--Comes me cranking in, And cuts me from the best of all my land,
A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out.
Henry IV. Part I
The company in the parlour at Ellangowan consisted of the Laird,
and a sort of person who might be the village schoolmaster, or
perhaps the minister's assistant; his appearance was too shabby to
indicate the minister, considering he was on a visit to the Laird.
The Laird himself was one of those second-rate sort of persons,
that are to be found frequently in rural situations. Fielding has
described one class as feras consumere nati; but the love of
field-sports indicates a certain activity of mind, which had
forsaken Mr. Bertram, if ever he possessed it. A good-humoured
listlessness of countenance formed the only remarkable expression
of his features, although they were rather handsome than otherwise.
In fact, his physiognomy indicated the inanity of character which
pervaded his life. I will give the reader some insight into his
state and conversation, before he has finished a long lecture to
Mannering, upon the propriety and comfort of wrapping his
stirrup-irons round with a wisp of straw when he had occasion to
ride in a chill evening.
Godfrey Bertram, of Ellangowan, succeeded to a long pedigree, and a
short rent-roll, like many lairds of that period. His list of
forefathers ascended so high, that they were lost in the barbarous
ages of Galwegian independence; so that his genealogical tree,
besides the Christian and crusading names of Godfreys, and
Gilberts, and Dennises, and Rolands, without end, bore heathen
fruit of yet darker ages,--Arths, and Knarths, and Donagilds, and
Hanlons. In truth, they had been formerly the stormy chiefs of a
desert, but extensive domain, and the heads of a numerous tribe,
called Mac-Dingawaie, though they afterwards adopted the Norman
surname of Bertram. They had made war, raised rebellions, been
defeated, beheaded, and hanged, as became a family of importance,
for many centuries. But they had gradually lost ground in the
world, and, from being themselves the heads of treason and
traitorous conspiracies, the Bertrams, or Mac-Dingawaies, of
Ellangowan, had sunk into subordinate accomplices. Their most
fatal exhibitions in this capacity took place in the seventeenth
century, when the foul fiend possessed them with a spirit of
contradiction, which uniformly involved them in controversy with
the ruling powers. They reversed the conduct of the celebrated
Vicar of Bray, and adhered as tenaciously to the weaker side, as
that worthy divine to the stronger. And truly, like him, they had
their reward.
Allan Bertram of Ellangowan, who flourished tempore Caroli primi
was, says my authority, Sir Robert Douglas, in his Scottish
Baronage (see the title Ellangowan), "a steady loyalist, and full
of zeal for the cause of his sacred majesty, in which he united
with the great Marquis of Montrose, and other truly zealous and
honourable patriots, and sustained great losses in that behalf. He
had the honour of knighthood conferred upon him by his most sacred
majesty, and was sequestrated as a malignant by the parliament,
1642, and afterwards as a resolutioner, in the year 1648."--These
two cross-grained epithets of malignant and resolutioner cost poor
Sir Allan one half of the family estate. His son Dennis Bertram
married a daughter of an eminent fanatic, who had a seat in the
council of state, and saved by that union the remainder of the
family property. But, as ill chance would have it, he became
enamoured of the lady's principles as well as of her charms, and my
author gives him this character: "He was a man of eminent parts and
resolution, for which reason he was chosen by the western counties
one of the committee of noblemen and gentlemen, to report their
griefs to the privy council of Charles II, anent the coming in of
the Highland host in 1678." For undertaking this patriotic task he
underwent a fine, to pay which he was obliged to mortgage half of
the remaining moiety of his paternal property. This loss he might
have recovered by dint of severe economy, but on the breaking out
of Argyle's rebellion, Dennis Bertram was again suspected by
government, apprehended, sent to Dunnottar Castle on the coast of
the Mearns, and there broke his neck in an attempt to escape from a
subterranean habitation, called the Whigs' Vault, in which he was
confined with some eighty of the same persuasion. The apprizer,
therefore (as the holder of a mortgage was then called), entered
upon possession, and, in the language of Hotspur, "came me cranking
in," and cut the family out of another monstrous cantle of their
remaining property.
Donohoe Bertram, with somewhat of an Irish name, and somewhat of an
Irish temper, succeeded to the diminished property of Ellangowan.
He turned out of doors the Rev. Aaron Macbriar, his mother's
chaplain (it is said they quarrelled about the good graces of a
milkmaid), drank himself daily drunk with brimming healths to the
king, council, and bishops; held orgies with the Laird of Lagg,
Theophilus Oglethorpe, and Sir James Turner; and lastly, took his
gray gelding, and joined Clavers at Killiecrankie. At the skirmish
of Dunkeld, 1689, he was shot dead by a Cameronian with a silver
button (being supposed to have proof from the Evil One against lead
and steel), and his grave is still called, the Wicked Laird's
Lair.
His son, Lewis, had more prudence than seems usually to have
belonged to the family. He nursed what property was yet left to
him; for Donohoe's excesses, as well as fines and forfeitures, had
made another inroad upon the estate. And although even he did not
escape the fatality which induced the Lairds of Ellangowan to
interfere with politics, he had yet the prudence, ere he went out
with Lord Kenmore In 1715, to convey his estate to trustees, in
order to parry pains and penalties, in case the Earl of Mar could
not put down the Protestant succession. But Scylla and Charybdis
--a word to the wise--he only saved his estate at expense of a
lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was,
however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated
the old castle, where the family lived in their decadence, as a
mouse (said an old farmer) lives under a firlot. Pulling down part
of these venerable ruins, he built with the stones a narrow house
of three stories high, with a front like a grenadier's cap, having
in the very centre a round window, like the single eye of a
Cyclops, two windows on each side, and a door in the middle,
leading to a parlour and withdrawing room, full of all manner of
cross lights.
This was the New Place of Ellangowan, in which we left our hero,
better amused perhaps than our readers, and to this Lewis Bertram
retreated, full of projects for re-establishing the prosperity of
his family. He took some land into his own hand, rented some from
neighbouring proprietors, bought and sold Highland cattle and
Cheviot sheep, rode to fairs and trysts, fought hard bargains, and
held necessity at the stairs end as well as he might. But what he
gained in purse, he lost in honour, for such agricultural and
commercial negotiations were very ill looked upon by his brother
lairds, who minded nothing but cock-fighting, hunting, coursing,
and horse-racing, with now and then the alternation of a desperate
duel. The occupations which he followed encroached, in their
opinion, upon the article of Ellangowan's gentry, and he found it
necessary gradually to estrange himself from their society, and
sink into what was then a very ambiguous character, a gentleman
farmer. In the midst of his schemes death claimed his tribute, and
the scanty remains of a large property descended upon Godfrey
Bertram, the present possessor, his only son.
The danger of the father's speculations was soon seen. Deprived of
Laird Lewis's personal and active superintendence, all his
undertakings miscarried, and became either abortive or perilous.
Without a single spark of energy to meet or repel these
misfortunes, Godfrey put his faith in the activity of another. He
kept neither hunters, nor hounds, nor any other southern
preliminaries to ruin; but, as has been observed of his countrymen,
he kept a man of business, who answered the purpose equally well.
Under this gentleman's supervision small debts grew into large,
interests were accumulated upon capitals, movable bonds became
heritable, and law charges were heaped upon all; though Ellangowan
possessed so little the spirit of a litigant, that he was on two
occasions charged to make payment of the expenses of a long
lawsuit, although he had never before heard that he had such cases
in court. Meanwhile his neighbours predicted his final ruin. Those
of the higher rank, with some malignity, accounted him already a
degraded brother. The lower classes, seeing nothing enviable in
his situation, marked his embarrassments with more compassion. He
was even a kind of favourite with them, and upon the division of a
common, or the holding of a black-fishing, or poaching court, or
any similar occasion, when they conceived themselves, oppressed by
the gentry, they were in the habit of saying to each other, "Ah, if
Ellangowan, honest man, had his ain that his forebears had afore
him, he wadna see the puir folk trodden down this gait." Meanwhile,
this general good opinion never prevented their taking the
advantage of him on all possible occasions, turning their cattle
into his parks, stealing his wood, shooting his game, and so forth,
"for the laird, honest man, he'll never find it,--he never minds
what a puir body does."--Pedlars, gipsies, tinkers, vagrants of all
descriptions, roosted about his outhouses, or harboured in his
kitchen; and the laird, who was "nae nice body," but a thorough
gossip, like most weak men, found recompense for his hospitality in
the pleasure of questioning them on the news of the country-side.
A circumstance arrested Ellangowan's progress on the high-road to
ruin. This was his marriage with a lady who had a portion of about
four thousand pounds. Nobody in the neighbourhood could conceive
why she married him, and endowed him with her wealth, unless
because he had a tall, handsome figure, a good set of features, a
genteel address, and the most perfect good-humour. It might be
some additional consideration, that she was herself at the
reflecting age of twenty-eight, and had no near relations to
control her actions or choice.
It was in this lady's behalf (confined for the first time after her
marriage) that the speedy and active express, mentioned by the old
dame of the cottage, had been despatched to Kippletringan on the
night of Mannering's arrival.
Though we have said so much of the Laird himself, it still remains
that we make the reader in some degree acquainted with his
companion. This was Abel Sampson, commonly called, from his
occupation as a pedagogue, Dominie Sampson. He was of low birth,
but having evinced, even from his cradle, an uncommon seriousness
of disposition, the poor parents were encouraged to hope that their
bairn, as they expressed it, "might wag his pow [* Head] in a
pulpit yet."
With an ambitious view to such consummation, they pinched and
pared, rose early and lay down late, ate dry bread and drank cold
water, to secure to Abel the means of learning. Meantime, his tall,
ungainly, figure, his taciturn and grave manners, and some
grotesque habits of swinging his limbs, and screwing his visage,
while reciting his task, made poor Sampson the ridicule of all his
school-companions. The same qualities secured him at Glasgow
college a plentiful share of the same sort of notice. Half the
youthful mob "of the yards" used to assemble regularly to see
Dominie Sampson (for he had already attained that honourable title)
descend the stairs from the Greek class, with his Lexicon under his
arm, his long misshapen legs sprawling abroad, and keeping awkward
time to the play of his immense shoulder-blades, as they raised and
depressed the loose and threadbare black coat which was his
constant and only wear. When he spoke, the efforts of the
professor (professor of divinity, though he was) were totally
inadequate to restrain the inextinguishable laughter of the
students, and sometimes even to repress his own. The long, sallow
visage, the goggle eyes, the huge under-jaw, which appeared not to
open and shut by an act of volition, but to be dropped and hoisted
up again by some complicated machinery within the inner man,--the
harsh and dissonant voice. and the screech-owl notes to which it
was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more distinctly,--
all added fresh subject for mirth to the torn cloak and shattered
shoe, which have afforded legitimate subjects of raillery against
the poor scholar, from Juvenal's time downward. It was never known
that Sampson either exhibited irritability at this ill usage, or
made the least attempt to retort upon his tormentors. He slunk
from college by the most secret paths he could discover, and
plunged himself into his miserable lodgings, where, for
eighteenpence a week, he was allowed the benefit of a straw
mattress, and, if his landlady was in good humour, permission to
study his task by her fire. Under all these disadvantages, he
obtained a competent knowledge of Greek and Latin, and some
acquaintance with the sciences.
In progress of time, Abel Sampson, probationer of divinity, was
admitted to the privileges of a preacher. But, alas! partly from
his own bashfulness, partly owing to a strong and obvious
disposition to risibility which pervaded the congregation upon his
first attempt, he became totally incapable of proceeding in his
intended discourse, gasped, grinned, hideously rolled his eyes till
the congregation thought them flying out of his head, shut the
Bible, stumbled down the pulpit-stairs, trampling upon the old
women who generally take their station there, and was ever after
designated as a "stickit minister." And thus he wandered back to
his own country, with blighted hopes and prospects, to share the
poverty of his parents. As he had neither friend nor confidant,
hardly even an acquaintance, no one had the means of observing
closely how Dominie Sampson bore a disappointment which supplied
the whole town with a week's sport. It would be endless even to
mention the numerous jokes to which it gave birth, from a ballad,
called "Sampson's Riddle," written upon the subject by a smart
young student of humanity, to the sly hope of the Principal, that
the fugitive had not, in imitation of his mighty namesake, taken
the college gates along with him in his retreat.
To all appearance, the equanimity of Sampson was unshaken. He
sought to assist his parents by teaching a school, and soon had
plenty of scholars, but very few fees. In fact, he taught the sons
of farmers for what they chose to give him and the poor for
nothing; and, to the shame of the former be it spoken, the
pedagogue's gains never equalled those of a skilful ploughman. He
wrote, however, a good hand, and added something to his pittance by
copying accounts and writing letters for Ellangowan. By degrees,
the Laird, who was much estranged from general society, became
partial to that of Dominie Sampson. Conversation, it is true, was
out of the question, but the Dominie was a good listener, and
stirred the fire with some address. He attempted even to snuff the
candies, but was unsuccessful, and relinquished that ambitious post
of courtesy after having twice reduced the parlour to total
darkness. So his civilities, thereafter, were confined to taking
off his glass of ale in exactly the same time and measure with the
Laird, and in uttering certain indistinct murmurs of acquiescence
at the conclusion of the long and winding stories of Ellangowan.
On one of these occasions, he presented for the first tine to
Mannering his tall, gaunt, awkward, bony figure, attired in a
threadbare suit of blacks with a coloured handkerchief, not over
clean, about his sinewy, scraggy neck, and his nether person
arrayed in gray breeches, dark-blue stockings, clouted shoes, and
small copper buckles.
Such is a brief outline of the lives and fortunes of those two
persons, in whose society Mannering now found himself comfortably
seated.