested
where it had involuntarily fallen; and then modestly
withdrawing herself from this strict embrace,
she whispered—“Oh! Wolfe, I am certainly
very foolish, perhaps very proud—but very, very
miserable; yet I thought not to have betrayed
myself to you. But now I must, and I will tell
you all.”

She put into his hands a letter written by order
of Mr. Hutchen, stating, in no very delicate terms,
that the trustee had received an advantageous offer
from a friend, who wished to possess Ernescraig
as a shooting residence, and hoped that H2v 116
among the numerous family friends, Miss de
Bruce would have no difficulty in fixing herself
properly.

“Do not think me so pitiful, so abject, so base
in spirit, as to have shed even one tear for all that
this man could either threaten or do. But this—
this”—she pointed to yet another letter, in which
Grahame recognised the strong, rigid, angular,
old-court characters of the Lady Tamtallan, the
aunt of Lord de Bruce, the Minerva of Monkshaugh’s
imagination.

“This—this”—Elizabeth could not reveal to any
human ear the stirrings of a young and proud spirit,
wounded, insulted, crushed in its tenderest
feelings—the memory of her mother—the wretchedness
of her father!—but she suffered herself to
be yet again clasped to the one generous heart
which beat for her—only for her—yearned over
her—worshipped her—and there she wept it all.
In this manner had the signal been given, the veil
dropped that for months had concealed feelings
which Grahame would not, and Elizabeth durst
not ascertain. And now—

“Eternity was in their lips and eyes, Bliss in their brows’ bend.”

“O, never mind my poor uncle’s objections,” H3r 117
said Grahame. “Let us be content to love him as
well as we can because he is our uncle; for I fear,
Elizabeth, neither your taste nor my reason will
ever be able to find a better because. It will delight
him to hear of our marriage after it is all
over; but to put him to the trouble of thinking
about it—what with jewels and ginger-cake, settlements
and bride favours, it would unquestionably
turn his head.”

Wolfe Grahame had known from his boyhood
the nervous horror entertained by his uncle of the
fatal malady incident to the family of de Bruce,
vain as he was of the relationship. He also knew
the firmness of Monkshaugh’s belief in the curse
that clung to that devoted house. There was
likewise some mystery—some cloud about the
birth of Elizabeth which no one could comprehend.
Mr. Hutchen, her guardian, had, it was understood,
been strictly prohibited from ever permitting
her to leave the Tower of Ernescraig; but this
indeed Monkshaugh imputed to his own ill-natured
cupidity. Monkshaugh had yet another objection.
The Lady Tamtallan, who had wished to ally her
nephew, Lord de Bruce, to a daughter of her own,
never could endure to hear the name of Elizabeth,
whom she loathed unseen, both as a girl, and as H3v 118
the daughter of an Irish “foreigner” who had
usurped the place of her own child.—“And she
was,” Monkshaugh said, as the Whittret well knew,
“a woman of a strong mind, with ten thousand
pounds at her own disposal, forbye linen, plate, and
the rose-diamond buckle—no nearer male connexion
than Wolfe Grahame, except grand-daughters,
—abhorred all lassies, and had shown a special favour
for Wolfe till when a callant he had stood in
his own light by trampling on the tail of Black
Agnes, and devouring, stoup and roup, a brace of
Poor Knights of Windsor, expressly cooked for
her ladyship’s Saturday night’s supper.—She pretended
to laugh at that loss,” added Monkshaugh;
“but it is weel kenned she likes her supper. She
clouted him for Black Agnes’s mishap; and the
graceless imp cuffed her again. She pretended to
laugh at that too—for she is a woman of an uncommon
strong mind.”

“I have heard she’s a dour busteous carlin,”
said Frisel, “threw her ebony stick at Lord
― sitting in his very place o’ judgment, when
he ga’e the plea against her.”

“Is it Lady Tamtallan ye name a busteous
carlin, sirrah?”

“Carlin, or Gyre-carlin, if she want to keep H4r 119
Wolfe Grahame frae marrying ’Lisbeth’Lizbeth de Bruce,
she need to cast her green een about her,” muttered
the Whittret.

Wolfe, it must be owned, had the utmost contempt
for those visions of succession to the rose-diamond
buckle, which were so much to Monkshaugh.
He had already with facile kindness which his
judgment condemned, guaranteed obligations incurred
by the weakness, the obstinacy, and the vanity
of his uncle, which he was aware must keep him a
poor man for many a year, even were the succession
open to him to-morrow; and he conceived that he
possessed the full right of following his own judgment,
and consulting his own feelings in the dearest
interest of his life. The very circumstances
that might have damped the ardour of a more prudent
lover, increased the tenderness of Grahame.
Elizabeth—to him the most winning and delightful
of human beings—stood alone—his own—only—
all his own—detached by singular fortune from all
human relationship, and liable, he shuddered to
believe, to the most fearful of human maladies,
from which his care, his tenderness, his love, were
henceforth to be her shield.

There was on every hand an understanding
that Elizabeth’s birth was coeval with the period H4v 120
of her father’s derangement, and with the burning
of Cambuskenneth Lodge. Of her mother little
was known to their few distant relations; and had
it not been for the scroll conveyed to him about
this time, notwithstanding the many tokens of a
mother’s care which Elizabeth found, or fancied in
the history of the first fifteen years of her life—
valuable and elegant gifts transmitted, no one knew
how, to old Monica Doran—Grahame must still
have believed that the victim of that memorable
night was the mother of his mistress. Again and
again did he examine Mr. Haliburton. That faithful
depositary of the secret of the dying midwife
resisted all attempts to betray the trust—if such it
was—with the fidelity of a father confessor; but
he agreed to search for the daughter of the woman,
and if her consent were gained his scruples would
give way.

Many other circumstances made a temporary
concealment of the union, which Grahame eloquently
urged, expedient at this time. Without
any overweening conceit, either of his own person,
or his various attributes as soldier, gentleman, and
presumptive heir, Wolfe could not fail to perceive,
in the course of the business arrangements which
his uncle’s affairs compelled him to have with H5r 121
Hutchen, that in that gentlemen he might hope
to find a willing and generous father-in-law, who,
if deprived of the chance of becoming such, might
be equally ready to visit upon the uncle the indifference
shown by the nephew for so desirable an alliance.
He wished also to clear up, if possible,
the mystery of Elizabeth’s birth, before he presented
her to the world as his. But paramount to all
was the passionate wish to make her his—to give
to his own existence an invaluable blessing, an unfading
charm, while to her he gave home, an ascertained
place in life, and, dearer still, boundless
unimaginable felicity—did she not look as if thus
it were?—in the possession of his affection.

The absence of Monica Doran, at this time on
one of her mysterious periodical journeys, was much
regretted by Elizabeth. Still she was happy.
She had found, and for the first time of her life—

“One bosom to recline upon, One heart to be her only one; And ’twas enough for love.”

Elizabeth’s marriage was celebrated in Ernescraig,
her humble friends there, whose secrecy was
easily purchased, being the only witnesses to the ceremony.
And for a few short months this “paradise
of hearts” was undisturbed; till the Irish rebellion H5v 122
brought a hasty summons to many a soldier—and
among others to Wolfe Grahame. It was now
that Elizabeth was first awakened to the real ills
of her condition; for if she had ever before entertained
any passing doubts as to the propriety of
her marriage, they were all hushed in its felicity.

But now she was alone, with new cares, new
anxieties. Yet the source of these was also the
fountain of all her past happiness, of all her future
hopes. She had something to love with affection
so supreme compared with all she had ever felt
before, that the sentiment alone seemed enough for
happiness.

From the period of her marriage Elizabeth had
not once visited Monkshaugh. In every place,
save the Tower of Ernescraig and the solitudes
around it, she felt embarrassment and disquiet;
and in every society, save his who made her world,
something was sure to occur, which her conscious
heart and quick feelings applied as reproach or
suspicion.

But Grahame had entreated her to accept of the
often repeated invitation of his uncle, at least as
soon as he should himself be gone; and those
only who have loved like Elizabeth, can understand
the many sources of interest and delight which a H6r 123
residence under his roof promised to her at this
time. In her lonely home, to her own heart only
could she whisper the name which was here a household
word. Here Wolfe was the engrossing object
of the whole family. Every chance visiter talked
of him. Those who had met with him or heard of
him, called to give the acceptable intelligence.
Yet there was pain as well as pleasure in this; for
who could understand—who talk of him to satisfy
Elizabeth!

When a few days passed the first embarrassments
of her visit were over, and again she mingled in the
current of domestic life in Monkshaugh, and, advancing
every hour in favour with its master, the
fresh and buoyant spirit of Elizabeth rose to its
natural level. Wolfe might obtain advancement,
or something might occur to restore her to his society,
—and what more was wanted to make her
happiness complete! These hopes of air a breath
would puff away. If Elizabeth had been rash in
her marriage she was soon doomed to expiate that
offence almost every hour of the day,—for Monkshaugh,
in the natural vanity of his heart, omitted
no opportunity of boasting of the splendid and
wealthy alliances which “her cousin,” with his
many advantages of talent, person, and family, H6v 124
might form, whenever he liked to give himself the
trouble of choice.

On the second evening of her visit, the Whittret
returned with the horse which his young master
had rode as far as ― on his was to Ireland;
and as this paragon of serving-men was blest with
a free copious elocution, and conversational tact
which went far to establish his claim to a highland
descent, the long evening was spent in listening to
the narrative of the first day’s journey. There
were, indeed, many episodes interwoven, fully as
interesting to Monkshaugh as was the main story
to Elizabeth. Towards the close of this rambling
narrative, the Whittret contrived to give her a private
signal of intelligence; and though her brow
reddened with proud shame, love conquered the
feeling, and she retired to the book-closet adjoining
the parlour, and from thence passed into the
garden by a sashed door, to favour the moonlight
audience demanded.

Chapter VI.

Family Gossip.

The old-fashioned garden of Monkshaugh was
a favourite haunt of Elizabeth’s. It lay immediately
behind the mansion, divided from the river
by a few acres half orchard half home-field, and
sheltered by double rows of embowering elms.
Garden enclosure there was none, though here a
few yards of glossy holly hedge, and there a detachment
of mossy pales interlaced with fresh
sprays of the white thorn, and again grassy banks
crowned with furze, and all glittering with buttercups
and daisies, showed that something of the H7v 126
kind might once have been contemplated. But
now this secluded garden was open to every wandering
wind of heaven, and every vagrant foot of
truant school-boy. Beds of chamomile, plats
of rue and rosemary, and other herbs of grace,
were carelessly mixed with tangled rose-trees and
fruit bushes. Dainty plants and common pot-
herbs flourished together in amity, with some attention
to neatness, but none to order or classification;
and a lively runlet, stolen from the dean
burn, danced and glided along the margin of the
turfen walks, giving life, spirit and freshness
to the whole scene. Yet the general effect of the
half-neglected spot was pleasing; and none felt that
desire to overleap the straggling enclosures which
is so apt to beset one cribbed in the durance of a
modern brick-walled garden.

Elizabeth made the tour of this garden once
and again, extended her walk to the Ducot park,
and the Foal’s park, two small enclosures that
flanked the mansion and garden on the right and
left, but still her squire appeared not. She returned
to the “library,” as the book closet was
termed. Near its sashed door, concealed by a tall
white rose-tree, was the trellissed window of a pantry
or store place, one of the many low out-shots H8r 127
stuck round the mansion; and in this place was
heard the voice of the Whittret, opening his budget
afresh for the solace and edification of Mistress
Euphan Fechnie, as she creamed her milk cogs.
These worthies and inseparables liked each other,
in Frisel’s phrase, “as cats like mustard;” but
they were nevertheless entirely agreed in one point:
Euphan had an inordinate desire to change her
state, and Frisel a wish equally ardent—“to make
the toun quit o’ her.”

“Ye’ll be for offering me some refreshment,
Effie, when I stow away my pack. Guess ye if I
need it no after my day’s trail: There were first
the Laird’s letter to Clerk Gled, anent the Harletillum
plea, and the draught on the British Linen;
for the whilk I got fient a boddle. Keep your
thumb on that Effie,—and look about ye, lass.”

“It’s a gone house—a sinking house!—If that
hare-brained lad dinna tak rule and prop the auld
wa’s the pride o’ Monkshaugh has gotten a whomle.
Miss July Annie Hurcheon has a lippie o’ red
gowd for tocher-gude they say.—Is that true,
Francie,—you that kens a’ thing?”

“That will ne’er be a match,” replied Francie,
winking and nodding his head oracularly.—“Say
ye I said it, Effie.”

H8v 128

“Mighty Goliah o’ Gath! and ye are amang
the sma’ prophets!”

“I ken what I ken.”

“Ye ken that Wolfe Grahame is a proud-
stomached headstrong fule, wha will sit in his ain
light till he find the frost o’t.”

“Whilk shows he’ll fill his father’s belt, and
may be gi’e it a rax. Aye! there was the man o’
mettle,—wi’ mair o’ the cock-bird in his little
finger than our Pernickitie Laird has in his haill
bouk!—But get me free o’ this gear Effie. I’m
the common pack-horse o’ the country side.—
What’s to come owre ye a’ when I gi’e up business?
—There’s first a half-stand o’ wires for Mrs.
Doran. I can look for sma’ propine for doing her
errands—besides she’s to the bent again; but she
has the will, honest woman.—And here’s five bawbies’
worth o’ pig-tail for auld Ba’whirley. He’ll
ha’e nae change as usual, but routh o’ cheek wind.
—And this i’ the bit paper is a pennyworth o’
arinetty litt, for the auld gudewife o’ Hungeremout,
to dye the young Laird’s breeks ’ankeen ere
he gangs a wooing Jock Hurcheon’s maiden.”

“To dye the butter I jalouse!” grinned Effie,
who had a deadly rivalry both in love and dairy
produce, with this frugal matron of Hungeremout.

1 I1r 129

“O! de’il a doubt,” replied Frisel, still unloading
his stores. “An ee to Mr. Gideon, said ye? He’ll
never look the gate she sits. Think ye, Effie,
what she offered me last week when I trailed her
hame some sosserie o’ treacle, to make plash o’
sma’ drink for the servants,—it gaed against the
stomach o’ my conscience to be the bearer—a
dainty luggie fu’ o’ plotted whey! I could ha’e
thrown it in the she-Nabal’s face. How does she
think man’s nature is to be supported on jaups like
that!”

“But ye took it though, Francie.”

“I took it no to affront the house o’ Hungeremout
—far-aff friends o’ our ain. The young gudeman
pays weel when he has siller. I canna compleen.
—And the Misses:—I ha’e brought them
four novelles, and three bend-boxes; aye left in the
barn till night-fa’, for fear o’ the gleg grey een o; the
auld leddy;—and care come on them they write sic
a scart that Twalmo Touchthebit, the book-man
in Rookston, can mak’ neither tap, tail, nor mane
o’t. However I made him gi’e me something
about a castle and a ghaist; and that will keep
the lasses greeting till my next raik to the burrowstoun.
They scrapit up a groat amang them, poor Vol. I. I I1v 130
dears,—magged frae their Sabbath pennies to the
brod, I’m thinking.”

And thus proceeded the Whittret, still as Elizabeth
supposed searching for the contents of his
valise, till he at last said abruptly, “And this—
Ou, this is just naething ava, Effie.”

“Ay, but it is just something ave, Francie!
and a bonny like something for ane eating the
bread, and wearing the livery coat o’ the Laird o’
Monkshaugh to ha’e about him! Packing cards
wi’ Harletillum, and conneeving and colloguing
to encourage a headstrong lad—with whom ye
are hand and glove again—in what ye ken will
lead to his rank ruin! and I ha’e naething to say
again’ the lassie, but that she may gang wode the
night afore the morn, like her puir daft father, and
is no worth a plack-a-bawbie, had she the wisdom
o’ Solomon and Sheba. Ye ken weel—nane better
—that sic a match wad loose Harletillum on our
Laird, to rend and spuilzie our grund; for it’s been
lang thought he has an ee to Captain Wolfe for
his Flanders-baby o’ a maiden; and tholes wi’ us,
and gi’es us the lang day allenarly for this. But
the Laird is as blind as a beetle, and as proud as
a Brissel cock.”

I2r 131

With great indignation did Frisel throw back
the charge of confederating with Harletillum; but
that he was the bearer of private despatches from
Captain Wolfe to Elizabeth, was he feared now
undeniable.

“Ye see what it is to be a scholar, and to read
hand-o’-writ, Effie.—Conscience! but it’s a gleg
ee too that single ane. But I ken one thing—
this maiden is a dear darling to Mr. Gideon. They
need expect little grace from him that show nane to
Leddy ’Lizbeth. And, Effie, rest ye merry, woman.
I’ll lay my spleuchan to your milsey clout, that ye’ll
be married afore her yet, if ye drive quiet and
canny. Come! let us see how handsomely ye’ll
supper me after my lang trail: a white puddin’—
nane spices them better in the parish,—a reisted
haddock, or some sic confection. I trow I expounded
a piece o’ doctrine to a certain person on the
Coalheugh muir the other day. ‘What better,’
as I said, ‘were we wi’ reformed ministers than wi’
Papish priests, if they were to rin loose about a
country-side, and no tak wives?’”

“Ye’re a fleechin fair-fashioned loonie,” said
the maiden, grimly smiling and shaking her head.
“But it is neither my wish nor will to breed dispeace
between man and master;—though I could I2v 132
ill fill the place o’ the worthy gudewife o’ Sourholes,
now—praised be the Lord for all things!—
in Abraham’s bosom.”

“Weel—behave, Effie, and ye may soon be in
as gude a fallow’s. Keep counsel woman:— ‘Cheer up your heart my bony lass, There’s gear to win ye never saw”—’”
sang the Whittret in affected glee.

“Na, the gudewives o’ the congregation thought
her but a doin’less boddie, to make so short outcome
o’ a stipend o’ thirty English pounds—there’s
a soom!—forbye an allowance for communion
yelements o’ as many shillings sterling!—no our
scrimpit Scots money, Francie.”

While visions of conjugal splendor and felicity
sparkled before Effie’s grey eye, and dimly
floated before her white one, Frisel expressed cordial
sympathy.—“Weel, lass! he’ll fa’ on his feet
at last—thanks to his weel-wishers! So get us
something comfortable—d’ye mark me?—and say
nae mair. Gosh, Effie, how caidgie he’ll look!”
And seizing the dun maiden by both hands he
dragged her round the floor, and capered round
her like a monkey setting to a bear, singing aloud— I3r 133 “‘The carle he came owre the craft, Wi’ his beard new shaven; He looked and lap as he’s been daft; The carle trows that I was ha’e him’”
till he fairly swung her into the kitchen, and taking
the liberty to turn the key outside, speeded
round into the garden. There stood Elizabeth,
pale and agitated, rooted to the spot where she
had overheard the above gratifying dialogue.

“My father! my father!” was her agonizing
thought. “This malady of our blood! This
dreadful visitation! Is our calamity then a common
speech—a cause of alarm, horror and exclusion,
a gulph that divides us from all hope? And
have I then rashly plunged into it—and dragged
into its abyss—him?”—She buried her face in her
hands in utter agony; and the letters for which
she had so earnestly longed, and which at another
season would have filled her bosom with transport,
were received with an unnatural deadness of heart,
such as she had never before experienced.

The trusty messenger presented his despatches
with as much outward shew of respect as was at
all compatible with his familiar habits; and expressed
his entire devotion to her service with zeal
that atoned for his late indiscretion. On that topic
he observed a prudent silence, merely saying—

I3v 134

“This is frae a friend, Lady ’Lizbeth, who
counselled me to say, that in ony strait or dilemmy
I was as trusty a hand at a message as e’er a he
throughout the bounds o’ braid Scotland—by
night or by day—wi’ a spice o’ contrivance at a
pinch that is no the gift o’ ilka auld trooper. A
nod or a wink will bring me to your leddyship’s
whistle, be I at kirk or fair, mill or smiddy:—
I’m aye gaun about like the ill bawbie, and will
come to your leddyship’s hand at ony time, like
the bowl o’ a pint stoup.”

With a scrape of one foot, and a shuffle of both,
the Whittret withdrew to release his prisoner.

This letter was of costly postage.—Elizabeth
paid it with both tears and blushes; but now, sealed
with “a double kiss,” it was placed in her bosom
that she might read it in the silence and solitude of
her own chamber. And never had the tedious inanity
and pribble-prabble of the Laird appeared
so tiresome as on this night. From the brood
goose to the Lady Tamtallan—from his ever
honoured mother’s recipe for white quality
cakes, to certain clauses of the entail, his mind
wandered through all its favourite regions of
thought; and a farewell buzz was in Elizabeth’s
ears about new fringing the yellow Turk-upon- I4r 135
Turk bed before Wolfe returned, and new dipping
the pink lining of the toilet-table cover in
the guests’ chamber, about which she came
under some promise, which could scarcely be
binding on her conscience, so totally absent was
her mind.

Chapter VII.

Hopes and Anxieties.

The weariest day has its close.—At last Elizabeth
was enabled to lock, and double lock her
door, and enjoy undisturbed the throbbing delight
of a first hasty perusal of her letter; and then in
more luxurious leisure every fond nothing, every
phrase of endearment, every tender expression was
dwelt upon and scanned. And last of all, with
what flutter and softness of heart were her first
attempts made to reply to this effusion of affection.

* * * * * * * * *

I5r 137

“Could you guess,” she said, among many other
desultory things, “how cordial and soothing to
me is this single little letter, you would not miss
every day to tell me how it fared with you, and
that you still held in remembrance the forlorn one
whose yearning heart clings around you in tenderness,
deeper, though more sorrowful, than ever blest
the most rapturous moments of our past intercourse.
How often, while by your side, have I fancied it
impossible that the blest and enviable creature
whom you loved, and who durst call you hers,
could ever know the touch of sorrow! I am not
sorrowful, dearest Wolfe, still less complaining;
yet I feel that every day takes you farther from
me, that every day is a day almost lost to affection,
which time can never repay to us, that every
passing hour increases that anxiety inexplicably
interwoven with our fondest hopes—sent perhaps
to temper and chastise them. Is it so? There is
a fearful mystery, from which my coward spirit
ever shrinks, in what good people tell us of the
permitted degree of human attachments—as if it
were sin to love as I do—with the unreserved, entire,
warm surrender of the whole burning heart
—with the devotion of the whole spirit. If it be
not idolatry—and I will not think so—it is at I5v 138
times I fear nearly allied to misery; and yet how
unspeakably sweet is it to me to have you thus
my own, to care about, and even to weep for.

But I must now give you news of me. I
have obeyed your wishes. I am in Monkshaugh,
under your own roof, the tenant of the little arched
room over the hall, on which, when it was yours,
I have so often gazed through tears. Do you remember
the feverish attack which you had in the
last spring?—but you never do remember any
thing about yourself half so well as I do—when I
used to wander all day long in the Pechs’ Path,
that, by the opening and closing of the curtains,
I might judge how it fared with him whom I
durst not approach, while my agonizing thoughts
hovered round his bed-side continually. Oh!
when will the time come that I may hold up my
head in any presence, and look as if I loved you!
Will it ever come? Now that you are far away,
every unmeaning look—every chance-dropt word
overwhelms me. * * * * * * * * * You remind me of our old fond disputes about
the different characters of man’s and woman’s love.
My idle reveries often wander into the old track; I6r 139
and I wish you here, were it only to make me
false to my old faith in woman’s purer, deeper,
fonder love—her unhesitating, uncalculating, passionate
affection, which surrenders the whole being,
and finds in its object a dearer and nobler
existence—the love of Imogen and Juliet, of Miranda
and Desdemona—in another degree, but yet
as truly woman’s, the love of la Valiere, l’humble
violette—of the Heloise of Abelard, and even
of the mistress of Macheath—poor Polly Peachum.
But I strive to believe you; and shall not
quarrel with either your faith or practice while you
still continue, as to-night, to tell me, that wherever
a man’s various fortune may call you to struggle
or endure, whatever of prosperity ambitious daring
may bring you, that it is here—only here—to
Ernescraig—to the bosom all your own, you can
ever turn for happiness. Could we not find it
now—this good old friends conciliated—here—living
together in safe obscurity, and what the false
world calls poverty—a world to each other—you
at least a universe to me? ”

How would godly Gideon have groaned over this
“idolatrous” trifling of his favourite Elizabeth!
But how dear—how soothing to her was the privilege
of this happy trifling, from which she could scarcely I6v 140
break off to repeat the long, lingering, melting
farewell, so hard to be said to the beloved even
in writing. Before this final, and to her painful
ceremony, she took a tranquillizing walk across
the chamber, and opened the window shutters
upon a still, sweet morning, unclosing its dewy
lids as softly as an infant waked by a mother’s
kiss—“creeping on with stealthy pace—not as it
wont to come,” wrote Elizabeth, “flushed with
haste, tearing you from me in our past happy
days yonder in our own valley. Will they ever—
ever come again? And do you still keep the
promise made to me there—so often renewed from
mere delight in its repetition—to give to your
God and to me the last remembrance of your
waking hours—the first fresh feeling of the returning
morning—one little minute snatched from
the turmoil of vulgar hours, consecrated to our
fond recollections, and our yet fonder hopes—
mingling in one sentiment faith, and homage,
and love. Are you awake yet, love? Are you
thus engaged now? How I trifle with you! and
with what a gush of overwhelming tenderness do
I now again say—God bless you! my own and
ever dearest―

Good night—Good night!”

I7r 141

And poor Elizabeth soon found more substantial
reason for indulging in those womanly or lover-
like apprehensions, which are ever inseparable from
a high and imaginative tone of passion; for who
ever loved as she loved without experiencing intense
and, perhaps, foolish anxiety, about the
strength of the sentiment which they inspire!

True to her own feelings, nightly did affection
repeat its orisons, and melancholy enough they at
last became. From Ayr Elizabeth got another
letter, and yet another from Carrickfergus, at
which garrison, instead of keeping the regular ferry,
vessels at that disturbed period were compelled to
land. Monkshaugh received, even after this, one
brief epistle from his young kinsman, who merely
mentioned that he had had some singular adventures
on his journey to Dublin, but was now with
his regiment. This last very brief letter Elizabeth
contrived to secret for a night. She had indeed
read it, and heard it read three times before;
but it might contain some expression, some allusion,
some trace which ingenious affection, willing
to be deceived, might construe into a reference to
herself. Not one was found.

“Ungenerous and cruel!” she exclaimed, throwing
down the letter, while floods of burning tears I7v 142
burst forth. “Common humanity—gentlemanly
feeling, might have spared me torture like this.
It is thus I expiate my folly.—Forgotten already!”
Elizabeth was now to feel the ineffable bitterness
of that moment when the withering heart first fears
that the human hope on which it has reposed, in joy
and trust, may be but a dream, and a mockery. But
these vagrant surmises, so mortifying to the pride
of her sex, so wounding to the tenderness of her
affection, were as indignantly dismissed. The letters
already received were again and again perused,
every proof of recollected love was dwelt on, clung
to now with fond tenacity; and confidence and
spirit would revive together, again to waver, flag,
and sink into yet deeper despondency. Bitterly
then would she reproach herself for what was past,
sometimes feeling in her humuliation as if she
almost grudged it to herself. At these seasons of
cruel depression, that enthusiastic tone of passion
which ever sees in the beloved being “a bright
peculiar star” to be admired and worshipped, led
her to wonder, while she grieved, that she could
have been so blinded as to believe that one so desolate,
so unregarded as she was, could become
the object of a permanent attachment to him whose I8r 143
lot and whose deservings lay so far beyond hers.
Could she then, had it still been possible, have surrendered
her hopes and claims? Elizabeth could
not so deceive herself. In the midst of anxiety,
regret, and anguish, there was exulting pride, and
thrilling delight in the consciousness that she was
his—while his protracted silence gave her reason
to fear that already he repented having made
her so—that rash as was the deed it was done
past recall, and that in her bosom duty and affection
were henceforth united for ever.

Another week passed, an age of suspense and
agony. Not even Monkshaugh received any letter;
and marvelling and indignant at his cool indifference,
she who durst at other times scarce
whisper the name of Wolfe Grahame, gained courage
to notice the circumstance as they sat together
in the twilight. Monkshaugh took the matter so
quietly as only to irritate her anxiety. And now
to watch the return of the servant from the post-
office, the throb and flutter of fevered expectation
giving way to distracting doubts or sickening despondency,
or to peruse at midnight the weekly
newspaper which arrived at Monkshaugh, her
heart throbbing with wild alarm, her blood curdling
with apprehension as often as her quick-eye I8v 144
caught the word “Ireland”, was become the daily
life of the once happy Elizabeth. Privileged grief,
with its pains, has its pomps and indulgences;
how much more bitter may be the stifled agony
which passes unmarked over that spirit to which
complaining is denied, by which complaining is
disdained—the cold curdling anguish which gathers
around the desolate breaking heart. The deepest
griefs of the drama of life were never wept aloud—
never known to exist. Elizabeth hoped that her
distress might pass unnoticed. The energy or the
pride of her psirit nerved her to bear up nobly,
when the cold or curious eye of the petty neighbouring
world was upon her; for though averse to
society no one, to a superficial observer, seemed
more gay when engaged in its amusements; and,
at all times externally serene, she went about the
ordinary details of life, feeling that she awaited her
fate.

As a petty aggravation of her own personal
uneasiness, she was now made the confidant of
all Monkshaugh’s distresses, angers, and hopes.
Wolfe Grahame would willingly have taken such
measures as might have enabled his uncle at once
to extricate himself from the toils of Hutchen;
but the Laird, with the natural feeling of an amiable,2 K1r 145
though perhaps weak mind, could not endure
the idea of selling one rood of his family inheritance.
It was like the dismemberment of a limb.
When Elizabeth looked grave and anxious as he
talked of his embarrassments, he would cheer her
with such scraps of comfort as the following:—

“Never mind, cousin ’Lizbeth,—yon soldier
lad may get haud o’ some lass wi’ as much gold
sewed to her coat-tail as will free us o’ Jock Hurcheon’s
bonds, without the bonnie holms o’ Monkshaugh
(and he looked with pride from the parlour
window) going to John’s Coffee-house—at least in
my day.”

Spite of her better understanding, and her unshaken
confidence in the honour and integrity of
her lover, cooled though his affection might become,
these little speeches would momentarily wring
the heart of Elizabeth, upheld though she was by
the generous consciousness of worth—self-existent
—independent of all outward shews and circumstances,
which, had they been thrown together on
some desert island of the ocean, or in the first ages
of the world, would have made her, all destitute
of friends and fortune as she now stood, a fit mate
even for him. If his inexplicable silence forced
her to doubt that his heart was forgetful, her faith Vol. I. K K1v 146
in the nobility of his nature never once wavered.
She was spared the pang, to a generous mind
more bitter than death, of having lavished her
whole heart on one who could be base as well as
wayward, sordid as well as fickle. It was not in
this view that Elizabeth ever once imagined cause
of regret in her secret ties. “I have given him all
that woman can bestow,” was her proud thought,—
“all that affection looks for—faith, truth, and
love—love how unbounded—how idolizing—how
exclusive—how sinful perhaps in its wild excess!”
And thus along with Monkshaugh’s irksome prattle,
and vague hopes of rich alliances, came old
Gideon’s theories, and stern denunciation—“Cursed
is an that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh
his armour”—sounding to her heart like the death-
watch in the ear of superstition.

Elizabeth had rested a lingering hope on the
return of Mr. Haliburton. But that reverend
person came back to his grumbling flock as ignorant
of the late movements of Wolfe Grahame as
even the inmates of Monkshaugh. His mission,
so far as regarded the mystery connected with
Elizabeth’s infancy, had been a complete failure.
No trace could be obtained of the daughter of his
old landlady, Mrs. Metcalf the midwife.

K2r 147

Gideon’s return was announced on a Saturday
morning by Frisel; and when the day passed and
he came not, with the restlessness inseparable from
the unhappy, Elizabeth, though she could not visit
his cottage, wandered forth in the hope of perhaps
somewhere meeting the minister. The Laird
who always imagined that he had a double portion
of household duty to perform on Saturdays, was
deeply engaged in pantry-business with Effie, and
never missed her. She stole through the now melancholy
garden and orchard down to the river.

The spirit of the year had waned like the
hopes of Elizabeth. The sear tinge of autumn
was on the woods—the hoarse voice of autumn
was in the streams—the pale cold sun no longer
drank up the dews, which hung all day on the
blade, like the icy moisture in a dead man’s eye—
red leaves were swirling in eddies from the path
down into the brown river; and the brilliant, the
overpowering chorus of the summer birds was
hushed into one broken feeble wail—the low sobbing
moan of expiring nature. It was a chill, grey
day, the dull sky sympathizing with the saddened
earth. But to Elizabeth even the rigour of the
blast was welcome. Its wing seemed to ruffle that K2v 148
leaden dullness—that heavy stagnation of spirit
which was creeping over her, from the constraint
perpetually imposed upon her feelings, as the freshening
breeze is said to relieve the mariner from
the distempered visions produced by a dead calm.

There never yet, however, was a day in which
the genuine lover of nature, if once fairly driven
into her bosom, could not perceive something to
waken his sympathies. Elizabeth, her frame braced,
and her spirits rising with exercise, held on her
way to those upland moors across the fords, where
she had last seen Wolfe Grahame, almost certain
that in distant horseman she discovered Mr. Gideon
mounted on the renowned Jenny Geddes.
“Surely he can tell me something,” said she; and
in the strength of this hope she began to feel somewhat
of her wonted enjoyment in marking every
surrounding object of natural beauty. The clusters
of coral berries glittering in the holly bushes
—the mosses more vividly green in winter than
when the hot sun looks upon their beauty—the
sweet churm of that little favourite bird “which
ever in the haunch of winter sings,”—the lone
whistle of the grey plover on the distant moors—
all brought a sober, chastened delight, as she strolled
onward.

K3r 149

From the hamlet of Castleburn, a deep scooped
path called the Cadger’s Loan, led to the fords
of Oran, so often mentioned in this story. It was
one of the many how roads which abounded in
Scotland at that period, formed on the very reverse
of Macadam’s plan, and as abhorrent to the owners
of post-horses as delightful to the tasteful pedestrian.
In winter those steep hollow paths or
trenches resembled more the channel of a stream
than a regular road. In fact this how road was
the channel of innumerable tiny rills, which streaming
over high incumbent banks of mingled rock and
verdure, trickled softly away over mosses, plants,
and pebbles, wandering, and turning, and twisting
at will, though here and there, where they
threatened to take the passenger fairly over the
shoes in their clear waters, a few stepping stones
had been strewed about, which diverted rather
than impeded the course of the brooklets.

Elizabeth was making her way bounding over
these stones, when a young gentleman on horseback,
followed by a servant also mounted, and several
sporting dogs, dashed so suddenly upon the
path that had he not dexterously reined in his
horse she must have been exposed to alarm, if not
to actual danger, from the encounter.

K3v 150

While he drew up at one side to permit the lady
to pass, the hounds recognized an old friend, and
with one accord sprung upon Elizabeth with clamorous
joy and obstreperous caresses. The long
green cloak in which she was wrapped was in a
second pulled from her shoulders; and there she
stood “red as rose,” with a gentle hand smilingly
beating down these importunate admirers, and with
a voice as gentle chiding them off. In one instant
the stranger was at her side; and his servant also
dismounted, and at the expense of some blows and
cuffs restored order.

“Don’t hurt them”—cried Elizabeth.

“Don’t kick the dogs, sir”—cried the stranger
to his active groom, though he as actively interfered
with his hand to restore order as the servant
did.

Elizabeth was pleased with this little trait. It
was humanity—it was true good-breeding. She
looked up and saw a young man of very pleasing
person, fashionably attired, and with a decided air
of fashion and refinement, who made many apologies
for his dogs while he assisted her in recovering
her cloak. The offenders meanwhile whined
and slunk into the rear; all save one—old Dermid
maintained his post at Elizabeth’s knee.

K4r 151

“I perceive,” said the young man, “that Mr.
Hutchen’s dogs, more fortunate than his guests,
are entitled to claim the privilege of old acquaintance.”

“We have met before,” said she. “Poor old
Dermid—’tis hard that I should reject your kindness;”
and caressing the old hound for an instant,
while he arched his neck as if proudly conscious
that fair hands and “bright eyes were upon him;”
she bowed slightly to the stranger and passed on.

The gentleman begged that he or his servant
might be allowed to carry home the wet cloak,
which she had thrown down on the bank; but she
declined the service, saying that it would lie quite
safely till she sent for it. He bowed and slowly
mounted his horse, looked back and bowed again;
and the high banks intervened.

About this same hour the Whittret from kindness,
alloyed it might be by some mixture of curiosity,
and a distant vision of one of Elizabeth’s
“splendid shillings,” had set forth to the hamlet
of Sourholes, to glean from the presiding apostle
of that place crumbs of comfort, which might well
merit the reward of perhaps a half-crown.

On the late journey Wolfe Grahame, by concert
with Elizabeth, had acquainted Mr. Haliburton K4v 152
with the position in which they stood; and
though the honest man groaned fearfully over their
rashness, and more deeply still over the enormity
of their passionate attachment, his feelings were
greatly interested in whatever might befal Elizabeth.
His previous knowledge prepared him for
Frisel’s address, who, after the first greetings,
said—

“If ye have not gude tidings o’ Captain Wolfe,
I’ll flee the country. Flesh and blude cannot
thole the white lips and sunken een o’ that gentle
leddy—and nae soul to make her moan to but mysel’
about our toun.—If she wad but gi’e hersel’ the
comfort of speaking out to me.”

Gideon in silence doffed his extraordinary indoor
costume, in which he looked, Frisel said,
like the giant of all potato-bogles; and, new-
shod and wigged, wended forth to comfort Elizabeth.

“I thought to ha’e put aff this visit till the
Sabbath’s darg was owre; but, Francie, we are
tauld not to let the sun go down upon our wrath
—we should not let it go down on our love
either; for oh! my wee man, how soon do
thoughts o’ kindness cool in human hearts!”

“Then ye’ll be for hitting wi’ Effie while the K5r 153
iron’s het,” said Frisel, with a waggish leer upwards
as he bounded on, making two steps and a
skip for every huge stride of Gideon’s. “Blithe
will she be to see you this same night.”

“Haud your peace, ye fule scoffer. But as
I’m a livin’ sinner, there’s ’Lizbeth de Bruce coming
down the Cadger’s Loan! What young
birkie is yon, Francie?”

“Mr. Delancy, a grand gentleman come to the
Whim to marry Miss July Annie Hurcheon,”
was the reply.

Long and cordial, but as perfectly sincere as
shorter greetings, were those now exchanged.
Elizabeth directed Frisel to carry home her mantle;
and listened with a sad enough heart to Gideon’s
long narrative of disappointment. In her
turn she unfolded a part—not the ten-thousandth
part of her own anxieties, fears, and wild imaginings.

“So ye’re no’ ready yet to resign your idol?”
said Gideon—“to say ‘Thy will be done,’ an it
were to streek him wi’ your ain hand in a bloody
shroud. I ken, alack! it’s a sair tug to the unrenewed
natural heart.”

“Oh!” cried Elizabeth, clasping her hands in K5v 154
agony. “You have heard—you know something
—some dreadful thing! Tell me—tell me all!”

A little alarmed by her agitation, and the deadly
hue which overspread her face, Gideon hastened
to say that he knew nothing. “But answer
the question I ha’e propounded to ye, my bairn.
The physician maun look down into the spirit’s
ails—yea probe them to the quick before he can
minister the remedy.”

Elizabeth saw he was playing the divine—a
game which even Gideon could not always resist
—and replied, “Mr. Haliburton, you are a good
man, but why torture me thus? I cannot—I
cannot—’tis beyond human power—woman’s
power what you require. God forbid such effort
were required of me. Heaven does not try me so
severely,—why will you?”

“Because I would have you cultivate the frame
of spirit which holds at nought husband and bairn,
house and land,” said he stoutly.

“I hold house and land at as small value as
you can do, Mr. Haliburton,” and Elizabeth,
proudly.

“Ay, there it is! but the human idol—the
clayey image!—that cannot be renounced. I
ha’e remarked, ’Lizbeth, in the course o’ my sma’ K6r 155
experience, that the love o’ man often proves the
Enemy’s maist tempting bait wi’ young professin’
Christian gentlewomen—them that wad ha’e despised
gowd ear-rings, and gauze mutches, and
gauds and toys, and bravely resisted the allurements
o’ the singing men, and the singing women,
and held at nought the lust of the eye and the
pride of life—I ha’e seen them e’en the readiest
to slide into this cunningly devised snare; fall
away from their first love, and their high respect
for gospel ministers, about the days o’ courtship;
and, after marriage, grow as careless, thowless,
cauldrife Christians as ye was wish to see. The
blackest ill that can befal a young Christian woman”
—and Gideon raised his voice—“is to be
joined to what she calls the man o’ her heart—
puir, deluded, blinded worm, seeking her heaven
on earth—ae potsherd o’ the dust falling down
to worship anither. It’s lamentable, ’Lizbeth, to see
the kindest and gentlest o’ the womenkind the
maist prone to this deadly, soul-killing, creature-
worship—even yoursel’, ’Lizbeth; and if it should
please Him to rebuke and lead back your wandering
heart, what should signify to you the fleeting
affections of a frail thing o’ the dust, whose breath
is in his nosthrils?”

K6v 156

At another season—in another person’s case,
Elizabeth would have understood all this precisely
as it deserved to be understood. But now it
looked like the very painting of her fears.

“You wish to bid me read my sin in my punishment,”
said she in a voice of deep emotion;
and her head sunk on her bosom—“to tell me
that I am forgotten—cast off already!” This was
wrung forth in very bitterness of spirit; and her
heart-struck tone, and despairing attitude, at once
affected and alarmed her ghostly monitor.

“Forgotten! na, na, my bairn, ye were no
made to be forgotten. Possess your spirit in patience,
’Lizbeth.—Forgotten!” Gideon looked as
if he could have knocked down any one who durst
forget her.

“Oh! I can tell myself of patience. Speak to
me of comfort, of cheer. Tell me, think you is
he well. Does he remember Ernescraig?”

“Mair it’s to be feared than he remembers his
Maker,” groaned forth Gideon. “Oh, the deadly
snare fond young creatures prove to ilk ither!
’Lizbeth, there was a lass ance”— And Gideon
in his zeal was about to reveal, as a warning to
his pupil, some of the wanderings of his own imagination
in the days of his vanity—the sinful K7r 157
yearnings and fond idolatry into which even he
had been led by human love, but he checked the
impulse, and went on—“If that should pleasure
ye, which ought, were ye to take a right view
of it, rather to grieve, be ye satisfied—that his
bauld, brave spirit keeps pace in this wild gallop
e’en wi’ your ain fond silly one. Puir fond
things! But the Lord’s gude time will come wi’
ye baith.”

“I trust that no time will come in which we
shall not be to each other the most beloved of
human beings,” thought Elizabeth; but she
kept the sentiment to herself.

“Forget ye!” continued Gideon, ruminating—
“Na, na! that wad na do neither. The natural
man, which I thought weel subdued, was
stirring in my ain auld breast at the distress o’
that puir blinded youth even while—as became me
as a faithful minister of God’s word—I laid before
him the iniquity—the grievous self-willed
sin of placing his affections on sic a frail perishable
commodity as yoursel’—of a comely countenance
as ye be, Burd ’Lizbeth.”

“’Pon my word I scarce know how to thank you
Mr. Haliburton, for this good service”, said Elizabeth,
now laughing; while the thought of her K7v 158
secret, quick-beating, raptured heart, was—“He
loves me! he loves me! I am not forgotten.—Oh,
how could my base fears—my baser suspicions—
thus wrong the truth to which even prejudice does
justice!”

Whatever salutary impressions might have been
made on Elizabeth’s mind by Gideon’s denunciations,
or her own apprehensions, it is to be feared
they all faded away like the morning dew from the
grass, before the delightful conviction that she
was fondly remembered still; and her heart yearning
with deeper tenderness to him whom all things
tended to endear, she walked on, giving, it must
be owned, a very distracted attention to Gideon’s
somewhat involved and obscure definition of the
misty boundaries which, according to him, separate
a permitted, from a sinful degree of mortal
attachment.

Though human charities held so low a place in
Mr. Haliburton’s creed, they possessed a very extended
dominion over his sympathies. In the
midst of his harangue, turning to the abstracted
Elizabeth, and probably having a key in his own
early recollections of the “lass that was ance,” to
the language of the sigh which just swelled her
bosom, just parted her rich lip, he turned away K8r 159
with a grim smile of mixed character, muttering to
himself—“Oh! that love, that blinded and blinding
love! It’s little she is thinking of me or my
lecture.” And on this discovery, he prudently
began to talk of how they were to institute inquiries
for Wolfe Grahame.

Ireland was at this time in a very convulsed state
—almost in open rebellion. Business was nearly
suspended—travelling was dangerous. The mails
had been robbed more than once, and in this way
Gideon not irrationally accounted for Wolfe’s
silence, which in secret was beginning to alarm
himself, and which he longed to see satisfactorily
accounted for.

“I ken that Saunders Ure, shoemaker in the
Gorbals, a savoury professor, ’Lizbeth, is weel
acquaint wi’ the Penpont carrier, who is ane o’ our
ain hill-side folk himsel.’ The Penpont carrier
will likely ha’e some channel o’ conveyance to
Stranraer, where Robert Maxwell, victualler, will
likely ken somebody at the Port.”

Elizabeth, limited as was her knowledge of life,
smiled over this singular line of posts for communicating
with a young officer of dragoons, who,
plain and unpretending man as he was in the
bosom of his home, was, she rather thought, inclined K8v 160
to abate nothing of his real consequence when
among strangers. She said she would be patient
a little longer.

While the plan was discussing the guest of
Harletillum once more came in sight, checked the
speed of his horse, and again in passing bowed
to Elizabeth, while he vouchsafed a rather astonished
side-glanced at her companion.

“Thae sparks o’ Haretillum’s are blawn about
this haill country-side. Come, ’Lizbeth, I maun
see you through the loanings.” Gideon talked of
Grahame, and she listened, cheered her with good
hopes of early accounts from Ireland, and she
was cheered; assured her that there was, he dreaded,
no near prospect of Wolfe seeing the sinful
enormity of her “creature-worship,”—and, notwithstanding
her acute perception of the ludicrous,
she smiled as much in joy as in mirth; finally,
for what strange messengers will not Cupid sometimes
press into his service, Gideon, without a word,
pushed something into her hand, as if ashamed of
being the conveyancer of “toys” and prohibited
wares, and with a hurried benediction took his
leave.

The midnight hour and the two chimes that
sounded next, found Elizabeth still lingering over 1 L1r 161
Gideon’s oddly delivered packet. It was the picture
of her lover. The arts have made rapid
strides in Scotland since that period; but this miniature
was not even of the first order of contemporary
excellence. It had however been sent by
him—it was intended to resemble him. Elizabeth
strove, in spite of her better taste, to admire it
as an exquisite specimen of art. It was a spontaneous
feeling to prize it as the most valued gift of
affection, to address to it a thousand fond murmurs,
to bestow on it a hundred kisses, notwithstanding
the disapprobation of a taste which, perhaps
after all, might be fastidious and exacting; for not
even Raphael could have painted this resemblance
so as to fill the imagination of Elizabeth. The
heart’s first objection—“’Tis like him—and not he”
—what effort of art could remove that!—“I must
not blame the artist’s skill,” thought she. “Cold
and serious he looks on me—the expression never
changing—the eye-beam never mingling with mine
—never compelling mine to bow down before its
burning glance in sweet and willing subjection.
But who save myself can divine all which that
passionate countenance may convey. They may
give me those brown curls—‘the open forehead
full of bounty brave;’ but the lips—the eyes with Vol. I. L L1v 162
all their rich, and varied, and glowing meanings—
how could this cold dead thing give forth even their
shadowy resemblance.” Elizabeth, all idolatrous as
she was charged with being, needed not, it appeared,
an actual image to assist her worship; for highly
as the picture was prized, she now turned from
it to look inward on the breathing image, which
love’s own hand had drawn on her heart in lines of
fire, glowing, deep-traced, inerradicable.

Such then was the immediate effect of Gideon’s
pious exhortations and warnings.

Chapter VIII.

The Journey.

The reader cannot be supposed, on so slight
an acquaintance, to feel much interest in the fortunes
of the young soldier, who, some time back
in this narrative, went forth to do battle with the
rebels of Ireland. There is, however, a principle
of sympathy very useful to the young adventurer
in life, an interest taken in his prosperity, for the
sake of those to whom he is dear, which he has
had no personal opportunity of exciting in his own
behalf; and on this we presume in now for a little
changing the course of the narrative.

With more management than was perhaps necessary
in a country where there was little chance
of misconstruing the nature of their connexion, L2v 164
Captain Wolfe Grahame contrived to pilot himself
and his companion through the various towns
on their route, till on the fourth day they reached
Auld Ayr. They did not, however, at all
times travel in company—for Gideon almost every
night diverged into the moors, where some little
thatched building, without chimneys, constructed
on the model of a farmer’s salt-bucket, shewed a
Cameronian place of worship, and gave hope of a
neighbouring cottage equally modest in appearance,
inhabited by some one of his truly apostolic
brethren. It suited alike ill with Gideon’s devotional
and parsimonious habits to sojourn in even
the humblest places of public entertainment, and
would, besides, have been a breach of the customs
of his order. When either ecclesiastical or secular
business led them from home they had their
regular stage-houses; and never was lying palmer,
or bare-foot friar more welcome at even-tide to the
chimney-corner of franklin or yeoman, than was the
wandering Cameronian minister to the ingle-neuk
of the primitive farmers in the hill-country of the
south-west of Scotland. The residences of the
regular preachers were necessarily few and far apart;
but lay members were, at that time, scattered
throughout all those pastoral districts at easy distances; L3r 165
and some pious and hospitable widow, or
wealthy childless couple, had both a comfortable
spence for the man of God, and a barn for the
wandering beggar, or humble travelling merchant.
Even in families less able to exercise hospitality,
there was often some “Prophet’s Chamber,” curiously
dove-tailed into a labyrinth of wooden-walled
bads, which seldom wanted an occasional occupant.
A shed and a little coarse fodder were more grudgingly
bestowed upon Jenny Geddes and steeds of
her degree, which, in those times, were as well
known on the old drove-roads in the southern
counties, as are the short-lived horses which draw
his Majesty’s mail from St. Alban’s to London at
the present day.

On this kindly footing, Mr. Gideon was spending
an evening in a muirland farm-house “behind
the hills where Stinchar flows,” with a grey-headed
elder of his sect; and when he next day, by appointment,
met Captain Wolfe Grahame on the
coast, it was so late that they entertained some apprehension
of reaching their next resting place.
There was sickness in the family which Gideon had
visited, and dissensions among the scattered flock;
and when the minister let it be understood, that
he had been detained by sympathy for the sick and L3v 166
the sorrowful, and in healing divisions and repairing
breaches in the Zion of the Stinchar, he seemed
to take for granted that no farther apology was
necessary. In ordinary circumstances he never
prolonged his visits, nor, as the gudewives remarked,
“abused discretion.” It was generally
night-fall before he arrived at his quarters; and by
day-break, with the unbribed assistance of the
herd-boy; and he and Jenny Geddes were soberly
plodding on to their next station.

The friends had already traversed a good part
of the interior of Ayrshire, in hopeless search of
the daughter of the midwife. A threatening evening
was closing in on a rough gusty day, when they
found themselves on the seaside, but still much
farther from their place of destination for the night
than the state of the weather made agreeable.—
The latter part of their day’s journey lay along a
bold, wild, and broken line of coast, traversed by
a road, leading now around low headlands, then
sweeping into bays, and anon winding and climbing
round the iron faces of high and rugged promontories.
The only thing visible on this road,
for many hours, was the Port-Patrick Fly, crawling
onwards in the distance like the “shard-borne
beetle.”

L4r 167

It was a tiresome day’s journey to Grahame;
for Jenny Geddes was a lady too much accustomed
to have her own way, at all times, to be easily
put off it now; and though he sometimes gave her
a smack or a poke, which made her throw up her
hind legs to the evident discomposure of her rider,
she soon fell back into her accustomed jog-trot.
So, by way of pastime, whenever a piece of level
ground was met, Grahame, and his good steed Saladin,
took a youthful scamper for a mile or two ahead,
and either waited for their friends, or returned,
welcomed by Jenny’s amorous neigh, to announce
their mutual discoveries. The last discovery
which Wolfe made before night-fall was unpleasant
enough—a skiff in the offing trimming her
sails to meet the gale, and exhibiting marks of
distress and alarm.

“We are like to have a wild night, Mr. Gideon,”
said the young soldier, who had rode back
to join his friend. “I wish to goodness we were
at that Crossgates of Caberax, or whatever you
call it. I will insist on your remaining there all
night with me, notwithstanding those hospitable
friends all along who entertain you every night I
think. You must stay with me indeed. I am L4v 168
rich, sir,—I have lands and beeves—or I shall
have them.”

This was the light speech which often accompanies
a purse as light.

We have spoken of Gideon’s parsimonious habits.
The phrase was incorrect. That man cannot
be called parsimonious who freely spends his
whole living. Gideon’s was a small one—but his
wants were far less—so that he was comparatively
a rich man; and, what is more rare, positively
thought himself so, when at the end of the half-
year he paid his few debts, and gave to “him
that needed” all that remained over, literally laying
up his treasure in heaven. With something
of the complacence inseparable from the consciousness
of possessing property—for he had a guinea
and some shillings in his pocket—he replied to
Wolfe’s proposal of defraying their common travelling
charges,

“Na, na! Captain Wolfe, make yoursel’ easy
about that, my lad. I’m far frae being a needy
man. Did ye no hear of the hunder mers augmentation,
man? I never looked for it, I’m sure;
but my lot as to temporals has been casten in
pleasant places. What wi’ ae thing, and what wi’
anither—the ruckle of a house, (the Session are to L5r 169
set a man to mend the theek, and have it made
warm and water-tight aboon the bed—in summer
the holes in the roof were airy and pleasant
enough,) the kail-yard, and the gang o’ the common
muir for Jenny, I cannot call the living o’
the Sourholes muckle waur, communibus annis,
put the head o’ the sow to the tail o’ the grice,
than five-and-thretty English punds.”

This was whispered—a pause between every
emphatic word—in a quite confidential style, Gideon
advancing his mouth to the young man’s
ear, and Jenny kindly laying her long dewy nose
on the proud neck of Saladin, a freedom which he
scarcely appeared to relish.

“I have a kind people,” continued Gideon.—
“The gudewives have been on me to take a drop
tea-water in my loneliness. BurdOpen note a001-rota Burd---A lady, a damsel. ’Lizbeth has
given me the trick o’ that too—and to be sure I
can weel afford it; but for a man like me, Captain
Wolfe, to be pettling himsel’ up with delicates,
while mony a precious saint and puir thing want
a meltith o’ bare porridge, is no to be thought of.
—Make me worthy o’ a’ this kindness! and forbid
that riches prove a snare to me a second time!”

L5v 170

“No fear of that, sir—I shall be your guarantee,”
said Grahame.

“I kenna, Captain Wolfe. Let him that
thinks he standeth tak’ heed. I was laid under
sore and dark temptation this very time twal-
month, in the shape of what ye call a double Joe.
I had never seen coined money o’ the splendour
and value. It was paid me in the Martlemas
half-year’s stipend. So I laid by my golden idol
i’ the kist-coffer, in a horn snuff-mull; and in the
very watches of the night, even upon my quiet
bed, the demon o’ covetousness, Mammon himsel’
would put in my head my golden Johannes,
and how I could best put it out to usury, and lay
anither and anither till’t: but I wrestled, and, wi’
the help o’ the Mighty, prevailed. I trust my
bank and coffer will be my breek pouch, or some
puir widow wife’s meal ark in a’ time coming. I’ll
ha’e nae mair locking o’ coffers—nae Tubal-Cain
wark in my tents.”

The good man shut his grey eyes, and appeared
engaged for a minute in ejaculatory thanksgiving,
for this signal deliverance from the snare of
riches, and the power of covetousness. A smile
rose on Grahame’s lip—a half-heaved sigh chased L6r 171
it away as he contrasted his own illumination, and
the knowledge of good and evil obtained by eating
the bitter apples of experience, with the primitive
simplicity of Gideon.

“With your known hospitality,” said Wolfe,
“I could not have conceived you very rich—so
you must indeed allow me”—

“Hospitality! little to brag o’ in that way, my
lad. To gi’e a meal of hamely meat, or a brat o’
auld duds to a needy fellow-creature that falls in
my way, in the name of Him who has given me so
largely to enjoy, is but a sma’ matter, Captain
Wolfe. To be sure my auld garments are, as ye
say, nae great shakes.”—And he cast his eye on a
coat cuff, of which every thread might be counted
without the aid of a weaver’s magnifying glass.—
“But this is my kirk and causey clothes.”

“Nay, I rather think I have sometimes seen
them very great shakes,” said Grahame, laughing.

But a pun, however bad or good, fell alike innocuous
on honest Gideon, who never had the
most glimmering perception of a double meaning
in any thing he had ever heard in his life: so the
young man went on—“I am sure if you are not
hospitable, I don’t know who is—I have known L6v 172
you keep daft folk, and lamiters, and beggars,
about the Sourholes for weeks and months together
—our friend Miss Jacky Pingle, for instance.”

“Small thanks to me for that, lad; we were
auld stair neighbours, as I have aften tauld you;
and, when her brain is no a’ the higher, she has
a sleight wi’ her thimble and her shears that’s
just wonderfu’ the women-folk and the Laird tell
me—for I’m an ignoramus in needle-work. In that
six weeks she last sojourned at the Sourholes, she
did as much white seam, and embroidery upon the
heels o’ my rig-and-fur stockings, as would have
cost me twenty-pence sterling to the school-mistress
o’ Castleburn; so let us ne’er reckon that
turn hospitality.—We are ready enough to be
vain-glorious without calling the keeping of puir
Jacky Pingle, (whom never a one would take off
my hands neither,) by the name of a grace of deevine
injunction, whereby some have entertained
angels.”

“I certainly do not mistake your keeping poor
Miss Jacky for entertaining an angel,” said Grahame,
laughing again; “but I am sure, as I said,
if you are not hospitable I don’t know who is. By
the way, I know of no word in the English language
more abused, or of more ambiguous meaning L7r 173
than this same.—One hears of hospitality of
the feudal chieftain. I beg to place it exactly on
the same level with that of the modern hospitality
of the candidate for parliament;—so much beef
and ale,—so many balls and feasts,—for so much
reputation to be maintained, or service done or expected.
—‘The hospitalities of the Whim,’ (Mr.
Hutcheon’s mansion) and such sort of places, which
we sometimes hear of, are another spurious species
of this kindly virtue:—splendid entertainments,
a sacrifice to personal vanity, given in ostentation,
and received, as they deserve to be, with indifference
or scorn, by persons who neither need nor
crave kindness nor countenance, though they may
lack amusement. In a lower rank, the same feeling
of vanity leads another class of persons to fête
all sorts of people, artists, travellers, recruiting-
officers, players, and so forth—the wonderful—the
wild! and this, forsooth, must be hospitality! This
unfortunate grace has much to answer for, which
ought, in all conscience, to be laid elsewhere. No
man, Mr. Gideon, was ever yet a martyr to this virtue,
if exercised in its pure and simple sense. The
entertainer of the desolate and the widow, the sick,
the maimed, the blind, he who leads the bashful
unfriended stranger to his modest feast, will never L7v 174
I venture to predict, ruin himself by hospitality,
a virtue which, according to some folks, fills
half the bankrupt list.”

“Verily, there is a smack of rationality in what
you say, Captain Wolfe.”

“I am sure hospitality, if it has a home on
earth, still lingers in Strathoran with you and my
uncle,” said Wolfe. “I vow there is more genuine
kindness in the dinner he so often gives to
these poor devils, the Rookston peripatetic surgeon,
scouring our country-side on sixpenny bleedings
and shilling blisters, and our nonjuring curate,
with his triple duty and quarter pay, than in
twenty Lord Mayors’ banquets, or letter-of-introduction
dinners. I leave him in evil times, Mr.
Maliburton; but I trust a blessing will remain
on the kind old soul that never once sent a hungry
heart from his gate. I am sure if I am not
a better man as long as I live for having known
you both, I deserve to be hanged.”

Upon hearing this suspicious doctrine, savouring
indeed of ramping prelacy, Gideon girded up
his loins for the polemic combat, and was about,
at some length, to correct the young soldier’s heterodox
notions of charity, mercy, and hospitality,
when the youth called his attention to the struggling L8r 175
skiff, which a commanding point of the road
now enabled them to see clearly. The lazy chill
mists which had all day long hooded the braes,
now rolled fast down upon their path. Cape, and
island, and promontory, which had all day stretched
away in hazy perspective, were, one by one,
blotted out; and when the horsemen rounded the
sheltering angle of a screen of rocks, they were at
once exposed to the unmitigated fury of the tempest,
which came wildly rushing from the ocean,
shaking drizzling vapours from its wings, as they
flapped against the splintered cliffs, at whose base
the full tide was boiling and lashing. The full
moon was drifting on in the heavens through dun
and yellow clouds as if she too had gone astray,
and has to maintain the same struggle above which
the little vessel held in the weltering tide.—Altogether,
the prospect was comfortless and painful.

“We will have a foul night, Mr. Haliburton.
The wind has ever some mischief in its head,
when it whistles lillibulero at its destructive work
in that way. Can you see those poor souls yet?”

Gideon groaned—“Alack no! Those who go
down to the sea in ships, and see the wonders of
the great deep, have much to thole as well as to
see, Captain Wolfe. Let us commit them to Him L8v 176
who sitteth on the floods, and holdeth the winds in
the hollow of his hand; who maketh the cloud
their tabernacle!—and push on Jenny to Mossbrettles
to John Fennick’s. He wones in a slack
near by the seaside; and we can hing out his lantern
to guide the boat off a wanchancy bit down there,
that has smashed many a goodly vessel. Profane
folk name it the De’il’s Saut-backet; and in very
deed I never heard it get another name—so what
can I ca’ it.”

“And very well named too, sir; but as I trust
these poor de― that is souls, will not be laid in
his Black Majesty’s pickle to-night, I shall push
on and do what I can with your friends; and you
may come up at your leisure with Jenny.”

Mightily did Gideon spur not to be left behind
in the race of humanity, and often did he apostrophize
Jenny Geddes; but before he reached the
Caberax, a fire was blazing on the low point, and
Grahame stood there directing a group of young
fellows, all ready and willing to obey his orders,
or from their superior knowledge of the coast to
suggest better expedients.

Chapter VIII.

The Farmer’s Ha’.

Travelling apostles, as well as every other
description of traveller, are often, we think, fully as
much indebted to the fair, as to the stern sex, for
the comfort and kindness of their reception.
“The best of the board, and the seat by the fire,”
had in Scotland, time immemorial, been the prescriptive
right of the Haly-wark folk; and, nothing
slackened in hospitality, David Fennick and
his wife cordially welcomed “the man of God;”
and, as he was cold and wet, and could be of no
use whatever on the shore, laid hands of violent
possession upon him as soon as he proposed going Vol. I. M M1v 178
to join the young men. So his clothes were changed
for dry and warm garments, and he sat him snugly
down in the chimney-nook.

If the evening was rough without, its discomfort
served to enhance the cheerful couthiness of the
Farmer’s Ha’. This kitchen and hall—for it was
the common room of the numerous family, and
served for all domestic purposes—was a large
apartment with strong, rough, stone walls, arched
by shining smoky rafters, and furnished with a
wide canopied open chimney. Through its picturesque
intricacies a blazing fire filling the cradle-
chimney, liberally fed from the neighbouring bog,
diffused a ruddy lustre, richer and warmer than the
costliest blaze ever yet shed through halls of pride,
by wax candles or oil gas. A brazen sconce, a few
bright copper utensils, and a bink well filled with
pewter, did more for the apartment in the way of
appropriate decoration than mirrors or pictures
could have done. But the Ha’ wanted not its
pictures. In an antique, carved, oaken settle below
the chimney canopy, discouring with his guest, sat
the grey-haired patriarch, clad in homespun muirland
grey, with a softened bearing between the
stern old Covenanter and the “monarch of a
shed,” regarding, with looks of sober kindness, his M2r 179
well-disciplined subjects busy on all sides of him
with their accustomed tasks and duties. Next to
him but lower in place, on a tripod sat a little decent
matron, (a maiden by the way,) his wife’s
aunt, carding wool to supply the spinning thrift of
David’s blooming woman-grown daughter, who
merrily turned her wheel, with that subdued hum
which was the nearest approach she durst
make to profane singing in her father’s honoured
presence. Sometimes she involuntarily cast backwards
a quick and bashful glance if a tirl was heard
at the door pin, a movement which as constantly
drew upon her the arch eye of a boy, her younger
brother, who was stretched before the fire conning
his Latin lesson for the next day. A ploughman
nearly as old and grey as his master, was driving
hob-nails into a clouted shoe; and a little in the
back ground the herd-boy was twisting a bird’s
cage of twigs—a little boy, the Benjamin of David’s
old age, looking on as the wonderful frame grew
beneath the cunning right hand of Jock. A squab,
four-cornered, ruddy, serving wench pounded away
in another corner, mashing a pot of potatoes for the
common supper of the family, an allowance which
might have fed a whole hill-side congregation;
and the gudewife, a comely well-thriven matron, M2v 180
many years younger than her lord, though on hospitable
thoughts intent, superintended the whole
establishment. A goodly and gracious show of
black puddings, hung to be smoked in the chimney,
showed that good things were going; for the
Mart was killed. And while Gideon and his host
seated apart— “reasoned high Of Providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate—”
the fate of an eirack was sealed, perhaps in honour
of Captain Grahame.

“My worthy father—ye’ll mind him weel, Mr.
Gideon,” said the dame—“had aye a joke, that
there was a natural friendship and couthiness between
a black coat and a black puddin’; and ye’se
have one to relish the potatoes this night if it were
my last.” And she cast an eye of pride over her
plentiful stores. This was said in the absence of
David, who had gone forth to see that the cattle
were properly foddered.

David was a good deal of the Milton in his domestic
circle. Except towards the darling Benjamin
he was indeed a very strict disciplinarian with
all his household. Few external marks of mirth
durst be shown in his presence; but when he withdrew M3r 181
to his private out-door devotions, or to his
wooden-walled dormitory, there came an hour of juvenile
relaxation to the family, at which David
winked hard, as every sensible absolute monarch
should do who wishes to avoid open revolt among
his subjects. But peace, and plenty, and goodness
were about him; and the whispered gibe of the
boys to their sister or to the maid-servant, and the
matron’s frequent whispered rebuke of—“Will ye
no be quiet?—the gudeman will just fell ye!”
shewed that genuine gaiety of heart was here, its
native spring uninjured though its expression
might be subdued.

While David was occupied in littering his cattle,
grumbling a little at the protracted absence of
his son and the younger farm-servants, who still fed
a bickering fire on the shore, Mr. Gideon strode
off in that direction, guided by the signal lights.

The police established along this line of coast at
that period, was, of necessity, extremely vigilant
and severe. The pernicious influences of that evil
time, which steeled the human breast against its
kind, had even extended to this region of tranquillity
and comparative safety; and the inhabitants
of the Scottish side were disposed to view whatever M3v 182
approached from the opposite coast, with great distrust
and unreasonable aversion.

The family of another farmer, who, with David,
was joint occupier of this headland moor, were still
engaged in the latest harvest-work of a tardy season.
During the whole afternoon of this tempestuous
day, this farmer had observed the skiff beating
about in the bay, and conjectured that it had stolen
out from some inlet on the beleaguered coast of
Antrim, which perhaps its crew found more perilous
than the iron-bound shores of the south-west
of Scotland, and the coil of waves, currents, and
breakers, amid which they were struggling. The
fate of the little vessel had indeed, for some hours
back, been the object of eager and agitating interest
to the people on the coast. Rebels, murderers,
or incendiaries its crew might be—still they
were human, and in this hour of mortal peril the
claim was felt in all its force. The presence and
exertions of Captain Grahame had, moreover, by
this time brought humanity into good fashion; and
though the discipline of David Fennick’s household
did not permit his womankind to roam abroad,
there were several females standing with the group
which Gideon and David joined; and their sympathies M4r 183
were fully awakened, and had the strongest
influence on those around them.

“Oh! if they could reach the Cutter—or if the
Cutter could reach them!” cried one of the women,
who watched the labouring skiff with intense
interest, uttering stifled groans as the little storm-
tossed speck was seen through the opening spin-
drift, or swept from view by the swell of the breakers,
and expressing renewed hope as the frail
thing again rose in sight, and gallantly mounted
the ridge of the billow.

“The Cutter!” cried a man of greater information.
“That would be gaun between the
de’il and the deep sea wi’ a witness! ’Od they
may be saying their neck-verse if the Cutter overtake
them; and she has been full chase after them
since the skiff was first seen aff the Scart’s Craig.
It’s just as weel to be drowned I think, David,
at the Almighty’s pleasure, as hanged, drawn, and
quartered by the government.”

“Wo is me! wo is me!” said the female speaker
—“This is nae joking matter. Be they what
they will, they are warm flesh and blood like ourselves.”

“Ay, and soul and spirit, Euphane!” said David
Fennick—“puir, sinfu’ perishing souls like M4v 184
yoursels, sirs, rocking and reeling on the brink
of an eternity, whilk may be as near to us as to
them; though there appear to us but a moment’s
space and a rotten plank, between them and the
fierce and fiery indignation which hastens to consume.”

“Let us hope better things for them, friend
David,” said Gideon, “baith for time and for
eternity. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there
no Physician there? Is there not hope for the
sinner, ay, even were the last sands o’ his glass
rinnin’ low? How shall man, proud worm! limit
the dealing of Omnipotence with the immortal
spirits He has called into existence!”

Now to David’s long ears this sounded very like
false doctrine; and he delivered a pious speech,
which so stirred the “Old Adam” in the heart of
his neighbour-tenant of the Moss, that he exclaimed
—“I wad rather hear the sugh o’ the
south-east win’ that’s to blaw thae puir battered
Irish deevils bye the De’il’s Saut-backet, than a’
the peching and graining e’er was grained on a
hill-side.”

At this instant a ruffian billow rushing in with
headlong fury, swept the little vessel on, till it almost
seemed to touch the firm earth where our M5r 185
anxious group were assembled. The blaze of the
fire danced and flared on the foamy crest of the
wave and in the faces of the crew, consisting of
three men and two females, one of the latter—
strange to say!—holding the helm. Words of
cheer—of sympathy—of counsel, were eagerly
shouted from the land by Grahame and the other
young men; and ropes were actively thrown out;
but the same tremendous wave which had borne
the skiff onward, snatched it back in its fearful recoil,
far from sight—for ever from sight, it was
feared—and every eye was fixed, and every heart
shivered, as a yell rose from some unseen drowning
wretch over whom the billows closed for ever. In
a few seconds the skiff rose once again into view,
but with one man short of its original number.
Still the little crew bore them gallantly, with firmness
and presence of mind, which gave the spectators
something of the wild delight experienced in
witnessing some noble pastime, in which ruffian
strength is matched against still, conduct, and
energy.

A signal gun was fired from the sea. The flash
was seen distinctly; the report came broken and
driven about by the wind.

“That’s the Cutter still in chase,” said David’s M5v 186
neighbour. “But the tempest will do their business,
I gi’e them up. Come hame, lads, and
bring the ropes wi’ ye.”

“O ye of little faith!” shouted Gideon. “Can
He that let loose the winds no stay them? Is His
arm shortened—is His hand straitened? Did
He make the dry land and not the sea also? Is
His time not a good time?—is His hand not a gracious
hand?—Bide ye still.”

Another “ruffian billow” again tossed the
skiff up on its foamy mane, and then seemed
to gulp it down into its tremendous jaws.

“O, Lord! of thy infinite mercy remember
thy puir perishing creatures!” cried Gideon.
—“That, neighbours, was a fearfu’ whomle!”

“Ay! that jaw gave e’en your faith a heisie,
minister,” said David’s profane neighbour.

Contrary to all expectation, a heavy shower
having somewhat beat down the fury of the storm,
the little vessel, once more out at sea, was seen to
weather the point round which it had all the afternoon
been beating. Grahame and Robert Fennick,
an intelligent and active young man, David’s
eldest son, and in reality the most useful person of
the rural group, were certain that they had seen,
in the bright glimpse of a still-wading moon the M6r 187
shadow of its little mast quivering on the water,
and that it had got through the breakers, and past
the entrance of that place which Gideon so much
disliked to name. Others of the number as confidently
predicted the inevitable destination of the
boat to be this same De’il’s Saut-backet.

Whatever her fate was, she was gone from their
sight, and the rain was pouring in torrents, so they
dispersed, Mr. Gideon going to his friend’s hospitable
hearth, and Wolfe Grahame, notwithstanding
David’s kind if not frank invitation, to the little
way-side public-house where he had left his horse.

David’s dame had, in the course of her experience,
often seen a comfortable supper prove a very agreeable
diversion of polemical discourse. Not so on
this evening. The argument between the learned
patriarchs on the oaken settle in chimney-neuk,
waxed hotter and hotter, and the black pudding,
colder and colder, to her secret grief and open discontent.
Monkshaugh had often scornfully said,
that “pease brose would please the minister better
than wine and wassail bread,” so that he got
leave to “preach owre his dish.”

Mrs. Fennick, though the bosom companion of
a self-denying saint, had a housewife’s natural
pride in her black, and in her white puddings; and M6v 188
Gideon fell considerably in her good graces from
this open disrespect to her good graces. Had he
sojourned but two days longer in her frugal menage,
he would probably have recovered this lost
ground, and gained the more lasting and substantial
praise of being “easily shot bye wi’ his victuals.”
—As it was, she cried “Patience!” and turned
the puddings.

The subject for which her savoury messes were
on this night permitted to freeze, was one which,
though foreign to our story, afterwards shook the
church of Sourholes to its foundation, and involved
the latter days of its presiding apostle in much
trouble and turmoil.

There was no Cameronian meeting within twenty
miles of David Fennick’s dwelling of Mossbrettles.
The ancient adherents to this nommade faith,
remained at home on Sabbaths and read their bibles,
when they could not attend the public worship
of their own sect; but the younger members of
David’s family, had, of late, strayed into the neighbouring
parish-church—at first covertly, but now
with less care for concealment. There they had,
among other defilements, acquired a taste for a sort
of church-music, certainly of no very alluring kind,
but totally different from that to which their venerable M7r 189
chief had been accustomed. To carry his
domestic plagues to the climax, Orpheus, assuming
the disguise of a yellow lank weaver from the
Riccartown of Kilmarnock, “fashed wi’ a stamack
complaint,” had rambled into the parish, and, in
widow Bonalie’s public, set up an evening class
for teaching this new-fangled psalmody. In an
evil hour David was teased into granting permission
to his children to attend; and now, instead of
the old reverend way of twanging out the psalm,
line by line, “their rants,” David said, “ran
straight on run-line”—thus invading, in fact destroying
for ever, him immutable privilege of doling
out line by line, rather than suffer any interruption,
or suspension of their own “most sweet voices.”

The controversy was still novel to Gideon; and
we must do him the justice to say, that, notwithstanding
his early prejudices and associations were
all on the side of the quaint antique method of
chanting the psalms, his naturally candid spirit
and sincere understanding rated the subject at its
true importance; and David found a much less
zealous partisan than he had reckoned upon.—He
indeed took but an indifferent part in the afflictions
of David.

M7v 190

“Is it not written—there shall be line upon line?”
grinned David, the thin white locks that straggled
over his pale sunken temples trembling in the eagerness
of his controversial zeal.—“What’s your
opinion of that scripture, minister?”

“And is it not written—‘Praise ye continually
—make a joyful noise?’” said Robert, the smiling
champion of St. Cecilia and her new lights.

Gideon was smitten to the heart’s core with what
he boldly pronounced this Pharisaical wark—
“And wo is mine! David, to hear this din about
robes and phylacteries taking place o’ the weightier
matters of the law—and that in a corner of the
vineyard ance fair and flourishing. But I’ll tell
ye, gudeman, what has filled me with shame, and
grief, and indignation. In Glasgow yonder, even
in kirks pretending to be reformed, bands of singing
bairns—they shame not to call them choirs—
laddies and lassies lilting away at the praises of
their Maker,—and as if it were an auld balland
or a ratt-rhyme; and this they call leading the
worship of a Presbyterian congregation, in the
most hallowed and heaven-like exercise of praise
—themselves a’ dumb! If we maun ha’e Popish
preluding, take to the kist fu’ o’ whistles at
ance, Robert. Tinkling brass wire, and sounding M8r 191
timber boards, have neither hearts to harden nor
souls to ensnare, like puir simple bairns.”

Now this truly orthodox opinion was reckoned
by David little better than “blinking the question,”
as in fact it was; for he abominated bands
of singing boys as utterly as did Gideon:—and indeed
it is not easy to see how a mode of worship
so simple—so spiritualized, if we may so say—as
the Presbyterian, can tolerate this anomalous feature.

After delivering his testimony against this enormity,
which was at that time quite a recent innovation,
Mr. Gideon proceeded, as was his
custom wherever he spent the night, to examine
the young people and servants of the family, in
their attainments in the Assembly’s shorter Catechism,
and on their general religious knowledge.—
The venerable head of the house had no reason to
be ashamed of this exhibition. Whatever were
their musical aberrations, they had been trained
up in “the way they should go;” and there was
good hope that they might never far “depart
from it.” The boy who had conned his Latin
lesson by the fire, the embryo preacher, next went
over his penna and doceo to the infinite delight of
his mother. Even stern David grinned complacent, M8v 192
and owned “human lear was nae doubt a
mean,” and melted into entire delight when his
little favourite son, the rosy, smiling, curly-haired
Davie, with a good deal of kindly prompting from
mother, sister, maiden, and brother, in lisping accents
went through his infant manual, and told
“Who made them,” and “Who redeemed him,”
very correctly.

“And who was the strongest man, Davie?”

“Samson,” replied Davie. “We ha’e a big
grey Samson, the cart aver.”

“Very right, Davie,” said Gideon.—“And
who was the wisest man?”

“Absalom,” cried Davie, undauntedly.

“O fie!” whispered the mother—“So-Sol-o-”

“Solomon,” shouted Davie, triumphantly.

“Very right!”

“And he’ll no be four till Candlemas!” whispered
the mother, aside.

“And who was the meekest man, Davie?”

“Job.”

“Hush, Davie—fie!” cried the sister.

“But it was though—Moses,” cried Davie,
dealing her a playful blow, with the petulance of a
spoiled, lively, and clever child.

1 N1r 193

Old David knitted his stern brows over this infant
trick of the carnal heart in his beloved child.

“That was na right, my little man,” said Gideon,
in grave rebuke; and Davie looked alarmed,
and with some cause. “But we must make a passover;
for puir Davie sees his fau’t. Think first
now—what they call the Gudeman of Mossbrettles,
and tell me ‘Who was the man according to
God’s own heart?’ ”

“Wee Davie’s ain daddy David,” cried the
cunning and affectionate little rogue, throwing
himself into his father’s arms; and old David involuntarily
kissed his brow, his grey eyes glistening,
and after a short fervid clasp put him hastily
away, as if ashamed of this emotion of natural affection.

“Ye think me like auld Eli, minister,” said he.
And he instantly walked forth to meditate, and
question of his own relaxed spirit, and screw up
his resolution to chastise wee Davie.

The little victim when invited to a private conference
in his father’s dormitory, first had his supper
to eat, and then his prayers to say—and, finally,
appealed to his mother, who, rebellious as her heart
was, durst not for her life have interfered between
her stern lord and his just displeasure; so the poor Vol. I. N N1v 194
trembler disappeared, Gideon’s heart yearning over
him. The calm expostulating voice of David was
heard for some time, and the low think sob of Davie,
—then rose the voice of one in earnest prayer,
and there was a moment’s pause followed by Davie’s
shrill scream of “Oh! father, father!—reason wi’
me, and shew me my error, a wee whilie langer;”
but the inexorable scourge descended rapidly, perhaps
severely; for David Fennick was no joker
in any business to which he seriously thought that
duty called him.

Such was the stern discipline of Scotland in
those days. A great deal has since been said for,
and against the use of the rod. We have recorded
wee Davie Mossbrettles’ opinion, as decidedly in
favour of prayer and reasoning, and against stripes.

Davie was put to bed; and old David again
walked out to compose his spirit.

Some pious neighbours had, by this time, come
in to gather the manna chance-dropt in this wilderness.
Preachers and Probationers were often
enough comin to Mossbrettles; but it was not
every night that a true-blue unmingled Cameronian
minister tarried there. David “had gotten a Levite
for his priest,” and felt his personal consequence
augmented accordingly. So he beckoned forward N2r 195
his modest guests to chairs, and stools, and tubs
overturned to make seats, with exactly the patronizing
feelings of a fine lady, who has caught a fashionable
poet or singer, for the amusement of her friends
and the eclat of her rout, and of its celebration-
paragraph in the Morning Post of the next day.
How essentially the same, after all, are the enjoyments
of the great human family, however their
external manifestations and their moral influences
may vary.

The seeds of poetry in Gideon’s character, were
not unfrequently displayed in his selection of a
portion of scripture to be read, or of the psalm to be
sung. On this night, from this humble rustic
group, a small farmer and a few poor Scottish cotters,
from the bosom of the barren moor, there
rose to heaven, slowly chanted line by line, one of
the most beautiful lyrics that ever was composed,
judging of it merely as a literary composition—
the 104 Psalm—the hymn of Universal nature to
the Universal Creator! Far higher was Gideon’s
standard of judging the inspired writings.

A simple, scriptural, earnest, and affectionate
prayer, almost as comprehensive as the hymn
which had been sung, forgetting no class nor
condition of sentient beings—concluded the domestic N2v 196
exercise; and when the group rose from
their knees, Robert, David’s eldest son, “a noble
peasant,” grasped the minister’s hand and said—

“Your ain, sir, and my father’s auld-fashioned
sughin out o’ the plaintive Dundee, and the noble
Martyrs, dinnel stronger on the heart-strings after
a,’ than a’ their crinkum crankum new tunes.”

“Robert, my man, if ye are led to think sae it
is weel,” replied Gideon. “So grieve not the
grey-haired man i’ the neuk, whose soul had travailed
for the weal o’ yours, ay when sweet sleep
sealed your ain eye-lids. Keep ye by these holy
harmonics, wi’ whilk the wail of the curlew and the
plover, and the roar of the linn ha’e chimed in yon
brave day: yea, the sweet melodies that rose in
the night-watches, like myrrh and frankincense
and the rich spices, frae these very moss-hags
and coves, and cleuchs round about us, whither
the red arm o’ persecution had driven forth the
stout true hearts o’ covenanted Ayr, and favoured
Gallowa’—Ayr, whose plants were as an orchard
of pomegranates with pleasant fruits. Alack!
that the canker-worm should creep in—that they
should either dwine or die!”

This honest ancestral eulogy was highly acceptable
to every present ear. But the puddings smoking N3r 197
hot were now served with the mashed potatoes,
together with a jorum of stout, home-brewed, harvest
ale, of which David partook very sparingly,
Robert and Mr. Gideon with greater freedom.—
Another hour passed in sober but social talk on
public and family affairs. Gideon was pleased to
hear that his friend David’s “temporals” prospered,
and that he was willing and eager to lend his
carts, during the winter, to drive stones for the
purpose of erecting a meeting-house in the vicinity.
The honest man chose a private minute to
confess to Gideon his sinful yearnings over the
“bairn, wee Davie;” but Gideon slurred that offence
on the present occasion, and, in spite of the
“carts,” rather warned his friend against “worldliness,”
and “coveteousness,” and “spiritual
pride,” than excess of natural tenderness. From
these sins David was certain that he stood wholly
clear.

The whole family now retired to rest—to that
“quiet sleep” for which Gideon had prayed—
that quiet sleep which, in the words of his petition,
“is Thy gift to Thy chosen ones!”

Chapter IX.

The Exile.

Captain Wolfe Grahame declined the hospitality
of Mossbrettles, neither in aristocratic
pride nor unsocial feeling, but simply because,
without much vanity, he feared that he might put
David’s womankind out of their way, and because he
was perhaps too modest to balance aright the trouble
given against the honour imparted. His humility
was rewarded by better quarters than the
external shows of the wayside public, kept by the
Widow Bonalie and her only daughter, warranted
him to expect. On this evening they luckily had
no other guest. Over their door-post the “ruddy
lion ramped in gold” only for the amusement and
solace of our friend.

N4r 199

Grahame changed his wet clothes for “fitting
weed;” and, with the landlady’s cordial permission,
instead of sequestering himself in the chill dignity
of the sanded parlour, occupied the chimney-corner
of the kitchen, which, in every view, afforded
metal more attractive. This apartment resembled,
in most points, the family room of Mossbrettles,
except that it was “got up for company.” Rows
of pewter measuring pots of various calibre betokened
that the vocations of the widow were not wholly
agricultural; and a series of rueful prints, coloured
in the “bold style,” illustrative of the ballad
of Auld Robin Gray, pinned round rough but
very white walls, shewed that the feminine tastes
of her ripe and rosy maiden, had not been under
disclipinediscipline so strict as David Fennick’s. The damsel
herself, occupied exactly as David’s daughter
had been, with a brisk and merry-going spinning-wheel,
held, at the same time, on her knee, a
huge stitched bunch of ballads, for which, we think,
the Roxburgh Club would have given their weight
in gold.

The jolly Widow Bonalie was none of the “Bigots of the iron time, Who held the tuneful art a crime.”

N4v 200

“Ye’ll be frae the Port, Captain,” was her address
to Wolfe, with whose style a landlady’s peculiar
industry had made her acquainted.—“Awfu’
doings amang the croppies! they say; but the Irish
were aye a wanrestfu’ generation. Randy rinthereouts
hawking this country—a perfect cess and harriement
on a widow-woman in a public line.—It’s
but like ten minutes sin’ the supervisor and twa
Shirra maires were here, booted and spurred, het fit
after some of thae clanjamphrey that were whommelling
about in the bay this afternoon. I daur
to say the de’il has gotten his ain out o’ them by
this time; for this has been a judgment-like evening.
I mind scarce the like of it since the Windy
Wodensday, which tirled the roof aff this house—
and grande Irish gentry wi’ us no twa days thereafter.”

“That must have been a memorable night over
Scotland,” said Grahame; and the spinning damsel,
from some association, burst into song:

“‘Wild blew the wind on that eerie night, And wilder beat the rain; And still on its moan came the deep, deep groan Of that ladye in her travail-pain, Ma chree, Of that ladye in her travail-pain.’”

“Heavens!—and this is one of your ballads,” N5r 201
cried Wolfe, snatching the bunch from her lap with
little ceremony.

“Eh na, sir!” cried the widow, who was deeply
engaged in the savoury mysteries of the frying-
pan.—“Jean learned that frae ane Bess Slattery,
an Irish horner-wife that hawks this country.—It’s
about some auld-world Edinburgh doings o’ folk
now i’ their cauld grave.—But here’s a better story
—your warm supper.”

“Gudewife, ye smell well,” said Grahame, trying
to recover himself.

“Ay, and taste better,—so draw ye in, Captain,
and make a comfortable meal o’ your ain
country vivres.—Here’s ham and eggs—new laid
eggs; for ye ken Christmas is clocking-mass—and
that’s no far aff—and mealy potatoes flaking like
the honey-comb—and powdered butter—and roasted
ingans—and”―

“Admirable!” interrupted Grahame.

“Had I but kenned, it should have been a
stoved, reeking howtowdie for your sake; for I
ance saw your uncle Monkshaugh, riding the
Ayr circuit, a little genty mannie, wi’ cheeks like
blush roses, and as trim as if he had come out of
a band-box.”

The landlady had indeed, in humble phrase, N5v 202
put her best foot foremost; and the young soldier
did a traveller’s justice to her genial cheer. She
saw that he appeared perfectly satisfied, and began,
as is usual in those cases, to make numerous
apologies. Self-justification as determined, would
have been inevitable, had he expressed the smallest
discontent with any part of her arrangements.

“With the shortest blink o’ notice,” said she,
“I could make ony reasonable gentleman perfectly
comfortable; but we seldom get a ca’ here but
frae drovers and jockeys, (though indeed the carriers
halt here,) and sic like graith, gaun to the
Ayr and Dumfreish markets. But I ne’er yet
saw a real-born gentleman ill to please, if he saw
gude will—I speak na of the gentleman that’s
made by the tailor and the braid-claith. Nae
higgling wi’ the real gentleman about an honest
widow-woman’s fair lawin, or hingin’ on for twa
or three bawbies o’ change back o’ a sca’ed crown-
piece. To be sure I ha’e seen them bait their
cattle here—they ne’er light down—gentlemen
and noblemen baith, ye wadna ca’ out o’ your
kale-yard. But mak’ your supper now; this is
a real ewe-milk kebbuck: I question if the gudewife
o’ Mossbrettles has the better o’t, wi’ a’ her
airs.”

N6r 203

The provident hostess, after a good deal of preliminary
bustle, next drew from its place of concealment
in the heart of an immense suspended
bundle of yarn, a small stone jar or graybeard,
which she pronounced as sound, auld, pine-apple,
Jamaica rum as ever sparkled to moonshine.

“It smells like the clow gilliflowers through the
house,” said she, snuffing up the “rich distilled perfume.”
“It’s but at Pasch and Yule, and high
times, this is produced, Captain; but the best in
my house is little enough the night.”

“Never paid duty, I dare say.”

“Ye may swear it!—but little comes our way.
The supervisor chield who was here this night,
instead of watching the Croppies’ landing, as he
should in duty do, keeps hounding his pack o’
riding offishers after the puir industrious boddies
wha bring us a drap frae Arran, or up frae the
Troon, wi’ muckle risk baith to purse and person.
The government, I whiles think, is no a hait better
than in the persecuting times. Troth, it’s very
hard!”—

“That the king won’t allow his industrious
subjects to cheat him unmolested,” replied Wolfe,
laughing; and adding his acknowledgments for N6v 204
the manifold kindness heaped upon him, to which
indeed there appeared no end.

“Do ye mix with loaf or raw, Captain? The
supervisor, he uses loaf—but our minister prefers
the raw, whilk he says makes the malmiest
drink.”

Grahame, from good-natured attention to the
feelings of his officiously-kind landlady, fell upon
the happy device of making his sherbet with both
sorts of sugar; so that to her dying hour, in advising
her customers, a liberty which she invariably
took, in addition to her old precedents of the
supervisor and minister, she added, or “Captain
Grahame de Bruce’s way—he aye, in this
house, drank half-and-half.”

The jolly beverage being compounded to the
taste of all parties interested, the ladies accepted
their modest share, and, with a pledge to herself
Wolfe Grahame drank “a good husband to the
landlady’s bonnie dochter.”

Jean stooped her head, and wet her flax with a
pouting lip, the matron hemmed; and an agreeable
affectation of demureness struggled with the smile
which naturally overspread both their faces.

“It’s lang, Captain, to the saddling o’ a foal,” N7r 205
quoth the landlady. “Time eneuch for Jean to
think o’ that daft nonsense—to be sure her looks
are no her warst fau’t. But as I tell her often,
‘Beauty’s but skin-deep, vertū goes to the bone.’
Nae doubt the great folk o’ Mossbrettles wad
think their rantin Robin thrown away on a hostler-wife’s
dochter. Set up the gudewife’s but pride
because her brither’s a placed Burgher minister!
Let them keep their lad, and I’ll mainteen my lass.
If she had her mither’s spunk she wad ne’er look
the airt he gangs—though I daur swear our
gudschirs were much of a muchness.”

“O, whisht now, mother!” implored Jean.

Grahame thought Robert Fennick a manly, active,
fine-looking fellow, and Jean Bonalie a
comely, decent, young woman; but he was a most
unfortunate person in family quarrels and delicate
arrangements of all kinds; so with (for him) an
uncommon degree of prudence, instead of running
headlong a tilt among the nonsensical squabbles
of the Widow Bonalie and her neighbours, he
kept perfectly quiet. He had in rural neighbourhoods
and Irish country quarters, in affairs of precedence,
often given mortal offence through sheer
ignorance; and he resolved to avoid this in future.
He however paid Robert the compliment to which N7v 206
he thought him entitled; and Jean raised a moistened
and grateful eye. The matron herself expressed
no dissent; and the conversation reverted
to the safer channel of public events, and the
many tales of fire, murder, and rapine, which every
chance traveller from the opposite shores brought
to the Crossgates of Caberax. With such bloody
and tragic narratives, the Lass of Loch Ryan, and
a few other ballads, which Jean sang with a decent
degree of rustic coquetry, the hour passed; and
when all failed, the widow had recourse to the family
library, which she lugged out, partly from the
window-shelf, but principally from some shelves
hung within the wood-enclosed family bed, accompanied
by a verbal catalogue raisonnée.

“This is The Cloud—a bonnie cloud o’ stoure
it rises”—and she rubbed the dusty volume upon
her apron. “It’s a’ about bluidy Mackingie, and
Claver’se, and the persecuting times; and this is
The Hind Let Loose; and Peden’s Prophecies: he
was a dreadfu’ divine—my gudedame ance heard
him preach at the Kens, but the Mossbrettles
folk think we are a’ publicans and sinners, and
ignoramuses, but themselves. And this is Godly
’Lizbeth West’s life—Take pattern by her, Jean,
wham neither master nor mistress could keep from N8r 207
travelling the country after ordinances! And
that’s—let me see—George Buchanan, and Godly
Samuel Rutherford’s letters—a gay queer hand;
and that’s Blind Harry, and Patie and Roger—I
ance kenned their stories weel;—but my memory is
clean gone, sir, an it binna for the score o’ the
liquor when I ha’e companies; and this is Robbie
Burns, a fairing nae doubt frae Mossbrettles’ Rob
to our dochter. But ye seem to like that better?
We ne’er could make out that—It’s a sealed book!
It was left by the Irish gentry in this house, just
at the Windy Wodensday time—a weary time it
was! I was laid up o’ Jean there—the roof was
aff the house—the gentles were in it—the gudeman
was camstairy—and the cow was calving. Na,
if ye can make it out, just put it in your pouch.
It is useless to us, e’en though we do get Rob Mossbrettles
for our gudeson.”

“Tuts, now mother!” said the girl once again.

It was a beautiful small copy of the Jerusalem
Delivered, in the original Italian, printed in Paris,
and bearing the name of “Aileeen O’ Connor,
Castle Connor,” written in a delicate female hand.
This was another gleam of that Will-o’-the-wisp,
which had from time to time danced before Wolfe
Grahame.

N8v 208

“If I could exchange with you,” said Grahame;
and his gold piece was tendered, repulsed, and accepted
in dumb shew; for a smart knock came to
the door, which was promptly answered by the
dame’s—“Wha’s there?”

This produced the expected response of “A
friend, gudewife—open the door.”

“I open nae doors to friends that travel so late
at e’en.”

“But we have lost the road.”

“Weel ye maun just find it again.”

“There’s a lady and a gentleman both dropping
wet.—There’s a good wife—open the dure.—We’ll
pay ye handsomely and not trouble ye long. We’re
for Mossbrettles, and want a lantern and direction.”

“Oh, open mother!” implored Jean.

“Hold your whisht!—If there be a lady let
her speak:—what ken I how mony’s o’ your randy
gang?”

A low muttering consultation was heard without.
“She’s a dumb lady—dafe and dumb.”

“Deaf and dumb!—There comes nae dumb leddies
here. If ye’re for Mossbrettles haud round
the snout o’ the Gallows’-hill—I daur say you
have rubbed shouthers wi’ it afore now—then 1 O1r 209
through the slack, and that will take you to Kilwhonnel
—and syne keep straught foret, and”—

“Open the dure, ye baste,” was again shouted
forth in the angry accents of Kerry. “Shure we
could with one keek lay it on its broad back, and
never a thanks to ye. Is this a night to lave
Christians bawling without, taking the cowld in
their mouths?”

“Had you not better afford these poor travellers
shelter. The night has indeed been horrible,”
said Wolfe.

The dame, who appeared to enjoy the parley,
nodded, as if to say, “Leave me to manage”—and
screamed—“Christians! Donaghadee Christians,
nae doubt?”—

“From Newton-Stewart then in truth—and
never a word of a lie: little good it would do me
with one so ’cute as yourself, Mistress Bonalie.—
So open the dure like a raisonable Christian sowl.
Shure you know me, Bess Slattery. Many is the
mug and pan I sowld ye, and ballad and boddice-
lace for your purty girl; and always found ye a
raisonable landlady.”

The name of Bess Slattery operated like
“Open Sesame” upon our hostess, who at once
recognized that wandering voice. The door Vol. I. O O1v 210
cautiously gave way, and forward stalked the speaker,
a tall, termagant, weather-beaten harridan, in a
red cloak, and a rusty, crumpled, black silk, slouched
bonnet tied down under her chin with a red
chequered handkerchief. She was followed by a
squab, truculent looking fellow, on whose arm
another gigantic female leaned, though, to say
truth, she appeared to have small need of such
support.

“Have ye company?” cried the first speaker,
starting back on seeing Grahame. The persons
behind instantly shrunk back into the shadow of the
door; and the dumb female hastily adjusted her
mantle in muffling folds about the lower part of
her face. Already had Grahame recognized the
helms-woman, who, in the midst of danger and
alarm, had so dauntlessly steered the little skiff.
These were the fugitives from Ireland; and with
a strong feeling of compassion, which he took no
time to analyze, he stepped forward, and begged
the dripping strangers to approach the fire; and in
detailing the brief history of the night, tacitly communicated
the extent of what he supposed their
danger.

The dumb person, as if feeling confidence from
the frank courtesy of the stranger, stepped forward, O2r 211
and the man retreated. With a look of intense
anxiety she examined the young man’s features;
but this vivacity of mien and gesture is common to
those having her infirmity; and Wolfe bore her
glance with patience, and in his turn with more
modesty regarded her. And hers was a form to
invite scrutiny from the most indifferent spectator.

The uncommon stature, the haggard countenance,
the wild, watchful, suspicious glance of a
blood-shot hollow eye, staring through dishevelled
black hair, and the scanty wet drapery which clung
around gaunt limbs of giant mould, and sent
up a reeking steam, the free, bold, masculine attitudes,
and unfeminine gait, composed a figure far
more picturesque than engaging, and, in contrast,
made even Bess Slattery, or Rouge-mantle, appear
a soft and interesting person.

“I must say, Bess, begging your pardon, that
your dumb acquaintance there, is nae ee-sweet
bird,” said the landlady. “She is just as like to
tak’ a purse as to gi’e ane, I’ll say that for her. She
is mair like Pearlin Jean or the Lady-wi’-the
lantern, or a witch-wife in some auld-warld tale,
than an Irish Christian gentlewoman travelling on
her lawfu’ occasions. Can she spae?—Lord preserve’s O2v 212
and keep us!—but she has an ee in her
head, as dark and how as the vizzying hole in an
auld castle postern door.—She surely does nae
hear me?”

“One of my poor uncle’s land Irish madams”—
thought Wolfe, with a smile—“How the good soul
would stare!” and he began to feel some anxiety
for the whole group taking their departure, as he
was at no loss to perceive that the dumb gentlewoman
had ears quick enough, and arms befitting.
—The raised anxious look, the start on the slightest
movement, the instinctive clutch, as if at a familiar
weapon, all told one tale of alarm, danger,
flight, and guilt. “Shure, and shure, I tould
ye the lady was dumb,” said Rouge-mantle, sullenly,
in reply to Widow Bonalie’s query.—“Lend
me a blast o’ the cuttie-pipe; and get us a morsel of
supper, and we’ll be off for Mossbrettles.—Those
who ask no questions will be told no lies. In the
meanwhile have you ne’er a dhrop o’ brandy?—
Fill it up—a pint would not touch her when the
blood is up.”

Both females swallowed a goodly portion of the
ardent fluid, and Rouge-mantle made her reverences
to Grahame; and, in doing so, gave a sudden
start, which might have made another spill the O3r 213
liquor. It, however, only impelled it more rapidly
over her throat; and then, with eager gesticulation
and muttered Irish speech, she drew her dumb
companion into the inner room.

“I ken na what to mak’ o’ thae cattle”—whispered
the widow to her first and favourite guest.
“Bess though a ramping wild limmer, has some
good about her; and I wad na be fain to tarry on
this road-side and thraw her humour. On the
other hand, the supervisor is so charp about whom
we harbour, as if poor victuallers wha have to pay
stent and rent, tax and burden, can be chary o’
wha are their customers.”

“Perhaps this is just a dumb woman,” said
Grahame. “They have always a wild look.”

“Conscience! she is a grusome ane!—But the
want o’ the tongue must, to a woman body, be a
sore bereavement. It is an unruly member no
doubt; but if I wanted my whirligig, I might
lock the door and throw away the key—for frae
morn to night I find use for it.—But whisht!”—

“It is he, I tell you—I know him well. I
have known him since he was cock-bird height,”
Rouge-mantle was heard to say, in that clear audible
whisper, which is more distinctly heard at a
distance than the loudest tones of ordinary speech. O3v 214
Some muttering in Irish followed, and Bess, returning
to the kitchen, told the young girl, that
the dumb lady wished to tell her her fortune, and
the Captain his fortune, whichever chose to attend
her first.

“Let the Captain tak’ the first turn,” said Jean,
with a frightened giggle; and in one minute Wolfe
was in the inner apartment alone, by the side of
the stranger.

The fugitive silently locked the door, and approaching
him, said in an energetic voice, and with
impassioned gesture. “You know me—you know
that I am—an Irishman—a fugitive—on whose
head a price is set—proscribed, hunted, guilty, or
so called. You are the kinsman of John de Bruce:
—he was my friend!—I am in your power. Is it
your wish to spare what the sword and the tempest
have spared—the life which misery makes
worthless?—or to give me up to the blood-suckers?
—Think of it well. She who has lain in your
bosom—my blood is blushing in her cheeks!”

Wolfe was too much overcome by the tumult
of his feelings to reply, save by broken exclamation
of wonder and doubt.

“You doubt my truth, then!” cried the stranger,
impatiently stamping, his lip quivering in passion. O4r 215
—“Your doubts are destruction. Hark! I
hear the tread of their returning horses!—Let me at
least die as I have lived—a man!” With a small
dagger or stiletto, which had been concealed about
his breast, he cut away the female weeds which disguised
him, tore off his muffling frontlet and
head-gear, and stood forth in the close-fitting green
vestments which were then the uniform, the badge
of rebellion—a man in very deed!

“Ay, a man every inch of him!” said Rouge-
mantle, who claimed admission to announce, in
eager whispers, the trampling of the horses, which
his own quick ear had heard a second or two earlier.
Her dark eyes flashed with momentary delight
as she saw her companion restored to himself.

“What am I to believe?” said Wolfe.

“Believe what you please, sir,” returned the
stranger, haughtily.

“Your tale is wild and improbable; but it is as
certain that your personal danger is great and imminent.
—Tell me what I can do consistently with
my honour as a man and a soldier, and command
me.”

“Lend me your military great-coat to cover
this unhappy garb.”

O4v 216

“Then don’t call it so.—God bless the merry
green!” said Rouge-mantle, with enthusiasm.

“Pass me, if needful, for your friend travelling
to, and not flying from Ireland. Yes, I will return.
The lion should fall by the mouth of his den—
nobly at bay—not skulking and doubling like the
felon fox only to secure his own wretched life.”

“Impossible!” replied Grahame. “But take my
coat,—my purse,—my horse.—Here is a way”—
and he pulled up, by main strength, the rusty bolt
which held to a small lattice. “I pledge myself
to hold the door against a hundred till you gain
the open moors; and there is room enough in Scotland.”

“Then you shall go, O’Connor,” said Rouge-
mantle.—“Have I not purchased the right of
speaking to you?”

“If you wish to prove your truth,” said Wolfe,
“try to wait for me near the rude obelisk, whence
a path strikes from the high-way down to the shore;
and assuredly, within the hour, I will be with you
for good or for evil.—Let me hope for good.”

Trampling sounded faster and nearer: Grahame
rushed to the house-door, and, in a whisper,
intimated to the landlady, the danger and impropriety O5r 217
of the dumb person being discovered on her
premises. Meanwhile he locked the door inside,
and put the key in his pocket. The butt end of a
riding-whip thumped hollow against the door.

“Keep them in parley,” whispered Grahame,
and flew back to the stranger.

“A barley there!” shouted the widow, taking her
cue at once. “Irish scoun’rels! knocking on an
honest widow-woman’s door, as if ye wad drive
down the house.—If I see the blessed morning the
supervisor shall hear o’ this assault and blattery.”

Wolfe found the fugitive already gone. Mistress
Slattery was probably trained to rapid toilettes,
for, in an inconceivably short space of time,
she had thrown off her mantle and head-gear,
torn a cap of the landlady’s from a curtain, flung
all her fugitive friend’s discarded weeds about her
own person, and, tucking this aggregation of wet
drapery under her, squatted down in the chimney-
corner, seized her labouring oar, smoked her pipe,
and alternately sung that elegant and loyal ditty— “Ye croppies of Dublin I bid ye take care, For ye’re very well known by the cut of your hair.”
The man who appeared much less au fait to such
movements, she ordered asleep at once.

O5v 218

“Be about us!—and was it you a’ the time,
supervisor?” cried the widow, with well affected
astonishment, opening her door.—“To keep you
cooling your chutes at my door!—But what will ye
tak’? This is Captain de Bruce Grahame, boune
for Ireland to quell the croppies, and give us peace
o’ them.”

The gentlemen exchanged salutations.

“A damned scamper, Captain, I have had after
the rebel rascals along shore there. I have had
up all the household of Kilwhonnel and Mossbrettles
for examination.”

“Od, ye was right to gar auld David say his
carritch,” rejoined the widow, laughing. “He
likes weel to targe ither folk on theirs.”

“There can be no doubt but their boat has gone
to flinders. The herring-pond has saved government
a half-crown tow. I must have acted valet
to this scoundrel myself had we nibbed him.—It
would have been a special-commission job.”

Grahame could not, at this instant, summon fortitude
to make the inquiries which trembled on
his tongue; scarcely could he compose his countenance
to a decent show of indifference.

“Eh!—What—how is this? Surely your
lamb’s blood is still lying near your heart, Luckie, O6r 219
if you keep your parlour window open in such
weather”—and the officer whistled as he looked
about keenly and suspiciously; and in rushed the
Sheriff maires from the hallan.—“Look about
you there! Sharp’s the word.—Sharp—sharp!”

“The reek—the weary reek,” said the widow.
“It will not leave an ee in my head—and makes
my bits o’ pearlins as yellow as a gule’s fit. Ye
are ane o’ the trustees yoursel’, supervisor—and I
must—and I will have that lum-head looked at.”

“O! is that it? Well, let us see what you
have got for us after our cool ride. What do you
prefer, Captain Grahame?—What has this lout
brought you in his creels?”—touching the soi-disant
sleeper with the end of his whip, and probably taking
him for a smuggler.

“I have already ended my potations, sir,” said
Grahame, rather haughtily.

“O!—so—and in odd company enough too.”

“I remain here for this night, and sit in this
apartment—because it best suits my convenience,”
continued Grahame, still in alt.

“O! no doubt—a jolly landlady—and a bonnie
dochter! Eh, Luckie—ha! ha! ha!”

“Na, ye’re just the auld, daft, rantin’ doug, supervisor,
wi’ pardon.—For I kenned the supervisor O6v 220
last year, Captain, when he was but a simple
gauger.—Ye may thank the Black-nebs for promotion
—but let merit mount, say I! Shall it be
a bottle o’ plottie, or a jug o’ the auld Jamaica?
The Captain he drinks half-and half:—And gang
ye butt the house, honest folk; gentlemen like
nae strange een upon them owre their liquor.”

Rouge-mantle poked her sleeping friend, who
enacted sundry well-executed awakening grunts,
stretched his limbs, and growling curses followed
her out.

Grahame, though not much enamoured of his
chance-associate, upon second thoughts fancied
it best to accept of the second proffer of civility;
and by way of balancing accounts, ordered in a
supply of liquor for the supervisor’s attendants, for
whom a table was set out by zealous widow in
another corner of the apartment.

Gladly would Wolfe, in the confusion of his
fermenting thoughts, have escaped the many tales
and accounts of detections, suspicions, and arrests,
with which this zealous partizan plied him during
the discussion of their rum punch—yet every minute
passed appeared like one gained to the fugitive,
who would, he concluded, make a better use of O7r 221
his time than in dallying on the seashore, merely to
afford himself an explanation of enigmatical words.

A few minutes of conversation tended to reconcile
the young man to the zealous official, against
whom his proud heart had at first sight risen. He
appeared more a sycophant than sordid, more a
partisan than a knave, staunch rather than dishonest;
and, though there was about him a vulgar
overbearing bustle, sufficiently offensive to our
young man’s taste, he felt that this officer was only
doing his duty, in his own disagreeable way, at a
period of great public agitation and peril.

The supervisor could give no precise information
as to the rank or real name of the person supposed
to have escaped from the Antrim coast,
but that he was a rebel leader—“a d―d rebel.”

“How many unhappy gentlemen were there in
the same situation in our own country but a few
years back,” said Wolfe, “whose personal honour
no one durst attaint—the friends of the exiled
Stuarts! How many bitter enemies were there
among honest Scotsmen to our own national Union
—noble true-hearted fellows, that would nevertheless
have fought against it over boots in blood! I
hope government is strong enough to give the O7v 222
mad Irish time to come to their senses; or to
clap a strait waistcoat on them, if gentler means
won’t do, till the paroxysm is over. In a better or
wiser cause, the enthusiasm, energy, and generosity
displayed by some of these reckless partisans,
would have immortalized them as martyrs of
freedom and religion; for, after all, a Papist’s faith
may be as dear to him as a Protestant’s is to us.”

This was too general a view of the subject for
the loyal supervisor; his official dignity fell, and
his zeal rose as the punch ebbed apace. He replied
by a succession of bumpers, and a volley of toasts
of denunciation and execration, which he ordered
all around him to drink; and, save Grahame, no
one refused a test swallowed in so palatable a medium.
“Coup it up, boys,” exclaimed he. “We
are on the public service; and the King—God
bless him!—pays for all.”

“Good night!” was at last exchanged between the
compotators; the reckoning was discharged, and the
horses were led forth. The sheriff-officers mounted
and followed their warlike leader, now in tolerable
glee. The landlady bent her ear till the trampling
of the steeds was heard no longer; but even
then it was in a whisper she addressed Grahame.

“It’s me and mine that’s beholden to you, Captain. O8r 223
I would have lost my license but for yon
friendly turn in getting aff the dumb quean, and
making a guisard o’ Bess—for she is a noted one.”

“You have a tolerable ready wit yourself at a
pinch, gudewife. That reek came not amiss.”

“Then, Captain, it must surely be auld Clootie
himsel’ that helps a simple body out at a pinch;
for I’m but an innocent duffie till I’m driven to an
extremity; and then a city o’ refuge will open in
the mist in a really wonderfu’ way.”

“Or in the reek!” said Grahame, laughing. “But
had this failed now, what would you have done?”

“Ou! just beflummed the gauger, and thought
little sin, in some ither way. I’m sure I could
not at this preceese moment tell ye an put my een
in pricks; but providence aye opens a door or
twa o’ deliverance to a strained woman.—I’m
only at a loss sometimes whilk to flee by.”

“True,” said Wolfe, smiling. “And Red-
mantle is off too I presume. She also feels
that, ‘The mouse that has but one poor hole, Can’t be a mouse of any soul.’”

“The rampler quean is aff, and made me give
her a lapful of bread and meat, a big whang o’ O8v 224
cheese, and weel on to a bottle of brandy, saying,
the bold hussey, that you, Captain, had ordered
her supper, and would pay a’ charges, for getting
your fortune spaed; but I’m not going to extortion
you.”

Wolfe understood this delicate hint as it was
meant, and carelessly replied—“Put it all in the
bill, gudewife. You know the good King pays for
all when soldiers and gaugers travel.”

“Now if I thought that I would make small
scruple—that eases my conscience clean. It’s no
little I gi’e him—so it’s but gif-gaf, which keeps
lang gude friends.”

“But whither has Red-mantle gone?”

“Let her see to that—She darkens na my door
again. She’s thought little better—let me heark
in your lug—than a spy atween the wild United
Croppies and the Glasgow Black-nebs! I was a
bit o’ a democraw mysel’ last year, and so was
auld David Mossbrettles,—he, for the auld cause
of Kirk and Covenant—me, for cheap tea and
tobacco. While the Black-nebs wanted only the
tea and sugar cheap, and a drap brandy at a reasonable
rate, I was hand in glove wi’ them; and
ga’e them ben the house to meet in, free o’ a
charge—save the natural corkage.”

2 P1r 225

“And what did the supervisor say to this?”
inquired Wolfe, who perceived that another hour
must elapse before he could with safety keep his
appointment, and cared not how time went.

“The supervisor!—When thae gentry clink
me down in their lang parchment books I waver
whiles yet in my principle. To think o’ taxing the
very blessed light, whilk the Almighty sends down
free frae His heavens through a puir widow’s window
bole!”

“When I get into Parliament we shall have all
this redressed,” said Wolfe, laughing.

“Lord’s sake! do so then; for it’s taxes makes
democraws. They tax the tea-pot the washing-tub, and
they tax the window bole; and if I steek up the
bole, they say, ‘Luckie, ye maun steek up your
lum;’ and if I steek up my lum, they’ll say,
‘Luckie, ye maunna.’”—But here the honest woman
pre-supposed a case so extreme, that her
blushing daughter interfered with another—

“Houts, mother!”

“Ay! muckle need o’ you and the like o’ you
in the Parliament, Captain. Johnnie Clydesdale,
the weaver, telled me—and he was within one o’
being constitute a Deput to the British Convention Vol. I. P P1v 226
—that under a sound form of Government, folk
might drink three times as muckle ale—and o’ twice
the straik o’ maut.”

“I think you almost qualified for a member of
that sapient body yourself, gudewife.”

“Hout awa’, Captain!” rejoined the dame, with
that equivocal smile, which pretending to hover between
jest and earnest, manifestly inclines to the
latter. “If the women-folks had the beard and
the breeks, the brain might be forthcoming. But
I was just giving you my ideas of Government
anent taxation. With their universal sufferings
and annual Parliaments I meddle not nor make
not.”

And these ideas we have recorded, literally as
they were given, for the benefit of Chancellors of
the Exchequer yet unborn.

“I see by your drumlie een, Captain, that ye
are thinking mair on your bed than of poleeticks.
I maun get ye a candle—and that’s taxed and
gauged too;—a sore matter that I cannot kill a
wether, and make twa or three moulds and dips
out o’ the tallow, without a gauger at my lug!
Mind ye that too in Parliament. But I’m nae
bluidy Black-neb for a’ that, Captain. When
they took to speak o’ burning houses, and cutting P2r 227
throats, and dividing lairds’ lands, I was
done o’ the blackguards. And indeed I ne’er was
for pulling down auld Geordie.—Take care o’
the anker there i’ the trance,” said she, piloting
the way to Wolfe’s chamber.—“No, no—a King
is a mensefu’ thing in a country—he is like the
gudeman in a house. You see how ilka loon
puts upon a lone widow-woman, Captain. Had it
been the Almighty’s will to clothe me with a husband,
as the blessed Apostle says, would these
Irish rapparees have ventured to spuilzie on me
as they did this night; and so fares o’ a country
without a King.”

“Well, I am glad to hear that you are loyal at
least,” said Grahame, fancying himself—and with
some reason—indebted to the supervisor’s rum
punch for Mrs. Bonalie’s Declaration of rights,
and statement of grievances.—“Leave my boots,
if you please,—I shall perhaps go off very early;
and the first time that I have the honour of seeing
his Majesty, I will surely tell him what a faithful
and loyal subject he has in my kind hostess of the
Crossgates of Caberax.”

“Lord’s sake! Captain, do sae, just for the
joke ye ken,” replied the Widow with glee. “I
can say ony thing to Balquharn,—but the King P2v 228
we ne’er saw. Now tell him I’m for setting him
free o’ Billy Pitt, and the Bute that hung sae lang
at his nose—I saw the picture o’ that in Balquharn
—and bringing him down to Holyrood wi’ the
Queen and their bonnie family, where we could
keep them for half the expense, and have something
to look at for our siller. But a sound sleep
to ye;—have ye plenty o’ claes? And for ony
sake, dinna think o’ travelling on an empty stomach.”

In a half hour afterwards, all in and about the
little inn was as still as a churchyard at midnight,
in the days when there were plenty of ghosts, but
few resurrection men; and Wolfe glided through
the same diamond-paned window which had served
for the escape of the exile, about three hours before.

It was two hours beyond midnight when Wolfe
walked forth to keep his mysterious tryst, scarcely
expecting to find the stranger awaiting him, his
mind tossed in a sea of doubt, and conjecture, and
vague distracting thought. “Could the fugitive
be the father of Elizabeth? Could he even be
her near relative—or was this alleged only to influence
his feelings and sympathies? Again—
who could know of his marriage save through the P3r 229
medium of the old woman, Monica Doran; or
through her who had sanctioned, and indeed enjoined
the alliance? Could he whose bearing
and language bore the irresistible impress of truth,
seek to deceive for the merely selfish object of personal
safety? Was he waiting now—or had he
fled?” Such were some of the drifting thoughts
that floated uppermost on the current of the young
man’s mind. There were others of deeper import
from which at first he shrunk; but, forced upon
their consideration, his feelings were such as became
his own heart, and did right to her to whom
that heart was pledged.

“Not less dear to me, my own noble Elizabeth,
as the child of this unhappy outlaw, than if the
daughter of de Bruce, my kinsman! Ay, perchance,
more dear—if that were possible,” was his
thought; and he walked forward firmly, and
in a few minutes, from behind the rude obelisk,
commemorative of some local skirmish between
Galwegian clans, beheld Rouge-mantle step out,
and beckon him to follow her track.

The winds having raged their fill, had now
sobbed themselves into the deepest peace. A
breathless calm lay on the sleeping face of nature,
on which nothing seemed alive save the tall figure, P3v 230
and the taller fantastic shadow of his guide crossing
the moonlight. Though the tempest was
lulled, the heavy rolling sea, like some savage
beast beaten back from its prey and growling in
its retreat, still moaned in its internal agitation,
uttering those heavy, monotonous, muffled sounds
which for hours and days follow a furious storm.
This muffled growling became louder. “Whither
do you lead?” inquired Grahame of his athletic
guide. She pointed to the shore, and pushed onward.
After breasting a considerable green ascent,
they plunged down sheer upon the beach, where
the rocky angle of a small creek or inlet, of only a
few yards in width, formed the boundary of a rustic
cemetery, hanging upon the seaward slope, from
the headland down to the ocean’s margin. The
broken surface of this neglected place of sepulture,
was composed of turfy knolls intermixed with grey
stones, weather-stained and covered with lichens,
which had once probably been part of the neighbouring
chapel of St. Bride, of which little other
vestige now remained. A line of firm silversand
formed the lower boundary; low ridges of rock
tasselled with sea-weed shut in the sides; and cattle
might be excluded by a natural fence of withered
brackens and brambles which waved on the P4r 231
summit; where a few hermit bushes of sloe-thorn,
hoary and shattered, intermingled their old grey
limbs and tough roots with the evanescent shoots
of a more ephemeral vegetation. A mariner who
had escaped a watery grave, might have chosen to
be laid here. A few mouldering tomb-stones, half
sunk in the turf, and heaved up and swaying from
their level, and a rude weather-tanned stone cross,
were the chief mementoes of mortality:—the little
green heaps had fallen in as the human dust
had shrunk which lay beneath them.

On one of those weather-stained tomb-stones,
under the shadow of a huge insulated mass of
rock, Wolfe perceived the fugitive. He sat with
his head resting on his hand, his elbow supported
on his knee, in an attitude of melancholy centemplation,
gazing out vacantly upon the crisp waves
all glistering in the moonlight, and flowing onward
to the sandy beach in a state as different
from their late furious agitation, as was his calm
and stern mood from the ecstacy of excitement in
which Grahame had so lately beheld him.

Wolfe bowed as he approached, and the female
drew back, having fulfilled her mission.

“But a few hours back,” said the stranger,
“and you beheld me struggling, and all but gulphed P4v 232
amid the coil of waves which are now rolling
on so stilly, the slave of that wretched human instinct
which compels us to struggle for the worthless
life that has long been but as a sick dream—
which, preserved with difficulty, already presses
upon the heart like a dead cold load, which I could
be glad to throw down forever—even here—and
now. But what is all this to you?”

“Pardon me, sir,” said Wolfe. “If it be, as
you have given me reason to believe, that you are
closely related to one, so tenderly, so justly dear to
me—can I be less than deeply interested in your
fate, dark and perilous as it may be?”

“If it be?—But this too must be borne. I
am, young gentleman, the brother of your wife’s
unhappy mother. I am in deadly jeopardy—that
is nothing—I have plunged hundreds of faithful
devoted wretches into peril as imminent. I have
been betrayed by treachery―and I have betrayed
many by my mad folly into a wild enterprize”—

“If you already so clearly perceive the folly and
injustice of your attempt,” interrupted Wolfe—

“Injustice!—By heavens! my purpose was as
holy and as just, as right and wrong could make it!
—right shamefully withheld—wrong cruelly inflicted
—oppression, contumely, scorn, poured not on P5r 233
me alone, but on all I ought to cherish! I were
a beast not to have felt—a coward not to have resisted!
But whither has the spirit of vengeance
led me!—On yon miserable shore—blood—ay,
faithful, generous, young blood, has already flowed
to secure a way of escape for me. God!—God!
that it should be thus!” and he clenched his hands
in an agony of despair. The female stepped forward
with an anxious gesture, and again drew back
in awe or fear; and in a calmer voice he proceeded
—“I have still something to live for—and I
must not cast away what has been so dearly purchased.
You know the temper of this land.—Give
me brief counsel how to reach the spot inhabited
by Elizabeth—that place in which I once hoped to
have seen in joy my poor sister. A friend expects me
there—a friend!—and from thence I hope to pass
to Hamburgh:—hope—why do men continue to be
duped by the sheat? But tell me, how, with safety
to that poor woman who has sworn to guide me
aright or perish, I may reach this Ernescraig?”

Wolfe appeared to hesitate, really from inability
to give instant counsel; and, with a start of
passionate impatience, the fugitive cried aloud—
“Have I then, in throwing myself upon your honour,
made a rash confidence? It boots not. Life P5v 234
to me is a thing too worthless to repay withering
suspicion, or cold-blooded calculations of man’s
faith or generosity. I may still cope with an open
enemy, but I cannot stoop either to supplicate or
to circumvent those whom I should find friends.”

“My conduct has not merited this,” said Grahame;
with pride and feeling, “even while I held
you a fugitive stranger, obnoxious, and perhaps
justly so, to the prince whose sword I wear.”

“You are right, young gentleman; bear with
one whom suffering, even bodily suffering, has
nearly driven mad. I have been skulking—yes,
that is the very word—skulking on the shores of
Antrim for six days, almost without sleep, or food,
or shelter. But why do I say so, that poor woman
has endured even more for me.”

“Never mind the likes of me, O’Connor,” said
the female thus alluded to, very coolly. “Shure
I’m used to the road night or day; and you will
both ate and dhrink now ere you say another word.
The young gentleman is true metal, I’ll come
bound. Ring him and try him; or if he should
not, there’s in Connaught, and nearer, will let him
hear of it agen.”

While this expostulation was in progress,
Rouge-mantle spread one of Widow Bonalie’s P6r 235
snow-white towels upon a tomb-stone, and on this
strange board arranged her pillage. She then urged
the unfortunate gentleman to eat, while she drew
back Grahame with something approaching to delicacy
and gentleness.

Lave him alone then.—Oh, Mother of glory!
to see a Scotch berrin-yard your hall, and a grave
stone your board, O’Connor!—and he a prince in
the land!—You saw him in the waters to-day—
the fires had gone over him before then. “He
did not break his fast or close his eye for three
days. May the black curse and the burning, light
upon, and hang about him and his that driv him
to this!—and that is your own lady’s”― She
checked her communicative vein; and again stepped
forward, and pressed her services upon the
fugitive, who tried to swallow a crust of bread, and
seemed to choke upon it.

“Try the brandy first, O’Connor,” said the
guide, coaxingly. “I have some experience—bless
you.”

“She says truly, sir,” said Wolfe. “After
your sufferings, privations, and incredible exertions,
warmth and rest must be more grateful,
and even more necessary than food. Would you
trust your safety for a day to the hospitality of P6v 236
the neighbouring farmer,—my neck should be your
guarantee.”

“No, No!—It cannot be. My blighting presence
shall never again carry misery and death into
any poor man’s dwelling.”

“He speaks of the boy—and would we not have
given up ten boys for you, O’Connor? Your own
nurse’s childer?”

Grahame respected the exile’s generous motive
too much, to dissuade him from his own fixed
purpose of entering no private dwelling.

“I have gone too far already,” said he, “in engaging
your sympathy for a fate which it is become
perilous even to guess at. Perhaps I may
see my neice. I have credentials from her mother
—her mother! till the last week, I had not for
nineteen years beheld Aileen; and she was as the
light of my eyes! Just Heaven!—if Heaven
there be that regards the doings of man—how,
and when shall I learn to reverence your dealings?”

Wolfe had never in his brief life witnessed sorrow
so bitter.

“We arraign the decrees of Heaven, and forget
our own deservings”—was his quiet reply.

“But Aileen?—de Bruce?—the young—the P7r 237
happy—the innocent! What had they done to
become the victims of a visitation so dark—so
wrathful—so relentless?” He sunk into thought;
and wrapping Wolfe’s military cloak around him,
leaned his uncovered head against the rock, in an
attitude strongly expressive of natural grace and
dignity.

“Is he not purty and gentale now?” whispered
Rouge-mantle, who assumed much more freedom
with the young man, than with her own proud ally.
“Six feet two in his shoes—and they were seven
boys of them, sones of the ould O’Connor; and
Aileen the youngest, and the fairest, and the flower,
and the curse:—and the sea got its part, and
the swoord got its part, and the grief as ever, had
its own double portion. But did I not guide him
weel?—Ay, and the blood will flow deeper, ere the
axe which Fitzmaurice is whetting, fall on the
proud neck of O’Connor!”

This new riddle was whispered through clenched
teeth, in a tone of almost insane energy; and
before Wolfe could reply, Rouge-mantle was
clambering over the grave-stones and rocks, on
her way to the little inn, for such spoils from
Grahame’s portmanteau as might be substituted P7v 238
for the ill-boding green garb worn by the fugitive.

She returned in an incredibly short time; and
the exile changed his garb under the shelter of the
block of rock, Rouge-mantle, at the same time, bidding
him, “never make no bones about her, as
she would just turn her head seaward and take a
blast o’ the ’baco pipe.”

In this attitude, something like common-sense
appeared to have dawned upon her mind; for she
turned round saying—“The boy is o’ the right,
O’Connor:—I must part yez. I am—bless the
mark!—as well known on the road as the Port
Dilly; and for as little good may be.”

“She is quite right in this, sir. With this
change of dress, and my horse, were you alone
you may proceed unchallenged whither you will.
To her who is dear to us both, you may make
those disclosures which neither time nor perhaps
inclination permits you to make to me. I am,
indeed, more desirous to see you gone ere the day
dawn, than for the gratification of my own anxious
curiosity. I dare not even in writing allude to our
rencontre. But tell her, that if I ever seemed to
listen with coldness to any one, whose life is fed P8r 239
with a portion of blood kindred to hers, to blame
my condition and acquit my heart.”

Grahame walked about to recover his composure.
Rouge-mantle addressed a few words in
Irish to O’Connor, and tossed his green garb far into
the sea, though with evident reluctance. He gave
her some money, and replied to her in the language
she had used; and with many courtesies of her own
peculiar kind, she went on her way.

The moon had almost sunk, the stars gleamed less
vividly, and a faint pale streak of dawn was visible
in the direction of the Antrim mountains. The
fugitive gazed darkly in the direction of his country,
with that yearning hopeless gaze of which only
the exile knows all the bitterness; and stretched
out his longing arms as if to clasp it to his heart.

“This is folly,” said he, assuming a lighter tone
than he had yet used. “I could play the woman
here:” he slipped his arm through Grahame’s.
“Poor country!—a sadder heart never left thee,—
a darker shadow never lowered over thee, since the
hour when thy glorious green head first rose in
pride above the waters, and thy God blessed thee,
and saw that his work was good!—You think me a
very fool, de Bruce, but that poor Ireland is my
country. In this hour it is more—the birthplace P8v 240
and the grave of noble hopes; and, in the narrow
space between them, what of toil, and suffering,
and grief, and remorse, are huddled!—I cannot tell
you my story to-night but I wish it were your
destiny to carry your arms elsewhere.”

As he talked, the sullen roll of a single cannonshot
swung over the waters of the channel. He made
a slight agitated movement, the nervous movement
of one who has been long hunted, but is at last
under no necessity of exercising self-command.

“’Tis the Carrickfergus signal-gun,” said Wolfe.
“On a still night the booming of the evening gun
may be heard on this coast.”

“’Tis to me the last voice of Ireland!” said
the exile.

Wolfe saddled his good steed himself; and a
load seemed taken off his heart when the fugitive
disappeared in the curves and bends of the road
leading towards Ayr, just as day was breaking.

“Ye are a brave riser at night, Captain,” were
the words with which Gideon saluted our young
man’s ears next day, an hour after Widow Bonalie
had arranged and re-arranged her guest’s breakfast
table. The sun was high in the heavens—Wolfe
sprung up, and his first thought was—“He must
be twenty miles hence.”

1 Q1r 241

A few half-crowns, judiciously administered,
effectually stopped sundry gaps, which the disappearance
of Saladin and certain other circumstances,
had made in the Widow Bonalie’s organ of inquisitiveness;
and she not only procured a hack-
horse for Port-Patrick, but sent some of her friends
forward with Wolfe’s luggage, while he still dallied
with Gideon over his breakfast. In requital
of these civilities, he pledged himself, in set terms,
never to pass her door; and she, as a balance of
courtesy, for the most “honourable day” she had
seen since Balquharn and the road trustees had
dined with her, implored that the gentlemen would
not stir still they had tasted her “cherub.”

“I see ye have forgotten me, Mr. Haliburton,”
said the widow, “and no wonder. I’m a changed
woman! Many is the lonely night has crept owre
my head in that care-bed lair,” pointing to her
widowed couch, “since the death of Peter Bonalie.
Ye ha’e forgotten me—auld springs gi’e
nae price.”

“Umph,” quoth Gideon, as she went off—“I
mind ye weel eneuch. She was thought to have
spoken the poor man to dead, Wolfe. ‘Lingulata’
—as we used to say at St. Andrews—a prating,
clavering, lang-tongued woman. But oh! man, Vol. I. Q Q1v 242
this is dour wark—this leave-taking. What am
I to say to comfort poor Burd ’Lizbeth?”

While Grahame profoundly cogitated whether
the hospitable intention of the widow, regarding a
taste of her “cherub,” had any special reference to
the rosy lips of Jean; and with more of a sentiment
and delicacy of a lover than the gallantry of
his profession, demurred to parting with Elizabeth’s
last fond kiss on such slight grounds, or indeed
on any grounds, the matron allayed his terrors by
re-appearing with a fluted Dutch bottle, as long-
necked as a heron, filled with home-made shrub.

In short there was no end to mutual civilities;
but as “the best of friends,” says the adage,
“must part,” Wolfe, with an abrupt adieu to
his old friend, sprung into the saddle and gallopped
off.

“A fair gude-day, and a brave journey, Captain
—and Lord’s sake have a care o’ the Croppies!”
bawled the Widow Bonalie.

Gideon and Jenny Geddes turned their rueful
heads silently and sorrowfully homeward; but on
the summit of the first knoll they stood, as if transfixed,
while the young man remained in sight, and
for some time afterwards.

“If it be Thy will, cover the young rash head Q2r 243
in the day of battle: And O! strengthen and
spare the soft heart that is hanging upon him—ay,
e’en but owre fondly.”

Gideon and Jenny again moved slowly on—
and, as has already been related, in due time
reached the douce hamlet of the Sourholes in the
fair strath of Oran.