nervous, somewhat highly strung temperament; and in the judge's mind
superstition began to hold unquestioned sway. Things taught him in
childhood by an old nurse, things which now folks, indeed, still
believed, but which he himself had to some extent given up or dismissed
from his thoughts, began to crowd back again into his brain. No mere
human power, surely, could have brought him here as he had been brought.
Was it in the dungeon of some sorcerer, of some disciple of the Devil,
that he now lay? Then, the shuffling old step that he heard so
frequently, the thin voice calling, "Hey! Maudge," followed always by
the mewing of a cat--what could that be but some old hag, given over to
evil deeds, talking to her familiar? It was but the other day that, with
his own eyes, he had seen nine witches burned together on Leith Sands,
and all, ere they died, had confessed to the most horrid commerce with
the Devil. It was no great time since a witch, under torture, had
revealed in her confession the terrible truth, of how two hundred women
had been wont to flock at night to a certain kirk in North Berwick,
there to listen eagerly to Satan preaching blasphemy and denouncing the
King. Even a judge was not safe from their malice. And could he but
escape from the snare in which he now lay entangled, assuredly, Lord
Durie thought, there should be more witch-burnings.
So the weeks dragged past, and Lord Durie lost all reckoning of the
flight of time; but ever the belief strengthened that it was no mere
human power that held him in bondage. And this belief received
confirmation at last, for he awoke one night from confused and heavy
sleep, to find himself once more bound, and wrapped, body and head, in
the thick folds of a cloak. Then, seemingly without moving from his bed,
he was borne through the air and set upon a horse; and again began that
awful journey which once before he had endured. This time, too, in
confirmation of his theory of the supernatural, when he came to his full
senses it was to find himself lying behind a clump of whins by the sands
of Leith, near to the very spot where, ages before, he had met a
strange-looking man who tried to draw him into conversation on law. And
nowhere was any cloak to be seen, nor trace of human agency. Only, he
ached sorely, and his legs almost refused to bear the weight of his
body, and in his head was the buzzing as of a thousand bees.
It was warlocks who had dealt with him--so his family and all his
friends agreed when his tale was told. But his successor in office
mourned, perhaps, that their dealings had not been more effectual, for
he liked ill to give up a post he had filled with ability for an all too
short three months.
To Lord Durie's regret, his return was too late to enable him to preside
in the famous case which was about to come on shortly after the date of
his disappearance. That had already been decided in a manner of which he
could not have failed to disapprove, and Lord Traquair had secured a
verdict.
For long the judge held to the warlock theory, and he was not averse,
after dinner, over a bottle, from telling at great length the story of
his terrible experiences during those mysterious three months of
captivity. Younger men, indeed, began to find the tale somewhat boring,
and in private some had been known to wish that the devil had flown away
permanently with Lord Durie. But those scoffers were chiefly a few
rising young advocates; the judge's family and his friends accepted the
tale in its entirety. Nor ever did any man, to the end of his days,
actually hear Lord Durie express doubt as to the supernatural nature of
his adventure.
Yet something did happen, later, which at least seemed in some measure
to have shaken his faith, and it was noticed that, towards the end of
his life, he was not fond of dwelling on the subject--had even been
known, in fact, to become irritable when pressed to tell his story. It
fell out, a year or two after the events which he had loved to narrate,
that Lord Durie had occasion to visit Dumfries. On the way back to
Edinburgh, travelling with some colleagues, it chanced that a heavy
storm caught them, and necessity drove them to take shelter for the
night in a farmhouse near to an old peel tower which stood on the verge
of the wild moorland country beyond Moffat.
That night Lord Durie, in his stuffy box-bed, dreamed a terrible dream.
He was once more in the power of the wizard or warlock; and it seemed to
him that in his dream he even heard again those mysterious words that
had once so haunted him. With a start he woke, bathed in perspiration,
to find that day had broken, and that from the hillside echoed the
long-drawn cry: "Far yaud! Far yaud! _Bauty!_" While, ben the house, he
could hear a slow, shuffling step, and a thin old voice quavering: "Hey,
Maudge!" to a mewing cat.
"What was yon cry oot on the hill? Oh, jist oor Ailick cryin' on his
dowg, Bauty, to weer the sheep," said the grey-haired, brown-faced old
woman to whom they had owed their shelter for the night.
"Veesitors?" she continued, in reply to further questions. "Na. We hae
nae veesitors here. There was aince a puir sick man lay twa three months
i' the auld tower yont by, a year or twa back, but there's been nae
veesitors. They said he was daft, an' I was kind o' feared whiles to gie
him his meat. But, oh, he wad be jist a silly auld body that did naebody
hairm. Na, I never richtly got sicht o' his face, for I aye put his bit
meat an' drink doon beside him whan he was sleepin'. An' them that
broucht him took him awa again whan they thoucht he was some better."
It was noted that after this visit Lord Durie no longer pursued the
subject of warlocks.
[NOTE.--The story of Lord Durie's abduction and captivity is differently
told by Chambers in his _Domestic Annals of Scotland_, as far, at least,
as the instigator of the kidnapping and its accomplisher are concerned.
It is there recorded that the maker of the plot to kidnap the judge was
George Meldrum the Younger of Dumbreck. Accompanied by two Jardines and
a Johnston--good Border names--and by some other men, Meldrum seized
Lord Durie and a friend near St. Andrews, robbed them of their purses,
then carried the judge across the Firth of Forth to the house of one
William Kay in Leith, thence past Holyrood, and, by way doubtless of
Soutra Hill, to Melrose, from which town he was hurried over the Border
to Harbottle, and there held prisoner. An account of the trial of the
perpetrators of the abduction is to be found in Pitcairns' _Criminal
Trials._ Sir Walter Scott, however, in his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border_, gives to Will Armstrong of Gilnockie the credit, or discredit,
of carrying out the abduction single-handed. Will was certainly a much
more picturesque ruffian than ever was Meldrum, and many a wild deed
might be safely fathered on him.
Tradition tells of his long ride to convey important papers from Lord
Traquair to King Charles I, and of his perilous return journey, bearing
a reply from his Majesty. Tidings of his mission had come to the ears of
the Parliamentarians, and orders were issued to seize him at Carlisle.
In that town, Will, unwitting of special danger, had halted an hour to
refresh man and beast, and as he proceeded on his journey, and was
midway over the high, narrow bridge across the Eden, the sudden clatter
of horses' feet and the jingle of accoutrements at either end of the
bridge showed him that his way was effectually blocked by the Roundhead
troopers. Without a moment's hesitation, Will faced his horse at the
parapet, and with a touch of the spur and a wild cheer over went the
pair into the flooded river, disappearing in the tawny, foaming water
with a mighty splash. Instead of hastening along the bank, Cromwell's
troopers crowded on to the bridge, gazing with astonishment into the
raging torrent. Thus, when Will and his horse, still unparted, came to
the surface a considerable way down, there was time for them to reach
the bank. But the bank was steep and the landing bad, and the weight of
Will's saturated riding-cloak was the last straw that hindered the horse
from scrambling up. With a curse Will cut the fastening that held the
cloak about his neck, and, relieved from the extra weight, the animal
with a desperate struggle gained the top of the bank and got away well
ahead of the pursuing troopers. Had it not been for the speed and
stamina of his horse, Will had surely been taken that night. As it was,
ere they reached the Esk, one trooper was already far in front of his
comrades, and thundering on Will's very heels. But a pistol pointed at
his head by Will, a pistol with priming saturated, and incapable of
being fired--had the man only thought of it--caused the trooper to draw
back out of danger, and Will gained Esk's farther bank in safety, where,
regardless of possible pistol shots, he waited to taunt his baffled
pursuers.
THE WRAITH OF PATRICK KERR
This is a tale they tell at the darkening, and you who are Rulewater
folk probably know it well. But however well you may know it, you have
to own that it is an eerie thing to listen to when the fire is dying
down, and there are queer-shaped shadows playing on the walls, and
outside in the wood the owls are beginning to hoot, or, from the far
moor, there comes a curlew's cry.
Not long after Prince Charlie's day there lived at Abbotrule, in
Rulewater, a laird named Patrick Kerr. Patrick Kerr was a Writer to His
Majesty's Signet, a dour man, with a mischancy temper. The kirk and
kirkyard of Abbotrule, as still may be seen, lay near the laird's
house--too near for the pleasure of one who had no love for the kirk and
who could not thole ministers. Most unfortunately, too, the laird took a
scunner at the minister of the parish of Abbotrule. It may be that he
and the minister saw too much of each other, and only saw each other's
faults, but of that no one now can tell. But, about the year 1770,
Patrick Kerr set about to put an end to Abbotrule Parish and Abbotrule
Kirk, that had seen many an open-air Sacrament on summer Sabbaths long
ago. For four years the laird laboured to attain his end, and a blithe
man was he when, in 1774, he got Eliott of Stobs and Douglas of Douglas
to side with him and wipe out for evermore the kirk and parish of
Abbotrule. The parish was joined to the parishes of Hobkirk and
Southdean, and the glebe--twenty-five acres of good land--which should
have been shared between the Southdean and Hobkirk ministers, was taken
by Patrick Kerr for his own use. Fifty acres of poor soil lying between
Doorpool and Chesters he certainly gave them in its stead, and must have
had pleasure in his bargain, for he had gained a rich glebe and had for
ever freed himself from his clerical neighbours. Speedily he pulled down
the manse and unroofed the kirk. He would willingly have ploughed up the
kirkyard, but this could not be. For a hundred years after he was gone,
the Rulewater folk still buried there.
Now, in Patrick Kerr's day, a Sacrament Sabbath was not quite what it is
now. They were solemn enough about the fencing of the tables, serious
and longfaced enough were ministers and elders as the bread and wine
were handed round, but the minister's wife, poor body, found it took her
all her time to preserve an earnest spirituality and to search her soul
as the roasts and pies and puddings spread out on the manse dining-table
haunted her anxious mind. Harder still, too, it was for a tired minister
and elders to abstain from all appearance of casuality as the
hospitality of the manse went on far into the afternoon, and the whisky
toddy had more than once gone the round of the table.
Seventeen years after the doing away with Abbotrule Parish there took
place at the manse of Southdean, after the Sacrament had been dispensed,
one of these gatherings of sanctified conviviality. It was dusk before
the party broke up, and it was probably due to the kindly forethought of
the minister that he and his guests strolled in little companies of
two's and three's out into the caller air before their final parting.
Their gait was solemn--if a trifle uncertain--as they slowly daundered
up the road between the trees. It was a still Sabbath evening, when one
can hear the very whispers of the fir branches, the murmur of a burn far
away--when suddenly the stillness was broken by the thud of a horse's
hoofs. Beat--beat--beat--on the turf by the side of the road they came,
and each man of the party cocked his ears and strained his eyes into the
darkness to see who might be the horseman who profaned the Sabbath by
riding in such hot haste. There was an elder there who, had the party
been held at any time but on the Sacrament Sabbath and anywhere but in
the manse dining-room, might have been said to have a trifle exceeded.
So when, cantering on the turf between the two fir woods, they saw a
white horse appear, he looked byordinar grave.
"I mind," said he, "a passage in the Revelations, '_Behold a pale
horse; and his name that sat on him was Death_.'" With that the horse
was upon them, and one and all looked up at the rider's face. Fearsome
and gash was the countenance they looked upon. Hatred and scorn was in
the burning eyes--anger, and the hatred that does not die. And there was
not one man of them but ran like hunted sheep back into the manse, and
there, in the light, faced each other, forfeuchen and well-nigh greeting
like terrified bairns, that did not know the face for that of Patrick
Kerr, the laird of Abbotrule.
Next day they all had the news that Patrick Kerr, who hated the kirk and
all ministers, and had done away with the parish of Abbotrule, had died
in the darkening of that Sabbath evening and gone to his last account.
THE LAIDLEY WORM OF SPINDLESTON-HEUGH
In a land where fairy tales die hard, it is sometimes no easy task to
discriminate between what is solid historical fact, what is fact,
moss-grown and flower-covered, like an old, old tomb, and what is mere
fantasy, the innocent fancy of a nation in its childhood, turned at last
into stone--a lasting stalactite--from the countless droppings of belief
bestowed upon it by countless generations.
Scientists nowadays crushingly hold prehistoric beasts, or still
existent marsh gas, accountable for dragons and serpents and other fauna
of legendary history; but in certain country districts there are some
animals that no amount of Board School information, nor countless
Science Siftings from penny papers can ever destroy, and to this
invulnerable class belongs the Laidley Worm of Spindleston-Heugh.
High above the yellow sand that borders the fierce North Sea on the
extreme north of the Northumbrian coast still stands the castle of
Bamborough. Many a fierce invasion has it withstood during the thousand
odd years since first King Ida placed his stronghold there. Many a cruel
storm has it weathered, while lordly ships and little fishing cobles
have been driven to destruction by the lashing waves on the rocks down
below. And there it was that, once on a day, there lived a King who,
when his fair wife died and left to him the care of her handsome,
fearless boy, and her beautiful, gentle daughter, did, as is the fashion
of every King of fairy tale, wed again, and wed a wicked wife. To the
south land he went, while his son sailed the seas in search of high
adventure, and his daughter acted as chatelaine in the castle by the
sea, and there he met the woman who came to Bamborough all those many
years ago, and who, they say, remains there still.
As the dawn rose over the grey sea, making even the dark rocks of the
Farnes like a garden where only pink roses grew, the Princess Margaret
would be on the battlements looking out, always looking out, for her
father and brother to return. At sunset, when the sea was golden and the
plain stretched purple away to the south, landward and seaward her eyes
would still gaze. And at night, when the silver moon made a path on the
sea, the Princess would listen longingly to the lap of the waves, and
strain her beautiful eyes through the darkness for the sails of the ship
that should bring the two that she loved safe home again. But when the
day came when the King, her father, returned, and led through the gate
the lady who was his bride, there were many who knew that it would have
been well for the Princess had she still been left in her loneliness.
Gracious indeed was her welcome to her mother's supplanter, for she
loved her father, and this was the wife of his choice.
"Oh! welcome, father," she said, and handed to him the keys of the
castle of which she had kept such faithful ward, and, holding up a face
as fresh and fragrant as a wild rose at the dawn of a June day, she
kissed her step-mother.
"Welcome, my step-mother," she said, "for all that's here is yours."
Many a gallant Northumbrian lord was there that day, and many a lord
from the southern land was in the King's noble retinue. One of them it
was who spoke what the others thought, and to the handsome Queen who had
listened already overmuch to the praises her husband sang of his
daughter, the Princess Margaret, the words were as acid in a wound.
"Meseemeth," said he, "that in all the north country there is no lady so
fair, nor none so good as this most beautiful Princess."
Proudly the Queen drew herself up, and from under drooped eyelids, with
the look of a hawk as it swoops for its prey, she made answer to the
lord from the south.
"I am the Queen," she said; "ye might have excepted me." Then, turning
swift, like a texel that strikes its quarry, she said to the Princess:
"A laidley worm shalt thou be, crawling amongst the rocks; a laidley
worm shalt thou stay until thy brother, Wynd, comes home again."
So impossible seemed such a threat to the Princess that her red lips
parted over her white teeth, and she laughed long and merrily. But those
who knew that the new Queen had studied long all manner of wicked spells
and cruel magic were filled with dread, for greatly they feared that the
fair Princess's joyous days were done.
The Farne Islands were purple-black in a chill grey sea, and the waves
that beat on the rocks beneath the castle seemed to have a more dolorous
moan than common when next evening came. The joyous Princess, jingling
her big bunch of keys and smiling a welcome to her father's guests, had
gone as completely as though she lay buried beside the drowned mariners,
for whom the silting sand under the waves makes a safe graveyard all
along that bleak and rugged coast; but a horror--a crawling, shapeless,
loathsome thing--writhed itself along the pathway from cliff to village,
and sent the terror-striken peasants shrieking into their huts and
battering at the castle gates for sanctuary. The old ballad tells us
that:
"For seven miles east and seven miles west,
And seven miles north and south,
No blade of grass or corn could grow,
So venomous was her mouth."
Like an embodied plague, the bewitched Princess preyed on the people of
her father's kingdom, who daily brought to the cave, where she coiled
herself up at night to sleep, a terrified tribute of the milk of seven
cows. All over the North Country spread the dread of her name, but now
she was no longer the lovely Princess Margaret, but the Laidley Worm of
Spindleston-Heugh.
"Word went east, and word went west,
And word is gone over the sea,
That a Laidley Worm in Spindleston-Heughs
Would ruin the North Countrie."
Far over the sea, with his thirty-three bold men-at-arms, the Princess's
brother, "Childe Wynd," was carving a career for himself with his sword.
Nothing on earth did Childe Wynd fear, yet ever and again, when success
in battle had been his, he would have a heavy heart, dreading he knew
not what, and often he longed to see again the castle on the high rock
by the sea, and the fair little sister with whom so many happy days had
been spent amongst the blue grass and on the yellow sand of the dunes at
Bamborough. To his camp came rumour of the strange monster that was
devastating his father's lands, and down to the coast he hastened with
his men, a great home-sickness dragging at his heart--home-sickness, and
a terror that all was not well with Margaret. Some rough, brown-faced
mariners, whose boat had not long before nearly suffered wreck on the
rocks of the Northumbrian coast, were able to tell the Prince that
rumour spoke truth, and that a laidley worm was laying waste his
father's kingdom. Of the Princess they could give no tidings, but the
Prince needed no words from them to tell him that all was not well.
"We have no time now here to waste,
Hence quickly let us sail:
My only sister Margaret
Something, I fear, doth ail."
And so, with haste, they built a ship, a ship for a Prince of Faery, for
its masts were made of the rowan tree, against which no evil witchcraft
could prevail, and its sails were of fluttering silk. With fair winds
and kindly waves the Prince and his men soon sped across the sea, and
gladly they saw again the square towers of the castle King Ida had
built, proudly looking down on the fields of restless water that only
the bravest of the King's husbandmen durst venture to plough. From her
turret window the Queen watched the sails of the gallant ship gleaming
in the sun, and knew full well that Prince Wynd was nearly home again.
Speedily she summoned all the witch wives along with whom she worked her
wicked magic, and set them to meet the ship, to use every spell they
knew that could bring shipwreck, and disaster, and death, and to rid her
of the youth whom she had always dreaded. But they returned to her
despairingly. No spell was known to them that could work against a ship
whose masts were made of the rowan tree. Then, casting aside magic, the
Witch Queen dispatched a boat-load of armed men to meet the ship, to
board it, and to slay all that they could. Little cared Wynd and his men
for a boat-load of warriors, and few there were left alive in the boat,
and those sore wounded, when Wynd's ship came to anchor in the shallows
under the dark cliff.
But here a more dangerous adversary met Prince Wynd. Threshing through
the water came the horrible, writhing thing that Northumbrians knew as
the Laidley Worm; and ever as they would have beached the ship, the huge
serpent beat them off again, till all the sea round them was a welter of
froth and slime and blood. Then Childe Wynd ordered his men to take
their long oars once more and bring the ship farther down the coast and
beach her on Budle sand. Down the coast they went, while the Queen
eagerly watched from the battlements, and the Laidley Worm followed them
fast along the shore, and all the folk of Bamborough scrambled up the
cliff side, and, holding on by jagged bits of crags and tough clumps of
grass and of yellow tansy, kept a precarious foothold, waiting,
wide-eyed, to see what would be the outcome of the fray. As near the
sandy beach of Budle as they durst venture their ship came Prince Wynd
and his thirty-three men, then the rowers sat still, and the Prince
leapt out, shoulder deep, into the water, and waded to the shore. Like a
wounded tiger that has been baulked of its prey but gets it into its
power at last, the Laidley Worm came to meet him, and all who watched
thought his last hour had come. But like the white flash of a sea-bird's
wings as it dives into the blue sea, the Prince's broad sword gleamed
and fell on the loathsome monster's flat, scaly head, and in a great
voice he cried aloud on all living things to witness that if this
creature of evil magic did him any harm, he would strike her dead. Then
there befell a great wonder, for in human voice, but all hoarse and
strange and ugly, as though almost too great were the effort for human
soul to burst through brute form, the Laidley Worm spoke to her
conqueror: "Oh! quit thy sword and put aside thy bow!" it moaned--so
moans the sea through the crash of the waves on nights when the storm
strews the beach of the North Country with wreckage--"Oh! quit thy
sword, for, poisonous monster though I be, no scaith will I do thee."
Then those who heard the wonder felt sure that the Worm sought by
subtilty to destroy their Prince, for still as a white, dead man he
stood, and gazed at the brute that shivered before him like a whipped
dog that would fain lick his master's feet. But again it spoke, in that
terrible, fearsome voice of mortal pain: