she felt a light step in the gig, and a sudden lightening of her load.
But the wind wailed round the church and the rain beat down, dimming the
glass in the flickering lantern, and every now and then Jim could hear a
pick striking against a stone or a heavy thud as of a spadeful of damp
earth being beaten down. Out of the gig came the sack, and out of the
sack speedily came the packman's erstwhile acquaintance, Jock. A gap in
the hedge across the road conveniently accommodated Jock's unresisting
body, over he went into the next field, and once again the mare started
as Dandy Jim sprang into the gig with one bound and quickly struggled
into the empty sack. He was only just in time. A parting clatter of
pickaxe and thud of spade, a swing of the lantern, that sent a yellow
light athwart some grey old headstones, rough voices and hasty steps,
and two men appeared, pushed their implements into the back of the gig,
released the mare from her nose-bag, clambered in, one on either side of
the upright sack, and drove off at a quick trot.
For some time they proceeded in silence.
"A good haul," at last one man remarked; "a young chap--in fine
condition."
"A heavy load for the little mare," said he who held the reins;
"fifteen stone if he's a pound. Not an easy one to tackle afore he died
for want o' breath."
Packman Jim lurched against the speaker ere the words were well out of
his mouth. With an oath the man shoved him back, and Jim stiffly leaned
against the seat in as nearly the attitude of the corpse, to whom he was
acting as understudy, as he was able to assume. They had got a little
beyond Kalefoot, and the flooded river was sending its moaning voice
above the sough of the wind and the drip of the rain when one of the men
spoke again to his companion. His voice was husky, and he spoke in a low
tone as though he feared some eavesdropper.
"Before God, man," he said, "I can feel the body moving." The other, in
his voice all the horror of a dread he had been trying to hide, answered
in a shrill scream, "It's _warm_, I tell ye!--the corpse is _warm!_"
Then came Dandy Jim's opportunity. His face was white enough in the
uncertain glimmer of the gig's lamps when he thrust his head out of the
sack and looked first at one and then at another of his companions. In a
deep and hollow voice he spoke:
"If you had been where I hae been, your body would burn too," said he.
A screech and a roar were, according to Dandy Jim, the result of his
remark, and on either side of the gig a man cast himself out into the
darkness, the rain, and the mud, and ran--ran--in heedless terror for an
unknown sanctuary. What happened to the pair no subsequent historian has
recorded, but when Dandy Jim shortly afterwards wed an apple-cheeked
cook and took up his abode in a rose-covered cottage near Hexham, he no
longer trudged the Border roads with a pack on his back, but drove a
useful gig, drawn by a very willing, strong-shouldered, chestnut mare.
THE VAMPIRES OF BERWICK AND MELROSE
At Berwick-on-Tweed a man had died. In life he was a man of much weight,
one of the wealthiest of the freemen. He did his good deeds with pomp.
The devoutness of his religion was visible for every man to see, and his
look of sanctity as he went to pray was surely an example and a reproach
to every rough mariner whose boat was moored in the harbour beneath the
walls.
But when death came to him, an evil thing befell the reputation of that
holy man of means.
Those tongues that had been tied in his lifetime began to wag. The dark
passages of his history, of the doors to which he had held the keys,
were thrown open. And a horrified town discovered that their respected
fellow-citizen had been a man of foul life, guilty of many a fraud and
of many a crime, and that a dog's death had been too good a death for
him. What wonder that every decent person in the town spoke of him with
horror? But the horror they had of him who had so deceived them was but
a little thing when compared with the hideous dread that the impostor
inspired ere he had lain for a week in his grave in Berwick. Men who
lived in those days had many an evil thing to dread, for wolves, ghouls,
and vampires were as terribly real to them as in our day are the
microbes of cancer, of fever, or of tuberculosis. And when a man who was
notoriously a sinner came to his end, there was in the grave no rest for
him, nor was there peace for his fellow-men. Night after night he was
sure to rise from his tomb and go a-hunting for a human prey. He sucked
blood, and so drained the life of the innocent clean away. He devoured
human flesh. He chased his victims as though he were a mad dog, sending
them crazed by his bite, or worrying and mangling them to a dreadful
death.
This citizen, then, was not likely to rest in peace, and but a night or
two after the earth had been heaped over his grave, he was up and out
and rushing through the dark streets where his decorous footsteps had so
often fallen solidly by day, so often slunk stealthily by night.
By Satan's agency he was set free, all men averred, yet the master that
he had faithfully served did but little to pleasure him. For all the
night through, as long as darkness lasted, the dead sinner was hunted
through the deserted streets by a pack of baying hell-hounds. Round the
walls, down by the quay, up Hyde Hill, through the Scots Gate, down
lanes and byeways and back again round the walls--a weariful hunt it
was. Thankfully must the quarry have welcomed the first streaks of
light on the grey sea line, when the chase was ended and he was
permitted to rest in his coffin once more.
Only the bravest durst venture out of doors after dusk, and the good
people of Berwick lay a-trembling in their beds as the hunt swept past
their very doors, and the blood-curdling howls of the hounds turned
their hearts to water within them.
But always, in such a case, there are to be found one or two bold
spirits, or one or two so heedless of what is passing around them that
they rush into danger unawares. Such there were at Berwick-on-Tweed, and
to them the hunted soul spoke as he fled past, the hell-hounds slavering
at his heels. "Until my body is burnt," he cried, "you folk of Berwick
shall have no peace!" And as they rushed for sanctuary into the nearest
dwelling they fancied they could still hear the tormented wretch's
shriek, shrill above the baying of the dogs--"Burn! burn! Peace! peace!"
So the people of the town took counsel together, and having solemnly
concluded that "were a remedy further delayed, the atmosphere, infected
and corrupted by the constant whirlings through it of the pestiferous
corpse, would engender disease and death to a great extent," they
resolved to follow the vampire's own suggestion. Ten young men,
"renowned for boldness," were appointed to lay the Horror. They went to
the grave, dug up the corpse, cut it limb from limb, then burned it
until a little heap of white ash was all that remained of the man of
evil life, whose shade had brought dread to all the citizens of Berwick.
But their wise action must, unfortunately, have been taken too late.
Very soon afterwards a great pestilence arose, and decimated the town's
population. "Never did it so furiously rage elsewhere," says William,
Canon of Newburgh, the learned churchman, who has chronicled for us the
tale, "though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of
England." According to him, the vampire had done his evil work. And as
man, woman, and child were carried by night to the graves prepared for
the plague-stricken, there were those who vowed they could still hear
the distant sound of baying hounds, and above them the shrill scream of
the man who in life had seemingly walked so godly a walk, and who had
given example to the rough mariners down at the quay as he daily went to
pray.
Such is the story of the vampire at Berwick, and of the way in which
valiant men laid him. But the old Canon of the Austin Friars has yet
another tale to tell of a vampire on the Border. Destruction by fire was
not the only means of laying the unholy spirit that "walked" to the hurt
of its fellow-creatures. When a suicide was buried, or when one who was
a reputed witch, warlock, or were-wolf, or who had been cursed by his
parents or by the church, was laid in the grave, it was always well to
take the precaution of driving a stake through the body. Such a stake
(in Russia an aspen) driven at one blow bereft the evil thing of all its
power. Only in the reign of George IV was the custom in the case of
suicides abolished. If the precaution had not been taken at burial, in
all probability when the vampire had already done some harm, the corpse
was exhumed and the ghastly ceremony gone through. And always, so it was
declared, the body of the vampire was found with fresh cheeks and open,
staring eyes, well nourished by the blood of his victims. In such
condition was found the vampire of Melrose, whose tale is also told by
William of Newburgh.
Many a holy man has chanted the Psalms under the arches of Melrose
Abbey, but the vampire priest had never lived aught but a worldly,
carnal life. He held a post that suited him well, as chaplain to a
certain illustrious lady whose property lay near the Eildons, and who,
so long as her Mess John performed his duties as family priest, paid no
heed to his mode of occupying his time when these were performed.
The chaplain was of the type of the sporting parson of later days. He
loved the hunt. He loved a good bottle, a good horse, a good dog. "_The
Hundeprest"_ was the name he went by. Other things he also loved that
made not for sanctity, and when, at last, he died, his death was no more
holy than his selfish, sensual life had been. No protecting aspen stake
had been driven through his body, and so when he was laid to rest under
the shadow of the monastery, for him rest there was none. The holy
brothers inside the walls protected themselves from him, when he came
a-wandering, by vigils and by prayers. The lady whose chaplain he had
been was less well protected, and when, night after night, her sleep was
broken by horrible groans and murmurings from a thing that always seemed
just without her room, and almost about to enter, she became nearly
frantic. She came to Melrose, and with tears besought the holy fathers,
who owed much to her bounty, to wrestle for her in prayer and drive this
evil thing away. The monks of Melrose did for her what they could. Not
only did they pray, but two stout-hearted friars and two powerful young
laymen all well armed were appointed to guard the grave of the lady's
late chaplain, and to go on duty that very night.
It was chill autumn, and as they paced the damp grass of the graveyard
there was a smell of dead leaves in the air, and a grey mist crept up
from the Tweed that moaned as it bore its flooded waters to the sea.
When midnight came they expected to see the Hundeprest, but midnight
passed in safety, and in "the wee, sma' hours" the two laymen and one of
the monks went into the nearest cottage to warm their icy feet. Now came
the chance of the vampire. With "a terrible noise" the Hundeprest
suddenly appeared, a thing of horror, and rushed at the monk who was
slowly pacing towards the grave. The holy man bravely stood the charge,
and, as the monster was almost touching him, he swung the axe which he
carried, and drove it with all his might into the body of his diabolic
adversary. With a groan, the vampire turned and fled away, and the
friar, the tables turned, ran in pursuit until the grave of the
Hundeprest was reached, and the horror vanished.
Nothing of the encounter was to be seen when the other three watchers
returned, but grey dawn was near, and at the first sign of light the
four men, with pick-axe and spade, opened up the grave. Even as they dug
their spades turned up mingled blood and clay, and when they came to the
corpse of the Hundeprest, they found it fresh as on the day he died, but
with a terrible wound in the body, from which the blood still oozed
away.
With horror they bore it out of sight of the monastery of which he had
been so unworthy a brother. A cleansing fire burned it to ashes, and a
shrewd, clean wind that blew from over the Lammermoors swept away all
trace of the accursed thing. No pestilence came to Melrose. Perchance in
the twelfth century it was by prayer and fasting that the holy men won
the day.
A BORDER MIDDY
One blustering February evening towards the close of the eighteenth
century there sat in a back room in a little inn at Portsmouth three
midshipmen, forlorn-looking and depressed to a degree quite at variance
with the commonly accepted idea of the normal mental condition of
midshipmen. It was a room, not in the famous "Blue Posts"--that hostelry
beloved by lads of their rank in the service--but in a smaller, meaner,
less frequented house in a very different quarter of the town, a quarter
none too savoury, if the truth were told.
Why they had betaken themselves to this particular tavern in preference
to that generally used by them, who can say. Perhaps--as Peter Simple's
coachman remarked on that occasion when Peter first made acquaintance
with Portsmouth--perhaps it was because they had too often "forgotten to
pay for their breakfastesses" at the "Blue Posts," and had not the
wherewithal to pay up arrears. In any case, here they were, and,
midshipman-like, during their stay they had recklessly run up a larger
bill than they had means to settle. There was no possibility of
following the course recommended by the drunken sailor, namely, to "cut
and run," for the landlady of the inn was much too astute a personage to
make that a possibility, and she had too little faith in human nature
generally, and in that of midshipmen in particular, to let her consent
to wait for her money till time and the end of their cruise again
brought their frigate back to Portsmouth. Pay they _must_, by some means
or other, for already the Blue Peter was flying at the fore and the
_Sirius_ would sail at daylight. If she sailed without them it was very
plain that there was an end of their career in the Navy--they would be
"broke." Small wonder that the three middies were in the last stage of
gloom. Their entire possessions, money and clothes, could not cover one
half of what they owed, and every compromise had been rejected by the
obdurate landlady. Appeal to their friends was useless, for time did not
admit of an answer being received before the ship sailed. And escape was
hopeless, for the one window that the room possessed was heavily barred,
the door carefully locked, and the key kept in the capacious pocket of
the landlady.
It was the very deuce of a situation--the devil to pay and no pitch hot.
Again and again as the evening wore on they discussed possibilities;
again and again the same conclusion was arrived at. Hope was dead. No
doubt in the end their friends might pay up, but they groaned as the
certainty forced itself on them that their career at sea was as good as
over. If only they had been entitled to any prize-money! But
prize-money there was none, and the few guineas each had had from home
had long been idly squandered.
"We're done, my boys; we're done! Oh, Lord, what swabs we have been!"
cried the senior of the three with a groan, laying his head on the
table.
"Oh, never say die!" said another, a cheery-faced, ruddy lad with a
noticeable Scottish accent. "I've been in as tight a hole before and got
out of it all right. We've a few hours yet to come and go on.
Something's pretty sure to turn up."
As he spoke the key was put in the door, and in came the landlady.
"Well! wot's it goin' to be? Am I to get that there money you owes me,
or am I not? You ain't got much time for shilly-shallyin', I can tell
you, young gentlemen. An' paid I'm agoin' to be, one way or other."
She was a big-boned, florid, dark-eyed woman, well over thirty, somewhat
inclined to be down-at-heel and slatternly, though not yet quite
destitute of some small share of good looks; a woman solid of step and
unattractive to the eye of youth; moreover, as they knew from recent
experience, possessed of a rasping tongue.
"None o' ye got anything to say? Well, then, I'll tell you what I'm
ready to do and let you go. One of you shall marry me! I don't care two
straws which of you it is. But if you three're to get aboard your ship
afore she sails, one of you's got to come with me to the parson this
night an' be spliced. Take it or leave it; them's my terms. For the good
o' my business I must 'ave a 'usband, now my old dad's gone aloft.
Whether he's on the spot or not I don't care not the value of a reefer's
button, so long as I can show my 'lines.' I'll give you 'alf an hour to
make up your minds an' settle atween you who's goin' to be the lucky
one."
And with that she left the room, again carefully locking the door and
taking away the key.
Truly were they now between the devil and the deep sea. And no amount of
discussion improved the prospect.
"We _can't_ do it, you know," piteously cried one. "I'll see her shot
first."
"Blest if I see any other way out of it," said another.
"And she's pretty old. She _might_ perhaps die before we came back,
mightn't she?" hopefully ventured the third.
"Oh, stow that! She's not more than forty, and she's likely to live as
long as any of us."
"Well, if you won't allow that _she's_ likely to oblige us by leaving
this world, at anyrate you'll admit that there's always a goodish chance
that the husband-elect may run up against a French cannonball and get
out of the scrape _that_ way. Anyhow, we've come to the end of our
tether. The alternative's ruin. It's pretty black to windward, whichever
way you look at it, but one way spells ruin for the lot of us; the
other, at the worst, means disaster for only one. I vote we draw lots,
and the man who draws the shortest lot wins--er ... at least he marries
the lady," said the cheery-faced boy, with rather a rueful laugh.
"You'll laugh perhaps on the wrong side of your face before all's done.
But, all right. If we must, we must. You make ready the lots, Watty, and
I'll take first draw. Only, I think if the bad luck's mine, I'll slip
over the side some middle watch," said the senior middy miserably.
With haggard young faces two drew, leaving the third lot to the Scottish
boy.
"Thank Heaven!" cried the first, wiping his brow as he saw that his, at
least, was not a short lot. "It's yours, Watty, old boy," he said to the
middy from north of the Tweed.
"My God! what will my dear old mother say?" groaned the poor boy, with
face grey as his own Border hills in a November drizzle. "Promise me, on
your honour, both of you, to keep this miserable business a dead secret
for ever.... Well, I've got to face it. Bring the woman in, and let's
have it over and get aboard."
Watty Scott was a scion of a good Scottish Border family, a youth
careless and harum-scarum as the most typical of middies, but a
gentleman, and popular alike with officers and men. He was about
eighteen, had already distinguished himself in more than one brush with
the enemy, and was looked on as a most promising officer. But now...!
"Oh, little did my mother ken,
The day she cradled me,"
(might he have wailed), in what dire scrape the recklessness inherent in
her boy would land him.
"I _thought_ you'd take my terms," said the landlady, when she came into
the room. "Faith! an' I've got the pick o' the basket! Well, come along,
my joker; we'll be off to the parson. But you'll take my arm all the
way, d'ye see!--as is right an' nat'ral for bride and bridegroom. You
ain't agoin' to give _me_ the slip afore the knot's tied, I can tell
you. Not if _I_ knows it, young man."
Broken clergymen, broken by drink or what not, ready to go through
anything for a consideration, were never hard to find in those days in a
town such as Portsmouth, and all too soon the ceremony, binding enough,
so far as Watty could see, was over. Then the new-made wife insisted,
before the three lads left her, that she should stand them a good
dinner, and as much wine as they cared to drink to the health of bride
and bridegroom.
"An' now," she said to her husband ere the youngsters departed, "I aint
agoin' to send my man to sea with empty pockets. Put _that_ in your
purse!"
But Watty would have none of the five guineas she tried to force on him.
"Well, I think none the worse of you for that," she cried. "Come, give
us a kiss, at anyrate." And with a shudder Watty Scott saluted his
bride.
Never did the grey waters of the English Channel look more cheerless
than they appeared to one unhappy midshipman of H.M.S. _Sirius_ next
morning, as the frigate beat down channel in the teeth of a strong
westerly breeze; never before had life seemed to him a thing purposeless
and void of hope. "To have and to hold from this day forward, for better
for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and
to cherish, till death us do part." The words rang in his ears still,
with a solemnity that even the red-nosed, snuffy, broken-down parson who
hiccuped through the service had not been able to kill. But, God! the
irony of the thing--the ghastly mockery! _To love and to cherish till
death us do part_! Verily, the iron entered into his soul; day and night
the hideous burden crushed him. The castles in the air that, boylike, he
had builded were crumbled into dust. Was _this_ the end of all his
dreams? Well, at least there was that friendly cannon-ball to be prayed
for, or a French cutlass or pike in some boat expedition, if the Fates
were kind.
The frigate's orders were--Halifax with despatches; thereafter, the
West India Station for an indefinite time. Six or eight weeks at
Halifax, varied by some knocking about off the Nova Scotia coast, did
not tend to relax Watty's depression, but rather the contrary. For just
before the frigate took her departure from those latitudes a lately
received Portsmouth journal which reached the midshipmen's berth had
recorded the arrest on a serious charge of, amongst others, a woman
giving her name as "Mrs. Walter Scott, licensee of the Goat's Head
Tavern, Portsmouth." Now the Goat's Head Tavern was that little inn
where in an evil moment the three lads had taken up their abode before
the sailing of the _Sirius_, and to Watty it appeared as if his disgrace
must now be spread abroad by the four winds of heaven.
It was mental relief to get away out to sea, and to feel that now at
least there was again some probability of the excitement of an action.
To Bermuda, thence to Jamaica, were the orders; and surely in no part of
the world was a ship of war more certain of active employment. Those
were days removed by no great number of years from Rodney's famous
victory over de Grasse, and not yet had we completed the reduction of
the French West India Islands; the greatest glutton of fighting could
scarce fail to have his fill.
One night, after the frigate had left Bermuda, it had come on to blow
desperately hard from the north-west, and with every hour the gale
increased, till at length--when sail after sail, thundering and
threshing, had come in--the ship lay almost under bare poles, straining
in every timber and nosing her weather bow into the mountainous seas
that swept by at intervals, ere they roared away into the murk to
leeward.
It was the middle watch, and Watty had been standing for some time
holding on by the lee mizzen rigging, peering eagerly into the darkness.
"I've thought two or three times, sir, that I can see something to
leeward of us," he reported to the officer of the watch.
And presently the "something"--a mere patch of denser black in a
darkness emphasized more than relieved by the grey-white crests of
breaking seas--resolved itself into a large vessel, which as day broke
was seen to be a frigate, like themselves under the shortest of canvas,
and with all possible top-hamper down on deck. Pitching and rolling
heavily, she lay; sometimes, as a sea struck her, half buried in a
grey-green mountain of foam and flying spray that left her spouting
cascades of water from her scuppers; one moment, as she rose, heaving
her fore-foot clean out of the water, showing the glint of the copper on
her bottom; the next, plunging wildly down, till some mighty billow,
roaring aloft between the vessels, hid each from the other's ken as
effectually as if the ocean had swallowed them.