resumed; "and we'll put things to rights in a brace of shakes. For
what's the use o' having money, says I, if a man don't spend it on his
whim! Ay! whether it's a fine lass, or what not, plank it down, and
enjoy yourself while ye can. That's what _I_ say. What's the sense o'
waiting till a man's too old? And I'm not so young as I was, thinks
Missie, eh? But let me tell you, there's many a fine lass, yet, that
would snap me up if she had the chance, if it was only for the sake of
the ducats. Now, when I was in the Spanish Main--hey! _that_ was the
place!--I mind...."
But what he "minded" Helen had no wish to hear, and she retired, leaving
her father and the stranger, both rapidly becoming somewhat over-loose
of speech under the influence of brandy.
"A likely wench!" cried the stranger as the door closed. "A likely
wench, sir. He'll be a lucky dog that get's her. Now ... ah!... hum!...
here's you, an old man, leaving this place--and not likely to get
another, says you; and here's me, a bachelor, or anyways a widower, with
plenty of cash and wanting a wife. Come I what's against our making a
bargain? You give me your daughter, and I'll see that you don't want a
home. Eh? What do you say to that, now?"
It was not very delicately put, but neither were the times very
delicate, and the upshot was that Helen's father, weak and selfish,
agreed to use his influence towards bringing the marriage about. The
stranger did not tell--and perhaps it would have made little difference
if he had told--his full history; how as a boy in London, the son of a
petty tradesman, he had been kidnapped and sold to the Plantations (a
common enough fate in those days); how in the West Indies, after a
varied and not over reputable career, in which buccaneering played no
small part, he had at length persuaded the wealthy old widow of a
planter to marry him; and how, when she had suddenly ended her days, in
a way which gave rise to more than a little talk in the island, he had
sold the estate and the slaves without haggling much over the price, and
had abruptly left for England, where--the talk ran--he meant to settle
down and found a family.
Helen's scornful rejection of the proposal at first was scathing, and
little less her scorn of a parent who could urge it. "It's to save me
from want, and from worse than want," he whimpered. Finally, ere many
days had passed, wearied by her father's importunity, she gave her
consent.
A pair more ill-matched could not have been found; the man by nature
coarse, brutal, and cowardly; the woman, insolent, fearless, and of
ungoverned temper. From the first things went badly, and when, within a
week of the wedding, Helen's father was drowned in attempting to ford
the Tweed on horseback, she chose to consider that her part of the
bargain was ended. Henceforward she was a wife only in name. Bluster and
storm as he might, she was more than the master of her husband, and
after one wild outburst he cringed before her. And as, before her
marriage, the wife had insisted on reinstating the greater number of the
old servants, who to fidelity to the old line added hostility to a
master whom they looked on as an interloper, the husband soon found it
to his advantage to conciliate the household by giving way to the whims
of his wife. Thereafter, the two met, if at all, only at meals.
For something over a year things continued on this unpleasant footing.
Then there came a day in spring, when Tweedside was tender with the
bursting of buds and the lush green of young grass, when birds sang
gaily from every thicket, and the hurrying brown water was dimpled into
countless rings by the rising trout. To Helen, listless and indifferent
even to Tweed's charm in springtime, came one of the younger servants
saying that a gentleman, desiring to speak to her, waited below. A
gentleman to see _her_? Nay, there must certainly be some mistake,
thought Helen. It must assuredly be one of the useless hangers-on of her
husband come to ask her to plead for him in regard to some trumpery
loan. Well! anything for a novelty, and to take her thoughts away from
herself. In this frame of mind she entered the lower room, where the
visitor stood with his back to the door, gazing from the window, beside
him a large deerhound.
"Well, sir," she exclaimed sharply, "what is there that I ... My God!
You!... Back from the dead! Back from the dead!" she wailed.
"Nay. Back from sickness and wounds; back from captivity. Many a message
have I sent you, Helen, during the long years; little did I think to
find you thus."
Apathy and listlessness no longer held her in bondage; the full horror
of the irrevocable gripped her. Tied for ever to a brute whom she
despised and hated, sacrificed to no purpose; whilst here, alive and
well, stood the man to whom in ardent youth she had plighted her
undisciplined heart. The thought maddened her. And as she struggled to
choke back this overwhelming rush of feeling, her husband's unwelcome
entrance broke the tension of a scene the strain of which was past
bearing.
Surely it was in an evil moment for himself that her husband entered
that room. In a clumsy effort to propitiate his wife's guest, the
unfortunate man laid his hand on the head of the visitor's dog, and with
vicious side-snap the animal bit his hand to the bone.
No consideration had the wife for her husband's sufferings, no trace of
sympathy did she show, as, with an oath, he hurried from the room to
bind up the ugly wound--her whole being was centred in the man before
her. And her very heart stood still when her stunned ears realised that
that man was now saying farewell. Lamentations and entreaties were of no
avail. "There remained nothing else for a man of honour to do," he said.
All these years he had been faithful to her; all these years no other
woman had entered his thoughts. Had she been as true to him as he had
ever been to her, the dearest wish of his heart would have been
fulfilled. Nay, had he come home to find her a widow, even so all might
yet perhaps have been well. But now, when, with his own eyes, he had
seen what, manner of man she had preferred to him, the old love was
killed--killed by her act.
The clatter of his departing horse's feet rang loud in her ears; and
now, great as of old had been her detestation of the man to whom she was
tied, it was but a feeble flame in comparison with the furnace of hate
that began to rage in her heart. Daily and hourly the anguish of the
"might have been" tormented her. Incessantly the words her lover had
spoken seethed in her brain: "If even you had been a widow," he had
said. "A widow?" ... Ever to the same word her thoughts returned--"a
widow." What if he were to die now? If only...! Then she thought of the
bitten hand. Was it not more than likely that the dog was mad when,
unprovoked, it bit a man? And if it _were_ mad ... But assuredly it was
mad! She would ask old Elspeth. Who so wise as Elspeth, who so skilled
as she in the treatment of wounds? And if she could _cure_ wounds, why
... perhaps...! Did not wounds sometimes refuse to heal, and did not
the patient sometimes gradually sink and die without anybody being to
blame?
But no comfort was found in Elspeth--no help. Surely the woman was in
her dotage. Fool! Why did the feckless old idiot not know that the dog
_must_ have been mad? The man was drinking heavily now, goaded by grim
terror of that very thing, and sodden with drink. Body and soul the old
nurse was hers, she believed. Then, what so easy to make as a mistake in
her treatment of the wound--to dress it with an irritating salve instead
of with a healing one? what so easy as to inflame a mind already
stricken by fear and maddened by drink? _Must_ she speak more plainly
the thing that had arisen in her mind?
* * * * *
Day followed day, and soon rumour spread and grew to certainty that of a
surety the dog was mad that had bitten the master. From his room, they
said, came the sound of ravings and of shouts. Folk spoke below their
breath of how it was said he foamed at the mouth, and few dared venture
near.
At last there came a night when Elspeth's son crept stealthily by the
back stairs to aid his mother in holding down the sick man in the
paroxysms of his madness; and the guilty wife, cowering alone in her
room, stopped her ears lest awful sounds should reach them.
* * * * *
Summer was spent, and Tweed murmured seaward between banks ruddy and
golden with autumn's foliage.
In a house in Edinburgh, not far removed from Holyrood, clad in deep
black, there lingered restlessly a Border woman, for whom the months had
dragged with halting foot since a certain spring night near Norham.
"Will he come?" to herself she whispered for the hundredth time. "Surely
he must come."
And as she waited, a flush leapt to her cheek at the sound of a step
nearing her door. A man entered, grave, almost stern, of face, and she
sprang to her feet with a cry, and with outstretched arms, that sank
slowly to her side, as her eyes questioned those of her visitor.
"You have come," she said unsteadily; "you have come. And you know ...
my husband ... is dead?"
"Rumours had reached me," he answered coldly. "When did he die?"
"It was in the spring, five months since. He was bitten by a dog, and he
died ... raving mad."
"Bitten by a dog?" he queried.
"Do you not remember? The dog you brought with you bit him. He never
recovered. And ... and he died mad."
"It was my dog that bit him? And he died mad in consequence of that
bite? I do not understand. My dog is alive and well; he was never mad."
Her eyes fell. What need to plead further! She knew now too well that
his love for her was indeed dead and buried. Had a spark of it yet
lived in his heart, suspicion could have found no place. Gone now was
all pride, all control; at his feet she threw herself, clasping her
knees.
"Have you no pity--no pity? He is dead, I tell you. I always cared only
for you."
"Good God!" he cried hoarsely, and pushed her from him; and the horror
in his eyes smote her as his bitterest words could not have done.
Alone once more in the room, she lay face downwards on the floor, and
the echo of his footfall on the stair beat into her brain like the
stroke of doom. Alone till the end of her days she lived a friendless,
wretched woman, eating out her heart with the canker of "the might have
been."
THE GHOST OF PERCIVAL REED
When we look back on the past history of the Border, we might almost
think that St. Andrew and St. George, who are supposed to keep watch and
ward over North and South Britain, had overlooked that hilly stretch of
country that lies between the Solway and the Tyne, leaving the heathen
god Mars to work his turbulent will with it. From the days of the Roman
Wall it was always a tourney-ground, and in the long years when English
and Scots warred against each other, scarcely one day in any year went
past without the spilling of blood on one or other of its hills or
moors. Not only did the Borderers fight against those of other nations.
Constantly they fought amongst themselves. A quick-tempered, revengeful
lot were the men of those Border clans. On the Northumberland side the
quarrels were as frequent as they were amongst those hot-headed
Scots--Kers and Scotts, Elliots and Turnbulls and Croziers.
In the sixteenth century one of the most powerful of the clans in the
wild Northumbrian country was that of the Reeds of Redesdale. Even now
it is a lonely part of the south land, that silent valley down which,
from its source up amongst the Cheviots, the Rede flows eastward. Bog
and heather and bracken still occupy the ground to right and to left of
it, and there are few sounds besides the bleat of sheep or the cries of
wild birds to break the silence of the hills and moors. But when the
Reeds held power the hills often echoed to the lowing of driven cattle,
to the hoof-beat of galloping horses, and to the sounds of a fight being
fought to the death. A foray into England brought many a sturdy Scottish
reiver riding over the Carter Bar; and Reeds, and Halls, and Ridleys
were never averse from a night ride across the English Border when a
Michaelmas moon smiled on the enterprise. The Reeds were a strong clan,
but in power and in reputation they took only a second place, for the
family of the Halls was stronger still. The head of the Hall clan lived
at Girsonfield, a little to the north of Otterburn, a farmhouse which
had belonged to the proprietors of Otterburn Castle since the time of
Queen Elizabeth. Only a few stones of it now remain, and the new house
stands on a much more exposed situation; but when Hall was its occupant,
Girsonfield stood on a plot of rich green sward on the east side of the
Otter.
Now it must have seemed to Hall of Girsonfield, the head of the chief of
the northern clans, a very clear error in judgment for any of the powers
that existed to pass him over and appoint as keeper of Redesdale his
friend and neighbour, Percival Reed. To have to bow to Reed's authority,
to obey his summons when called on to help to intercept a party of
reiving Scots or to pursue them, hot trod, into Scotland, to hear the
praises of Percival Reed in all mouths--these were bitter things to be
swallowed by him who has come down to us as "the false-hearted Ha'." And
so, having opened the door of his heart for the messengers of Satan to
come in, Hall of Girsonfield had not long to wait for his tenants.
Clearly Percival Reed had no right to be keeper, but as he did his
duties bravely and well, there was no chance of his being deposed, save
by death. Never a day or a night was there when Hall and his friend Reed
cantered together to meet some of the Scott or Elliot clan, or to rescue
a drove of cattle or sheep from them, or from some of the Croziers or
Turnbulls, but what Hall rode with murder in his heart. Reed was utterly
unconscious. There was no scheme that he did not confide to him whom he
took for his loyal friend, no success for which he did not jubilantly
claim Hall's sympathy and congratulations. He laid bare the whole of his
innocent heart, and Hall hated him all the more bitterly because of it.
"If he were not so handy with his Ferrara," brooded Hall.... "If only he
had been a little slower that time in getting out his dag when Nixon had
covered him." ... "If only his mare had not only stumbled, but had
fallen there by the peat hag when Sandy's Jock so near had him...."
To Hall of Girsonfield Providence seemed to take special care of
Percival Reed, for no other reason than to goad him to extremity. The
devils who possessed him were skilfully nursing their prey.
There came at last a day, when no raids were afoot, when Hall met some
of the Crozier clan, and opinions were frankly expressed with regard to
the keeper of Redesdale. Things had been going badly with the Croziers.
Their beef-tubs were empty. The Borders were evidently going to the
dogs. It was no longer possible for any hard-working reiver to make a
living on them. Percival Reed would have to get his leave, or it was all
up with reiving in Redesdale. To all of these complaints Hall lent a
willing ear; nay, more, to their surprise, a sympathetic one. Apparently
he, too, had some little schemes afoot, with which the keeper's
over-vigilance had seriously interfered. What a merry jest it would be,
next time the Croziers crossed the Border by moonlight, if the keeper's
plans for that night were known to them, and if, instead of finding in
the clan Hall enemies, they found them allies. The Croziers might have
all the spoil, but the Halls would share the joke, and Percival Reed
would crow less crouse for the future.
It was a quite simply arranged affair. The Halls entered with zest into
the plot. Second place was not good enough for them, and the Reeds had
boasted long enough.
And Percival Reed, in all innocence, soon heard rumour of a foray by
the Croziers, and confided in his friend Girsonfield exactly how he
meant to meet it. This information speedily found its way to the
Scottish side of the Border, and in Hall of Girsonfield Reed found a
more than usually willing supporter. The appointed night came, and ere
they started in the uncertain light of a misty moon the keeper of
Redesdale supped at Girsonfield. "Ye're loaded, are ye, Parcy?" asked
the genial host in the burring Northumbrian voice we know so well even
to-day. "I'll give a look to our primings while ye drink a stirrup-cup."
More than a look he gave. Strong spirit from the Low Countries might be
good jumping powder for the Keeper of Redesdale, but it was a damping
potion for the keeper's musket when gently poured on its priming. At
Batenshope, on the Whitelee ground, Reeds and Halls and Croziers met,
and a joyous crew were the Croziers that night as they homewards rode up
the Rede valley. For at the first fire of Percival Reed's musket it
burst, and he dropped from his horse a murdered man. The Reeds knew it
for treason, and the subsequent conduct of the Halls left them no room
for doubt. It was, indeed, a fine foundation for a family feud, and for
generation after generation the feud went on.
What was the end of Hall of Girsonfield no one has chronicled; it is not
hard to imagine the purgatory of his latter years.
But it is not of him but of his innocent victim that tales are still
told in the Rede valley.
From the night when his spirit was by treachery and violence reft from
his body, there was no rest for Percival Reed.
In the gloaming, when trees stand out in the semblance of highway
robbers, and a Liddesdale drow meets a North Sea haar, his sorrowful
spirit was wont to be seen by the lonely traveller, making moan, seeking
rest. Far and near, through all that part of the Border that he had so
faithfully "kept," the spirit wandered. A moan or sigh from it on the
safe side of the Carter Bar would scatter a party of Scottish reivers
across the moorland as no English army could have done. Any belated
horseman riding out of the dark would take the heart out of the most
valiant of Northumbrians because they feared that they saw "Parcy Reed."
Not always in the same form did the Keeper appear. That was the terror
of it. At times he would come gallantly cantering across the moorland as
he had done when blood ran warm in his veins. At other times he would be
only a sough in the night wind. A feeling of dread, an undefinable
something that froze the marrow and made the blood run cold. And yet,
again, he would come as a fluttering, homeless soul, whimpering and
formless, with a moaning cry for Justice--Justice--Judgment on him who
had by black treachery hurried him unprepared to his end. The folk of
Redesdale bore it until they could bear it no longer. The blood of many
a Hall was spilt by the men of Percival Reed's clan without giving any
ease to that clamouring ghost. At last they sought the help of a
"skeely" man. He was only a thatcher, but whilst he plied his trade of
covering mortal dwellings with sufficient to withstand the blasts of
heaven, he had also studied deeply matters belonging to another sphere.
"Gifted," says his chronicler, "with words to lay it at rest," he
summoned the ghost to his presence, and "offered it the place and form
it might wish to have."
Five miles of land did that disembodied spirit of the Keeper of
Redesdale choose for his own. As might be guessed, he fixed on the banks
of the Rede, and he chose that part of it that lies between Todlawhaugh
and Pringlehaugh. The fox that barks from the bracken on the hillside at
early morning, the grouse that crows from the heather, the owl that
hoots from the fir woods at night, to those did the ghost of Percival
Reed act as keeper. By day he roosted, like a bat or a night bird, on
some tree in a lonely wood. By night he kept his special part of the
marches. Still the Keeper of Redesdale was Percival Reed. Todlaw Mill,
in ruins long ago, was his favourite haunt, and there, as the decent
folk of the valley went on the Sabbath to the meeting-house at Birdhope
Cragg, they often saw him, a dreary sight for human eyes, patiently
awaiting his freedom. The men would uncover their heads and bow as they
passed, and the Keeper of Redesdale, courteous in the spirit as in the
body, would punctiliously return their salutations.
Thus did the years wear on until the appointed days were fulfilled, and
the Rede Valley knew its Keeper no more. On the last day of the time
fixed by him, the skeely man was thatching a cottage at the Woollaw.
Suddenly he felt something touch him, as though the wing of a bird had
brushed by. He came down the ladder on which he stood, and it seemed as
though the bird's feathers had brushed against his heart, and had come
from a place where the cold and ice are not cold and ice as mortals know
them, for "he was seized," says the chronicler, "with a cold trembling."
Some power, too strong for his own skill to combat, had laid hold on
him, and shivering, still shivering, he fell into the hands of Death.
Such was the passing of Percival Reed, Keeper of Redesdale, who took
with him, when at length he relinquished his charge, a humble henchman,
a hind of the Rede Valley.
DANDY JIM THE PACKMAN
It was the back end of the year. The crops were all in, and but little
was left of the harvest moon that had seen the Kirn safely won on the
farms up "Ousenam" Water. A disjaskit creature she looked as the wind
drove a scud of dark cloud across her pale face, or when she peered over
the black bank below her, only to be hidden once more by an angry drift
of rain. It was no night for lonely wayfarers. Oxnam and Teviot were
both in spate, and their moan could be heard when the wind rested for a
little and allowed the fir trees to be still. Only for very short
intervals, however, did the tireless wind cease, and always, after a
short respite, the trees were attacked again, and made to beck and bow
their dark heads like the nodding plumes of a hearse. The road from
Crailing was in places dour with mud, heavy-rutted by harvest carts,
with ever and anon a great puddle that stretched across from ditch to
ditch. But dismal or not dismal, the night had apparently no evil effect
on the spirits of the one man who was trudging his homeward way from
Crailing to Eckford.
Dandy Jim, the packman, was a young fellow who wanted more than evil
weather and a dreich, black night to depress him. A fine, upstanding lad
he was, with a glib English tongue that readily sold his wares, and
which, along with a handsome, merry face, helped him with ease into the
good graces of those whom he familiarly knew as "the lasses." Dandy Jim
had had many a flirtation, but now he felt that his roving days were
nearly past. He was seriously thinking of matrimony.
"She's a bonny lass," thought he contemplatively, dwelling on the charms
of the young cook at the farmhouse he had left just past midnight,
"bonny and thrifty, and as fond o' a laugh as I am mysel. That bit shop
as ye come out o' Hexham, with red roses growing up the front o't, and
fine-scented laylock bushes at the back, that would do us fine...."
And so, safely wrapped up in happy plans and in thoughts of his
apple-cheeked lady-love, Jim manfully splashed through puddles and
tramped through mud, conscience free, and fearful of nothing in earth or
out of it. The graveyard at Eckford possessed no horrors for him.
"Bogles," quoth he, "what's a bogle? I threw muckle Sandy, the wrestler,
at Lammas Fair, an' pity the bogle that meddles wi' me."
But, nevertheless, Jim, glancing towards the old church with its
surrounding tombstones as he went by, saw something he did not expect,
and quickly checked the defiant whistle that is, somehow, an infallible
aid to the courage of even the bravest. There was a light over there
among the graves, a flickering light that the wind lightly tossed, and
that, somehow, did not suggest likeable things, even to Dandy Jim.
Stock-still he stood for a couple of minutes watching the yellow glimmer
among the tombstones, and then, with grim suspicion in his mind, he
walked up to the churchyard gate. Nowadays we have only an occasional
"watch-tower" in an old kirkyard, or a rusted iron cage over a
grass-grown grave to remind us of times when human hyænas prowled abroad
after nightfall, and carried off their white, cold prey to be chaffered
for by surgeons for the dissecting-rooms. But Dandy Jim's day was the
day of Burke and Hare, of Dr. Knox, and of many another murderous and
scientific ghoul, and a lantern's gleam in a churchyard in the small
hours usually meant but one thing. As he expected, a gig stood at the
churchyard gate; a bony, strong-shouldered, chestnut mare tethered to
the gate-post, munching, mouth in nose-bag. In the gig was a sack,
standing upright--a remarkably tall sack, five foot ten high at least,
stiffly balanced against the seat.
"Aye, aye," said Jim to himself, "it was a six-foot coffin when they
planted Jock the day. Him an' me was much of an age and of a height,
poor lad; and here he is now, off to Edinburgh to be made mincemeat
of."