Gallows and knock are too powerful on the highway
--Winter's Tale.
The hint of the hospitable farmer was not lost on Brown. But while he
paid his reckoning he could not avoid repeatedly fixing his eyes on Meg
Merrilies. She was in all respects the same witch-like figure as when
we first introduced her at Ellangowan Place. Time had grizzled her
raven locks and added wrinkles to her wild features, but her height
remained erect, and her activity was unimpaired. It was remarked of
this woman, as of others of the same description, that a life of
action, though not of labour, gave her the perfect command of her limbs
and figure, so that the attitudes into which she most naturally threw
herself were free, unconstrained, and picturesque. At present she stood
by the window of the cottage, her person drawn up so as to show to full
advantage her masculine stature, and her head somewhat thrown back,
that the large bonnet with which her face was shrouded might not
interrupt her steady gaze at Brown. At every gesture he made and every
tone he uttered she seemed to give an almost imperceptible start. On
his part, he was surprised to find that he could not look upon this
singular figure without some emotion. 'Have I dreamed of such a
figure?' he said to himself, 'or does this wild and singular-looking
woman recall to my recollection some of the strange figures I have seen
in our Indian pagodas?'
While he embarrassed himself with these discussions, and the hostess
was engaged in rummaging out silver in change of half-a-guinea, the
gipsy suddenly made two strides and seized Brown's hand. He expected,
of course, a display of her skill in palmistry, but she seemed agitated
by other feelings.
'Tell me,' she said, 'tell me, in the name of God, young man, what is
your name, and whence you came?'
'My name is Brown, mother, and I come from the East Indies.'
'From the East Indies!' dropping his hand with a sigh; 'it cannot be
then. I am such an auld fool, that everything I look on seems the thing
I want maist to see. But the East Indies! that cannot be. Weel, be what
ye will, ye hae a face and a tongue that puts me in mind of auld times.
Good day; make haste on your road, and if ye see ony of our folk,
meddle not and make not, and they'll do you nae harm.'
Brown, who had by this time received his change, put a shilling into
her hand, bade his hostess farewell, and, taking the route which the
farmer had gone before, walked briskly on, with the advantage of being
guided by the fresh hoof-prints of his horse. Meg Merrilies looked
after him for some time, and then muttered to herself, 'I maun see that
lad again; and I maun gang back to Ellangowan too. The Laird's dead!
aweel, death pays a' scores; he was a kind man ance. The Sheriff's
flitted, and I can keep canny in the bush; so there's no muckle hazard
o' scouring the cramp-ring. I would like to see bonny Ellangowan again
or I die.'
Brown meanwhile proceeded northward at a round pace along the moorish
tract called the Waste of Cumberland. He passed a solitary house,
towards which the horseman who preceded him had apparently turned up,
for his horse's tread was evident in that direction. A little farther,
he seemed to have returned again into the road. Mr. Dinmont had
probably made a visit there either of business or pleasure. 'I wish,'
thought Brown, 'the good farmer had staid till I came up; I should not
have been sorry to ask him a few questions about the road, which seems
to grow wilder and wilder.'
In truth, nature, as if she had designed this tract of country to be
the barrier between two hostile nations, has stamped upon it a
character of wildness and desolation. The hills are neither high nor
rocky, but the land is all heath and morass; the huts poor and mean,
and at a great distance from each other. Immediately around them there
is generally some little attempt at cultivation; but a half-bred foal
or two, straggling about with shackles on their hind legs, to save the
trouble of inclosures, intimate the farmer's chief resource to be the
breeding of horses. The people, too, are of a ruder and more
inhospitable class than are elsewhere to be found in Cumberland,
arising partly from their own habits, partly from their intermixture
with vagrants and criminals, who make this wild country a refuge from
justice. So much were the men of these districts in early times the
objects of suspicion and dislike to their more polished neighbours,
that there was, and perhaps still exists, a by-law of the corporation
of Newcastle prohibiting any freeman of that city to take for
apprentice a native of certain of these dales. It is pithily said,
'Give a dog an ill name and hang him'; and it may be added, if you give
a man, or race of men, an ill name they are very likely to do something
that deserves hanging. Of this Brown had heard something, and suspected
more, from the discourse between the landlady, Dinmont, and the gipsy;
but he was naturally of a fearless disposition, had nothing about him
that could tempt the spoiler, and trusted to get through the Waste with
daylight. In this last particular, however, he was likely to be
disappointed. The way proved longer than he had anticipated, and the
horizon began to grow gloomy just as he entered upon an extensive
morass.
Choosing his steps with care and deliberation, the young officer
proceeded along a path that sometimes sunk between two broken black
banks of moss earth, sometimes crossed narrow but deep ravines filled
with a consistence between mud and water, and sometimes along heaps of
gravel and stones, which had been swept together when some torrent or
waterspout from the neighbouring hills overflowed the marshy ground
below. He began to ponder how a horseman could make his way through
such broken ground; the traces of hoofs, however, were still visible;
he even thought he heard their sound at some distance, and, convinced
that Mr. Dinmont's progress through the morass must be still slower
than his own, he resolved to push on, in hopes to overtake him and have
the benefit of his knowledge of the country. At this moment his little
terrier sprung forward, barking most furiously.
Brown quickened his pace, and, attaining the summit of a small rising
ground, saw the subject of the dog's alarm. In a hollow about a gunshot
below him a man whom he easily recognised to be Dinmont was engaged
with two others in a desperate struggle. He was dismounted, and
defending himself as he best could with the butt of his heavy whip. Our
traveller hastened on to his assistance; but ere he could get up a
stroke had levelled the farmer with the earth, and one of the robbers,
improving his victory, struck him some merciless blows on the head. The
other villain, hastening to meet Brown, called to his companion to come
along, 'for that one's CONTENT,' meaning, probably, past resistance or
complaint. One ruffian was armed with a cutlass, the other with a
bludgeon; but as the road was pretty narrow, 'bar fire-arms,' thought
Brown, 'and I may manage them well enough.' They met accordingly, with
the most murderous threats on the part of the ruffians. They soon
found, however, that their new opponent was equally stout and resolute;
and, after exchanging two or three blows, one of them told him to
'follow his nose over the heath, in the devil's name, for they had
nothing to say to him.'
Brown rejected this composition as leaving to their mercy the
unfortunate man whom they were about to pillage, if not to murder
outright; and the skirmish had just recommenced when Dinmont
unexpectedly recovered his senses, his feet, and his weapon, and
hastened to the scene of action. As he had been no easy antagonist,
even when surprised and alone, the villains did not choose to wait his
joining forces with a man who had singly proved a match for them both,
but fled across the bog as fast as their feet could carry them, pursued
by Wasp, who had acted gloriously during the skirmish, annoying the
heels of the enemy, and repeatedly effecting a moment's diversion in
his master's favour.
'Deil, but your dog's weel entered wi' the vermin now, sir!' were the
first words uttered by the jolly farmer as he came up, his head
streaming with blood, and recognised his deliverer and his little
attendant.
'I hope, sir, you are not hurt dangerously?'
'O, deil a bit, my head can stand a gay clour; nae thanks to them,
though, and mony to you. But now, hinney, ye maun help me to catch the
beast, and ye maun get on behind me, for we maun off like whittrets
before the whole clanjamfray be doun upon us; the rest o' them will no
be far off.' The galloway was, by good fortune, easily caught, and
Brown made some apology for overloading the animal.
'Deil a fear, man,' answered the proprietor; 'Dumple could carry six
folk, if his back was lang eneugh; but God's sake, haste ye, get on,
for I see some folk coming through the slack yonder that it may be just
as weel no to wait for.'
Brown was of opinion that this apparition of five or six men, with whom
the other villains seemed to join company, coming across the moss
towards them, should abridge ceremony; he therefore mounted Dumple en
croupe, and the little spirited nag cantered away with two men of great
size and strength as if they had been children of six years old. The
rider, to whom the paths of these wilds seemed intimately known, pushed
on at a rapid pace, managing with much dexterity to choose the safest
route, in which he was aided by the sagacity of the galloway, who never
failed to take the difficult passes exactly at the particular spot, and
in the special manner, by which they could be most safely crossed. Yet,
even with these advantages, the road was so broken, and they were so
often thrown out of the direct course by various impediments, that they
did not gain much on their pursuers. 'Never mind,' said the undaunted
Scotchman to his companion, 'if we were ance by Withershins' Latch, the
road's no near sae soft, and we'll show them fair play for't.'
They soon came to the place he named, a narrow channel, through which
soaked, rather than flowed, a small stagnant stream, mantled over with
bright green mosses. Dinmont directed his steed towards a pass where
the water appeared to flow with more freedom over a harder bottom; but
Dumple backed from the proposed crossing-place, put his head down as if
to reconnoitre the swamp more nearly, stretching forward his fore-feet,
and stood as fast as if he had been cut out of stone.
'Had we not better,' said Brown, 'dismount, and leave him to his fate;
or can you not urge him through the swamp?'
'Na, na,' said his pilot, 'we maun cross Dumple at no rate, he has mair
sense than mony a Christian.' So saying, he relaxed the reins, and
shook them loosely. 'Come now, lad, take your ain way o't, let's see
where ye'll take us through.'
Dumple, left to the freedom of his own will, trotted briskly to another
part of the latch, less promising, as Brown thought, in appearance, but
which the animal's sagacity or experience recommended as the safer of
the two, and where, plunging in, he attained the other side with little
difficulty.
'I'm glad we're out o' that moss,' said Dinmont, 'where there's mair
stables for horses than change-houses for men; we have the Maiden-way
to help us now, at ony rate.' Accordingly, they speedily gained a sort
of rugged causeway so called, being the remains of an old Roman road
which traverses these wild regions in a due northerly direction. Here
they got on at the rate of nine or ten miles an hour, Dumple seeking no
other respite than what arose from changing his pace from canter to
trot. 'I could gar him show mair action,' said his master, 'but we are
twa lang-legged chields after a', and it would be a pity to stress
Dumple; there wasna the like o' him at Staneshiebank Fair the day.'
Brown readily assented to the propriety of sparing the horse, and added
that, as they were now far out of the reach of the rogues, he thought
Mr. Dintnont had better tie a handkerchief round his head, for fear of
the cold frosty air aggravating the wound.
'What would I do that for?' answered the hardy farmer; 'the best way's
to let the blood barken upon the cut; that saves plasters, hinney.'
Brown, who in his military profession had seen a great many hard blows
pass, could not help remarking, 'he had never known such severe strokes
received with so much apparent indifference.'
'Hout tout, man! I would never be making a humdudgeon about a scart on
the pow; but we'll be in Scotland in five minutes now, and ye maun gang
up to Charlie's Hope wi' me, that's a clear case.'
Brown readily accepted the offered hospitality. Night was now falling
when they came in sight of a pretty river winding its way through a
pastoral country. The hills were greener and more abrupt than those
which Brown had lately passed, sinking their grassy sides at once upon
the river. They had no pretensions to magnificence of height, or to
romantic shapes, nor did their smooth swelling slopes exhibit either
rocks or woods. Yet the view was wild, solitary, and pleasingly rural.
No inclosures, no roads, almost no tillage; it seemed a land which a
patriarch would have chosen to feed his flocks and herds. The remains
of here and there a dismantled and ruined tower showed that it had once
harboured beings of a very different description from its present
inhabitants; those freebooters, namely, to whose exploits the wars
between England and Scotland bear witness.
Descending by a path towards a well-known ford, Dumple crossed the
small river, and then, quickening his pace, trotted about a mile
briskly up its banks, and approached two or three low thatched houses,
placed with their angles to each other, with a great contempt of
regularity. This was the farm-steading of Charlie's Hope, or, in the
language of the country, 'the town.' A most furious barking was set up
at their approach by the whole three generations of Mustard and Pepper,
and a number of allies, names unknown. The farmer [Footnote: See Note
3.] made his well-known voice lustily heard to restore order; the door
opened, and a half-dressed ewe-milker, who had done that good office,
shut it in their faces, in order that she might run 'ben the house' to
cry 'Mistress, mistress, it's the master, and another man wi' him.'
Dumple, turned loose, walked to his own stable-door, and there pawed
and whinnied for admission, in strains which were answered by his
acquaintances from the interior. Amid this bustle Brown was fain to
secure Wasp from the other dogs, who, with ardour corresponding more to
their own names than to the hospitable temper of their owner, were much
disposed to use the intruder roughly.
In about a minute a stout labourer was patting Dumple, and introducing
him into the stable, while Mrs. Dinmont, a well-favoured buxom dame,
welcomed her husband with unfeigned rapture. 'Eh, sirs! gudeman, ye hae
been a weary while away!'