Guy Mannering, a young Englishman traveling through Scotland, stopped
one night at the home of the Laird of Ellangowan. When the Laird
learned that the young man had studied astrology, he begged him to
cast the horoscope of his son, who had been born that night. What was
Mannering's dismay to find that two catastrophes overhung the lad,
one at his fifth, and the other at his twenty-first year! He told the
father, however, that he might be warned; and later went his way.
The fortunes of the Laird of Ellangowan, Godfrey Bertram, waned
rapidly. In addition to this, his son, Harry, at the age of five, was
kidnapped. It was impossible to learn whether the child was alive or
dead. The boy's mother died from the shock; and some years later the
Laird himself followed her, leaving his daughter Lucy penniless.
In the meanwhile, Guy Mannering had become Colonel Mannering. He had
married and had a daughter, Julia. She had fallen in love with a young
officer, named Vanbeest Brown, who had served in India under Colonel
Mannering. The colonel objected to him as a suitor, because of the
obscurity of his birth.
When things were at their worst for Lucy Bertram, Colonel Mannering
returned to England. Accidentally hearing of the straits to which she
had been reduced, he at once invited her and her guardian to make their
home with him and his daughter Julia.
Captain Brown followed the Mannerings to England; and finally he
proved to be the long lost Harry Bertram, brother of Lucy. He had been
abducted with the help of Meg Merrilies, a gypsy, and some smugglers,
at the instigation of a man named Glossin, once agent for the Laird of
Ellangowan, who had hoped to get possession of the Laird's property.
He finally succeeded in this; but, after his crime was discovered, he
died a violent death in prison. Bertram had been kidnapped and taken to
Holland, where the name of Vanbeest Brown had been given him.
Meg Merrilies is regarded as one of the great characters of fiction.
"The fairy bride of Sir Gawaine, while under the influence of the
spell of her wicked stepmother, was more decrepit, probably, and what
is commonly called more ugly, than Meg Merrilies; but I doubt if she
possessed that wild sublimity which an excited imagination communicated
to features marked and expressive in their own peculiar character, and
to the gestures of a form which, her sex considered, might be termed
gigantic. Accordingly, the Knights of the Round Table did not recoil
with more terror from the apparition of the loathly lady placed between
'an oak and a green holly,' than Lucy Bertram and Julia Mannering
did from the appearance of this Galwegian sibyl upon the common of
Ellangowan.
"'For God's sake,' said Julia, pulling her purse, 'give that dreadful
woman something, and bid her go away,'
"'I cannot,' said Bertram: 'I must not offend her.'
"'What keeps you here?' said Meg, exalting the harsh and rough tones
of her hollow voice. 'Why do you not follow? Must your hour call you
twice? Do you remember your oath?--were it at kirk or market, wedding
or burial,'--and she held high her skinny forefinger in a menacing
attitude....
"Almost stupefied with surprise and fear, the young ladies watched
with anxious looks the course of Bertram, his companion, and their
extraordinary guide. Her tall figure moved across the wintry heath
with steps so swift, so long, and so steady, that she appeared rather
to glide than to walk. Bertram and Dinmont, both tall men, apparently
scarce equaled her in height, owing to her longer dress and high
headgear. She proceeded straight across the common, without turning
aside to the winding path by which passengers avoided the inequalities
and little rills that traversed it in different directions. Thus the
diminishing figures often disappeared from the eye as they dived into
such broken ground, and again ascended to sight when they were past the
hollow. There was something frightful and unearthly, as it were, in the
rapid and undeviating course which she pursued, undeterred by any of
the impediments which usually incline a traveler from the direct path.
Her way was as straight, and nearly as swift, as that of a bird through
the air. At length they reached those thickets of natural wood which
extended from the skirts of the common towards the glades and brook of
Derneleugh, and were there lost to the view."
"Guy Mannering" was published in 1815, the second of the Waverley
novels to appear. It is said to have been the result of six weeks'
work. There are less than forty characters in the book, and the plot is
not very complicated.
[Illustration: EFFIE DEANS AND GEORDIE--"HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN"
COURTESY, THE PAGE COMPANY
FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR J. E. MILLAIS]