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 1.
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 Dunnotar 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 Reverend 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 grey 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 cattle, 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
staff's 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 alternative 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 forbears had afore him, he wadna see the puir folk trodden down
this gait.' Meanwhile, this general good opinion never prevented their
taking 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 highroad 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 in a pulpit yet.' With an ambitious view to such a
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
lodging, 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
candles, 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 time to Mannering
his tall, gaunt, awkward, bony figure, attired in a threadbare suit of
black, with a coloured handkerchief, not over clean, about his sinewy,
scraggy neck, and his nether person arrayed in grey 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.