SHOWS THAT THE LOSS OF A HORSE'S SHOE MAY BE A SERIOUS INCONVENIENCE
The manner and air of Waverley, but, above all, the glittering contents
of his purse, and the indifference with which he seemed to regard
them, somewhat overawed his companion, and deterred him from making any
attempts to enter upon conversation. His own reflections were, moreover,
agitated by various surmises, and by plans of self-interest, with which
these were intimately connected. The travellers journeyed, therefore,
in silence, until it was interrupted by the annunciation, on the part of
the guide, that his 'naig had lost a fore-foot shoe, which, doubtless,
his honour would consider it was his part to replace.'
This was what lawyers call a FISHING QUESTION, calculated to ascertain
how far Waverley was disposed to submit to petty imposition. 'My part
to replace your horse's shoe, you rascal!' said Waverley, mistaking the
purport of the intimation.
'Indubitably,' answered Mr. Cruickshanks; 'though there was no preceese
clause to that effect, it canna be expected that I am to pay for
the casualties whilk may befall the puir naig while in your honour's
service.--Nathless, if your honour--'
'Oh, you mean I am to pay the farrier; but where shall we find one?'
Rejoiced at discerning there would be no objection made on the part of
his temporary master, Mr. Cruickshanks assured him that Cairnvreckan,
a village which they were about to enter, was happy in an excellent
blacksmith; 'but as he was a professor, he would drive a nail for no
man on the Sabbath, or kirk-fast, unless it were in a case of absolute
necessity, for which he always charged sixpence each shoe.' The most
important part of this communication, in the opinion of the speaker,
made a very slight impression on the hearer, who only internally
wondered what college this veterinary professor belonged to; not aware
that the word was used to denote any person who pretended to uncommon
sanctity of faith and manner.
As they entered the village of Cairnvreckan, they speedily distinguished
the smith's house. Being also a PUBLIC, it was two stories high, and
proudly reared its crest, covered with grey slate, above the thatched
hovels by which it was surrounded. The adjoining smithy betokened none
of the Sabbatical silence and repose which Ebenezer had augured from the
sanctity of his friend. On the contrary, hammer clashed and anvil rang,
the bellows groaned, and the whole apparatus of Vulcan appeared to be
in full activity. Nor was the labour of a rural and pacific nature. The
master smith, benempt, as his sign intimated, John Mucklewrath, with two
assistants, toiled busily in arranging, repairing, and furbishing old
muskets, pistols, and swords, which lay scattered around his workshop
in military confusion. The open shed, containing the forge, was crowded
with persons who came and went as if receiving and communicating
important news; and a single glance at the aspect of the people who
traversed the street in haste, or stood assembled in groups, with
eyes elevated, and hands uplifted, announced that some extraordinary
intelligence was agitating the public mind of the municipality of
Cairnvreckan. 'There is some news,' said mine host of the Candlestick,
pushing his lantern-jawed visage and bare-boned nag rudely forward into
the crowd--'there is some news; and if it please my Creator, I will
forthwith obtain speirings thereof.'
Waverley, with better regulated curiosity than his attendant's,
dismounted, and gave his horse to a boy who stood idling near. It arose,
perhaps, from the shyness of his character in early youth, that he felt
dislike at applying to a stranger even for casual information, without
previously glancing at his physiognomy and appearance. While he looked
about in order to select the person with whom he would most willingly
hold communication, the buzz around saved him in some degree the trouble
of interrogatories. The names of Lochiel, Clanronald, Glengarry, and
other distinguished Highland Chiefs, among whom Vich Ian Vohr was
repeatedly mentioned, were as familiar in men's mouths as household
words; and from the alarm generally expressed, he easily conceived that
their descent into the Lowlands, at the head of their armed tribes, had
either already taken place, or was instantly apprehended.
Ere Waverley could ask particulars, a strong, large-boned, hard-featured
woman, about forty, dressed as if her clothes had been flung on with
a pitchfork, her cheeks flushed with a scarlet red where they were
not smutted with soot and lamp-black, jostled through the crowd, and,
brandishing high a child of two years old, which she danced in her
arms, without regard to its screams of terror, sang forth, with all her
might,--
'Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling,
Charlie is my darling,
The young Chevalier!
'D'ye hear what's come ower ye now,' continued the virago, 'ye whingeing
Whig carles? D'ye hear wha's coming to cow yer cracks?
Little wot ye wha's coming,
Little wot ye wha's coming,
A' the wild Macraws are coming.'
The Vulcan of Cairnvreckan, who acknowledged his Venus in this exulting
Bacchante, regarded her with a grim and ire-foreboding countenance,
while some of the senators of the village hastened to interpose.
'Whisht, gudewife; is this a time, or is this a day, to be singing your
ranting fule sangs in?--a time when the wine of wrath is poured out
without mixture in the cup of indignation, and a day when the land
should give testimony against popery, and prelacy, and quakerism, and
independency, and supremacy, and erastianism, and antinomianism, and a'
the errors of the church?'
'And that's a' your Whiggery,' re-echoed the Jacobite heroine; 'that's
a' your Whiggery, and your presbytery, ye cut-lugged, graning carles!
What! d'ye think the lads wi' the kilts will care for yer synods and
yer presbyteries, and yer buttock-mail, and yer stool o' repentance?
Vengeance on the black face o't! Mony an honester woman's been set upon
it than streeks doon beside ony Whig in the country. I mysell'--
Here John Mucklewrath, who dreaded her entering upon a detail of
personal experience, interposed his matrimonial authority. 'Gae hame,
and be d-- (that I should say sae), and put on the sowens for supper.'
'And you, ye doil'd dotard,' replied his gentle helpmate, her wrath,
which had hitherto wandered abroad over the whole assembly, being at
once and violently impelled into its natural channel, 'ye stand
there hammering dog-heads for fules that will never snap them at a
Highlandman, instead, of earning bread for your family, and shoeing this
winsome young gentleman's horse that's just come frae the north! I'se
warrant him nane of your whingeing King George folk, but a gallant
Gordon, at the least o' him.'
The eyes of the assembly were now turned upon Waverley, who took the
opportunity to beg the smith to shoe his guide's horse with all speed,
as he wished to proceed on his journey;--for he had heard enough to make
him sensible that there would be danger in delaying long in this place.
The smith's eye rested on him with a look of displeasure and suspicion,
not lessened by the eagerness with which his wife enforced Waverley's
mandate. 'D'ye hear what the weel-favoured young gentleman says, ye
drunken ne'er-do-good?'
And what may your name be, sir?' quoth Mucklewrath.
'It is of no consequence to you, my friend, provided I pay your labour.'
'But it may be of consequence to the state, sir,' replied an old farmer,
smelling strongly of whisky and peat-smoke; 'and I doubt we maun delay
your journey till you have seen the Laird.'
'You certainly,' said Waverley, haughtily, 'will find it both difficult
and dangerous to detain me, unless you can produce some proper
authority.'
There was a pause and a whisper among the crowd--'Secretary Murray;'
'Lord Lewis Gordon;' 'Maybe the Chevalier himsell!' Such were the
surmises that passed hurriedly among them, and there was obviously an
increased disposition to resist Waverley's departure. He attempted to
argue mildly with them, but his voluntary ally, Mrs. Mucklewrath, broke
in upon and drowned his expostulations, taking his part with an abusive
violence, which was all set down to Edward's account by those on whom it
was bestowed. 'YE'LL stop ony gentleman that's the Prince's freend?'
for she too, though with other feelings, had adopted the general opinion
respecting Waverley. 'I daur ye to touch him,' spreading abroad her long
and muscular fingers, garnished with claws which a vulture might have
envied. 'I'll set my ten commandments in the face o' the first loon that
lays a finger on him.'
'Gae hame, gudewife, quoth the farmer aforesaid; 'it wad better set you
to be nursing the gudeman's bairns than to be deaving us here.'
'HIS bairns!' retorted the amazon, regarding her husband with a grin of
ineffable contempt--'HIS bairns!
O gin ye were dead, gudeman,
And a green turf on your head, gudeman!
Then I would ware my widowhood
Upon a ranting Highlandman.'
This canticle, which excited a suppressed titter among the younger part
of the audience, totally overcame the patience of the taunted man of the
anvil. 'Deil be in me but I'll put this het gad down her throat!' cried
he, in an ecstasy of wrath, snatching a bar from the forge; and he might
have executed his threat, had he not been withheld by a part of the mob;
while the rest endeavoured to force the termagant out of his presence.
Waverley meditated a retreat in the confusion, but his horse was nowhere
to be seen. At length he observed, at some distance, his faithful
attendant, Ebenezer, who, as soon as he had perceived the turn matters
were likely to take, had withdrawn both horses from the press, and,
mounted on the one, and holding the other, answered the loud and
repeated calls of Waverley for his horse--'Na, na! if ye are nae friend
to kirk and the king, and are detained as siccan a person, ye maun
answer to honest men of the country for breach of contract; and I maun
keep the naig and the walise for damage and expense, in respect my
horse and mysell will lose to-morrow's day's-wark, besides the afternoon
preaching.'
Edward, out of patience, hemmed in and hustled by the rabble on every
side, and every moment expecting personal violence, resolved to
try measures of intimidation, and at length drew a pocket-pistol,
threatening, on the one hand, to shoot whomsoever dared to stop him,
and, on the other, menacing Ebenezer with a similar doom, if he stirred
a foot with the horses. The sapient Partridge says, that one man with a
pistol is equal to a hundred unarmed, because, though he can shoot but
one of the multitude, yet no one knows but that he himself may be that
luckless individual. The levy en masse of Cairnvreckan would therefore
probably have given way, nor would Ebenezer, whose natural paleness had
waxed three shades more cadaverous, have ventured to dispute a mandate
so enforced, had not the Vulcan of the village, eager to discharge upon
some more worthy object the fury which his helpmate had provoked, and
not ill satisfied to find such an object in Waverley, rushed at him with
the red-hot bar of iron, with such determination as made the discharge
of his pistol an act of self-defence. The unfortunate man fell; and
while Edward, thrilled with a natural horror at the incident, neither
had presence of mind to unsheathe his sword nor to draw his remaining
pistol, the populace threw themselves upon him, disarmed him, and were
about to use him with great violence, when the appearance of a venerable
clergyman, the pastor of the parish, put a curb on their fury.
This worthy man (none of the Goukthrapples or Rentowels) maintained his
character with the common people, although he preached the practical
fruits of Christian faith, as well as its abstract tenets, and was
respected by the higher orders, notwithstanding he declined soothing
their speculative errors by converting the pulpit of the gospel into a
school of heathen morality. Perhaps it is owing to this mixture of faith
and practice in his doctrine, that, although his memory has formed a
sort of era in the annals of Cairnvreckan, so that the parishioners, to
denote what befell Sixty Years since, still say it happened 'in good Mr.
Morton's time,' I have never been able to discover which he belonged to,
the evangelical, or the moderate party in the kirk. Nor do I hold the
circumstance of much moment, since, in my own remembrance, the one was
headed by an Erskine, the other by a Robertson. [The Rev. John Erskine,
D.D., an eminent Scottish divine, and a most excellent man, headed
the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland at the time when the
celebrated Dr. Robertson, the historian, was the leader of the Moderate
party. These two distinguished persons were colleagues in the Old Grey
Friars' Church, Edinburgh; and, however much they differed in church
politics, preserved the most perfect harmony as private friends, and as
clergymen serving the same cure.]
Mr. Morton had been alarmed by the discharge of the pistol, and the
increasing hubbub around the smithy. His first attention, after he had
directed the bystanders to detain Waverley, but to abstain from injuring
him, was turned to the body of Mucklewrath, over which his wife, in a
revulsion of feeling, was weeping, howling, and tearing her elf-locks,
in a state little short of distraction. On raising up the smith, the
first discovery was, that he was alive; and the next, that he was likely
to live as long as if he had never heard the report of a pistol in his
life. He had made a narrow escape, however; the bullet had grazed his
head, and stunned him for a moment or two, which trance terror and
confusion of spirit had prolonged, somewhat longer. He now arose
to demand vengeance on the person of Waverley, and with difficulty
acquiesced in the proposal of Mr. Morton, that he should be carried
before the laird, as a justice of peace, and placed at his disposal. The
rest of the assistants unanimously agreed to the measure recommended;
even Mrs. Mucklewrath, who had begun to recover from her hysterics,
whimpered forth, 'She wadna say naething against what the minister
proposed; he was e'en ower gude for his trade, and she hoped to see him
wi' a dainty decent bishop's gown on his back; a comelier sight than
your Geneva cloaks and bands, I wis.'
All controversy being thus laid aside, Waverley, escorted by the whole
inhabitants of the village who were not bed-ridden, was conducted to the
house of Cairnvreckan, which was about half a mile distant.