Say from whence
You owe this strange intelligence? or why
Upon this blasted heath you stop our way
With such prophetic greeting?
Speak, I charge you.
Macbeth.
Upon the evening of the day when Bertram’s examination had taken place,
Colonel Mannering arrived at Woodbourne from Edinburgh. He found his
family in their usual state, which probably, so far as Julia was
concerned, would not have been the case had she learned the news of
Bertram’s arrest. But as, during the Colonel’s absence, the two young
ladies lived much retired, this circumstance fortunately had not reached
Woodbourne. A letter had already made Miss Bertram acquainted with the
downfall of the expectations which had been formed upon the bequest of
her kinswoman. Whatever hopes that news might have dispelled, the
disappointment did not prevent her from joining her friend in affording a
cheerful reception to the Colonel, to whom she thus endeavoured to
express the deep sense she entertained of his paternal kindness. She
touched on her regret that at such a season of the year he should have
made, upon her account, a journey so fruitless.
‘That it was fruitless to you, my dear,’ said the Colonel, ‘I do most
deeply lament; but for my own share, I have made some valuable
acquaintances, and have spent the time I have been absent in Edinburgh
with peculiar satisfaction; so that on that score there is nothing to be
regretted. Even our friend the Dominie is returned thrice the man he was,
from having sharpened his wits in controversy with the geniuses of the
northern metropolis.’
‘Of a surety,’ said the Dominie, with great complacency, ‘I did wrestle,
and was not overcome, though my adversary was cunning in his art.’
‘I presume,’ said Miss Mannering, ‘the contest was somewhat fatiguing,
Mr. Sampson?’
‘Very much, young lady; howbeit I girded up my loins and strove against
him.’
‘I can bear witness,’ said the Colonel; ‘I never saw an affair better
contested. The enemy was like the Mahratta cavalry: he assailed on all
sides, and presented no fair mark for artillery; but Mr. Sampson stood to
his guns notwithstanding, and fired away, now upon the enemy and now upon
the dust which he had raised. But we must not fight our battles over
again to-night; to-morrow we shall have the whole at breakfast.’
The next morning at breakfast, however, the Dominie did not make his
appearance. He had walked out, a servant said, early in the morning. It
was so common for him to forget his meals that his absence never deranged
the family. The housekeeper, a decent old-fashioned Presbyterian matron,
having, as such, the highest respect for Sampson’s theological
acquisitions, had it in charge on these occasions to take care that he
was no sufferer by his absence of mind, and therefore usually waylaid him
on his return, to remind him of his sublunary wants, and to minister to
their relief. It seldom, however, happened that he was absent from two
meals together, as was the case in the present instance. We must explain
the cause of this unusual occurrence.
The conversation which Mr. Pleydell had held with Mr. Mannering on the
subject of the loss of Harry Bertram had awakened all the painful
sensations which that event had inflicted upon Sampson. The affectionate
heart of the poor Dominie had always reproached him that his negligence
in leaving the child in the care of Frank Kennedy had been the proximate
cause of the murder of the one, the loss of the other, the death of Mrs.
Bertram, and the ruin of the family of his patron. It was a subject which
he never conversed upon, if indeed his mode of speech could be called
conversation at any time; but it was often present to his imagination.
The sort of hope so strongly affirmed and asserted in Mrs. Bertram’s last
settlement had excited a corresponding feeling in the Dominie’s bosom,
which was exasperated into a sort of sickening anxiety by the discredit
with which Pleydell had treated it. ‘Assuredly,’ thought Sampson to
himself, ‘he is a man of erudition, and well skilled in the weighty
matters of the law; but he is also a man of humorous levity and
inconsistency of speech, and wherefore should he pronounce ex cathedra,
as it were, on the hope expressed by worthy Madam Margaret Bertram of
Singleside?’
All this, I say, the Dominie THOUGHT to himself; for had he uttered half
the sentence, his jaws would have ached for a month under the unusual
fatigue of such a continued exertion. The result of these cogitations was
a resolution to go and visit the scene of the tragedy at Warroch Point,
where he had not been for many years; not, indeed, since the fatal
accident had happened. The walk was a long one, for the Point of Warroch
lay on the farther side of the Ellangowan property, which was interposed
between it and Woodbourne. Besides, the Dominie went astray more than
once, and met with brooks swoln into torrents by the melting of the snow,
where he, honest man, had only the summer recollection of little
trickling rills.
At length, however, he reached the woods which he had made the object of
his excursion, and traversed them with care, muddling his disturbed
brains with vague efforts to recall every circumstance of the
catastrophe. It will readily be supposed that the influence of local
situation and association was inadequate to produce conclusions different
from those which he had formed under the immediate pressure of the
occurrences themselves. ‘With many a weary sigh, therefore, and many a
groan,’ the poor Dominie returned from his hopeless pilgrimage, and
weariedly plodded his way towards Woodbourne, debating at times in his
altered mind a question which was forced upon him by the cravings of an
appetite rather of the keenest, namely, whether he had breakfasted that
morning or no? It was in this twilight humour, now thinking of the loss
of the child, then involuntarily compelled to meditate upon the somewhat
incongruous subject of hung beef, rolls, and butter, that his route,
which was different from that which he had taken in the morning,
conducted him past the small ruined tower, or rather vestige of a tower,
called by the country people the Kaim of Derncleugh.
The reader may recollect the description of this ruin in the
twenty-seventh chapter, as the vault in which young Bertram, under the
auspices of Meg Merrilies, witnessed the death of Hatteraick’s
lieutenant. The tradition of the country added ghostly terrors to the
natural awe inspired by the situation of this place, which terrors the
gipsies who so long inhabited the vicinity had probably invented, or at
least propagated, for their own advantage. It was said that, during the
times of the Galwegian independence, one Hanlon Mac-Dingawaie, brother to
the reigning chief, Knarth Mac-Dingawaie, murdered his brother and
sovereign, in order to usurp the principality from his infant nephew, and
that, being pursued for vengeance by the faithful allies and retainers of
the house, who espoused the cause of the lawful heir, he was compelled to
retreat, with a few followers whom he had involved in his crime, to this
impregnable tower called the Kaim of Derucleugh, where he defended
himself until nearly reduced by famine, when, setting fire to the place,
he and the small remaining garrison desperately perished by their own
swords, rather than fall into the hands of their exasperated enemies.
This tragedy, which, considering the wild times wherein it was placed,
might have some foundation in truth, was larded with many legends of
superstition and diablerie, so that most of the peasants of the
neighbourhood, if benighted, would rather have chosen to make a
considerable circuit than pass these haunted walls. The lights, often
seen around the tower, when used as the rendezvous of the lawless
characters by whom it was occasionally frequented, were accounted for,
under authority of these tales of witchery, in a manner at once
convenient for the private parties concerned and satisfactory to the
public.
Now it must be confessed that our friend Sampson, although a profound
scholar and mathematician, had not travelled so far in philosophy as to
doubt the reality of witchcraft or apparitions. Born, indeed, at a time
when a doubt in the existence of witches was interpreted as equivalent to
a justification of their infernal practices, a belief of such legends had
been impressed upon the Dominie as an article indivisible from his
religious faith, and perhaps it would have been equally difficult to have
induced him to doubt the one as the other. With these feelings, and in a
thick misty day, which was already drawing to its close, Dominie Sampson
did not pass the Kaim of Derncleugh without some feelings of tacit
horror.
What, then, was his astonishment when, on passing the door--that door
which was supposed to have been placed there by one of the latter Lairds
of Ellangowan to prevent presumptuous strangers from incurring the
dangers of the haunted vault--that door, supposed to be always locked,
and the key of which was popularly said to be deposited with the
presbytery--that door, that very door, opened suddenly, and the figure of
Meg Merrilies, well known, though not seen for many a revolving year, was
placed at once before the eyes of the startled Dominie! She stood
immediately before him in the footpath, confronting him so absolutely
that he could not avoid her except by fairly turning back, which his
manhood prevented him from thinking of.
‘I kenn’d ye wad be here,’ she said, with her harsh and hollow voice; ‘I
ken wha ye seek; but ye maun do my bidding.’
‘Get thee behind me!’ said the alarmed Dominie. ‘Avoid ye! Conjuro te,
scelestissima, nequissima, spurcissima, iniquissima atque miserrima,
conjuro te!!!’
Meg stood her ground against this tremendous volley of superlatives,
which Sampson hawked up from the pit of his stomach and hurled at her in
thunder. ‘Is the carl daft,’ she said, ‘wi’ his glamour?’
‘Conjuro,’ continued the Dominie, ‘abjuro, contestor atque viriliter
impero tibi!’
‘What, in the name of Sathan, are ye feared for, wi’ your French
gibberish, that would make a dog sick? Listen, ye stickit stibbler, to
what I tell ye, or ye sail rue it while there’s a limb o’ ye hings to
anither! Tell Colonel Mannering that I ken he’s seeking me. He kens, and
I ken, that the blood will be wiped out, and the lost will be found,
And Bertram’s right and Bertram’s might
Shall meet on Ellangowan height.
Hae, there’s a letter to him; I was gaun to send it in another way. I
canna write mysell; but I hae them that will baith write and read, and
ride and rin for me. Tell him the time’s coming now, and the weird’s
dreed, and the wheel’s turning. Bid him look at the stars as he has
looked at them before. Will ye mind a’ this?’
‘Assuredly,’ said the Dominie, ‘I am dubious; for, woman, I am perturbed
at thy words, and my flesh quakes to hear thee.’
‘They’ll do you nae ill though, and maybe muckle gude.’
‘Avoid ye! I desire no good that comes by unlawful means.’
‘Fule body that thou art,’ said Meg, stepping up to him, with a frown of
indignation that made her dark eyes flash like lamps from under her bent
brows--‘Fule body! if I meant ye wrang, couldna I clod ye ower that
craig, and wad man ken how ye cam by your end mair than Frank Kennedy?
Hear ye that, ye worricow?’
‘In the name of all that is good,’ said the Dominie, recoiling, and
pointing his long pewter-headed walking cane like a javelin at the
supposed sorceress--‘in the name of all that is good, bide off hands! I
will not be handled; woman, stand off, upon thine own proper peril!
Desist, I say; I am strong; lo, I will resist!’ Here his speech was cut
short; for Meg, armed with supernatural strength (as the Dominie
asserted), broke in upon his guard, put by a thrust which he made at her
with his cane, and lifted him into the vault, ‘as easily,’ said he, ‘as I
could sway a Kitchen’s Atlas.’
‘Sit down there,’ she said, pushing the half-throttled preacher with some
violence against a broken chair--‘sit down there and gather your wind and
your senses, ye black barrow-tram o’ the kirk that ye are. Are ye fou or
fasting?’
‘Fasting, from all but sin,’ answered the Dominie, who, recovering his
voice, and finding his exorcisms only served to exasperate the
intractable sorceress, thought it best to affect complaisance and
submission, inwardly conning over, however, the wholesome conjurations
which he durst no longer utter aloud. But as the Dominie’s brain was by
no means equal to carry on two trains of ideas at the same time, a word
or two of his mental exercise sometimes escaped and mingled with his
uttered speech in a manner ludicrous enough, especially as the poor man
shrunk himself together after every escape of the kind, from terror of
the effect it might produce upon the irritable feelings of the witch.
Meg in the meanwhile went to a great black cauldron that was boiling on a
fire on the floor, and, lifting the lid, an odour was diffused through
the vault which, if the vapours of a witch’s cauldron could in aught be
trusted, promised better things than the hell-broth which such vessels
are usually supposed to contain. It was, in fact, the savour of a goodly
stew, composed of fowls, hares, partridges, and moor-game boiled in a
large mess with potatoes, onions, and leeks, and from the size of the
cauldron appeared to be prepared for half a dozen of people at least. ‘So
ye hae eat naething a’ day?’ said Meg, heaving a large portion of this
mess into a brown dish and strewing it savourily with salt and pepper.
[Footnote: See Note 4.]
‘Nothing,’ answered the Dominie, ‘scelestissima!--that is, gudewife.’
‘Hae then,’ said she, placing the dish before him, ‘there’s what will
warm your heart.’
‘I do not hunger, malefica--that is to say, Mrs. Merrilies!’ for he said
unto himself,’ the savour is sweet, but it hath been cooked by a Canidia
or an Ericthoe.’
‘If ye dinna eat instantly and put some saul in ye, by the bread and the
salt, I’ll put it down your throat wi’ the cutty spoon, scaulding as it
is, and whether ye will or no. Gape, sinner, and swallow!’
Sampson, afraid of eye of newt, and toe of frog, tigers’ chaudrons, and
so forth, had determined not to venture; but the smell of the stew was
fast melting his obstinacy, which flowed from his chops as it were in
streams of water, and the witch’s threats decided him to feed. Hunger and
fear are excellent casuists.
‘Saul,’ said Hunger, ‘feasted with the witch of Endor.’ ‘And,’ quoth
Fear, ‘the salt which she sprinkled upon the food showeth plainly it is
not a necromantic banquet, in which that seasoning never occurs.’ ‘And,
besides,’ says Hunger, after the first spoonful, ‘it is savoury and
refreshing viands.’
‘So ye like the meat?’ said the hostess.
‘Yea,’ answered the Dominie, ‘and I give thee thanks,
sceleratissima!--which means, Mrs. Margaret.’
‘Aweel, eat your fill; but an ye kenn’d how it was gotten ye maybe wadna
like it sae weel.’ Sampson’s spoon dropped in the act of conveying its
load to his mouth. ‘There’s been mony a moonlight watch to bring a’ that
trade thegither,’ continued Meg; ‘the folk that are to eat that dinner
thought little o’ your game laws.’
‘Is that all?’ thought Sampson, resuming his spoon and shovelling away
manfully; ‘I will not lack my food upon that argument.’
‘Now ye maun tak a dram?’
‘I will,’ quoth Sampson, ‘conjuro te--that is, I thank you heartily,’ for
he thought to himself, in for a penny in for a pound; and he fairly drank
the witch’s health in a cupful of brandy. When he had put this copestone
upon Meg’s good cheer, he felt, as he said, ‘mightily elevated, and
afraid of no evil which could befall unto him.’
‘Will ye remember my errand now?’ said Meg Merrilies; ‘I ken by the cast
o’ your ee that ye’re anither man than when you cam in.’
‘I will, Mrs. Margaret,’ repeated Sampson, stoutly; ‘I will deliver unto
him the sealed epistle, and will add what you please to send by word of
mouth.’
‘Then I’ll make it short,’ says Meg. ‘Tell him to look at the stars
without fail this night, and to do what I desire him in that letter, as
he would wish
That Bertram’s right and Bertram’s might
Should meet on Ellangowan height.
I have seen him twice when he saw na me; I ken when he was in this
country first, and I ken what’s brought him back again. Up an’ to the
gate! ye’re ower lang here; follow me.’
Sampson followed the sibyl accordingly, who guided him about a quarter of
a mile through the woods, by a shorter cut than he could have found for
himself; then they entered upon the common, Meg still marching before him
at a great pace, until she gained the top of a small hillock which
overhung the road.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘stand still here. Look how the setting sun breaks
through yon cloud that’s been darkening the lift a’ day. See where the
first stream o’ light fa’s: it’s upon Donagild’s round tower, the auldest
tower in the Castle o’ Ellangowan; that’s no for naething! See as it’s
glooming to seaward abune yon sloop in the bay; that’s no for naething
neither. Here I stood on this very spot,’ said she, drawing herself up so
as not to lose one hair-breadth of her uncommon height, and stretching
out her long sinewy arm and clenched hand--‘here I stood when I tauld the
last Laird o’ Ellangowan what was coming on his house; and did that fa’
to the ground? na, it hit even ower sair! And here, where I brake the
wand of peace ower him, here I stand again, to bid God bless and prosper
the just heir of Ellangowan that will sune be brought to his ain; and the
best laird he shall be that Ellangowan has seen for three hundred years.
I’ll no live to see it, maybe; but there will be mony a blythe ee see it
though mine be closed. And now, Abel Sampson, as ever ye lo’ed the house
of Ellangowan, away wi’ my message to the English Colonel, as if life and
death were upon your haste!’
So saying, she turned suddenly from the amazed Dominie and regained with
swift and long strides the shelter of the wood from which she had issued
at the point where it most encroached upon the common. Sampson gazed
after her for a moment in utter astonishment, and then obeyed her
directions, hurrying to Woodbourne at a pace very unusual for him,
exclaiming three times, ‘Prodigious! prodigious! pro-di-gi-ous!’