JULIA GETS INTO A PLEASANT PANDEMONIUM.
Now, it happened that honest Angus M’Guire and Donald M’Nair, two
brawny Highlanders, were that day busily occupied in distilling
a drop of good whisky, in a subterraneous distillery, to which
the hole wherein Gustavus had laid his wife, led by a covered and
concealed passage; and it was in no other than this very place that
Julia had been so plentifully supplied with the liquor by which
she was so often inebriated. Sitting by the mouth of the worm or
serpent, which gave forth drop by drop the poison, stronger and
more hurtful than ever came from the mouth of the Snake of Lerna,
they heard a strange noise on the ground over their heads, as
Gustavus was busy about the details of his interment, and shook
with unfeigned terror, as if they had been on the point of being
discovered in their illicit operations. By and by they heard a
rumbling in the mouth of the cavern, as if some one had been in
the act of descending, and, rising and seizing each a pistol and
a sword, they stood on the defensive, prepared to slay the first
gauger that should set his face into their subterraneous dominions.
But the never an exciseman appeared: in place of that, to them,
most fearful of all mortal beings, they saw the identical coffin in
which Julia M’Iver had been laid, fall with a heavy sound upon the
floor of their dark habitation.
Terror-struck, twenty times more than if they had seen the ghost
of a murdered exciseman, they stood with their hair forcing up
their bonnets on their head, and stared till their eyes seemed
ready to burst from the sockets, at the dreadful object of their
fears. A faint light glimmered through the cave, and was reflected
from the rows of white buttons with which the black vision was
studded; and all the horrid features of the grim apparition were
displayed by that kind of dim light by which they could be seen to
advantage. They could speak not a word to each other; and their
mutual looks excited by sympathy a greater mutual fear than ever;
and so they still stood and looked, and wondered, and would have
moved their bodies to take a closer survey, but could not for very
nervousness—albeit any one of them would have knocked a gauger
on the head in an instant. But it was clear, even to themselves,
that they could not thus stand staring at a coffin for ever; and
it is not unlikely that this prospective impossibility supplied
the place of courage; and so, Donald being the less timid of the
two, gradually approached and surveyed their extraordinary visiter.
Beckoning his friend Angus forward, he proceeded to force open the
lid.
“The corpse o’ Julia M’Iver, our goot customer,” said he, “as sure
as my name’s Tonald M’Nair!” And Angus, bending his head down, and
holding his hands up, acknowledged the apparent truth. “Murtered py
Custaphus, py Cot!” added he, “and puried here to hide the plack,
purning shame!”
And they sat down by the coffin, and stared at each other and at
the dead beauty, lost in deep cogitation as to what they should do.
Their thoughts both took the same direction.
“What is to pe done?” muttered they both at the same instant.
“We cannot inform, and we cannot take the pody to Custaphus,” again
said Donald; “for that would tiscover us.”
“To pe surely na,” said Angus; “put we can pury her, cannot we,
Tonald?”
“Ay, that we can,” answered the latter; “and that we will, too, as
surely as my grandmother was puried in the houf o’ Kepplemechan.”
“Ay, or as mine was puried in Fochapers kirkyard,” rejoined Angus;
“but we maun let the nicht fa’ first, or it may pe said that we
were the murterers o’ the puir cratur. Ochone! put this is a tam
pad world. We maun hae a quaich to keep up oor courage.”
And so they set about preparing themselves for the work they had
in prospect, by drinking of their own spirits by the side of the
coffin; every now and then looking in the face of Julia, and
lamenting the unhappy fate of their former visiter, with whom they
had drunk many a good bumper, and enjoyed much good fun and frolic.
In this occupation, and exchanging many a comely sentiment on the
wickedness of man, and the shortness and uncertainty of human life,
they passed several hours, until it should be dark enough for the
purpose of interring Julia in reality, which they would execute as
surely as ever mortal was consigned to dust. They had drunk till
their eyes began to reel in their heads, and till tears of mawkish
and drunken sentimentality were dropping on the face of their
merry boon companion, as she lay in her bier. A toast of exquisite
pathos—“Here’s to the good cratur’s soul then!” had just escaped
from Donald’s lips, when Julia opened her eyes, and, altogether
unconscious where she lay, obeyed the first impulse of her wakening
heart, by holding out her hand, and asking for a glass of the
whisky which she saw them drinking with so much good will. Twenty
ghosts in their winding sheets could not have produced a greater
sensation; for the two Highlanders threw from them their quaichs,
and, starting to their feet, flew, with a scream of terror that
might have been heard upon the surface of the earth itself, into
the farthest recesses of the dark abode.
“Heaven pe merciful to us!” they both muttered, as they crouched
down beside the stove, and eyed fearfully the moving corpse,
through the dim light that came from the half-concealed fire; and
their fears had a small chance of being removed or alleviated by
what they farther heard and saw; for, as they watched and trembled,
they witnessed the rising terrors of Julia herself, who, looking
around her, and seeing herself placed in the coffin, had never a
shadow of doubt that she was actually buried, and that she was in
the region appointed for the wicked daughters of men. She began
to groan piteously; and, being yet only half sober, mixed up her
thoughts of the lower regions with the feelings she cherished
on earth, in such a grotesque manner, that it would have been
impossible for an ordinary person to have heard her without at once
trembling and laughing.
“And am I, of a surety, here at the long run,” she muttered, “among
devils and devils’ dams, who will have never a qualm of mercy for
me any more than they have for their other victims, who have broken
the laws of the upper world?” And, sighing as deep as her stomach,
she paused and again soliloquised:—“But did I not see my good
friends, Angus M’Guire and Donald M’Nair, drinking by my side, even
at this moment? There cannot be a doubt on’t, and they will be dead
and damned too for a certainty; but, faith, I care not if I should
be here after all, if I fare as they were faring even now, when
I saw them with the quaichs in their very hands, as I have seen
before in the distillery in the wood of Balmaclallan, so often when
I was in the body. Ho! there! Donald M’Nair, it is no other than
Julia Briggs that calls you, and she is as thirsty as fire can make
her.”
The truth now began to dawn on the minds of the Highlanders. “She
is no more tead than I am, or any living pody,” cried Donald, as he
began to move from his dark hole. “I am coming, my tarling Julia;
and, py te Holy Virgin, you shall not want what ye are now asking
for!” And, pulling Angus along with him, he again approached the
coffin, where he saw his old friend looking up from her prostrate
position with a pair of as clear eyes as whisky ever illuminated.
“Are ye tead or living, Julia?” cried Angus.
“I cannot tell you till I get a quaich,” answered Julia; and the
medicine was on the instant administered by Donald, when all doubt
on the mysterious subject having been dispelled, her friends
lifted her from the coffin, and they set to work after their usual
manner, which was no other than indulging in numerous potations.
The recollection of Gustavus’s threat enabled her to explain
everything; and as they sat carousing and singing in great glee,
they laughed heartily at the circumstance of Gustavus having buried
his wife in a distillery, with the view of curing her of a love of
whisky.