“Implore his aid, for Proteus only knows
The secret cause and cure of all thy woes,
But first the wily wizard must be caught,
For unconstrain’d he nothing tells for naught,
Nor is with prayers, or bribes, or flattery bought,
Surprise him first, and with strong fetters bind.”--GEORGICS.
[Sidenote: THE MERMAID.]
Of all the old mythologic existences of Scotland--half earth, half
air--there was none with whom the people of Cromarty were better
acquainted than with the mermaid. Thirty years have not yet gone by
since she has been seen by moonlight sitting on a stone in the sea,
a little to the east of the town; and scarce a winter passed, forty
years earlier, in which she was not heard singing among the rocks,
or seen braiding up her long yellow tresses on the shore. Like her
contemporaries the river-wraiths and fairies--like the nymphs and
deities, too, of the Greeks and Romans--she was deemed scarcely less
material than the favoured individuals of our own species, who, in
the grey of the morning or at the close of evening, had marked her
sitting on some desert promontory, or frolicking amid the waves of some
solitary arm of the sea. But it is not so generally known, that though
in some respects less potent even than men--than at least the very
strong and very courageous--she had a power through her connexion with
the invisible world over human affairs, and could control and remodel
even the decrees of destiny. A robust, fearless man might treat her, it
is said, as Ulysses did Circe, or Diomedes Venus; but then, more potent
than these goddesses, she could render all his future undertakings
either successful or unfortunate, or, if a seafaring man, could either
bury him in the waves or protect him from their fury. It is said, too,
that like the Proteus of classical mythology (and the coincidence,
if merely such, is at least a curious one), she never exerted this
power in a good direction except when compelled to it. She avoided in
the daytime shores frequented by man, and when disturbed by him in
her retreats, escaped into her native element; but if he succeeded
in seizing and overpowering her, she always purchased her release by
granting him any three wishes he might form, connected with either
his own fortunes or those of his friends. Her strength, however, was
superior to that of most men; and, if victorious in the struggle, she
carried the unfortunate assailant with her into the sea.
[Sidenote: THE STORY OF JOHN REID.]
It is now nearly a hundred and twenty years since honest John Reid, the
Cromarty shipmaster, was positively the most unhappy man in the place.
He was shrewd, sensible, calculating, good-humoured, in comparatively
easy circumstances, and at this time in his thirtieth year. The early
part of his life had been spent abroad; he had voyaged over the
wide Pacific, and traded to China and both the Indies; and to such
purpose--for he was quite the sort of person one would most like to
have for one’s grandfather--that in about fourteen years after sailing
from Cromarty a poor ship-boy, he had returned to it with money enough
to purchase a fine large sloop, with which he engaged in the lucrative
trade carrying on at this period between Holland and the northern ports
of Scotland. His good luck still followed him; nor was he of the class
who are ingenious in discovering imaginary misfortunes. What is more,
too, he was of so cool a temperament, that when nature rendered him
capable of the softer passion at all, it seemed as if she had done so
by way of after-thought, and contrary to her original intention. And
yet, John Reid, with all his cool prudence, and his good humour and
good fortune to boot, was one of the unhappiest men in the place--and
all this because he had been just paying his addresses to one of its
prettiest girls.
He had first seen Helen Stuart when indulging in a solitary walk on the
hill of Cromarty, shortly after his return from the Indies. Helen was
fully twelve years younger than himself, slightly but elegantly formed,
with small regular features, and a complexion in which the purest white
was blended with the most exquisite red. Never before had the sailor
seen a creature half so lovely; he thought of her all the evening
after, and dreamed of her all the night. But there was no corresponding
impression on the other side; the maiden merely remembered that she had
met in the wood with the newly-arrived shipmaster and described him
to one of her companions as a strongly-built man of barely the middle
size, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a set of irregular,
good-humoured features, over which a tropical sun had cast its tinge
of the deepest bronze. Helen was a village heiress, with a good deal
of the pride of beauty in her composition, and a very little of the
pride of wealth, and, with what was perhaps as unfavourable to the
newly-formed passion of Reid as either, a romantic attachment to that
most perfect man of the imagination, the _maid’s husband_--a prince in
disguise, the Admirable Crichton in a revised edition, or the hero of
an old ballad.
This dangerous, though shadowy rival of the true lover, who assumes
in almost every feminine mind a shape of its own, was in the present
instance handsome as Helen herself, with just such a complexion and
such eyes and hair; and, excelling all men in fine clothes, fine
speeches, and fine manners, he excelled them in parts, and wealth,
and courage too. What had the robust, sunburned sailor of thirty to
cast into the opposite scale? Besides, Helen, though she had often
dreamed of courtship, had never seriously thought of marriage; and
so, partly for the sake of her ideal suitor, partly through a girlish
unwillingness to grapple with the realities of life, the real suitor
was rejected. Grave natures, says Bacon, are ever the most constant in
their attachments. Weeks and months passed away, and still there was
an uneasy void in the mind of the sailor, which neither business nor
amusement could fill--a something which differed from grief, without
affecting him less painfully. He could think and dream of only Helen
Stuart. Her image followed him into Holland among the phlegmatic
Dutchmen, who never break their hearts for the sake of a mistress, and
watched beside him for many a long hour at the helm. He ever saw her as
he had first seen her on the hill; there were trees in the background,
and the warm mellow flush of a setting sun, while in front there
tripped lightly along a sylph-looking creature, with bright happy eyes,
and cheeks glowing with crimson.
He had returned from one of his voyages late in April, and had risen,
when May-day arrived, ere the first peep of daylight, in the hope of
again meeting Helen among the woods of the hill. Were he but to see
her, barely see her, he could be happy, he thought, for months to
come; and he knew she would be gathering May-dew this morning, with
all her companions, on the green slopes of Drieminory. Morning rose
upon him as he sauntered eastward along the edge of the bay; the stars
sunk one by one into the blue; and on reaching a piece of rocky beach
that stretches along the brow of the hill, the sun rose all red and
glorious out of the Firth, and flung a broad pathway of flame across
the waters to the shore. The rocks, the hill, the little wavelets which
came toppling against the beach, were tinged with the orange light of
morning; and yet, from the earliness of the hour, and the secluded
character of the scene, a portion of terror might well have mingled
with one’s quieter feelings of admiration when in the vicinity of a
place so famous for the wild and the wonderful as the Dropping-Cave.
But of the cave more anon. Darkness and solitude are twin sisters, and
foster nearly the same emotions; but they failed this morning to awaken
a single fear in the mind of the shipmaster, sailor as he was, and
acquainted, too, with every story of the cave. He could think of only
Helen Stuart.
An insulated pile of rock, roughened with moss and lichens, which
stands out of the beach like an old ruinous castle, surmounted by
hanging bartisans and broken turrets, conceals the cave itself, and the
skerries abreast of it, from the traveller who approaches them from the
west. It screened them this morning from the view of the shipmaster,
as, stepping lightly along the rough stones, full of impossible wishes
and imaginings, he heard the low notes of a song. He looked round to
ascertain whether a boat might not be passing, or a shepherd seated on
the hill; but he could see only a huge overgrown seal that had raised
its head over the waves, and seemed listening to the music with its
face towards the east. On turning, however, the edge of the cliff, he
saw the musician, apparently a young girl, who seemed bathing among the
cliffs, and who was now sitting half on the rock, half in the water,
on one of the outer skerries, opposite the cave. Her long yellow hair
fell in luxuriant profusion on her snowy shoulders, and as she raised
herself higher on the cliff, the sun shone on the parts below her waist
with such dazzling brightness, that the sailor raised his hands to his
eyes, and a shifting speck of light, like the reflection of a mirror,
went dancing over the shaded roughnesses of the opposite precipice.
Her face was turned towards the cave, and the notes of her song seemed
at times to be answered from it in a chorus, faint and low indeed, but
which could not, he thought, be wholly produced by echo.
Reid was too well acquainted with the beliefs of the age not to know
that he looked upon the mermaid. And were he less a lover than he
was, he would have done nothing more. But, aware of her strange power
over the destinies of men, he only thought that now or never was his
opportunity for gaining the hand of Helen. “Would that there were some
of my lads here to see fair play!” he muttered, as, creeping amid the
crags, and availing himself of every brake that afforded the slightest
cover, he stole towards the shelf on which the creature was seated. She
turned round in the moment he had gained it; the last note of her song
lengthened into a shriek; and with an expression of mingled terror and
surprise, which clouded a set of the loveliest features, she attempted
to fling herself into the water; but in the moment of the attempt, the
brawny arms of the shipmaster were locked round her waist. Her arms
clasped his shoulders in turn, and with a strength scarcely inferior
to that exerted by the snake of India when struggling with the tiger,
she strove to drag him to the edge of the rock; but though his iron
sinews quivered under her grasp like the beams of his vessel when
straining beneath a press of canvas, he thought of Helen Stuart, and
bore her down by main force in the opposite direction. A fainter and
a still fainter struggle ensued, and she then lay passive against the
cliff. Never had Reid seen aught so beautiful--and he was convinced of
it, lover as he was--as the half-fish half-woman creature that now lay
prostrate before him.
“Man, what with me?” she said, in a tone of voice which, though sweet
as the song of a bird, had something so unnatural in it that it made
his blood run cold. “Wishes three,” he replied, in the prescribed
formula of the demonologist, and then proceeded to state them. His
father, a sailor like himself, had been drowned many years before;
and the first wish suggested to him by the circumstance was, that
neither he himself nor any of his friends should perish by the sea.
The second--for he feared lest Helen, so lady-looking a person, and an
heiress to boot, might yet find herself the wife of a poor man--was,
that he should be uninterruptedly fortunate in all his undertakings.
The third wish he never communicated to any one except the mermaid,
and yet no one ever failed to guess it. “Quit, and have,” replied
the creature. Reid slackened his hold; and pressing her tail against
the rock until it curled to her waist, and raising her hands, the
palms pressed together, and the edge to her face, she sprang into the
sea. The spray dashed to the sun; the white shoulders and silvery
tail gleamed for a moment through the green depths of the water. A
slight ripple splashed against the beach, and when it subsided, every
trace of the mermaid had vanished. Reid wiped his brow, and ascending
by one of the slopes of the hill towards the well-known resorts of
his town’s-women--not the less inclined to hope from the result of
his strange contest--he found Helen Stuart seated with one of her
companions, a common acquaintance, on the grassy knoll over the Lover’s
Leap. The charm, thought he, already begins to work.
He bowed to Helen, and addressed her companion. “The man of all the
world,” said the latter, “whom we most wished to see. Helen has been
telling me one of the strangest dreams; and it is not half an hour
yet since we both thought we were going to see it realized; but you
must assist us in reading it. She had just fallen asleep last night,
when she found herself on the green slope covered with primroses and
cuckoo-flowers, that lies, you know, to the west of the Dropping-Cave;
and there she was employed, she thought, as we have been this morning,
in gathering May-dew. But the grass and bushes seemed dry and parched,
and she had gathered only a few drops, when, on hearing some one
singing among the rocks beside the cave, she looked that way, and saw
you sleeping on the beach, and the singer, a beautiful lady, watching
beside you. She turned again to the bushes, but all was dry; and she
was quite unhappy that she could get no dew, and unhappy, too, lest the
strange lady should suffer you to sleep till you were covered by the
tide; when suddenly you stood beside her, and began to assist her in
shaking the bushes. She looked for the lady, and saw her far out among
the skerries, floating on the water like a white sea-gull; and as she
looked and wondered, she heard a shower of drops which you had shaken
down, tinkling against the bottom of the pitcher. And only think of the
prettiness of the fancy!--the drops were all drops of pure gold, and
filled the pitcher to the brim. So far the dream. But this is not all.
We both passed the green primrose slope just as the sun was rising,
and--can you believe it?--we heard from among the rocks the identical
song which Helen heard in her dream. It was like nothing else I ever
listened to; and now here are you to fill our pitchers with gold, like
the genie of a fairy tale.”
“And so you have really heard music from among the rocks?” said Reid.
“Well, but I have more than heard it--I have seen and conversed with
the musician; the strange unearthly lady of Helen’s dream. I have
visited every quarter of the globe, and sailed over almost every ocean,
but never saw the mermaid before.”
“Seen the mermaid!” exclaimed Helen.
“Seen and conversed with the mermaid!” said her companion; “Heaven
forbid! The last time she appeared at the Dropping-Cave was only a few
days before the terrible storm in which you lost your father. Take care
you repeat not her words--for they thrive ill who carry tales from the
other world to this.”
“But I am the creature’s master,” said the sailor, “and need not be so
wary.”
He told his story; how he had first seen the mysterious creature
sitting in the sea, and breathing exquisite music, as she combed down
her long yellow tresses; how he had stolen warily among the crags,
with a heart palpitating betwixt dread and eagerness; and how, after
so fearful a struggle, she had lain passive against the cliff. Helen
listened with feelings of wonder and admiration, dashed with terror;
and in returning home, though the morning was far advanced, and the
Dropping-Cave a great way below, she leaned for support and protection
on the arm of the sailor--a freedom which no one would have remarked as
over great at May-day next year, for the sailor had ere then become
her husband. For nearly a century after, the family was a rising
one; but it is now extinct. Helen, for the last seventy years, has
been sleeping under a slab of blue marble within the broken walls of
the Chapel of St. Regulus; her only daughter, the wife of Sir George
Mackenzie of Cromarty, lies in one of the burying-grounds of Inverness,
with a shield of I know not how many quarterings over her grave; and
it is not yet twenty years since her grandson, the last of the family,
died in London, bequeathing to one of his Cromarty relatives several
small pieces of property, and a legacy of many thousand pounds.
[Sidenote: THE POT.]
There is on the northern side of the Firth of Cromarty, a shallow arm
of the sea several miles in length, which dries during stream tides
throughout almost its entire extent, and bears the name of the sands
of Nigg. Like the sands of the Solway, it has been a frequent scene of
accidents. Skirting a populous tract of country on both sides, it lies
much in the way of travelers; and the fords, which shift during land
floods and high winds, are often attempted at night, and occasionally
at improper times of the tide. A narrow river-like channel in the
middle, fed by the streams which discharge themselves into the estuary
from the interior, and which never wholly dries, bears the name of
“The Pot,” and was infamous during even the present century for its
death-lights and its wraiths, and for the strange mysterious noises
which used to come sounding from its depths to either shore previous
to “a drowning.” Little more than half a century ago, a farmer of the
district who had turned aside to see an acquaintance, an old man who
lived on the northern shore of the sands of Nigg, found him leaning
over the fence of his little garden, apparently so lost in thought
that he seemed unconscious of his presence. “What ails you, Donald?”
inquired the visitor. “There will be a drowning to-day in the Pot,”
replied Donald. “A drowning in the Pot!--what makes you say so?” “Do
you hear nothing?” “No’o--and yet I rather think I do;--there are faint
sounds as of a continual knocking--are there not?--so very faint, that
they seem rather within the ear, than without; and yet they surely come
from the Pot;--knock, knock, knock--what can it mean?” “That knocking,”
said the old man, “has been sounding in my ears all this morning. I
have never known a life lost on the sands but that knocking has gone
before.” As he spoke, a horseman was seen riding furiously along the
road which skirts the opposite shore of the estuary. On reaching the
usual ford, though the rise of the tide had rendered it impracticable
for more than an hour before, he spurred his horse across the beach
and entered the water. “Surely,” said the old man to his friend, “that
madman is not taking the ford, and the sea nearly at full?” “Ay, but
he is though,” said the other; “if the distance does not deceive me,
it is Macculloch the corn-agent, in hot haste for the Tain market. See
how he spurs through the shallows; and see, he has now reached the Pot,
and the water deepens--he goes deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Merciful
heavens! he is gone!” Horse and rider had sunk into one of the hollows.
The horse rose to the surface a moment after, and swam to the shore;
but the rider had disappeared for ever. A story of nearly the same part
of the country connects the mysterious knocking with the mermaid.
[Sidenote: MACCULLOCH THE CORN-AGENT.]
In the immediate neighbourhood of the Old Abbey of Fearn, famous for
its abbot, Patrick Hamilton, our first Protestant martyr, there stood,
rather more than ninety years ago, a little turf cottage, inhabited by
a widow, whose husband, a farmer of the parish, had died suddenly in
the fields about ten years before. The poor woman had been within doors
with her only child, a little girl of seven years of age, at the time;
and when, without previous preparation, she had opened the door on a
hurried summons, and seen the corpse of her husband on the threshold,
her mind was totally unhinged by the shock. For the ten following years
she went wandering about like a ghost, scarce conscious apparently of
anything; no one ever heard her speak, or saw her listen; and save
that she retained a few of the mechanical neatnesses of her earlier
years--which, standing out alone on a groundwork of vacuity, seemed
akin to the instincts of the inferior animals--her life appeared to be
nearly as much a blank as that of the large elm-tree which stretched
its branches over her cottage. Her husband’s farm, shortly after his
death, had been put into the hands of a relation of the family, a
narrow sordid man who had made no generous use, it was thought, of
the power which the imbecility of the poor woman and the youth of her
daughter gave him over their affairs; it was at least certain that he
became comparatively wealthy, and they very poor; and in the autumn of
1742, the daughter, now a pretty girl of seventeen, had to leave her
mother on the care of a neighbour, and to engage as a reaper with a
farmer in the neighbouring parish of Tarbat. She had gone with a heavy
heart to work for the first time among strangers, but her youth and
beauty, added to a quiet timidity of manner, that showed how conscious
she was of having no one to protect her, had made her friends; and now
that harvest was over, she was returning home, proud of her slender
earnings, and full of hope and happiness. It was early on a Sabbath
morning, and her path winded along the southern bank of Loch-Slin,
where the parish of Tarbat borders on that of Fearn.
[Sidenote: THE WASHING OF THE MERMAID.]
Loch-Slin is a dark sluggish sheet of water, bordered on every side
by thick tangled hedges of reeds and rushes; nor has the surrounding
scenery much to recommend it. It is comparatively tame--tamer perhaps
for the last thirty years than at any former period; for the plough
has been busy among its green undulating slopes, and many of its
more picturesque thickets of alders and willows have disappeared. It
possesses, however, its few points of interest; and its appearance
at this time in the quiet of the Sabbath morning, was one of extreme
seclusion. The tall old castle of Loch-Slin, broken and weather-worn,
and pregnant with associations of the remote past, stood up over it
like some necromancer beside his mirror; and the maiden, as she tripped
homewards along the little blind pathway that went winding along the
quiet shore--now in a hollow, anon on a height--could see the red image
of the ruins heightened by the flush of the newly-risen sun, reflected
on the calm surface that still lay dark and grey under the shadow of
the eastern bank. All was still as death, when her ear suddenly caught
a low indistinct sound as of a continuous knocking, which heightened
as she went, until it was at length echoed back from the old walls;
and which, had she heard it on a week morning, she would have at once
set down as that of the knocking of clothes at a washing. But who,
she thought, can be “knocking claes” on the Sabbath? She turned a
projecting angle of the bank, and saw, not ten yards away, what seemed
to be a tall female standing in the water immediately beyond the line
of flags and rushes which fringed the shore, and engaged apparently in
knocking clothes on a stone, with the sort of bludgeon still used in
the north country for the purpose. The maiden hurried past, convinced
that the creature before her could be none other than the mermaid of
Loch-Slin; but in the midst of her terror she was possessed enough
to remark that the beautiful goblin seemed to ply its work with a
malignant pleasure, and that on a grass plot directly opposite where it
stood, there were spread out as if to dry, more than thirty smocks and
shirts, all horribly dabbled with blood. As the poor girl entered her
mother’s cottage, the excitement that had borne her up in her flight
suddenly failed, and she sunk insensible upon the floor. For a moment
the mother seemed roused by the circumstance, but as her daughter
recovered, she again relapsed into her accustomed apathy.
The spirits of the maiden were much flurried, and there was one to
whom she would have fain communicated her strange story, and sought
relief in his society from the terror that made her heart still
palpitate against her side. But her young cousin (the son of her
unkind relation, the farmer), with whom she had so often herded on
the same knoll, and wrought on the same harvest-furrow, had set out
for a neighbouring farm, on his way to church, and so there was no
probability of her seeing him before evening. She sickened at the gloom
of her mother’s cottage, where the scowling features of the mermaid
seemed imprinted on every darker recess; and, taking her mother by the
hand, she walked out with her to the fields. It was now about an hour
after noon, and the sun in his strength was looking down in the calm
on the bare stubbly campaign, and the old abbey in the midst, with
its steep roof of lichened stone, and its rows of massy buttresses.
The maiden could hear the higher notes of the congregational psalm as
they came floating along the slope from the building, when--fearful
catastrophe!--sudden as the explosion of a powder magazine, or the
shock of an earthquake, there was a tremendous crash heard, accompanied
by a terrific cry; a dense cloud of dust enveloped the ancient abbey,
and when it cleared away, it was seen that the ponderous stone roof
of the building had sunk in. “O wretched day!” exclaimed the widow,
mysteriously restored by the violence of one shock to that full command
of her faculties which she had lost by another, and starting at once
from the deathlike apathy of years, “O wretched day! the church has
fallen, and the whole congregation are buried in the ruins. Fearful
calamity!--a parish destroyed at a blow. Dear, dear child, let us haste
and see whether something cannot be done--whether some may not be
left.” The maiden followed her mother to the scene of the accident in
distraction and terror.
As they approached the churchyard gate they met two young women covered
with blood, who were running shrieking along the road, and shortly
after an elderly man so much injured, that he was creeping for support
along the wall. “Go on,” he said to the widow, who had stopped to
assist him; “I have gotten my life as a ransom, but there are hundreds
perishing yonder.” They entered the churchyard; two-thirds of the
roof had fallen, and nearly half the people were buried in the ruins;
and they could see through the shattered windows men all covered with
blood and dust, yelling, like maniacs, and tearing up the stones
and slates that were heaped over their wives and children. As the
sufferers were carried out one by one, and laid on the flat tombstones
of the churchyard, the widow, so strangely restored to the energies
of her better years, busied herself in stanching their wounds, or
restoring them to animation; and her daughter, gathering heart, strove
to assist her. A young man came staggering from among the ruins, his
face suffused with blood, and bearing a dead body on his shoulders,
when, laying down his charge beside them, he sunk over it in a swoon.
It was the young cousin of the maiden, and the mutilated corpse which
he carried was that of his father. She sobbed over him in an agony
of grief and terror; but the exertions of the widow, who wonderfully
retained her self-possession, soon recovered him to consciousness,
though in so weak a state from exhaustion and loss of blood, that some
time elapsed ere he was able to quit the burying-ground, leaning on
the arm of his cousin. Thirty-six persons were killed on the spot, and
many more were so dreadfully injured that they never recovered. The
tombstones were spread over with dead bodies, some of them so fearfully
gashed and mangled that they could scarce be recognised, and the paths
that wended throughout the churchyard literally ran with blood. It
was not until the maiden had reached her mother’s cottage, and the
heart-rending clamour had begun to fall more faintly on the ear, that
she thought of the mysterious washing of Loch-Slin, with its bloody
shirts, and felt that she could understand it.
There were lights that evening in many a cottage, and mourners beside
many a bed. The widow and her daughter watched beside the bed of their
young relative, and though the struggle for life was protracted and
doubtful, the strength of his constitution at length prevailed, and
he rose, pale and thin, and taller than before, with a scar across
his left temple. But ere the first spring had passed, with its balmy
mornings and clear sunshine days, he had recovered his former bloom,
and more than his former strength. The widow retained the powers so
wonderfully restored to her; for the dislocation of faculty effected by
one shock had been completely reset by another, and the whole intellect
refitted. She had, however, her season of grief to pass through, as if
her husband had died only a few days before; and when the relations of
the lately perished came to weep over the newly-formed graves that rose
so thickly in the burying-place, and around which the grass and hemlock
stalks still bore the stain of blood, the widow might be seen seated by
a grave covered with moss and daisies, and sunk so low that it was with
difficulty its place could be traced on the sward. Of the ten previous
years she retained only a few doubtful recollections, resembling those
of a single night spent in broken and feverish dreams. At length,
however, her grief subsided; and though there were louder and gayer
guests at the bridal of her daughter and her young cousin, which took
place about two years after the washing of the mermaid, there were none
more sincerely happy on that occasion than the widow.