Mannering had not come back. No one had even received a letter
from him; and in his absence, as there was no other bidder, the
infamous Glossin was declared to be the lawful purchaser, and a
new Laird of Ellangowan.
At six o'clock that night a drunken post-boy reached the village
with a letter from the colonel, containing instructions to buy the
property. It had been delayed on its way, and was now no longer of
any use.
Poor Lucy Bertram now found herself an orphan without house or
home; but the kindness of some neighbours named Mac-Morlan, to
some extent, assuaged the misery of her position. They insisted on
her coming to live with them and Mr. Mac-Morlan even offered the
dominie a clerkship in his establishment, where he might still be
near his lady pupil, to whom, in spite of his strange and awkward
ways, he was devotedly attached for her father's sake.
When Colonel Mannering, after the death of Mr. Bertram, left
Ellangowan with the intention of coming back to buy the property,
he travelled some distance, and after a while came to a post-town
where he expected some letters. He received one letter, which
displeased him very much, from a great friend of his who was
living in the north of England, Mr. Mervyn by name, in whose care
he had left his daughter, Julia Mannering, when he was starting
for Kippletringan. This letter informed him that Miss Mannering
was being serenaded at night from the lake beside the house by
some unknown stranger, who had, however, disappeared before the
letter was written.
On reading this intelligence the colonel hastened at once to Mr.
Mervyn's residence, having first sent off the instructions in
reference to the purchase of the Ellangowan estate which, as
already said, arrived too late.
The lover who had been serenading Julia Mannering was in reality,
the same Vanbeest Brown whom she had known in India, and with whom
her father had fought the duel. Colonel Mannering had, however, no
idea that Brown was still alive, and the daughter was afraid to
tell her father that he was. Captain Brown, as he was now known,
was a handsome and gallant young fellow; and, having returned to
England with his regiment, and being still deeply devoted to Miss
Mannering, he had lost no time in making his way to where she was
staying in the house of Mr. Mervyn, her father's friend.
When Mannering arrived at Mr. Mervyn's, he said very little about
the information which had been the cause of his return; but he
told his daughter that he had taken a place near Kippletringan,
called Woodbourne, where he meant to reside for some time. He also
told her that she would have a pleasant companion in Lucy Bertram,
the daughter of an old friend of his, who was going to stay with
them in his new house.
Accordingly, as soon as Woodbourne was made ready to receive them,
the colonel and his daughter Julia took up their residence there,
and Lucy Bertram became their guest. Another inmate of the new
house was the dominie, for whom Colonel Mannering had a liking,
and who, he knew, could not bear to be parted altogether from Miss
Bertram, whose tutor he had been from her earliest days. When the
poor half-cracked dominie heard that he was to be employed as
Colonel Mannering's librarian, his joy knew no bounds; and on
seeing the large number of old books which were committed to his
charge he became almost crazy with delight, and shouted his
favourite word, "Pro-di-gi-ous!" till the roof rung to his
raptures.
After a little time Lucy Bertram and Miss Mannering became fast
friends, but the latter was careful never to say anything to her
new companion about her lover, Captain Brown.
Now, Brown, when he found that Julia Mannering had gone to
Woodbourne, determined to follow her, with the purpose of resuming
his addresses, and he accordingly set out on foot towards the
North.
It was a fine clear frosty winter's day when he found himself in
the wilds of Cumberland on his way to his destination in Scotland.
He had walked for some distance, when he stopped at a small
public-house to procure refreshment. He here fell in with a farmer
named Dandie Dinmont, a big, rollicking fellow, with an honest
face and kindly ways, with whom he became friends in a very little
time.
There was another person, however, in the inn on whom Brown could
not avoid repeatedly fixing his eyes--a tall, witch-like woman. It
was Meg Merrilies the gipsy; but time had grizzled her raven
locks, and added many wrinkles to her wild features. As he looked
at her, he could not help saying to himself: "Have I dreamed of
such a figure?"
As he was asking himself the question, the gipsy suddenly made two
strides towards him and seized his hand, at the same time saying
to him:
"In God's name, young man, tell me your name, and whence you
come!"
"My name is Brown, mother, and I come from the East Indies," he
answered.
On hearing his answer she dropped his hand with a sigh, and said:
"It cannot be, then--it cannot be; but be what ye will, ye have a
face and a tongue that puts me in mind of old times." As Brown
took his departure on foot, the gipsy looked after him and
muttered to herself: "I maun [Footnote: I must.] see that lad
again."
The traveller had gone a considerable distance across the lonely
moorland through which his road lay, when his little dog Wasp
began to bark furiously at something in front of them. Brown
quickened his pace, and soon caught sight of the subject of the
terrier's alarm. In a hollow, a little below him, was his late
companion Dandie Dinmont, engaged with two other men in a
desperate struggle. In a moment Brown, who was both strong and
active, came to the rescue; and, after a short fight, the two
would-be murderers of the farmer were flying for their own lives
across the heath, pursued by Wasp. Dinmont then took his friend
upon his pony, and they succeeded after some time in reaching
Charlie's Hope, the farmer's home, where they were welcomed by his
wife and a large troop of children.
The next few days were spent salmon spearing, and hunting otters
on the hills in the neighbourhood. One of the huntsmen, of whom
there were a large number out, was a dark-featured man, resembling
a gipsy in his appearance; and Brown noticed that whenever he
approached him he endeavoured to hide his face. He could not
remember, however, having ever seen the man before; but he
learned, on asking about him, that he was a stranger in those
parts, who had come from the south-west of Scotland, and that his
name was Gabriel. Nothing further was known about him at Charlie's
Hope.
Brown's visit to Dandie Dinmont was now at an end, and he again
took the road for Woodbourne, the residence of Julia Mannering.
He had hired a chaise and horses, but had not gone far on the wild
road to Kippletringan when night came on and the snow fell
heavily; and shortly after, to make matters worse, the driver
missed the way. When the horses were unable to proceed any
further, Brown dismounted from the carriage in order to look for a
house where he could ask the way; and as he wandered through the
plantations which skirted the road, he saw a light in the distance
amongst the trees. After traversing a deep and dangerous glen, he
reached the house from which the light shone. It was an old and
ruinous building. Before approaching the door, he peeped in
through an aperture in the ruined wall, and saw in the room inside
the figure of a man, stretched on a straw bed, with a blanket
thrown over it. He could see that the man was dying. A woman clad
in a long cloak was sitting by the bedside, and moistening at
times the lips of the man with some liquid. She was singing a low
monotonous strain.
She paused in her singing, and Brown heard a few deep groans come
from the dying man.
"It will not be," she muttered to herself. "He cannot pass away
with that on his mind; I must open the door."
Brown stood before her as she opened the door, and he at once
recognised the same gipsy woman whom he had met in the inn a few
days before. He noticed, too, that there was a roll of linen about
the dying man's head, which was deeply stained with blood.
"Wretched woman, who has done this?" exclaimed Brown.
And the gipsy answered: "They that were permitted;" and she added
after a few moments, "He's dead now."
Sounds of voices at a distance were now heard. "They are coming,"
said she to Brown; "you are a dead man." He was about to rush out,
when the gipsy seized him with a strong grasp. "Here," she said,
"here, be still, and you are safe; stir not, whatever you see or
hear, and nothing shall befall you!"
She made him lie down among a parcel of straw, and covered him
carefully; and then resumed her song.
Brown, though a soldier and a brave one, was terrified as he lay
in his hiding-place. Peeping out through the straw, he saw five
rough-looking men come in who seemed to be gipsies and sailors.
They closed round the fire and commenced to drink, holding
consultation together in a strange gibberish which he could not
altogether understand. Whenever the gipsy woman addressed them,
she spoke angrily to them; and more than once she called them
murderers; they, however, did not seem to mind her.
They continued drinking and talking for a considerable time, but
all that Brown could make out was that there was someone whom they
were going to murder. They also referred to a murder committed
some twenty years before, in which their dead companion had had a
hand.
After some time spent in this way, one of the party went out and
brought in a portmanteau, which Brown at once recognised as the
one he had left in the chaise. They ripped it open, and after
examining the contents, which included all the owner's ready
money, with the exception of a trifling sum in his pocket, they
divided the whole amongst them. Then they drank more; and it was
not until morning that they left the building. When they left,
they carried the dead body with them.
No sooner were they well outside, than Meg Merrilies got up from
where she had been pretending to be asleep, and told Brown to
follow her instantly. Brown obeyed with alacrity, feeling that he
was already out of reach of danger when the villains had gone out;
but before leaving he took up a cutlass belonging to one of the
five, and brought it with him in the belief that he might yet have
to fight with them for his life. The snow lay on the ground as he
and the gipsy came out, and as he followed her he noticed that she
chose the track the men had taken, so that her footprints might
not be seen.
After a while, however, she turned from the track, and led the way
up a steep and rugged path under the snow-laden trees, and on
reaching a place some distance farther on, she pointed out the
direction of Kippletringan, and told her companion to make what
speed he could. Brown was entirely at a loss to make out the
reason the gipsy had for taking such an interest in preserving his
life from her comrades; and was even more puzzled by her conduct
when she took an old purse from her pocket before parting, and
gave it to him.
She said as she handed it to him: "Many's the alms your house has
given Meg and hers." And Brown, as he thanked her for her
kindness, asked her how he could repay the money she had given
him.
"I have two boons to crave," answered the gipsy, speaking low and
hastily: "one is that you will never speak of what you have seen
this night; the other, that when I next call for you, be it in
church or market, at wedding or at burial, meal-time or fasting,
that ye leave everything else and come with me."
"That will do you little good, mother," answered Brown.
"But 'twill do yourself much good," replied Meg Merrilies. "I know
what I am asking, and I know it has been the will of God to
preserve you in strange dangers, and that I shall be the means to
set you in your father's seat again. So give your promise, and
mind that you owe your life to me this blessed night."
When Brown had promised, she parted from him, and was soon out of
sight.
The young soldier could come to no other conclusion but that the
woman was mad; and having in this way solved the mystery to his
own satisfaction, he strode quickly on through the wood in search
of the highroad to Kippletringan.
He reached the village at length, and engaged a room at the Gordon
Arms, a comfortable inn kept by a Mrs. Mac-Candlish. On opening
the purse which the gipsy had given him, he was astonished to find
that it contained money and jewels worth about a hundred pounds.
He accordingly entrusted it to the landlady of the inn for safe
keeping.
The day after his arrival at the village of Kippletringan, he
determined to see Miss Mannering; and learning that she was
likely to be found with a party of skaters on a lake in the
neighbourhood, he proceeded in that direction.
The skating party, of whom Julia Mannering was one, consisted of
herself and Lucy Bertram, and young Charles Hazlewood, who, as
before mentioned, was Miss Bertram's lover. Having spent some time
upon the ice, they were returning to Woodbourne through the
plantation. Hazlewood, who had a gun with him, had offered his arm
to Miss Mannering, who was tired after skating, as they walked
towards home. When they had proceeded some little distance in this
way, Brown happened to meet them. He was wearing the rough suit in
which he had spent the night in the gipsy's house, having been
unable to procure a change on account of his portmanteau having
been stolen.
Julia Mannering, who had had no intimation that her old lover was
in the district, uttered a scream when she suddenly saw him
standing before her; and Hazlewood, fancying from the rough
appearance of the stranger that he was either a gipsy or a tramp,
pointed his gun towards him, and ordered him to keep off.
Brown, in a fit of jealousy, and fearing that the gun might go
off, rushed upon Hazlewood and seized the fowling-piece. But in
the struggle which ensued between them it was discharged by
accident, and young Hazlewood fell to the ground, wounded in the
shoulder.
Brown, when he saw what had occurred, became frightened at the
thought of the dangers of his position. He bounded over a hedge
which divided the footpath from the plantation, and was not heard
of again for a considerable time.
On the news of Hazlewood's being wounded getting abroad, the
neighbourhood was thrown into a ferment of indignation. All the
circumstances of the occurrence were exaggerated. It was
universally believed that the attacking party was a smuggler or a
gipsy, and that he had attempted in broad daylight to murder the
young man. It was stated that the assailant had been seen earlier
in the day wearing a smuggler's cutlass; and the purse which had
been left at the inn was opened and found to contain property
which had been previously stolen. Charles Hazlewood himself,
however, continued to protest that the wounding was accidental;
while the only person who could give any real account of the
mysterious stranger, namely Julia Mannering, for reasons best
known to herself, never pretended that she had any idea who he
was.
Amongst those who were most active in their endeavours to capture
the missing Brown was Glossin, the new Laird of Ellangowan. It was
plain, too, that he had some other motive for apprehending him
than merely the desire to do his duty as a magistrate of the
county, which he had now become.
On returning to his house one day, he was informed that Mac-
Guffog, the thief-taker, had made a prisoner, and that he was
waiting with him in the kitchen. When the prisoner was introduced
to the magistrate's room, Glossin at once recognised that it was
Dirck Hatteraick, the smuggler captain.
In the interview which took place between them, no one else being
present, it transpired that Glossin had been a kind of partner
with the smuggler at the time of Kennedy's murder and the
disappearance of young Harry Bertram. Dirck Hatteraick told him,
too, very plainly, that if he was to be condemned he would let the
secret out and ruin Glossin. Glossin, who was much terrified at
the thought of being discovered, then arranged, like a villain
that he was, to imprison Hatteraick for that night in a room in
the old castle of Ellangowan, and at the same time give him a
small file with which he might rid himself of his handcuffs and
escape. During the interview between them, Hatteraick also told
the attorney that young Bertram was still alive, and at
Kippletringan. Glossin's situation was therefore perilous in the
extreme, for the schemes of a life of villainy seemed at once to
be crumbling around and about him.
Hatteraick was accordingly then sent to his place of confinement
in the old castle.
At midnight Glossin looked out from his bedroom towards the
castle, and after watching for some time in an agony of guilty
suspense, he saw the dark form of a man, whom he knew to be
Hatteraick, drop from the prison window and make his way to the
beach, where he succeeded in shoving out a boat which was lying
there. In a few minutes after, he had hoisted the sail, and soon
disappeared round the Point of Warroch.
Great was the alarm and confusion the next morning when it was
discovered that the smuggler had escaped from prison. Constables
were sent out in every direction to search for him, and Glossin
took care to send them to places where they would be least likely
to find him.
In the meantime he himself made his way to a cave by the seashore
near the Point of Warroch, where he had arranged with Hatteraick
to meet him the day after his escape.
Glossin had never been near this spot since the day on which the
unfortunate Kennedy was murdered; and the terrible scene came back
to his mind with all its accompaniments of horror as he stealthily
approached the cavern. When he reached it and went in, he found
Hatteraick in the dark and shivering with cold.
During the conversation that ensued between them he learned from
the smuggler what had become of young Bertram after Kennedy's
murder. He had been taken to Holland, Hatteraick said, and left
with an old merchant named Vanbeest Brown, who took a fancy to the
boy and called him by his own name. He had afterwards been sent to
India; but the smuggler knew nothing of him from the time he went
there. Bertram had, however, been seen, he said, a few days
before, among the hills by a gipsy named Gabriel.
Glossin then discovered for the first time that it was young
Bertram, in reality, who had wounded Hazlewood. In his terror at
the thought of losing his property at Ellangowan if it came to be
known that Harry Bertram was alive, yet at all times fertile in
every kind of villainous device, Glossin now hit upon a new plan
to get rid of the man who stood between him and his peace of mind.
By making large promises to Hatteraick he induced the smuggler to
agree to come by night, with a large body of his men, to the
prison where Bertram would be confined for his attack on
Hazlewood, and to break open the doors and carry him off. He said
he would have the soldiers withdrawn on some pretence or other, so
as to make the rescue more certain; and having completed the
details of this desperate and lawless piece of villainy, he went
back to Ellangowan.
But it is time to return to Brown, who was now a fugitive from
justice in consequence of the unlucky accident of which his
rashness had been the cause. He determined to make his way to
England, and to wait there until he received letters from friends
in his regiment establishing his identity, in possession of which
he could again show himself at Kippletringan, and offer to young
Hazlewood any explanation or satisfaction he might require. He
accordingly took ship for Cumberland. He chanced on board to meet
a man whose daughter was at the time in Colonel Mannering's
service at Woodbourne and by his means contrived to get a letter
delivered to Miss Mannering, in which he begged of her to forgive
him for his rash conduct towards Hazlewood. Having landed on the
English coast, he wrote to the colonel of his regiment for such
testimony of his rank in the army as should place his character as
a gentleman and an officer beyond question; and, as he was now
reduced to great straits for want of funds, he wrote to his sturdy
farmer friend, Dandie Dinmont, for the loan of a little money.
After a delay of some days, he received a short letter from Miss
Mannering, in which she upbraided him for his thoughtless conduct,
and bade him good-bye, telling him on no account to come back to
Woodbourne.
On reading it over, he came somehow to the conclusion that Miss
Mannering meant the opposite of all she had written, and in this
belief he set sail at once for Kippletringan.
After a rough and dangerous voyage by night, he found himself in
the morning off the Scottish coast. The weather had now cleared. A
woody cape, that stretched into the sea, lay some little distance
from the vessel; and, in answer to Brown's inquiries, the boatman
told him that it was Warroch Point. Close beside it was the old
castle of Ellangowan; and Brown felt a strange longing, as he
looked at it, to be put ashore for the purpose of examining it
more closely. The boatman readily acceded to his wishes, and
landed him on the beach beneath the ruins.
And thus, in complete ignorance of his own real identity,
surrounded by dangers, and without the assistance of a friend
within the circle of several hundred miles, accused of a heavy
crime, and almost penniless, did the weary wanderer, for the first
time after an interval of many eventful years, approach the
remains of the castle where his ancestors had once dwelt in lordly
splendour.
It will have dawned upon the reader before now that the young
soldier known to him as Brown was in reality no other than the
Harry Bertram who had disappeared on the day when Kennedy was
murdered. The name of Brown will consequently be dropped during
the remainder of the story, and our hero will be called by his
proper appellation--Bertram.
After wandering for some time through the ruined apartments of the
castle, he stepped outside, and happened by chance to stand on the
very spot where his father--the old Laird of Ellangowan--had
died.
Glossin at that moment chanced to be engaged close by with a
surveyor, in reference to some building plans connected with an
intended addition to his house; and he was just saying to his
companion that the whole ruin should be pulled down, when Bertram
met him, and said:
"Would you destroy this fine old castle, sir?"
His face, person, and voice were so exactly like those of his
father when alive, that Glossin almost believed that the grave had
given up its dead.
But after a time he recovered his self-possession, and then set
himself to discover if Bertram, whom he recognised, had any
knowledge of his own identity. He was much terrified when he heard
him repeat some lines of an old song, which he said he had learnt
in his childhood:
"The dark shall be light,
And the wrong made right,
When Bertram's right and Bertram's might
Shall meet on ...;"
but, although he could not recall the end of the last line,
Glossin thought he knew already a good deal too much about it.
A few of Glossin's men were now seen approaching up the slope,
whereupon he immediately assumed a different attitude and tone
towards Bertram.
"I believe your name is Brown, sir?" said Glossin.
"And what of that, sir?" replied Bertram.
"Why in that case," said Glossin, "you are my prisoner in the
king's name."
After a slight resistance the prisoner was secured, and shortly
after was brought before Sir Robert Hazlewood, one of the county
magistrates, and accused of maliciously wounding Charles
Hazlewood, his son.
In reply to the questions put to him, the prisoner said that he
was a captain in a regiment of horse in his Majesty's service, and
in a frank, manly way described how the wounding of Charles
Hazlewood was merely an accident, for which he expressed a sincere
sorrow. When required to give some proof of his rank in the army,
he stated that his luggage had been stolen. When asked to say
where he had spent the night on which it was taken, his promise
to Meg Merrilies came to his mind, and he replied that he must
refuse to answer the question. He was then pressed to account for
his having worn a smuggler's cutlass; but he also declined to
explain that matter. And his answers were equally unsatisfactory
when questioned on the subject of the purse which the gipsy had
given him.