the last words that came from the lips of the betrayed one.
The pangs of remorse penetrated the heart of the insidious Campbell. He
leaped himself into a boat, held out an oar toward his drowning friend,
with real oaths of fidelity; but Reginald pushed it from him, and
abandoned himself to death. The waters of the lake are singularly
transparent near the rock on which the Tower of Gloom was perched; and
Campbell beheld his victim gradually sinking, till he seemed to lie
among the broad weeds under the waters. Once, only once, he saw, or
thought he saw, him lift his hand as if to reach his; and that dying
hand never left his remembrance.
Campbell having thus successfully accomplished the enterprise he had
projected, applied for and obtained the reward he had stipulated for. He
received a grant of the lands of Inshannock; and the long-wished-for
Tower of Gloom came into his hands, together with the sum of money
offered for the capture or death of Reginald. So far, therefore, as
worldly matters went, Donald Campbell, Esq. of Inshannock, had no cause
to complain. But he was far from happy, for he could not but reproach
himself with the death of one who, trusting to his honour, had been
basely betrayed; and those reasons of expediency which had satisfied him
when he contemplated the deed, after its accomplishment lost all their
previous efficacy. He had another and separate cause of distress; his
only son, Roderick, a promising youth, above sixteen years of age, had
suddenly disappeared in the year 1745, and no traces of him whatever
could be found. Every effort had been made to discover his fate, but in
vain; thus, although Donald Campbell was, apparently, a man of opulence,
he was in reality a much less happy man than when he lived from hand to
mouth, and knew not one day where he was to look for provision for the
next.
Although this enterprise had been successful, Campbell did not reap all
the fruits of his perfidy; for some of the remote portions of the
Highland estate which he had procured a gift of from the crown, were
altogether unproductive, the tenants refusing to recognise any other
chief than the son of the deceased proprietor. William Grahame was, at
the time of his father's death, a boy of fifteen. He had been removed
from the Tower of Gloom by his mother's relations, about the time of the
suppression of the rebellion, and placed by them in the Marischal
College in the city of Aberdeen.
The lad, who had no great taste for classical literature, was by no
means comfortable, and longed to return to the purple heath of his
native hills. So long as his father lived, William behaved himself with
considerable propriety, and made some progress in his studies; but no
sooner did the tidings arrive of the untimely fate of the ill-starred
Reginald, than his son disappeared from the university, and the anxious
search of his friends was unable to obtain any traces of his flight.
Some time afterwards, a body was found in the river Dee, in a state of
great decomposition, which generally was supposed to be that of the
young man, and was duly interred as the corpse of the last Grahame of
Inshannock.
Time hurried on; and the new proprietor of Inshannock had begun to feel
the effect of its rapid transit: he was no longer the vigorous man of
forty; and as he passed towards the period of threescore, the effects of
age told severely upon him.
For a series of years, Donald Campbell had been very much exposed to the
depredations of a set of caterans or gipsies, who frequently kept him in
a state of siege in his tower.
This tower was of the true Scottish fabric, divided into three storeys:
the highest of which contained the dormitories; the second or middle
served as a general refectory; and the lowest contained his cattle,
which required this lodgment at night, or very few would have been found
next morning.
The leader of the gipsies frequented the fairs on the north side of the
Frith, well mounted--paying at inns and ferries like a gentleman; and
attended by bands of gillies, whose green coats, cudgels, and knives,
were sufficiently feared by the tenantry of the Lennox. The gipsy
chieftain had also a grim cur of the true black-faced breed, famous for
collecting and driving off sheep, and therefore distinguished by his own
name. In the darkest cleughs or ravines, or in the deepest snow, this
faithful animal had never been known to abandon the flock commited to
his care, or to fail in tracing a fugitive. But, as sight and strength
began to fail, the four-footed chieftain was deposed, imprisoned in a
byre loft, and finally sentenced to be drowned.
In one of those drear midnights so awful to travellers in the Highlands,
a man, wrapped in a large coarse plaid, strode from a stone ridge, on
the border of Loch Lomond, into a boat which he had drawn from its
covert. He rowed resolutely and alone, looking carefully to the right
and to the left, till he suffered the tide to bear his little bark into
a gorge or gulf, so narrow, deep, and dark, that no escape but death
seemed to await him. Precipices, rugged with dwarf shrubs and broken
granite, rose more than a hundred feet on each side, sundered only by
the stream, which a thirsty season had reduced to a sluggish and shallow
pool. The boatman, poising himself erect on his staff, drew three times
the end of a strong chain which hung among the underwood. In a few
minutes a basket descended from the pinnacle of the cliff; and, having
moored his boat, he placed himself in the wicker carriage, and was
safely drawn into a crevice high in the fissure of a rock, into which he
disappeared.
The boat was moored; but the adventurer had not observed that it
contained another passenger. Underneath a plank, laid artfully along its
bottom, and shrouded in his plaid of the darkest green, another man had
been lurking more than an hour before the owner of the boat entered it,
and remained hidden by the darkness of the night.
His purpose was answered. He had now discovered--what he had sacrificed
many a perilous night to obtain a knowledge of--the mode by which the
owner of the Tower of Gloom gained access to his impregnable fortress
unsuspected. He instantly unmoored the boat, and rowed slowly back
across the loch to an island near the centre. He rested on its oars, and
looked down into the transparent water. "It is there still," he said to
himself; and drawing close among the rocks, leaped on dry land. A dog of
the true shepherd breed sat waiting under the bushes, and ran before him
till they descended together under an archway of stones and withered
branches. "Watch the boat," said the Highlander to his faithful guide,
who sprang immediately away to obey him. Meanwhile his master lifted up
one of the grey stones, took a bundle from beneath it, and equipped
himself in such a suit as a trooper of Campbell's regiment usually wore.
He then looked at the edge of his dirk, and returned to his boat.
Having thus acquired an accurate knowledge of the secret mode of access
to the tower, the stranger returned to the place where he had seen the
basket descending for the purpose of conveying its present possessor to
the tower; climbing up its rough face with the activity acquired by
mountain warfare, he hung among furze and broken rocks like a wild cat,
till he found the crevice through which the basket had seemed to issue.
It was artfully concealed by tufts of heather; but creeping on his hands
and knees, he forced his way into the interior. There the deepest
darkness confounded him, till he had laid his hands on a chain which he
rightly guessed to be the same he had seen hanging on the side of the
lake when Campbell landed. One end was coiled up; but he readily
concluded that the end must have some communication with the keep; and
he followed its course, till he found it inserted in what seemed a
subterraneous wall. A crevice behind the pulley admitted a gleam of
light; but, striving to raise himself, he leaned too forcibly on the
chain, and he was somewhat startled to hear the sound of a deep-toned
bell.
Donald Campbell was sitting alone in the chamber, from the windows of
which, fifteen years before, his betrayed friend, Reginald Grahame, had
precipitated himself into the lake below. His eyes were fixed on the
blazing logs on the hearth. The thoughts of former times were flitting
before him: he pondered on the days of his youth, before ambition and
avarice had fixed their poisoned arrows in his heart; ere the world had
banished those notions of virtue and religion that his excellent parents
had, in his boyhood, so unceasingly inculcated. Many minor delinquencies
had he committed; but the crime which now preyed upon his mind was the
betrayal of his friend, embittered as it was by the reflection of the
sordid motive that induced it.
In this state of mind he was startled by one of those figures which
fancy so frequently suggests to a disordered mind. In the masses of the
burning embers, he traced the outline of a face: imagination lent its
aid; and he recognised a resemblance of Reginald. He started
up:--"Avaunt, base mockery; am I to be daunted with a mere figment of
the brain? Alas! trifles now disturb me. If I have sinned, I have
suffered: the loss of my only son has been the penalty. I have paid for
my misdeeds." So saying, he sat back on his chair quite exhausted; and
at that moment the bell rung. At the deep and hollow sound he cast his
eyes fearfully round, but made no attempt to rise, though he stretched
his hand towards a staff which lay near him. The stranger saw the tremor
of the dismayed Lord of the Tower; and, putting his lips to the crevice,
murmured, "Father," in a low and supplicating tone. That word made
Campbell tremble. But when the other added, "Father! father! save me,"
he sprang to the wall, drew back the iron bolts of a narrow door,
invisible to any eye but his own, and gave admission to the muffled man,
who leaped eagerly in. Years had passed since Campbell had seen his son,
and many rumours had been spread that the younger Campbell had not
really perished, but had engaged in the service of the Pretender. The
hopes and love of the father all revived in one moment; and the sudden
apparition--the appeal for mercy--had full effect on his imagination.
The voice, eyes, and figure of the stranger resembled his son: all else
might and must be changed by the lapse of so many years. He wept like an
infant on his shoulder, grasped his hand a hundred times, and forgot to
blame him for the rash disloyalty he had shown to his father's cause.
Roderick, in explanation, mentioned a variety of circumstances
explanatory of the reasons of his evasion: how he had escaped, after the
battle of Culloden, to France, where he had endeavoured to earn a scanty
livelihood; and how he had at last resolved to revisit his native land,
in hopes of obtaining the forgiveness of his father. His narrative was
much abridged, by the fond delight of the old man weeping and rejoicing
over the return of his prodigal son.
Old Campbell eagerly asked by what happy chance he had discovered the
secret entrance, and whether any present danger threatened him. Roderick
answered the first question by repeating what our readers are already
acquainted with; and he added, in answer to the second, that he feared
nothing but the emissaries of the government, from whom he could not be
better concealed than in the Tower of Gloom. Old Campbell agreed with
joyful eagerness, but presently added--
"Roderick, my boy, we must trust in Annette: she's too near in kin to
betray you; and ye were to have been her spouse."
Then he explained that his niece was the only one person in his
household acquainted with the secret of the basket and the bell; that by
her help he could provide a mattress and provisions for his son; but
without it he would be forced to hazard the most dangerous
inconveniences.
Roderick was commanded to return into the cavern passage, while his
delighted father prepared his kinswoman for her new guest; and he
listened greedily to catch the answers Annette gave to her uncle's tale.
He heard the hurry of her steps preparing, as he supposed, a larger
supper for the old laird's table, with the simplicity and hospitality of
a Highland maiden. He was not mistaken. When the bannocks, and grouse,
and claret were arranged, Campbell presented his restored son to the
mistress of the feast. Roderick was pale and dumb as he looked upon her.
She came before him like a dream of some lovely picture remembered in
his youth; and with her came some remembrance of his former self. The
old laird, forgetting that his niece had been but a child, and his son a
stripling, when they parted, indulged the joy of his heart, by asking
Annette a thousand times whether she remembered her betrothed husband;
and urging his son, since he was still unmarried, to pledge his promised
bride.
Annette, whose predilections in favour of her cousin had been created by
association--for she remembered him as far back as her recollections
went--rejoiced at his reappearance, after so long an interval, and
seemed by no means disinclined to listen to her uncle's proposition.
Besides the persons just mentioned, there were present in the apartment
an old woman, and a dog, also evidently advanced in years. The latter,
upon the entrance of Roderick, saluted him with a loud bark; but,
strange to say, suddenly paused in the middle of his hostile
demonstrations, and, after smelling for half-a-minute, as if he was
investigating what sort of person the intruder was, quietly retreated to
his place by the fireside, apparently satisfied that all was right.
The fire on the hearth was replenished, and burned cheerfully.
Immediately opposite to the dog, on one side of the ingle, sat the
woman. She was aged, and bent almost double, with no apparent sense of
sight or hearing, though her eyes were fixed on the spindle she was
twirling; and sometimes, when the laird raised his voice, she put her
lean hand on the hood that covered her ears.
"Do you not remember poor old Moome?" said Annette; and the laird led
his supposed son towards the superannuated crone, though without
expecting any mark of recognition. Whether she had noticed anything that
had passed, could not be gathered from her idiot laugh; and she had
almost ceased to speak. Therefore, as if only dumb domestic animals had
been sitting by his hearth, Campbell pursued his arrangements for his
son's safety, advising him to sleep composedly in the wooden panelled
bed that formed a closet off this chamber, without regarding the
half-living skeleton, who never left her corner. He gave him his
blessing, and departed, taking with him his niece and the key of this
dreary room, promising to return and watch by his bedside. He came back
in a few minutes; and, while Roderick couched himself on his mattress,
took his station by the fire and fell fast asleep, overcome with joy.
The embers gradually sunk on the hearth, and the light diminished in
proportion. Roderick, who had lain awake for some time, began to feel
the approach of sleep; and, whilst in a state of transition, he
observed, by the dying embers of the fire, the old woman cautiously
rise, and, removing the dirk from the side of her sleeping master,
approach his bed with cautious step and silent tread. The astonishment
of Roderick at beholding this infirm creature advance, with a purpose so
evidently hostile, was so great, that, in place of jumping from his
couch, and wresting the weapon from the hands of its weak and attenuated
possessor, he lay fascinated, as birds are said to be by the eyes of the
rattlesnake, until the actual advent of the apparent assassin. The
motions of the beldame were carefully watched in a quarter which she
little suspected; for she barely reached the couch on which her intended
victim reposed, and was about to raise her arm to strike, than the aged
dog sprang at her throat, and brought her to the ground, from which she
never rose again: the frail thread of her existence had been snapped by
the suddenness of the onset.
This unexpected occurrence awoke the lord of the tower, who, springing
up, beheld the nurse lying on the ground, with the dog growling over
her.
This at once aroused Roderick from his trance; and he briefly explained
to his father the singularly mysterious scene he had witnessed, and the
fact of his rescue by the wonderful sagacity of the dog.
The father was perfectly amazed that such an attempt should have been
made on the life of his son by one whom he naturally supposed would, as
his vassal, have rather died a thousand deaths than have touched a hair
of the head of the son of her chief. The only plausible ground he could
assign for this murderous attempt was the insanity of the old woman,
who, perhaps, perplexed by the unexpected appearance of a stranger in a
place where none had heretofore been, had, by some hallucination,
fancied him a robber; and, under this impression, had boldly gone
forward to do battle for the laird.
"Dear Roderick," said the father, "this is a sad welcome to the Tower
of Gloom. If I was superstitious, I should augur something bad from this
event. Poor Moome! she had long been a faithful servant, and I could
have wished her fate different. We must conceal it from Annette. She
will be sufficiently unhappy as it is; and it would be cruel to add to
her annoyance by disclosing the strange fact that she had perished in
attempting the life of her benefactor's son. Once more, good-night, dear
boy."
So saying, he pressed his son's forehead to his lips, and, removing the
body, left Roderick to his own thoughts.
Poor Annette was shocked exceedingly by the unexpected death of the
nurse; but sorrow is said to be near akin to love; and, in the delicate
attentions of her cousin Roderick, the fair Celt felt her grief
strangely soothed, and her bosom experience sensations to which it had
previously been a stranger.
Old Campbell witnessed the progress of this passion with great delight,
and gave the young couple every opportunity for studying "_la belle
passion_:" indeed, the necessary confinement of Roderick in the tower
threw them so much together, that it was no wonder they became attached
to each other.
The scene from the top of the tower was magnificent: the clear and
pellucid water of the fairest of Scotland's lakes at its feet; the isles
with which its glassy bosom was studded, looked like so many fairy
bowers; and the magnificent range of mountains to the northward, added
to the grandeur of a scene, the beauty of which words can but
inadequately express. Often, at night, by the light of the silvery moon,
the cousins would repair to this favourite seat, where Roderick would
speak
"Of moving accidents by flood and field;
Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach;
Of being taken by the insolent foe,
And sold to slavery;"
whilst Annette listened breathless, but delighted, to his words.
It was here that he first ventured to breathe of love. Seizing the
guitar from his cousin's hand, he poured forth his feelings in the
following verses:--
"Impell'd by angry fate's decree
In foreign lands to roam,
With heavy heart I bid adieu
To happiness and home.
"I braved the perils of the land,
The dangers of the sea;
But every suffering is repaid
By one kind look from thee."
It is unnecessary to trouble our readers with all the love-passages
between the two lovesick swains, which, although exceedingly interesting
to the parties themselves, is anything but agreeable to any one else. It
is sufficient to say, that Annette yielded her heart to her cousin, and
that her uncle rejoiced at the surrender. A change for the better was
evident in Roderick. He was no longer the gloomy repulsive individual
that he once was. His manners gradually softened; and even the coldness
with which he originally repelled his father's kindness began to
disappear. He had been barely a fortnight in the tower, when he
expressed an urgent desire to be allowed to leave it for a short time.
Old Campbell was not a little surprised at this, and represented the
great risk he ran in leaving a place of security, and exposing himself
to the chance of apprehension: he also expressed some curiosity to know
what engagement could lure him from his father's house at such a time.
Roderick replied, that, were the business his own, he would not have
scrupled to have explained everything to his father; but, as any
disclosure would compromise other persons, he could not, as a man of
honour, betray a trust that had been confided in him. The laird, whose
notions of honour were somewhat lax, was not altogether convinced by
this reasoning; but he did not press his opposition farther, and
Roderick was allowed to depart.
After the absence of a week, Roderick returned, and was welcomed in the
most affectionate manner by his father and cousin. Some time afterwards
he again left the tower for a few days; but these absences became less
and less, as his love prospered. One day his father, who had been from
home for some time, returned, and calling his son and niece to his
presence, said--
"My dear Roderick, you are now a free man--I hold here a free pardon for
all offences. The interest of our chief with government has effected
this. The Duke of Argyle is ever ready to assist his clansmen; and the
faults and errors of the son have been overlooked in the services of the
father. No obstacle longer remains to your nuptials with my beloved
niece: take her from my hand as the greatest treasure I can give you."
Roderick's passion was equal to her rapture. Here was every obstacle
removed. He could again appear in the world as a free agent, and the
husband of one whose beauty was her least recommendation.
"Father," he exclaimed, "I know not how to express my gratitude for
these favours. Henceforth you shall----" And here he paused--a blush
came over his haughty features, and the sentence was left unfinished.
A week before the nuptials, the old man took his son aside.
"Roderick, I have something for your private ear."
"I attend."
"It is painful for a father to declare his unworthiness to his own
offspring; but it must be. A bitter remorse has for many years soured my
existence. My wealth is considerable; but it is a burden to me, because
it originated in--blood!"
Roderick answered not.
"You must have heard that this tower once belonged to another?"
The son started.
"I have."
"I betrayed my friend. He perished, not by my hands, but by my fault;
and from that moment deep remorse has filled my bosom: but of that no
more. A sense of justice induces me to act decisively. Reginald Grahame
had a son."
Roderick rose from his seat, but made no reply.
"It is of him I would speak. Circumstances have induced me to believe
that the leader of the caterans who pursued me so long--who harried my
lands, and injured my crops--was that son. His feelings towards me must
be deadly; but I forgive him. It is but natural that he should hate the
destroyer of his father. Would that he knew the pangs I have
suffered--the anguish I have felt!"
"And is this true? Was your remorse so great? Have you repented of this
cruel act?"
"Deeply--deeply, my son; but what avails it?"
"Much; for contrition----" And he paused.
"Proceed."
"I mean to say, that a contrite heart is acceptable to Heaven."
"I hope it is--I believe it is. But, to proceed:--I have enough to make
you and Annette comfortable; and it is my wish to return to my own
estate, now redeemed from the burdens which once pressed heavily upon
it. If young Grahame lives, as I suspect he does, I will surrender his
father's lands. I ask not his forgiveness--that I expect not--but I
request him to take back his own. Have I your consent?"
"Most cordially."
"Then all is right. I must see the gipsy chief. I will place myself in
his hands."
"Nay, nay, think not of that. I will myself see him."
"No, no; if he slays me, he but extinguishes a light that soon must be
quenched; but if he murder you, I am left desolate, and Annette
miserable."
"Feel no alarm: he knows me not. As a stranger I will seek him; and, be
assured, no harm will befall me."