as the sleeve of a soldier's jacket, and her two eyes burning like live
coals--"'Od the butcher, but I'll butcher him, the nasty, ugly,
ill-faured vagabond; the thief-like, cruel, malicious, ill-hearted,
down-looking blackguard! He would go for to offer for to presume for to
dare to lay hands on an honest man's son's doug! It sets him weel, the
bloodthirsty Gehazi, the halinshaker ne'er-do-weel! I'll gie him sic a
redding up as he never had since the day his mother boor him!" Then
looting down to the poor bit beast, that was bleeding like a sheep--"Ay,
Puggie, man," she said in a doleful voice, "they've made ye an unco
fright; but I'll gie them up their fit for't; I'll show them, in a couple
of hurries, that they have catched a Tartar!"--and with that out went the
woman, paper-parcel, leather-cap and all, randying like a tinkler from
Yetholm; the wee wretchie cowering behind her, with the mouse-wabs
sticking on the place I had put them to stop the bleeding; and looking,
by all the world, like a sight I once saw, when I was a boy, on a visit
to my father's half-cousin, Aunt Heatherwig, on the Castle-hill of
Edinburgh--to wit, a thief going down Leith Walk, on his road to be
shipped for transportation to Botany Bay, after having been pelted for a
couple of hours with rotten eggs in the pillory.
Knowing the nature of the parties concerned, and that intimately on both
sides, I jealoused directly that there would be a stramash; so not
liking, for sundry reasons, to have my nebseen in the business, I shut to
the door, and drew the long bolt; while I hastened ben to the room, and,
softly pulling up a jink of the window clapped the side of my head to it;
that, unobserved, I might have an opportunity of overhearing the
conversation between Reuben Cursecowl and the coallier wife; which,
weel-a-wat, was likely to become public property.
"Hollo! you man, de ye ken onything about that?" cried the randy
woman;--but wait a moment, till I give a skiff of description of our
neighbour Reuben.
By this time--it was ten years after James Batter's tragedy--Mr Cursecowl
was an oldish man--he is gathered to his fathers now--and was
considerably past his best, as his wife, douce, honest woman, used to
observe. His dress was a little in the Pagan style, and rendered him
kenspeckle to the eye of observation. Instead of a hat, he generally
wore a long red Kilmarnock nightcap, with a cherry on the top of it,
through foul weather and fair; and having a kind of trot in his walk,
from a bink forward in his knees, it dang-dangled behind him, like the
cap of Mr Merry-man with the painted face, the showfolk's fool. On the
afternoon alluded to, he was in full killing-dress, having on an auld
blue short coatie, once long, but now docked in the tails, so that the
pocket-flaps and hainch buttons were not above three inches from the
place where his wife had snibbed it across by; and, from long use in his
blood-thirsty occupation, his sleeves flashed in the daylight as if they
had been double japanned. Tied round his beer-barrel-like waist was a
stripped apron, blue and white; and at his left side hung a bloody gaping
leather pouch, as if he had been an Israelite returned from the slaughter
of the Philistines, filled with steels and knives, straight and crooked,
that had done ample execution in their day I'll warrant them. Up his
thighs were rolled his coarse rig-and-fur stockings, as if it were to
gird him for the battle, and his feet were slipped into a pair of
bauchles--that is, the under part of auld boots cut from the legs. As to
his face, lo, and behold! the moon shining in the Nor-west--yea, the sun
blazing in his glory--had not a more crimson aspect than Reuben. Like
the pig-eyed Chinese folk on tea-cups, his peepers were diminutive and
twinkling; but his nose made up for them--and that it did--being portly
in all its dimensions broad and long, as to colour, liker a radish than
any other production in nature. In short, he was as bonny a figure as
ever man of woman born clapped eye on; and was cleaving away most
devoutly, at a side of black-faced mutton, when the woman, as I said
before, cried out, "Hollo! you man, do ye ken onything about that?"
pointing to the dumb animal that crawled and crouched behind her.
"Aweel, what o't?" cried Cursecowl, still hacking and cleaving away at
the meat.
"What o't? i' faith, billy, that's a gude ane," answered the wife. "But
ye'll no get aff that way; catch me, my man. My name's no Jenny
Mathieson an I haena ye afore your betters. I'll learn ye what
soommenses are."
Looking at her with a look of lightning for a couple of seconds--"Aff wi'
ye, gin you're wise," quo' Cursecowl, still cleaving away--"or I'll maybe
bring ye in for the sheep's-head it was trying to make off with its
teeth. Do ye understand that?" And he gave a girn, that stretched his
mouth from ear to ear.
This was too much for the subterranean daughter of Eve; it was like
putting a red-hot poker among the coals of her own pit. "Oh, ye
incarnate cannibal!" she bawled out, doubling her nieve, and shaking it
in Reuben's face; "if ye have a conscience at a', think black-burning
shame o' yoursell! Just look, ye bluidy salvage; just take a look there,
my bonny man, o' your handiwark now. Isn't that very pretty?"--"Aff wi'
ye," continued Cursecowl, still cleaving away with the chopping-axe, and
muttering a volley of curses through the knife, which he held between his
teeth--"Aff wi' ye; and keep a calm sough."
"The dog's no mine, or I wadna have cared sae muckle. Siccan a like
beast! Siccan a fright to be seen!!! I'faith I think shame to tak' it
hame again!! Ay, man, ye're a pretty fellow! Ye've run fast when the
noses were dealing; ye're a bonny man to hack off the poor dumb animal's
tail. If it had been a Christian like yoursell, it wad have mattered
less--but a puir bit dumb harmless animal!"
"Aff wi' ye there, and nane o' your chatter," thundered Reuben, stopping
in his cleaving, and turning the side of his red face round to the woman.
"Flee--vanish--and be cursed to ye--baith you and your doug thegither, ye
infernal limmer! It's well for't, luckie, it was not his head instead of
its tail. Ye had better steik your gab--cut your stick--and pack off,
gin ye be wise."
"Think shame--think shame--think black-burning shame o' yoursell, ye born
and bred ruffian!" roared out the wife at the top story of her
voice--shaking her doubled nieve before him--stamping her heels on the
causey--then, drawing herself up, and holding her hands on her
hainches--"Just look, I tell ye, you unhanged blackguard, at your
precious handywark! Just look, what think ye of that now? Tak' another
look now, ower that fief-like fiery nose o' yours, ye regardless Pagan!"
Flesh and blood could stand this no longer; and I saw Cursecowl's anger
boiling up within him, as in a red-hot fiery furnace.
"Wait a wee, my woman," muttered Cursecowl to himself, as, swearing
between his teeth, he hurried into the killing-booth.
Furious as the woman, however, was, she had yet enough of common sense
remaining within her to dread skaith; so, apprehending the bursting
storm, she had just taken to her heels, when out he came, rampauging
after her like a Greenland bear, with a large liver in each hand;--the
one of which, after describing a circle round his head, flashed after her
like lightning, and hearted her between the shoulders like a clap of
thunder; while the other, as he was repeating the volley, slipping
sideways from his fingers while he was driving it with all his force,
played drive directly through the window where I was standing, and gave
me such a yerk on the side of the head, that it could be compared to
nothing else but the lines written on the stucco image of Shakspeare, the
great playactor, on our parlour chimneypiece,
"The great globe itself,
Yea, all that it inherits, shall dissolve;"
and I lay speechless on the floor for goodness knows the length of time.
Even when I came to my recollection, it was partly to a sense of torment;
for Nanse, coming into the room, and not knowing the cause of my
disastrous overthrow, attributed it all to a fit of the apoplexy; and, in
her frenzy of affliction, had blistered all my nose with her Sunday
scent-bottle of aromatic vinegar.
For some weeks after there was a bumming in my ears, as if all the
bee-skeps on the banks of the Esk had been pent up within my head; and
though Reuben Cursecowl paid, like a gentleman, for the four panes he had
broken, he drove into me, I can assure him, in a most forcible and
striking manner, the truth of the old proverb--which is the moral of this
chapter that "listeners seldom hear anything to their own advantage."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT--MANSIE WAUCH ON SOME SERIOUS MUSINGS
After consultation with friends, and much serious consideration on such a
momentous subject, it having been finally settled on between the wife and
myself to educate Benjie to the barber and haircutting line, we looked
round about us in the world for a suitable master to whom we might
entrust our dear laddie, he having now finished his education, and
reached his fourteenth year.
It was visible in a twinkling to us both, that his apprenticeship could
not be gone through with at home in that first-rate style which would
enable him to reach the top of the tree in his profession; yet it gave us
a sore heart to think of sending away, at so tender an age, one who was
so dear to his mother and me, and whom we had, as it were, in a manner
made a pet of; so we reckoned it best to article him for a twelvemonth
with Ebenezer Packwood at the corner, before finally sending him off to
Edinburgh, to get his finishing in the wig, false-curl, and hair-baking
department, under Urquhart, Maclachlan, or Connal. Accordingly, I sent
for Eben to come and eat an egg with me--matters were entered upon and
arranged--Benjie was sent on trial; and though at first he funked and
fought refractory, he came, to the astonishment of his master and the old
apprentice, in less than no time to cut hair without many visible
shear-marks; and, within the first quarter, succeeded, without so much as
drawing blood, to unbristle for a wager of his master's, the Saturday
night's countenance of Daniel Shoebrush himself, who was as rough as a
badger.
Having thus done for Benjie, it now behoved me to have an eye towards
myself; for, having turned the corner of manhood, I found that I was
beginning to be wearing away down the hillside of life. Customers, who
had as much faith in me as almost in their Bible with regard to
everything connected with my own department, and who could depend on
their cloth being cut according to the newest and most approved fashions,
began now and then to return a coat upon my hand for alteration, as being
quite out of date; while my daily work, to which in the days of other
years I had got up blythe as the lark, instead of being a pleasure, came
to be looked forward to with trouble and anxiety, weighing on my heart as
a care, and on my shoulders as a burden.
Finding but too severely that such was the case, and that there is no
contending with the course of nature, I took sweet counsel together with
James Batter over a cup of tea and a cookie, concerning what it was best
for a man placed in my circumstances to betake myself to.
As industry ever has its own reward, let me without brag or boasting be
allowed to state, that in my own case, it did not disappoint my
exertions. I had sat down a tenant, and I was now not only the landlord
of my own house and shop, but of all the back tenements to the head of
the garden, as also of the row of one-story houses behind, facing to the
loan, in the centre of which Lucky Thamson keeps up the sign of the
Tankard and Tappit Hen. It was also a relief to my mind, as the head of
my family, that we had cut Benjie loose from his mother's apron string,
poor fellow, and set him adrift in an honest way of doing to buffet the
stormy ocean of life; so, everything considered, it was found that enough
and to spare had been laid past by Nanse and me to spend the evening of
our days by the lound dykeside of domestic comfort.
In Tammy Bodkin, to whom I trust I had been a dutiful, as I know I was an
honoured master, I found a faithful journeyman, he having served me in
that capacity for nine years; so, it is not miraculous, being constantly,
during that period, under my attentive eye, that he was now quite a
deacon in all the departments of the business. As an eident scholar he
had his reward; for customers, especially during the latter years, when
my sight was scarcely so good, came at length to be not very scrupulous
as to whether their cloth was cut by the man or his master. Never let
filial piety be overlooked:--when I first patronized Tammie, and promoted
him to the dignity of sitting crosslegged along with me on the
working-board, he was a hatless and shoeless ragamuffin, the orphan lad
of a widowed mother, whose husband had been killed by a chain-shot, which
carried off his head, at the bloody battle of the Nile, under Lord
Nelson. Tammie was the oldest of four, and the other three were lasses,
that knew not in the morning where the day's providing was to come from,
except by trust in Him who sent the ravens to Elijah. By allowing Tammie
a trifle for board-wages, I was enabled to add my mite to the comforts of
the family; for he was kind, frugal, and dutiful, and would willingly
share with them to the last morsel. In the course of a few years he
became his mother's bread-winner, the lasses being sent to service, I
myself having recommended one of them to Deacon Burlings, and another to
Springheel the dancing-master; retaining Katie, the youngest, for
ourselves, to manage the kitchen, and go messages when required.
[Picture: The lazy corner, Dalkeith]
Providence having thus blessed Tammie's efforts in the paths of
industrious sobriety, what could I do better--James Batter being exactly
of the same opinion--than make him my successor; giving him the shop at a
cheap rent, the stock in trade at a moderate valuation, and the good-will
of the business as a gratis gift.
Having recommended Tammie to public patronage and support, he is now, as
all the world knows, a thriving man; nor, from Berwick Bridge to Johnny
Groat's, is it in the power of any gentleman to have his coat cut in a
more fashionable way, or on more moderate terms, than at the sign of the
Goose and the Pair of Shears rampant.
Leaving Tammie to take care of his own matters, as he is well able to do,
allow me to observe, that it is curious how habit becomes a second
nature, and how the breaking in upon the ways we have been long and long
accustomed to, through the days of the years that are past, is as the
cutting asunder of the joints and marrow. This I found bitterly, even
though I had the prospect before me of spending my old age in peace and
plenty. I could not think of leaving my auld house--every room, every
nook in it was familiar to my heart. The garden trees seemed to wave
their branches sorrowfully over my head, as bidding me a farewell; and
when I saw all the scraighing hens catched out of the hen-house I had
twenty years before built and tiled with my own hands, and tumbled into a
sack, to be carried on limping Jock Dalgleish's back up to our new abode
at Lugton, my heart swelled to my mouth, and the mist of gushing tears
bedimmed my eyesight. Four of Thomas Burlings' flour carts stood laden
before the door with our furniture, on the top of which were three of
Nanse's grand geraniums in flower-pots, with five of my walking-sticks
tied together with a string; and as I paced through the empty rooms,
where I had passed so many pleasant and happy hours, the sound of my feet
on the bare floor seemed in my ears like an echo from the grave. On our
road to Lugton I could scarcely muster common sense to answer a person
who wished us a good-day; and Nanse, as we daundered on arm-in-arm, never
once took her napkin from her een. Oh, but it was a weary business!
Being in this sober frame of mind, allow me to wind up this chapter--the
last catastrophe of my eventful life that I mean at present to make
public--with a few serious reflections; as it fears me, that, in much of
what I have set down, ill-natured people may see a good deal scarcely
consistent with my character for douceness and circumspection; but if
many wonderfuls have befallen to my share, it would be well to remember
that a man's lot is not of his own making. Musing within myself on the
chances and changes of time, the uncertainties of life, the frail thread
by which we are tacked to this world, and how the place that now knows us
shall soon know us no more, I could not help, for two or three days
previous to my quitting my dear old house and shop, taking my stick into
my hand, and wandering about all my old haunts and houffs--and need I
mention that among these were the road down to the Duke's south gate with
the deers on it, the waterside by Woodburn, the Cow-brigg, up the back
street, through the flesh-market, and over to the auld kirk in among the
headstones? For three walks, on three different days, I set out in
different directions; yet, strange to say! I aye landed in the
kirkyard:--and where is the man of woman born proud enough to brag, that
it shall not be his fate to land there at last?
Headstones and headstones around me! some newly put up, and others mossy
and grey; it was a humbling yet an edifying sight, preaching, as forcibly
as ever Maister Wiggie did in his best days, of the vanity and the
passingness of all human enjoyments. Mouldered to dust beneath the tufts
lay the blithe laddies with whom I have a hundred times played merry
games on moonlight nights; some were soon cut off; others grew up to
their full estate; and there stood I, a greyhaired man, among the weeds
and nettles, mourning over times never to return!
The reader will no doubt be anxious to hear a few words regarding my son
Benjie, who has turned out just as his friends and the world expected.
After his time with Ebenezer Packwood in Dalkeith, he served for four
years in Edinburgh, where he cut a distinguished figure, having shaved
and shorn lots of the nobility and gentry; among whom was a French
Duchess, and many other foreigners of distinction. In short, nothing
went down at the principal hotels but the expertness of Mr Benjamin
Wauch; and, had he been so disposed, he could have commenced on his own
footing with every chance of success; but knowing himself fully young,
and being anxious to see more of the world before settling, he took out a
passage in one of the Leith smacks, and set sail for London, where he
arrived, after a safe and prosperous voyage, without a hair of his head
injured. The only thing I am ashamed to let out about him is, that he is
now, and has been for some time past, principal shopman in a Wallflower
Hair-powder and Genuine Macassar Oil Warehouse, kept by three Frenchmen,
called Moosies Peroukey.
But, though our natural enemies, he writes me that he has found them
agreeable and chatty masters, full of good manners and pleasant
discourse, first-rate in their articles, and, except in their language,
almost Christians.
I aye thought Benjie was a genius; and he is beginning to show himself
his father's son, being in thoughts of taking out a patent for making
hair-oil from rancid butter. If he succeeds it will make the callant's
fortune. But he must not marry Madamoselle Peroukey without my especial
consent, as Nanse says, that her having a French woman for her
daughter-in-law would be the death of her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE--CONCLUSION
On first commencing this memoir of my life, I put pen to paper with the
laudable view of handing down to posterity--to our children, and to their
children's children--the accidents, adventures, and mischances that may
fall to the lot of a man placed by Providence even in the loundest
situation of life, where he seemed to lie sheltered in the bield of peace
and privacy;--and, at that time, it was my intention to have carried down
my various transactions to this dividual day and date. My materials,
however, have swelled on my hand like summer corn under sunny showers;
one thing has brought another to remembrance; sowds of bypast marvels
have come before my mind's eye in the silent watches of the night,
concerning the days when I sat working crosslegged on the board; and if I
do not stop at this critical juncture--to wit, my retiring from trade,
and the settlement of my dear and only son Benjie in an honourable way of
doing; as who dares to deny that the barber and hair-cutting line is a
safe and honourable employment?--I do not know when I might get to the
end of my tether; and the interest which every reasonable man must take
in the extraordinary adventures of my early years, might be grievously
marred and broken in upon through the garrulity of old age.
Perhaps I am going a little too far when I say, that the whole world
cannot fail to be interested in the occurrences of my life; for since its
creation, which was not yesterday, I do not believe--and James Batter is
exactly of the same mind--that there ever was a subject concerning which
the bulk of mankind have not had two opinions. Knowing this to be the
case, I would be a great gomeril to expect that I should be the only
white swan that ever appeared; and that all parties in church and state,
who are for cutting each other's throats on every other great question,
should be unanimous only in what regards me. Englishmen, for instance,
will say that I am a bad speller, and that my language is kittle; and
such of the Irishers as can read, will be threaping that I have abused
their precious country; but, my certie, instead of blaming me for letting
out what I could not deny, they must just learn to behave themselves
better when they come to see us, or bide at home.