Is she a Capulet?
O dear account! my life is my foe’s debt.
SHAKESPEARE
The Lord Keeper walked for nearly a quarter of a mile in profound
silence. His daughter, naturally timid, and bred up in those ideas of
filial awe and implicit obedience which were inculcated upon the youth
of that period, did not venture to interrupt his meditations.
“Why do you look so pale, Lucy?” said her father, turning suddenly
round and breaking silence.
According to the ideas of the time, which did not permit a young woman
to offer her sentiments on any subject of importance unless required to
do so, Lucy was bound to appear ignorant of the meaning of all that had
passed betwixt Alice and her father, and imputed the emotion he had
observed to the fear of the wild cattle which grazed in that part of
the extensive chase through which they were now walking.
Of these animals, the descendants of the savage herds which anciently
roamed free in the Caledonian forests, it was formerly a point of state
to preserve a few in the parks of the Scottish nobility. Specimens
continued within the memory of man to be kept at least at three houses
of distinction—Hamilton, namely, Drumlanrig, and Cumbernauld. They had
degenerated from the ancient race in size and strength, if we are to
judge from the accounts of old chronicles, and from the formidable
remains frequently discovered in bogs and morasses when drained and
laid open. The bull had lost the shaggy honours of his mane, and the
race was small and light made, in colour a dingy white, or rather a
pale yellow, with black horns and hoofs. They retained, however, in
some measure, the ferocity of their ancestry, could not be domesticated
on account of their antipathy to the human race, and were often
dangerous if approached unguardedly, or wantonly disturbed. It was this
last reason which has occasioned their being extirpated at the places
we have mentioned, where probably they would otherwise have been
retained as appropriate inhabitants of a Scottish woodland, and fit
tenants for a baronial forest. A few, if I mistake not, are still
preserved at Chillingham Castle, in Northumberland, the seat of the
Earl of Tankerville.
It was to her finding herself in the vicinity of a group of three or
four of these animals, that Lucy thought proper to impute those signs
of fear which had arisen in her countenance for a different reason. For
she had been familiarised with the appearance of the wild cattle during
her walks in the chase; and it was not then, as it may be now, a
necessary part of a young lady’s demeanour to indulge in causeless
tremors of the nerves. On the present occasion, however, she speedily
found cause for real terror.
Lucy had scarcely replied to her father in the words we have mentioned,
and he was just about to rebuke her supposed timidity, when a bull,
stimulated either by the scarlet colour of Miss Ashton’s mantle, or by
one of those fits of capricious ferocity to which their dispositions
are liable, detached himself suddenly from the group which was feeding
at the upper extremity of a grassy glade, that seemed to lose itself
among the crossing and entangled boughs. The animal approached the
intruders on his pasture ground, at first slowly, pawing the ground
with his hoof, bellowing from time to time, and tearing up the sand
with his horns, as if to lash himself up to rage and violence.
The Lord Keeper, who observed the animal’s demeanour, was aware that he
was about to become mischievous, and, drawing his daughter’s arm under
his own, began to walk fast along the avenue, in hopes to get out of
his sight and his reach. This was the most injudicious course he could
have adopted, for, encouraged by the appearance of flight, the bull
began to pursue them at full speed. Assailed by a danger so imminent,
firmer courage than that of the Lord Keeper might have given way. But
paternal tenderness, “love strong as death,” sustained him. He
continued to support and drag onward his daughter, until her fears
altogether depriving her of the power of flight, she sunk down by his
side; and when he could no longer assist her to escape, he turned round
and placed himself betwixt her and the raging animal, which, advancing
in full career, its brutal fury enhanced by the rapidity of the
pursuit, was now within a few yards of them. The Lord Keeper had no
weapons; his age and gravity dispensed even with the usual appendage of
a walking sword—could such appendage have availed him anything.
It seemed inevitable that the father or daughter, or both, should have
fallen victims to the impending danger, when a shot from the
neighbouring thicket arrested the progress of the animal. He was so
truly struck between the junction of the spine with the skull, that the
wound, which in any other part of his body might scarce have impeded
his career, proved instantly fatal. Stumbling forward with a hideous
bellow, the progressive force of his previous motion, rather than any
operation of his limbs, carried him up to within three yards of the
astonished Lord Keeper, where he rolled on the ground, his limbs
darkened with the black death-sweat, and quivering with the last
convulsions of muscular motion.
Lucy lay senseless on the ground, insensible of the wonderful
deliverance which she had experience. Her father was almost equally
stupefied, so rapid and unexpected had been the transition from the
horrid death which seemed inevitable to perfect security. He gazed on
the animal, terrible even in death, with a species of mute and confused
astonishment, which did not permit him distinctly to understand what
had taken place; and so inaccurate was his consciousness of what had
passed, that he might have supposed the bull had been arrested in its
career by a thunderbolt, had he not observed among the branches of the
thicket the figure of a man, with a short gun or musquetoon in his
hand.
This instantly recalled him to a sense of their situation: a glance at
his daughter reminded him of the necessity of procuring her assistance.
He called to the man, whom he concluded to be one of his foresters, to
give immediate attention to Miss Ashton, while he himself hastened to
call assistance. The huntsman approached them accordingly, and the Lord
Keeper saw he was a stranger, but was too much agitated to make any
farther remarks. In a few hurried words he directed the shooter, as
stronger and more active than himself, to carry the young lady to a
neighbouring fountain, while he went back to Alice’s hut to procure
more aid.
The man to whose timely interference they had been so much indebted did
not seem inclined to leave his good work half finished. He raised Lucy
from the ground in his arms, and conveying her through the glades of
the forest by paths with which he seemed well acquainted, stopped not
until he laid her in safety by the side of a plentiful and pellucid
fountain, which had been once covered in, screened and decorated with
architectural ornaments of a Gothic character. But now the vault which
had covered it being broken down and riven, and the Gothic font ruined
and demolished, the stream burst forth from the recess of the earth in
open day, and winded its way among the broken sculpture and moss-grown
stones which lay in confusion around its source.
Tradition, always busy, at least in Scotland, to grace with a legendary
tale a spot in itself interesting, had ascribed a cause of peculiar
veneration to this fountain. A beautiful young lady met one of the
Lords of Ravenswood while hunting near this spot, and, like a second
Egeria, had captivated the affections of the feudal Numa. They met
frequently afterwards, and always at sunset, the charms of the nymph’s
mind completing the conquest which her beauty had begun, and the
mystery of the intrigue adding zest to both. She always appeared and
disappeared close by the fountain, with which, therefore, her lover
judged she had some inexplicable connexion. She placed certain
restrictions on their intercourse, which also savoured of mystery. They
met only once a week—Friday was the appointed day—and she explained to
the Lord of Ravenswood that they were under the necessity of separating
so soon as the bell of a chapel, belonging to a hermitage in the
adjoining wood, now long ruinous, should toll the hour of vespers. In
the course of his confession, the Baron of Ravenswood entrusted the
hermit with the secret of this singular amour, and Father Zachary drew
the necessary and obvious consequence that his patron was enveloped in
the toils of Satan, and in danger of destruction, both to body and
soul. He urged these perils to the Baron with all the force of monkish
rhetoric, and described, in the most frightful colours, the real
character and person of the apparently lovely Naiad, whom he hesitated
not to denounce as a limb of the kingdom of darkness. The lover
listened with obstinate incredulity; and it was not until worn out by
the obstinacy of the anchoret that he consented to put the state and
condition of his mistress to a certain trial, and for that purpose
acquiesced in Zachary’s proposal that on their next interview the
vespers bell should be rung half an hour later than usual. The hermit
maintained and bucklered his opinion, by quotations from _Malleus
Malificarum, Sprengerus, Remigius_, and other learned demonologists,
that the Evil One, thus seduced to remain behind the appointed hour,
would assume her true shape, and, having appeared to her terrified
lover as a fiend of hell, would vanish from him in a flash of
sulphurous lightning. Raymond of Ravenswood acquiesced in the
experiment, not incurious concerning the issue, though confident it
would disappoint the expectations of the hermit.
At the appointed hour the lovers met, and their interview was
protracted beyond that at which they usually parted, by the delay of
the priest to ring his usual curfew. No change took place upon the
nymph’s outward form; but as soon as the lengthening shadows made her
aware that the usual hour of the vespers chime was passed, she tore
herself from her lover’s arms with a shriek of despair, bid him adieu
for ever, and, plunging into the fountain, disappeared from his eyes.
The bubbles occasioned by her descent were crimsoned with blood as they
arose, leading the distracted Baron to infer that his ill-judged
curiosity had occasioned the death of this interesting and mysterious
being. The remorse which he felt, as well as the recollection of her
charms, proved the penance of his future life, which he lost in the
battle of Flodden not many months after. But, in memory of his Naiad,
he had previously ornamented the fountain in which she appeared to
reside, and secured its waters from profanation or pollution by the
small vaulted building of which the fragments still remained scattered
around it. From this period the house of Ravenswood was supposed to
have dated its decay.
Such was the generally-received legend, which some, who would seem
wiser than the vulgar, explained as obscurely intimating the fate of a
beautiful maid of plebeian rank, the mistress of this Raymond, whom he
slew in a fit of jealousy, and whose blood was mingled with the waters
of the locked fountain, as it was commonly called. Others imagined that
the tale had a more remote origin in the ancient heathen mythology.
All, however, agreed that the spot was fatal to the Ravenswood family;
and that to drink of the waters of the well, or even approach its
brink, was as ominous to a descendant of that house as for a Grahame to
wear green, a Bruce to kill a spider, or a St. Clair to cross the Ord
on a Monday.
It was on this ominous spot that Lucy Ashton first drew breath after
her long and almost deadly swoon. Beautiful and pale as the fabulous
Naiad in the last agony of separation from her lover, she was seated so
as to rest with her back against a part of the ruined wall, while her
mantle, dripping with the water which her protector had used profusely
to recall her senses, clung to her slender and beautifully proportioned
form.
The first moment of recollection brought to her mind the danger which
had overpowered her senses; the next called to remembrance that of her
father. She looked around; he was nowhere to be seen. “My father, my
father!” was all that she could ejaculate.
“Sir William is safe,” answered the voice of a stranger—“perfectly
safe, and will be with you instantly.”
“Are you sure of that?” exclaimed Lucy. “The bull was close by us. Do
not stop me: I must go to seek my father!”
And she rose with that purpose; but her strength was so much exhausted
that, far from possessing the power to execute her purpose, she must
have fallen against the stone on which she had leant, probably not
without sustaining serious injury.
The stranger was so near to her that, without actually suffering her to
fall, he could not avoid catching her in his arms, which, however, he
did with a momentary reluctance, very unusual when youth interposes to
prevent beauty from danger. It seemed as if her weight, slight as it
was, proved too heavy for her young and athletic assistant, for,
without feeling the temptation of detaining her in his arms even for a
single instant, he again placed her on the stone from which she had
risen, and retreating a few steps, repeated hastily “Sir William Ashton
is perfectly safe and will be here instantly. Do not make yourself
anxious on his account: Fate has singularly preserved him. You, madam,
are exhausted, and must not think of rising until you have some
assistance more suitable than mine.”
Lucy, whose senses were by this time more effectually collected, was
naturally led to look at the stranger with attention. There was nothing
in his appearance which should have rendered him unwilling to offer his
arm to a young lady who required support, or which could have induced
her to refuse his assistance; and she could not help thinking, even in
that moment, that he seemed cold and reluctant to offer it. A
shooting-dress of dark cloth intimated the rank of the wearer, though
concealed in part by a large and loose cloak of a dark brown colour. A
montero cap and a black feather drooped over the wearer’s brow, and
partly concealed his features, which, so far as seen, were dark,
regular, and full of majestic, though somewhat sullen, expression. Some
secret sorrow, or the brooding spirit of some moody passion, had
quenched the light and ingenuous vivacity of youth in a countenance
singularly fitted to display both, and it was not easy to gaze on the
stranger without a secret impression either of pity or awe, or at least
of doubt and curiosity allied to both.
The impression which we have necessarily been long in describing, Lucy
felt in the glance of a moment, and had no sooner encountered the keen
black eyes of the stranger than her own were bent on the ground with a
mixture of bashful embarrassment and fear. Yet there was a necessity to
speak, or at last she thought so, and in a fluttered accent she began
to mention her wonderful escape, in which she was sure that the
stranger must, under Heaven, have been her father’s protector and her
own.
He seemed to shrink from her expressions of gratitude, while he replied
abruptly, “I leave you, madam,” the deep melody of his voice rendered
powerful, but not harsh, by something like a severity of tone—“I leave
you to the protection of those to whom it is possible you may have this
day been a guardian angel.”
Lucy was surprised at the ambiguity of his language, and, with a
feeling of artless and unaffected gratitude, began to deprecate the
idea of having intended to give her deliverer any offence, as if such a
thing had been possible. “I have been unfortunate,” she said, “in
endeavouring to express my thanks—I am sure it must be so, though I
cannot recollect what I said; but would you but stay till my
father—till the Lord Keeper comes; would you only permit him to pay you
his thanks, and to inquire your name?”
“My name is unnecessary,” answered the stranger; “your father—I would
rather say Sir William Ashton—will learn it soon enough, for all the
pleasure it is likely to afford him.”
“You mistake him,” said Lucy, earnestly; “he will be grateful for my
sake and for his own. You do not know my father, or you are deceiving
me with a story of his safety, when he has already fallen a victim to
the fury of that animal.”
When she had caught this idea, she started from the ground and
endeavoured to press towards the avenue in which the accident had taken
place, while the stranger, though he seemed to hesitate between the
desire to assist and the wish to leave her, was obliged, in common
humanity, to oppose her both by entreaty and action.
“On the word of a gentleman, madam, I tell you the truth; your father
is in perfect safety; you will expose yourself to injury if you venture
back where the herd of wild cattle grazed. If you will go”—for, having
once adopted the idea that her father was still in danger, she pressed
forward in spite of him—“if you _will_ go, accept my arm, though I am
not perhaps the person who can with most propriety offer you support.”
But, without heeding this intimation, Lucy took him at his word. “Oh,
if you be a man,” she said—“if you be a gentleman, assist me to find my
father! You shall not leave me—you must go with me; he is dying perhaps
while we are talking here!”
Then, without listening to excuse or apology, and holding fast by the
stranger’s arm, though unconscious of anything save the support which
it gave, and without which she could not have moved, mixed with a vague
feeling of preventing his escape from her, she was urging, and almost
dragging, him forward when Sir William Ashton came up, followed by the
female attendant of blind Alice, and by two woodcutters, whom he had
summoned from their occupation to his assistance. His joy at seeing his
daughter safe overcame the surprise with which he would at another time
have beheld her hanging as familiarly on the arm of a stranger as she
might have done upon his own.
“Lucy, my dear Lucy, are you safe?—are you well?” were the only words
that broke from him as he embraced her in ecstasy.
“I am well, sir, thank God! and still more that I see you so; but this
gentleman,” she said, quitting his arm and shrinking from him, “what
must he think of me?” and her eloquent blood, flushing over neck and
brow, spoke how much she was ashamed of the freedom with which she had
craved, and even compelled, his assistance.
“This gentleman,” said Sir William Ashton, “will, I trust, not regret
the trouble we have given him, when I assure him of the gratitude of
the Lord Keeper for the greatest service which one man ever rendered to
another—for the life of my child—for my own life, which he has saved by
his bravery and presence of mind. He will, I am sure, permit us to
request——”
“Request nothing of ME, my lord,” said the stranger, in a stern and
peremptory tone; “I am the Master of Ravenswood.”
[Illustration]
There was a dead pause of surprise, not unmixed with less pleasant
feelings. The Master wrapt himself in his cloak, made a haughty
inclination toward Lucy, muttering a few words of courtesy, as
indistinctly heard as they seemed to be reluctantly uttered, and,
turning from them, was immediately lost in the thicket.
“The Master of Ravenswood!” said the Lord Keeper, when he had recovered
his momentary astonishment. “Hasten after him—stop him—beg him to speak
to me for a single moment.”
The two foresters accordingly set off in pursuit of the stranger. They
speedily reappeared, and, in an embarrassed and awkward manner, said
the gentleman would not return.
The Lord Keeper took one of the fellows aside, and questioned him more
closely what the Master of Ravenswood had said.
“He just said he wanda come back,” said the man, with the caution of a
prudent Scotchman, who cared not to be the bearer of an unpleasant
errand.
“He said something more, sir,” said the Lord Keeper, “and I insist on
knowing what it was.”
“Why, then, my lord,” said the man, looking down, “he said—But it wad
be nae pleasure to your lordship to hear it, for I dare say the Master
meant nae ill.”
“That’s none of your concern, sir; I desire to hear the very words.”
“Weel, then,” replied the man, “he said, ‘Tell Sir William Ashton that
the next time he and I forgather, he will not be half sae blythe of our
meeting as of our parting.’”
“Very well, sir,” said the Lord Keeper, “I believe he alludes to a
wager we have on our hawks; it is a matter of no consequence.”
He turned to his daughter, who was by this time so much recovered as to
be able to walk home. But the effect, which the various recollections
connected with a scene so terrific made upon a mind which was
susceptible in an extreme degree, was more permanent than the injury
which her nerves had sustained. Visions of terror, both in sleep and in
waking reveries, recalled to her the form of the furious animal, and
the dreadful bellow with which he accompanied his career; and it was
always the image of the Master of Ravenswood, with his native nobleness
of countenance and form, that seemed to interpose betwixt her and
assured death. It is, perhaps, at all times dangerous for a young
person to suffer recollection to dwell repeatedly, and with too much
complacency, on the same individual; but in Lucy’s situation it was
almost unavoidable. She had never happened to see a young man of mien
and features so romantic and so striking as young Ravenswood; but had
she seen an hundred his equals or his superiors in those particulars,
no one else would have been linked to her heart by the strong
associations of remembered danger and escape, of gratitude, wonder, and
curiosity. I say curiosity, for it is likely that the singularly
restrained and unaccommodating manners of the Master of Ravenswood, so
much at variance with the natural expression of his features and grace
of his deportment, as they excited wonder by the contrast, had their
effect in riveting her attention to the recollections. She knew little
of Ravenswood, or the disputes which had existed betwixt her father and
his, and perhaps could in her gentleness of mind hardly have
comprehended the angry and bitter passions which they had engendered.
But she knew that he was come of noble stem; was poor, though descended
from the noble and the wealthy; and she felt that she could sympathise
with the feelings of a proud mind, which urged him to recoil from the
proffered gratitude of the new proprietors of his father’s house and
domains. Would he have equally shunned their acknowledgments and
avoided their intimacy, had her father’s request been urged more
mildly, less abruptly, and softened with the grace which women so well
know how to throw into their manner, when they mean to mediate betwixt
the headlong passions of the ruder sex? This was a perilous question to
ask her own mind—perilous both in the idea and its consequences.
Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination
which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is
true, absence, change of scene and new faces, might probably have
destroyed the illusion in her instance, as it has done in many others;
but her residence remained solitary, and her mind without those means
of dissipating her pleasing visions. This solitude was chiefly owing to
the absence of Lady Ashton, who was at this time in Edinburgh, watching
the progress of some state-intrigue; the Lord Keeper only received
society out of policy or ostentation, and was by nature rather reserved
and unsociable; and thus no cavalier appeared to rival or to obscure
the ideal picture of chivalrous excellence which Lucy had pictured to
herself in the Master of Ravenswood.
[Illustration]
While Lucy indulged in these dreams, she made frequent visits to old
blind Alice, hoping it would be easy to lead her to talk on the subject
which at present she had so imprudently admitted to occupy so large a
portion of her thoughts. But Alice did not in this particular gratify
her wishes and expectations. She spoke readily, and with pathetic
feeling, concerning the family in general, but seemed to observe an
especial and cautious silence on the subject of the present
representative. The little she said of him was not altogether so
favourable as Lucy had anticipated. She hinted that he was of a stern
and unforgiving character, more ready to resent than to pardon
injuries; and Lucy combined, with great alarm, the hints which she now
dropped of these dangerous qualities with Alice’s advice to her father,
so emphatically given, “to beware of Ravenswood.”
But that very Ravenswood, of whom such unjust suspicions had been
entertained, had, almost immediately after they had been uttered,
confuted them by saving at once her father’s life and her own. Had he
nourished such black revenge as Alice’s dark hints seemed to indicate,
no deed of active guilt was necessary to the full gratification of that
evil passion. He needed but to have withheld for an instant his
indispensable and effective assistance, and the object of his
resentment must have perished, without any direct aggression on his
part, by a death equally fearful and certain. She conceived, therefore,
that some secret prejudice, or the suspicions incident to age and
misfortune, had led Alice to form conclusions injurious to the
character, and irreconcilable both with the generous conduct and noble
features, of the Master of Ravenswood. And in this belief Lucy reposed
her hope, and went on weaving her enchanted web of fairy tissue, as
beautiful and transient as the film of the gossamer when it is pearled
with the morning dew and glimmering to the sun.
Her father, in the mean while, as well as the Master of Ravenswood,
were making reflections, as frequent though more solid than those of
Lucy, upon the singular event which had taken place. The Lord Keeper’s
first task, when he returned home, was to ascertain by medical advice
that his daughter had sustained no injury from the dangerous and
alarming situation in which she had been placed. Satisfied on this
topic, he proceeded to revise the memoranda which he had taken down
from the mouth of the person employed to interrupt the funeral service
of the late Lord Ravenswood. Bred to casuistry, and well accustomed to
practise the ambidexter ingenuity of the bar, it cost him little
trouble to soften the features of the tumult which he had been at first
so anxious to exaggerate. He preached to his colleagues of the privy
council the necessity of using conciliatory measures with young men,
whose blood and temper were hot, and their experience of life limited.
He did not hesitate to attribute some censure to the conduct of the
officer, as having been unnecessarily irritating.
These were the contents of his public despatches. The letters which he
wrote to those private friends into whose management the matter was
likely to fall were of a yet more favourable tenor. He represented that
lenity in this case would be equally politic and popular, whereas,
considering the high respect with which the rites of interment are
regarded in Scotland, any severity exercised against the Master of
Ravenswood for protecting those of his father from interruption, would
be on all sides most unfavourably construed. And, finally, assuming the
language of a generous and high-spirited man, he made it his particular
request that this affair should be passed over without severe notice.
He alluded with delicacy to the predicament in which he himself stood
with young Ravenswood, as having succeeded in the long train of
litigation by which the fortunes of that noble house had been so much
reduced, and confessed it would be most peculiarly acceptable to his
own feelings, could he find in some sort to counterbalance the
disadvantages which he had occasioned the family, though only in the
prosecution of his just and lawful rights. He therefore made it his
particular and personal request that the matter should have no farther
consequences, and insinuated a desire that he himself should have the
merit of having put a stop to it by his favourable report and
intercession. It was particularly remarkable that, contrary to his
uniform practice, he made no special communication to Lady Ashton upon
the subject of the tumult; and although he mentioned the alarm which
Lucy had received from one of the wild cattle, yet he gave no detailed
account of an incident so interesting and terrible.
There was much surprise among Sir William Ashton’s political friends
and colleagues on receiving letters of a tenor so unexpected. On
comparing notes together, one smiled, one put up his eyebrows, a third
nodded acquiescence in the general wonder, and a fourth asked if they
were sure these were _all_ the letters the Lord Keeper had written on
the subject. “It runs strangely in my mind, my lords, that none of
these advices contain the root of the matter.”
But no secret letters of a contrary nature had been received, although
the question seemed to imply the possibility of their existence.
“Well,” said an old grey-headed statesman, who had contrived, by
shifting and trimming, to maintain his post at the steerage through all
the changes of course which the vessel had held for thirty years, “I
thought Sir William would hae verified the auld Scottish saying, ‘As
soon comes the lamb’s skin to market as the auld tup’s’.”
“We must please him after his own fashion,” said another, “though it be
an unlooked-for one.”
“A wilful man maun hae his way,” answered the old counsellor.
“The Keeper will rue this before year and day are out,” said a third;
“the Master of Ravenswood is the lad to wind him a pirn.”
“Why, what would you do, my lords, with the poor young fellow?” said a
noble Marquis present. “The Lord Keeper has got all his estates; he has
not a cross to bless himself with.”
On which the ancient Lord Turntippet replied,
“If he hasna gear to fine,
He ha shins to pine.
“And that was our way before the Revolution: _Lucitur cum persona, qui
luere non potest cum crumena_. Hegh, my lords, that’s gude law Latin.”
“I can see no motive,” replied the Marquis, “that any noble lord can
have for urging this matter farther; let the Lord Keeper have the power
to deal in it as he pleases.”
“Agree, agree—remit to the Lord Keeper, with any other person for
fashion’s sake—Lord Hirplehooly, who is bed-ridden—one to be a quorum.
Make your entry in the minutes, Mr. Clerk. And now, my lords, there is
that young scattergood the Laird of Bucklaw’s fine to be disposed upon.
I suppose it goes to my Lord Treasurer?”
“Shame be in my meal-poke, then,” exclaimed the Lord Turntippet, “and
your hand aye in the nook of it! I had set that down for a bye-bit
between meals for mysell.”
“To use one of your favourite saws, my lord,” replied the Marquis, “you
are like the miller’s dog, that licks his lips before the bag is
untied: the man is not fined yet.”
“But that costs but twa skarts of a pen,” said Lord Turntippet; “and
surely there is nae noble lord that will presume to say that I, wha hae
complied wi’ a’ compliances, taen all manner of tests, abujred all that
was to be abjured, and sworn a’ that was to be sworn, for these thirty
years bye-past, sticking fast by my duty to the state through good
report and bad report, shouldna hae something now and then to synd my
mouth wi’ after sic drouthy wark? Eh?”
“It would be very unreasonable indeed, my lord,” replied the Marquis,
“had we either thought that your lordship’s drought was quenchable, or
observed anything stick in your throat that required washing down.”
And so we close the scene on the privy council of that period.