Such was our fallen father’s fate,
Yet better than mine own;
He shared his exile with his mate,
I’m banish’d forth alone.
WALLER
I will not attempt to describe the mixture of indignation and regret
with which Ravenswood left the seat which had belonged to his
ancestors. The terms in which Lady Ashton’s billet was couched rendered
it impossible for him, without being deficient in that spirit of which
he perhaps had too much, to remain an instant longer within its walls.
The Marquis, who had his share in the affront, was, nevertheless, still
willing to make some efforts at conciliation. He therefore suffered his
kinsman to depart alone, making him promise, however, that he would
wait for him at the small inn called the Tod’s Hole, situated, as our
readers may be pleased to recollect, half-way betwixt Ravenswood Castle
and Wolf’s Crag, and about five Scottish miles distant from each. Here
the Marquis proposed to join the Master of Ravenswood, either that
night or the next morning. His own feelings would have induced him to
have left the castle directly, but he was loth to forfeit, without at
least one effort, the advantages which he had proposed from his visit
to the Lord Keeper; and the Master of Ravenswood was, even in the very
heat of his resentment, unwilling to foreclose any chance of
reconciliation which might arise out of the partiality which Sir
William Ashton had shown towards him, as well as the intercessory
arguments of his noble kinsman. He himself departed without a moment’s
delay, farther than was necessary to make this arrangement.
At first he spurred his horse at a quick pace through an avenue of the
park, as if, by rapidity of motion, he could stupify the confusion of
feelings with which he was assailed. But as the road grew wilder and
more sequestered, and when the trees had hidden the turrets of the
castle, he gradually slackened his pace, as if to indulge the painful
reflections which he had in vain endeavoured to repress. The path in
which he found himself led him to the Mermaiden’s Fountain, and to the
cottage of Alice; and the fatal influence which superstitious belief
attached to the former spot, as well as the admonitions which had been
in vain offered to him by the inhabitant of the latter, forced
themselves upon his memory. “Old saws speak truth,” he said to himself,
“and the Mermaiden’s Well has indeed witnessed the last act of rashness
of the heir of Ravenswood. Alice spoke well,” he continued, “and I am
in the situation which she foretold; or rather, I am more deeply
dishonoured—not the dependant and ally of the destroyer of my father’s
house, as the old sibyl presaged, but the degraded wretch who has
aspired to hold that subordinate character, and has been rejected with
disdain.”
We are bound to tell the tale as we have received it; and, considering
the distance of the time, and propensity of those through whose mouths
it has passed to the marvellous, this could not be called a Scottish
story unless it manifested a tinge of Scottish superstition. As
Ravenswood approached the solitary fountain, he is said to have met
with the following singular adventure: His horse, which was moving
slowly forward, suddenly interrupted its steady and composed pace,
snorted, reared, and, though urged by the spur, refused to proceed, as
if some object of terror had suddenly presented itself. On looking to
the fountain, Ravenswood discerned a female figure, dressed in a white,
or rather greyish, mantle, placed on the very spot on which Lucy Ashton
had reclined while listening to the fatal tale of love. His immediate
impression was that she had conjectured by which path he would traverse
the park on his departure, and placed herself at this well-known and
sequestered place of rendezvous, to indulge her own sorrow and his
parting interview. In this belief he jumped from his horse, and, making
its bridle fast to a tree, walked hastily towards the fountain,
pronouncing eagerly, yet under his breath, the words, “Miss
Ashton!—Lucy!”
The figure turned as he addressed it, and displayed to his wondering
eyes the features, not of Lucy Ashton, but of old blind Alice. The
singularity of her dress, which rather resembled a shroud than the
garment of a living woman; the appearance of her person, larger, as it
struck him, than it usually seemed to be; above all, the strange
circumstance of a blind, infirm, and decrepit person being found alone
and at a distance from her habitation (considerable, if her infirmities
be taken into account), combined to impress him with a feeling of
wonder approaching to fear. As he approached, she arose slowly from her
seat, held her shrivelled hand up as if to prevent his coming more
near, and her withered lips moved fast, although no sound issued from
them. Ravenswood stopped; and as, after a moment’s pause, he again
advanced towards her, Alice, or her apparition, moved or glided
backwards towards the thicket, still keeping her face turned towards
him. The trees soon hid the form from his sight; and, yielding to the
strong and terrific impression that the being which he had seen was not
of this world, the Master of Ravenswood remained rooted to the ground
whereon he had stood when he caught his last view of her. At length,
summoning up his courage, he advanced to the spot on which the figure
had seemed to be seated; but neither was there pressure of the grass
nor any other circumstance to induce him to believe that what he had
seen was real and substantial.
Full of those strange thoughts and confused apprehensions which awake
in the bosom of one who conceives he has witnessed some preternatural
appearance, the Master of Ravenswood walked back towards his horse,
frequently, however, looking behind him, not without apprehension, as
if expecting that the vision would reappear. But the apparition,
whether it was real or whether it was the creation of a heated and
agitated imagination, returned not again; and he found his horse
sweating and terrified, as if experiencing that agony of fear with
which the presence of a supernatural being is supposed to agitate the
brute creation. The Master mounted, and rode slowly forward, soothing
his steed from time to time, while the animal seemed internally to
shrink and shudder, as if expecting some new object of fear at the
opening of every glade. The rider, after a moment’s consideration,
resolved to investigate the matter further. “Can my eyes have deceived
me,” he said, “and deceived me for such a space of time? Or are this
woman’s infirmities but feigned, in order to excite compassion? And
even then, her motion resembled not that of a living and existing
person. Must I adopt the popular creed, and think that the unhappy
being has formed a league with the powers of darkness? I am determined
to be resolved; I will not brook imposition even from my own eyes.”
In this uncertainty he rode up to the little wicket of Alice’s garden.
Her seat beneath the birch-tree was vacant, though the day was pleasant
and the sun was high. He approached the hut, and heard from within the
sobs and wailing of a female. No answer was returned when he knocked,
so that, after a moment’s pause, he lifted the latch and entered. It
was indeed a house of solitude and sorrow. Stretched upon her miserable
pallet lay the corpse of the last retainer of the house of Ravenswood
who still abode on their paternal domains! Life had but shortly
departed; and the little girl by whom she had been attended in her last
moments was wringing her hands and sobbing, betwixt childish fear and
sorrow, over the body of her mistress.
The Master of Ravenswood had some difficulty to compose the terrors of
the poor child, whom his unexpected appearance had at first rather
appalled than comforted; and when he succeeded, the first expression
which the girl used intimated that “he had come too late.” Upon
inquiring the meaning of this expression, he learned that the deceased,
upon the first attack of the mortal agony, had sent a peasant to the
castle to beseech an interview of the Master of Ravenswood, and had
expressed the utmost impatience for his return. But the messengers of
the poor are tardy and negligent: the fellow had not reached the
castle, as was afterwards learned, until Ravenswood had left it, and
had then found too much amusement among the retinue of the strangers to
return in any haste to the cottage of Alice. Meantime her anxiety of
mind seemed to increase with the agony of her body; and, to use the
phrase of Babie, her only attendant, “she prayed powerfully that she
might see her master’s son once more, and renew her warning.” She died
just as the clock in the distant village tolled one; and Ravenswood
remembered, with internal shuddering, that he had heard the chime sound
through the wood just before he had seen what he was now much disposed
to consider as the spectre of the deceased.
It was necessary, as well from his respect to the departed as in common
humanity to her terrified attendant, that he should take some measures
to relieve the girl from her distressing situation. The deceased, he
understood, had expressed a desire to be buried in a solitary
churchyard, near the little inn of the Tod’s Hole, called the
Hermitage, or more commonly Armitage, in which lay interred some of the
Ravenswood family, and many of their followers. Ravenswood conceived it
his duty to gratify this predilection, commonly found to exist among
the Scottish peasantry, and despatched Babie to the neighbouring
village to procure the assistance of some females, assuring her that,
in the mean while, he would himself remain with the dead body, which,
as in Thessaly of old, it is accounted highly unfit to leave without a
watch.
Thus, in the course of a quarter of an hour or little more, he found
himself sitting a solitary guard over the inanimate corpse of her whose
dismissed spirit, unless his eyes had strangely deceived him, had so
recently manifested itself before him. Notwithstanding his natural
courage, the Master was considerably affected by a concurrence of
circumstances so extraordinary. “She died expressing her eager desire
to see me. Can it be, then,” was his natural course of reflection—“can
strong and earnest wishes, formed during the last agony of nature,
survive its catastrophe, surmount the awful bounds of the spiritual
world, and place before us its inhabitants in the hues and colouring of
life? And why was that manifested to the eye which could not unfold its
tale to the ear? and wherefore should a breach be made in the laws of
nature, yet its purpose remain unknown? Vain questions, which only
death, when it shall make me like the pale and withered form before me,
can ever resolve.”
He laid a cloth, as he spoke, over the lifeless face, upon whose
features he felt unwilling any longer to dwell. He then took his place
in an old carved oaken chair, ornamented with his own armorial
bearings, which Alice had contrived to appropriate to her own use in
the pillage which took place among creditors, officers, domestics, and
messengers of the law when his father left Ravenswood Castle for the
last time. Thus seated, he banished, as much as he could, the
superstitious feelings which the late incident naturally inspired. His
own were sad enough, without the exaggeration of supernatural terror,
since he found himself transferred from the situation of a successful
lover of Lucy Ashton, and an honoured and respected friend of her
father, into the melancholy and solitary guardian of the abandoned and
forsaken corpse of a common pauper.
He was relieved, however, from his sad office sooner that he could
reasonably have expected, considering the distance betwixt the hut of
the deceased and the village, and the age and infirmities of three old
women who came from thence, in military phrase, to relieve guard upon
the body of the defunct. On any other occasion the speed of these
reverend sibyls would have been much more moderate, for the first was
eighty years of age and upwards, the second was paralytic, and the
third lame of a leg from some accident. But the burial duties rendered
to the deceased are, to the Scottish peasant of either sex, a labour of
love. I know not whether it is from the temper of the people, grave and
enthusiastic as it certainly is, or from the recollection of the
ancient Catholic opinions, when the funeral rites were always
considered as a period of festival to the living; but feasting, good
cheer, and even inebriety, were, and are, the frequent accompaniments
of a Scottish old-fashioned burial. What the funeral feast, or
_dirgie_, as it is called, was to the men, the gloomy preparations of
the dead body for the coffin were to the women. To straight the
contorted limbs upon a board used for that melancholy purpose, to array
the corpse in clean linen, and over that in its woollen shroad, were
operations committed always to the old matrons of the village, and in
which they found a singular and gloomy delight.
The old women paid the Master their salutations with a ghastly smile,
which reminded him of the meeting betwixt Macbeth and the witches on
the blasted heath of Forres. He gave them some money, and recommended
to them the charge of the dead body of their contemporary, an office
which they willingly undertook; intimating to him at the same time that
he must leave the hut, in order that they might begin their mournful
duties. Ravenswood readily agreed to depart, only tarrying to recommend
to them due attention to the body, and to receive information where he
was to find the sexton, or beadle, who had in charge the deserted
churchyard of the Armitage, in order to prepare matters for the
reception of Old Alice in the place of repose which she had selected
for herself.
“Ye’ll no be pinched to find out Johnie Mortsheugh,” said the elder
sibyl, and still her withered cheek bore a grisly smile; “he dwells
near the Tod’s Hole, an house of entertainment where there has been
mony a blythe birling, for death and drink-draining are near neighbours
to ane anither.”
“Ay! and that’s e’en true, cummer,” said the lame hag, propping herself
with a crutch which supported the shortness of her left leg, “for I
mind when the father of this Master of Ravenswood that is now standing
before us sticked young Blackhall with his whinger, for a wrang word
said ower their wine, or brandy, or what not: he gaed in as light as a
lark, and he came out wi’ his feet foremost. I was at the winding of
the corpse; and when the bluid was washed off, he was a bonny bouk of
man’s body.” It may be easily believed that this ill-timed anecdote
hastened the Master’s purpose of quitting a company so evil-omened and
so odious. Yet, while walking to the tree to which his horse was tied,
and busying himself with adjusting the girths of the saddle, he could
not avoid hearing, through the hedge of the little garden, a
conversation respecting himself, betwixt the lame woman and the
octogenarian sibyl. The pair had hobbled into the garden to gather
rosemary, southernwood, rue, and other plants proper to be strewed upon
the body, and burned by way of fumigation in the chimney of the
cottage. The paralytic wretch, almost exhausted by the journey, was
left guard upon the corpse, lest witches or fiends might play their
sport with it.
The following law, croaking dialogue was necessarily overheard by the
Master of Ravenswood:
“That’s a fresh and full-grown hemlock, Annie Winnie; mony a cummer
lang syne wad hae sought nae better horse to flee over hill and how,
through mist and moonlight, and light down in the King of France’s
cellar.”
“Ay, cummer! but the very deil has turned as hard-hearted now as the
Lord Keeper and the grit folk, that hae breasts like whinstane. They
prick us and they pine us, and they pit us on the pinnywinkles for
witches; and, if I say my prayers backwards ten times ower, Satan will
never gie me amends o’ them.”
“Did ye ever see the foul thief?” asked her neighbour.
“Na!” replied the other spokeswoman; “but I trow I hae dreamed of him
mony a time, and I think the day will come they will burn me for’t. But
ne’er mind, cummer! we hae this dollar of the Master’s, and we’ll send
doun for bread and for yill, and tobacco, and a drap brandy to burn,
and a wee pickle saft sugar; and be there deil, or nae deil, lass,
we’ll hae a merry night o’t.”
Here her leathern chops uttered a sort of cackling, ghastly laugh,
resembling, to a certain degree, the cry of the screech-owl.
“He’s a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master,” said Annie
Winnie, “and a comely personage—broad in the shouthers, and narrow
around the lunyies. He wad mak a bonny corpse; I wad like to hae the
streiking and winding o’ him.”
“It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie,” returned the octogenarian,
her companion, “that hand of woman, or of man either, will never
straught him: dead-deal will never be laid on his back, make you your
market of that, for I hae it frae a sure hand.”
“Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground then, Ailsie Gourlay?
Will he die by the sword or the ball, as his forbears had dune before
him, mony ane o’ them?”
“Ask nae mair questions about it—he’ll no be graced sae far,” replied
the sage.
“I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Aislie Gourlay. But wha tell’d ye
this?”
“Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie,” answered the sibyl, “I
hae it frae a hand sure eneugh.”
“But ye said ye never saw the foul thief,” reiterated her inquisitive
companion.
“I hae it frae as sure a hand,” said Ailsie, “and frae them that spaed
his fortune before the sark gaed ower his head.”
“Hark! I hear his horse’s feet riding aff,” said the other; “they dinna
sound as if good luck was wi’ them.”
“Mak haste, sirs,” cried the paralytic hag from the cottage, “and let
us do what is needfu’, and say what is fitting; for, if the dead corpse
binna straughted, it will girn and thraw, and that will fear the best
o’ us.”
Ravenswood was now out of hearing. He despised most of the ordinary
prejudices about witchcraft, omens, and vaticination, to which his age
and country still gave such implicit credit that to express a doubt of
them was accounted a crime equal to the unbelief of Jews or Saracens;
he knew also that the prevailing belief, concerning witches, operating
upon the hypochondriac habits of those whom age, infirmity, and poverty
rendered liable to suspicion, and enforced by the fear of death and the
pangs of the most cruel tortures, often extorted those confessions
which encumber and disgrace the criminal records of Scotland during the
17th century. But the vision of that morning, whether real or
imaginary, had impressed his mind with a superstitious feeling which he
in vain endeavoured to shake off. The nature of the business which
awaited him at the little inn, called Tod’s Hole, where he soon after
arrived, was not of a kind to restore his spirits.
It was necessary he should see Mortsheugh, the sexton of the old
burial-ground at Armitage, to arrange matters for the funeral of Alice;
and, as the man dwelt near the place of her late residence, the Master,
after a slight refreshment, walked towards the place where the body of
Alice was to be deposited. It was situated in the nook formed by the
eddying sweep of a stream, which issued from the adjoining hills. A
rude cavern in an adjacent rock, which, in the interior, was cut into
the shape of a cross, formed the hermitage, where some Saxon saint had
in ancient times done penance, and given name to the place. The rich
Abbey of Coldinghame had, in latter days, established a chapel in the
neighbourhood, of which no vestige was now visible, though the
churchyard which surrounded it was still, as upon the present occasion,
used for the interment of particular persons. One or two shattered
yew-trees still grew within the precincts of that which had once been
holy ground. Warriors and barons had been buried there of old, but
their names were forgotten, and their monuments demolished. The only
sepulchral memorials which remained were the upright headstones which
mark the graves of persons of inferior rank. The abode of the sexton
was a solitary cottage adjacent to the ruined wall of the cemetery, but
so low that, with its thatch, which nearly reached the ground, covered
with a thick crop of grass, fog, and house-leeks, it resembled an
overgrown grave. On inquiry, however, Ravenswood found that the man of
the last mattock was absent at a bridal, being fiddler as well as
grave-digger to the vicinity. He therefore retired to the little inn,
leaving a message that early next morning he would again call for the
person whose double occupation connected him at once with the house of
mourning and the house of feasting.
An outrider of the Marquis arrived at Tod’s Hole shortly after, with a
message, intimating that his master would join Ravenswood at that place
on the following morning; and the Master, who would otherwise have
proceeded to his old retreat at Wolf’s Crag, remained there accordingly
to give meeting to his noble kinsman.