of the corpse, she noticed these extraordinary proceedings on the part
of her husband. "Why do you lock up our five sons, when vengeance calls
them to Gilmanscleugh? and why ask ye for the bloody vest, which should
be the pennon to fly over the smoking ruins of the destroyer's tower? If
you are to stop revenge, lock up the mother with her sons; for my heart
beats with the pulsations of man's courage, and I will cease to feel as
a woman till this blood be avenged. If thou wilt not lead on our sons to
Gilmanscleugh, let me undertake the task; and mark well the issue of a
woman's foray, when a son's bloody doublet hangs on the point of the
spear."
"Recollect ye not your words, Mary?" answered Wat, hurriedly. "Said ye
not that Gilmanscleugh would serve for both our sons? That one lying
there is satisfied; by the powers of revenge, the other shall not be
disappointed. The doublet! come, wife, the doublet!--and see that you
give our sons meat enough, through the west hole of the strong-room, to
keep their blood warm and their hearts glowing for three days. Let our
dead Forester lie there for that time; but turn his head to
Gilmanscleugh. The doublet! come, quick!"
Mary could not understand the meaning of these words; but she well knew
that the resolutions of her husband, when determined, were founded on
prudence and principle, and beyond the affecting capabilities of mortal
man; so she proceeded to take from the body of her son the doublet,
which was stained with blood, and perforated in the right breast by the
sword which had deprived him of life. Having removed it, she handed it
to Walter, who, holding it up to the light, looked through the hole,
and, with that strange mixture of a peculiar humour with the deepest
seriousness of human nature for which he was remarkable, declared, with
a grim smile, that he saw through it the lands of Gilmanscleugh, and the
Harden arms over the door of the old tower; then, wrapping up the
vestment, he hurried to the outer court, and, binding it to the front of
his saddle, mounted, and clapping spurs to his horse, was, in a few
moments, away at a hard gallop over the hills.
Confused by these abrupt and incomprehensible proceedings, Mary had not
been able to make the necessary effort to get an explanation, though it
is doubtful if all her entreaties would have been successful in wringing
from the determined and cunning old chief what were his intentions.
Returning to the apartment where the dead body lay, she found there a
duty which would occupy the time till her husband returned--in watching
the corpse of her beloved Forester, and tracing in his rigid, pallid
features the traces of those expressions of his beautiful face which
used to extend so much influence over the hearts of his father and
mother, and bring love to him from all sides on the rapid wings of
sympathetic attraction. On one side lay the corpse she had to watch; at
the other were her five remaining sons, enclosed as prisoners, and
prevented from executing the revenge with which she burned, or extending
to her the comforting and assuasive assistance of their presence and
conversation. As she looked on the face of the corpse, she heard the
impatient murmurings of her sons, who, burning to get forth to satisfy
the yearnings of their hearts, demanded of her, through a small opening
in the door, what was the intention of their father in thus keeping them
from so just and necessary an object as the vindication of the honour of
Harden, and the taking of blood for blood.
"We shall not be balked of our revenge, mother," cried the youngest.
"The Forester's blood cries more loudly than the voice of our father.
Call the retainers, and break open the door, that we may get free.
Haste, good mother!"
"Haste! haste!" added other voices.
"I cannot disobey Harden's commands," replied she, "though the face of
this fair corpse seems to beckon me to the satisfaction of a mother's
heart, at the price of a wife's rebellion. My Forester's glazed eyes are
fixed on me, and say, 'Open, and let my brothers free, that my blood may
be avenged.' I cannot obey. Three days you must remain there--three days
must the Forester lie in his shroud--then will Harden be back, and he
will bring with him the bloody doublet to hang on the point of your
spears."
"Whither is our father gone?" rejoined the impatient youths.
"I know not, but these were his words," replied she. "I am to watch my
Forester's body, and feed you through the west bole, for three days."
"We cannot survive three days unrevenged, mother," said another. "We
will take on ourselves the responsibility of release. Send us Wat's
John, and he will break down this door. Bethink ye, good mother, that
Gilmanscleugh may fly, and the Forester's ghost may wander for twenty
moons in Harden's Glen, upbraiding his five brothers for not avenging
his death."
"I cannot disobey your father," again said she.
"Then we will force our freedom, mother," cried the third son.
"Disobedient boy, say not the word," answered she. "Wait the three days,
and, if you will, nurse during that time your fire; for, if I am not
deceived, your father will require of you as much avenging wrath as you
have to bestow, when his horn sounds again his return to Harden."
With difficulty did Mary prevail on the impetuous youths to refrain from
an effort to effect their freedom. For the three appointed days, she sat
in the room by the side of her dead son; and at every meal-hour she
handed in the food necessary for the sustenance of her prisoners. Nor
did she conceive that she had any title to rest from her watchful
labour, or to cease her care of the dead body, even during the hours of
night, till she saw his death avenged. The midnight lamp was regularly
trimmed, and hung upon the wall, that its glimmering flame might fall
upon the pale face of the youth, as he lay rolled up in the shroud which
his mother had prepared for him, while sitting by the bier. At the
solemn hour of midnight, she sat silent and sad, looked now in the face
of the dead, listened to hear if any sound of a horn without announced
the approach of her husband, or of a messenger from him, and then
inclined her ear, to catch the broken words of revenge muttered by her
sons in their sleep, or the strains of mournful lamentations for the
death of their brother, which the energy of their grief forced from them
at those intervals when their revenge was overcome by the more intense
feeling. Groans and sighs, muttered oaths, sobs, and expressions of
impatience, mixed or separate, told continually the workings of their
minds. The speech of the dreamer was often mixed with the conversation
of those awake; but so well acquainted was the mother with the sounds of
their voices, that she could distinguish the one from the other. The
question was often put by one who slept--"Are the three days past yet?"
and those awake gave him the answer he could not hear. Then some of them
seemed to clutch his neighbour in his dreams, and call out, that he had
now caught him, and would avenge on him the death of the Forester,
accompanying his speech with a struggle, as if he were in the act of
stabbing Gilmanscleugh. Another would call to the mother, to know the
hour; and, when she told him that it was midnight, or an hour past
midnight, he would sigh deeply, as if he felt the hours of the three
days winged with lead. Then again, a victim of nightmare groaned with
fear, at the vision of the Forester's ghost, and cried, that it would
not have long to walk the glen, for that the three days were fast on the
wing. The shrill scream of a passing eagle or solitary owl, wakening
those who slumbered in a half sleep, was mistaken for their father's
horn, and an appeal to the mother was required to rectify the mistake.
All these things passed in her hearing, and threw a gloom over her mind,
which was not relieved by the look which she every moment stole at the
dead face, as it shone white as the shroud in the light of the lamp: but
she stood the trial, and continued her watch. The beam of a deadly
revenge indicated the steadfastness with which she adhered to her
resolution never to rest till she knew that Gilmanscleugh had expiated
by his life the murder of her son.
Since the departure of Harden, no intelligence had come from him; and so
strange had been his conduct when he went away, that his wife had often
to combat the rising thought, that the fate of his favourite son had
unsettled his intellects, and driven him away from the scene of his
loss, in some wild dream of superstitious retribution. The locking up
of his sons was the very reverse of the conduct which his revengeful
nature might have dictated; and the taking with him the bloody doublet,
through the sword-hole in which he declared he saw the lands of
Gilmanscleugh his own, was far more like the act of a madman, than that
of one who had duties to perform to himself, to his wife and children,
on that sorrowful occasion, more serious and difficult than he had ever
yet been called upon to fulfil. These thoughts rising throughout the
dark night, when her ears were pained by the strange noises proceeding
from the excitement of her sons, and her eye had nothing to rest on but
the dead body of him who lay stretched by her side, stung her with
anguish, and filled her heart with boding anticipations of terror. The
third night was on the wing; and, though twelve o'clock had passed,
there was no appearance of her husband. Her sons had become more than
ordinarily restless, and said that, if their father did not make his
appearance in the morning, they would disregard all authority, and call
to the retainers to break down the door with battle-axes, and set them
at liberty. She heard them in silence, and trembled to communicate to
them the thoughts that had been passing through her mind as to the
sanity and safety of their father. In a little, the restless prisoners
began to fall over into their troubled sleep, and the moon, newly risen,
sent in through the small windows a bright beam, that lay on the face of
the corpse. She had wrought up her mind almost to a conviction that her
husband had, in a fit of madness, thrown himself into the Borthwick, or
otherwise committed suicide, and figured to her diseased fancy his body
placed alongside of her son's, and with that same pale beam resting on
it, and exhibiting to her the features which she had so long looked on
with delight, made rigid by the grasp of death. Every sound was now
hushed, with the exception of the occasional broken mutterings of her
sons, and the notes of the winged inhabitants of the upper parts of the
tower, who cawed their hoarse omens to the midnight wanderer in the
forest. Every thought that rose in her mind was charged with a double
portion of awe; and cold shivers, in opposition to her efforts to be
firm, ran over her from head to heel, and precipitated her farther and
farther into the depths of her fancied evils. Superstition might have
borrowed a thousand aids from the circumstances in which she was placed;
but, though she was beyond the influence of the direct operation of that
power, the thoughts of evil which she had some reason for indulging,
borrowed a part of their dark hue from the clouds in which the mystic
goddess is generally enshrined: the individual would indeed have been
more than woman who could have sat in the situation in which she was
placed, and measured her evils with the gauge of calm reason.
While sunk in these gloomy reflections, a shrill blast of a horn
reverberated among the hills. "That is our father's horn!" cried the
sons, who awoke with the sound; and Mary herself knew the signal of the
approach of her husband. She rose from the side of the corpse, and,
looking forth from the window, saw, by the moon's light, Harden himself
hastening towards the tower. In a moment he bounded from his horse, and
in another he appeared before his wife.
"To horse! to horse! my sons!" he shouted, as he came forward. "Now for
Gilmanscleugh, with the fire and the sword of Harden's revenge!"
A loud shout from the chamber where the sons lay announced the relief
which this statement brought to their frenzied minds. The door was
opened, and the prisoners were set at liberty. Without waiting for
refreshment, the old chief, having cast a look on the dead body, hurried
with his liberated sons to the court, where every retainer was summoned
to attend his master. A large party was assembled in a very short time,
and, with the moon as their guide, the cavalcade, making the castle ring
with Harden's war-cry, issued with rapid steps out of the ballium, and
took the road to Gilmanscleugh. They arrived at the place of their
destination while the moon shone still clear in the heavens; and
Harden's sons observed that their father now took no precautions, as was
usual in his night attacks, to prevent the assailed party from knowing
his approach. He marched them silently, deliberately, and boldly up in
front of the tower of Gilmanscleugh, where Scott, who had fondly
imagined that his act had not been traced to him, was residing in a
security that had been daily increasing, but was now so soon to be
ended. The whole party were ranged in front of the devoted tower, and
Harden's horn was sounded for entrance. Scott appeared at the window,
and asked the pleasure of Harden, and the purpose of his call at that
unusual hour, though he well knew to what he owed the fearful visit.
"I have a paper, under the king's hand, to read to thee, Gilmanscleugh,"
replied Harden.
"We had better read it in the mornin," replied Scott. "Our lights are
out in the tower. I will wait ye at yer ain time; but let it be in the
licht o' day."
"The moon is Harden's time," rejoined the chief. "If thou wilt not let
us in to read it, here, in the light of this torch, brought for the
occasion, thou shalt hear the words of majesty. I am only the royal
commissioner, and must do my duty."
The torch was held up, and Harden calling forth one of his retainers,
who had been a clerk in a convent, ordered him to read a royal charter
which he put into his hands. The man obeyed, and read the document which
purported, in the few words of these old land rights, that the king, for
the love and favour he bore to Walter Scott of Harden, had conveyed and
settled upon him and his heirs the lands, tower, and appurtenances of
Gilmanscleugh, which formerly belonged to William Scott, but had fallen
to the crown by escheat, in consequence of the constructive rebellion of
the said William Scott, in killing the son of Harden, known by the name
of the Forester, when engaged in hunting on his father's lands. The
charter gave, in addition, full power to the said Walter Scott to take
immediate possession of the property, and to adopt all necessary steps
for ejecting the former proprietor and his family from the same.
"Thou hast heard read the king's writ," cried the chief. "What sayest
thou to the royal authority? I come here peaceably to demand the
possession of Gilmanscleugh. If you will consent to depart, and give me
up the key of the tower, I will pass my honour for the safety of thee
and thine. If not, I will enforce the king's authority. Take a
quarter-of-an-hour to decide. I will wait the decision."
This announcement produced surprise on all hands, as well to the unhappy
proprietor, who was to be deprived of his lands that had come to him
from his ancestors, as to the sons of Harden, who were to be deprived of
that species of revenge they had burned for, and considered to be the
only one suited to the occasion which called for it--the life of the
slayer. While Gilmanscleugh retired to consider of the proposal, the
sons of Harden crowded round him, and implored him to retract his
condition of extending safety to the person of the murderer of their
brother. The old chief--who had already counted all the advantages and
disadvantages of the bargain, and saw how much better were the broad
acres of Gilmanscleugh, which the king had given him for the loss of his
son, than the life of its master, which, although he took, he could make
nothing of, seeing that it would vanish in the act of capture--replied
calmly, to their warm entreaties, that the lands were his revenge, and a
very good revenge, too; but he promised them that, if Scott did not
immediately comply with his request, they would have their pleasure of
him and his whole household, to kill, or wound, or burn, or hang, as
they chose. This addition roused the spirits and restored the hopes of
the sons, who could not suppose that a man would give up his property in
the easy manner anticipated by their father. Yet so it turned out; for
in a short time Scott appeared again, and stated that, upon condition of
him and his household being permitted to go forth safe and free, he
would instantly deliver to him the key of the tower. The bargain was
struck; and in a short time the extraordinary scene was witnessed of a
whole family leaving the home of their fathers on a quarter-of-an-hour's
notice, and wandering away to beg a habitation and a meal from those who
were their dependants. Scott's wife had in her arms a sucking child, and
three other children held by her garments, and cried bitterly as they
passed on through the fierce troop, who looked the daggers of a
disappointed revenge. A sister of his wife's tended a sickly son of
Scott's, who was borne forth on a board carried by two of his retainers;
and there was seen, hobbling along, with a long piked staff in her hand,
the laird's mother, who had gone to Gilmanscleugh sixty years before,
and born in it seven sons and three daughters. Then came Scott himself,
with the keys in his hand, at the sight of whom Harden's sons moved
involuntarily forward, as the instinctive desire of revenge for a moment
overcame the command of their father. The keys were handed forth in dead
silence; and the servants of the ejected laird wiped their eyes as they
beheld the melancholy scene. They wandered slowly and reluctantly away.
Harden looked back as the last of them were disappearing in the wood.
"Revenge enough," he muttered--"revenge enough, and to spare." He then
entered and took possession of the tower, in which he left as many of
his men as were sufficient to guard it. He then returned with his sons
and a part of his troop to Harden, where he found Mary Scott still
sitting by the side of her dead son, in conformity with a custom among
the Borderers, derived from the land of Odin, that the corpse of a
murdered relative should not be committed to the earth till his death
was avenged. She looked up in the face of Harden as he entered, and the
blue eye of the Flower of Yarrow searched wistfully for tokens of a deed
of stern retribution. Such is the power of custom and education, that
one of the fairest of women, who, if she had lived in the nineteenth
century, might have been a Lady Fanny, and shrunk, according to fashion,
from the sight of a murdered worm, deemed it necessary, from duty, and
felt it as consonant to the feelings of her sex, to look her
disappointment at not observing, on the clothes or arms of her husband
and sons, the signs of a wrong righted by blood.
"Is it thus that Harden comes, with bright steel and unsullied clothes,
from the house of the murderer of his fairest son?" cried she. "Look at
that corpse, and blush deep as the crimson that dyes the lily-lire of
our boy. Is there no vengeance, Walter? Is there no satisfaction, my
sons?"
"Whether, Mary," replied Harden, "would you accept a charter to the
lands of Gilmanscleugh to Harden and his heirs for ever, or the life's
blood of its master, as a satisfaction for the death of our boy who lies
there, killed by his hand?"
"I would rather enjoy the lands," replied she, "and let the murderer
enjoy, if he can, the life that is spared to him. Our revenge is double;
for, while life may be painful to him, the lands will yield us pleasure
in after years."
"Here, then," said he, "is a charter to the lands of
Gilmanscleugh"--holding out the parchment. "I got it from the king as my
satisfaction; and now we may indeed say, as you strangely predicted,
that Gilmanscleugh hath served both of our sons."
On the following day, the unfortunate son of Harden was buried; and,
long afterwards, the lands of Gilmanscleugh remained in the family under
the name of Harden's Revenge.
THE PHYSIOGNOMIST'S TALE.
Hill and valley were clad in the cold and glistening mantle of winter,
and the snow floated softly, though chillingly, against the cheek of a
young and apparently weary traveller, who was plodding his way along the
high road towards Annan. He was a youth of about nineteen, tall and
good-looking, apparently of the labouring class, and carried a small
bundle on a stick over his shoulder. I happened to be walking homewards
in the same direction, and had been for some time watching him with
great interest--my attention having been excited by his handsome and
intelligent countenance, and by the expression of deep and settled
sorrow which clouded it. Absorbed in the gloom of his own thoughts, he
seemed not to heed the cold, and bleak, and desolate scene around him;
or perhaps it might be more congenial to his feelings than the brightest
landscape of summer; for who has not felt, in the first hours of grief
and deprivation, a morbid seeking after, and clinging to, objects which
serve to cherish and keep alive our feelings of gloom and depression? He
started, as if awakened from a dream, when I addressed him with some
trifling remark upon the weather; but there was something in the tone of
his voice, when he answered me, which increased my prepossession in his
favour. After some trifling conversation, I took an opportunity to
remark, and to express my sympathy for, his evident dejection, at the
same time hinting my wish to know the cause of it, and, if possible, to
remove it. Many of my readers will no doubt think this sudden and
uncalled-for interest in a perfect stranger romantic and injudicious;
but I have rather Quixotic opinions on many subjects, and, among others,
is a love of judging of character by countenance; and if I choose to
run the risk of "paying for my whistle," I do but follow in the
footsteps of wiser and better men. Events proved, as the reader will
learn in the course of this story, that in this instance, at least, my
judgment had not deceived me. The young man was evidently affected by
the interest which I seemed to feel in him; and, after some little
hesitation, said, with a strong Roxburghshire accent, "I feel grateful
for your kindness, sir; yours is the first friendly voice I have heard
since I left home, and the accents of sympathy fall as soft upon the
wounded spirit as the snow-flakes on the warm ground, melting as they
fall."