Вальтер Скотт
Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer
CHAPTER XXIII
Gallows and knock are too powerful on the highway
– Winter’s Tale.
The hint of the hospitable farmer was not lost on Brown. But while he paid his reckoning he could not avoid repeatedly fixing his eyes on Meg Merrilies. She was in all respects the same witch-like figure as when we first introduced her at Ellangowan Place. Time had grizzled her raven locks and added wrinkles to her wild features, but her height remained erect, and her activity was unimpaired. It was remarked of this woman, as of others of the same description, that a life of action, though not of labour, gave her the perfect command of her limbs and figure, so that the attitudes into which she most naturally threw herself were free, unconstrained, and picturesque. At present she stood by the window of the cottage, her person drawn up so as to show to full advantage her masculine stature, and her head somewhat thrown back, that the large bonnet with which her face was shrouded might not interrupt her steady gaze at Brown. At every gesture he made and every tone he uttered she seemed to give an almost imperceptible start. On his part, he was surprised to find that he could not look upon this singular figure without some emotion. ‘Have I dreamed of such a figure?’ he said to himself, ‘or does this wild and singular-looking woman recall to my recollection some of the strange figures I have seen in our Indian pagodas?’
While he embarrassed himself with these discussions, and the hostess was engaged in rummaging out silver in change of half-a-guinea, the gipsy suddenly made two strides and seized Brown’s hand. He expected, of course, a display of her skill in palmistry, but she seemed agitated by other feelings.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘tell me, in the name of God, young man, what is your name, and whence you came?’
‘My name is Brown, mother, and I come from the East Indies.’
‘From the East Indies!’ dropping his hand with a sigh; ‘it cannot be then. I am such an auld fool, that everything I look on seems the thing I want maist to see. But the East Indies! that cannot be. Weel, be what ye will, ye hae a face and a tongue that puts me in mind of auld times. Good day; make haste on your road, and if ye see ony of our folk, meddle not and make not, and they’ll do you nae harm.’
Brown, who had by this time received his change, put a shilling into her hand, bade his hostess farewell, and, taking the route which the farmer had gone before, walked briskly on, with the advantage of being guided by the fresh hoof-prints of his horse. Meg Merrilies looked after him for some time, and then muttered to herself, ‘I maun see that lad again; and I maun gang back to Ellangowan too. The Laird’s dead! aweel, death pays a’ scores; he was a kind man ance. The Sheriff’s flitted, and I can keep canny in the bush; so there’s no muckle hazard o’ scouring the cramp-ring. I would like to see bonny Ellangowan again or I die.’
Brown meanwhile proceeded northward at a round pace along the moorish tract called the Waste of Cumberland. He passed a solitary house, towards which the horseman who preceded him had apparently turned up, for his horse’s tread was evident in that direction. A little farther, he seemed to have returned again into the road. Mr. Dinmont had probably made a visit there either of business or pleasure. ‘I wish,’ thought Brown, ‘the good farmer had staid till I came up; I should not have been sorry to ask him a few questions about the road, which seems to grow wilder and wilder.’
In truth, nature, as if she had designed this tract of country to be the barrier between two hostile nations, has stamped upon it a character of wildness and desolation. The hills are neither high nor rocky, but the land is all heath and morass; the huts poor and mean, and at a great distance from each other. Immediately around them there is generally some little attempt at cultivation; but a half-bred foal or two, straggling about with shackles on their hind legs, to save the trouble of inclosures, intimate the farmer’s chief resource to be the breeding of horses. The people, too, are of a ruder and more inhospitable class than are elsewhere to be found in Cumberland, arising partly from their own habits, partly from their intermixture with vagrants and criminals, who make this wild country a refuge from justice. So much were the men of these districts in early times the objects of suspicion and dislike to their more polished neighbours, that there was, and perhaps still exists, a by-law of the corporation of Newcastle prohibiting any freeman of that city to take for apprentice a native of certain of these dales. It is pithily said, ‘Give a dog an ill name and hang him’; and it may be added, if you give a man, or race of men, an ill name they are very likely to do something that deserves hanging. Of this Brown had heard something, and suspected more, from the discourse between the landlady, Dinmont, and the gipsy; but he was naturally of a fearless disposition, had nothing about him that could tempt the spoiler, and trusted to get through the Waste with daylight. In this last particular, however, he was likely to be disappointed. The way proved longer than he had anticipated, and the horizon began to grow gloomy just as he entered upon an extensive morass.
Choosing his steps with care and deliberation, the young officer proceeded along a path that sometimes sunk between two broken black banks of moss earth, sometimes crossed narrow but deep ravines filled with a consistence between mud and water, and sometimes along heaps of gravel and stones, which had been swept together when some torrent or waterspout from the neighbouring hills overflowed the marshy ground below. He began to ponder how a horseman could make his way through such broken ground; the traces of hoofs, however, were still visible; he even thought he heard their sound at some distance, and, convinced that Mr. Dinmont’s progress through the morass must be still slower than his own, he resolved to push on, in hopes to overtake him and have the benefit of his knowledge of the country. At this moment his little terrier sprung forward, barking most furiously.
Brown quickened his pace, and, attaining the summit of a small rising ground, saw the subject of the dog’s alarm. In a hollow about a gunshot below him a man whom he easily recognised to be Dinmont was engaged with two others in a desperate struggle. He was dismounted, and defending himself as he best could with the butt of his heavy whip. Our traveller hastened on to his assistance; but ere he could get up a stroke had levelled the farmer with the earth, and one of the robbers, improving his victory, struck him some merciless blows on the head. The other villain, hastening to meet Brown, called to his companion to come along, ‘for that one’s CONTENT,’ meaning, probably, past resistance or complaint. One ruffian was armed with a cutlass, the other with a bludgeon; but as the road was pretty narrow, ‘bar fire-arms,’ thought Brown, ‘and I may manage them well enough.’ They met accordingly, with the most murderous threats on the part of the ruffians. They soon found, however, that their new opponent was equally stout and resolute; and, after exchanging two or three blows, one of them told him to ‘follow his nose over the heath, in the devil’s name, for they had nothing to say to him.’
Brown rejected this composition as leaving to their mercy the unfortunate man whom they were about to pillage, if not to murder outright; and the skirmish had just recommenced when Dinmont unexpectedly recovered his senses, his feet, and his weapon, and hastened to the scene of action. As he had been no easy antagonist, even when surprised and alone, the villains did not choose to wait his joining forces with a man who had singly proved a match for them both, but fled across the bog as fast as their feet could carry them, pursued by Wasp, who had acted gloriously during the skirmish, annoying the heels of the enemy, and repeatedly effecting a moment’s diversion in his master’s favour.
‘Deil, but your dog’s weel entered wi’ the vermin now, sir!’ were the first words uttered by the jolly farmer as he came up, his head streaming with blood, and recognised his deliverer and his little attendant.
‘I hope, sir, you are not hurt dangerously?’
‘O, deil a bit, my head can stand a gay clour; nae thanks to them, though, and mony to you. But now, hinney, ye maun help me to catch the beast, and ye maun get on behind me, for we maun off like whittrets before the whole clanjamfray be doun upon us; the rest o’ them will no be far off.’ The galloway was, by good fortune, easily caught, and Brown made some apology for overloading the animal.
‘Deil a fear, man,’ answered the proprietor; ‘Dumple could carry six folk, if his back was lang eneugh; but God’s sake, haste ye, get on, for I see some folk coming through the slack yonder that it may be just as weel no to wait for.’
Brown was of opinion that this apparition of five or six men, with whom the other villains seemed to join company, coming across the moss towards them, should abridge ceremony; he therefore mounted Dumple en croupe, and the little spirited nag cantered away with two men of great size and strength as if they had been children of six years old. The rider, to whom the paths of these wilds seemed intimately known, pushed on at a rapid pace, managing with much dexterity to choose the safest route, in which he was aided by the sagacity of the galloway, who never failed to take the difficult passes exactly at the particular spot, and in the special manner, by which they could be most safely crossed. Yet, even with these advantages, the road was so broken, and they were so often thrown out of the direct course by various impediments, that they did not gain much on their pursuers. ‘Never mind,’ said the undaunted Scotchman to his companion, ‘if we were ance by Withershins’ Latch, the road’s no near sae soft, and we’ll show them fair play for’t.’
They soon came to the place he named, a narrow channel, through which soaked, rather than flowed, a small stagnant stream, mantled over with bright green mosses. Dinmont directed his steed towards a pass where the water appeared to flow with more freedom over a harder bottom; but Dumple backed from the proposed crossing-place, put his head down as if to reconnoitre the swamp more nearly, stretching forward his fore-feet, and stood as fast as if he had been cut out of stone.
‘Had we not better,’ said Brown, ‘dismount, and leave him to his fate; or can you not urge him through the swamp?’
‘Na, na,’ said his pilot, ‘we maun cross Dumple at no rate, he has mair sense than mony a Christian.’ So saying, he relaxed the reins, and shook them loosely. ‘Come now, lad, take your ain way o’t, let’s see where ye’ll take us through.’
Dumple, left to the freedom of his own will, trotted briskly to another part of the latch, less promising, as Brown thought, in appearance, but which the animal’s sagacity or experience recommended as the safer of the two, and where, plunging in, he attained the other side with little difficulty.
‘I’m glad we’re out o’ that moss,’ said Dinmont, ‘where there’s mair stables for horses than change-houses for men; we have the Maiden-way to help us now, at ony rate.’ Accordingly, they speedily gained a sort of rugged causeway so called, being the remains of an old Roman road which traverses these wild regions in a due northerly direction. Here they got on at the rate of nine or ten miles an hour, Dumple seeking no other respite than what arose from changing his pace from canter to trot. ‘I could gar him show mair action,’ said his master, ‘but we are twa lang-legged chields after a’, and it would be a pity to stress Dumple; there wasna the like o’ him at Staneshiebank Fair the day.’
Brown readily assented to the propriety of sparing the horse, and added that, as they were now far out of the reach of the rogues, he thought Mr. Dintnont had better tie a handkerchief round his head, for fear of the cold frosty air aggravating the wound.
‘What would I do that for?’ answered the hardy farmer; ‘the best way’s to let the blood barken upon the cut; that saves plasters, hinney.’
Brown, who in his military profession had seen a great many hard blows pass, could not help remarking, ‘he had never known such severe strokes received with so much apparent indifference.’
‘Hout tout, man! I would never be making a humdudgeon about a scart on the pow; but we’ll be in Scotland in five minutes now, and ye maun gang up to Charlie’s Hope wi’ me, that’s a clear case.’
Brown readily accepted the offered hospitality. Night was now falling when they came in sight of a pretty river winding its way through a pastoral country. The hills were greener and more abrupt than those which Brown had lately passed, sinking their grassy sides at once upon the river. They had no pretensions to magnificence of height, or to romantic shapes, nor did their smooth swelling slopes exhibit either rocks or woods. Yet the view was wild, solitary, and pleasingly rural. No inclosures, no roads, almost no tillage; it seemed a land which a patriarch would have chosen to feed his flocks and herds. The remains of here and there a dismantled and ruined tower showed that it had once harboured beings of a very different description from its present inhabitants; those freebooters, namely, to whose exploits the wars between England and Scotland bear witness.
Descending by a path towards a well-known ford, Dumple crossed the small river, and then, quickening his pace, trotted about a mile briskly up its banks, and approached two or three low thatched houses, placed with their angles to each other, with a great contempt of regularity. This was the farm-steading of Charlie’s Hope, or, in the language of the country, ‘the town.’ A most furious barking was set up at their approach by the whole three generations of Mustard and Pepper, and a number of allies, names unknown. The farmer [Footnote: See Note 3.] made his well-known voice lustily heard to restore order; the door opened, and a half-dressed ewe-milker, who had done that good office, shut it in their faces, in order that she might run ‘ben the house’ to cry ‘Mistress, mistress, it’s the master, and another man wi’ him.’ Dumple, turned loose, walked to his own stable-door, and there pawed and whinnied for admission, in strains which were answered by his acquaintances from the interior. Amid this bustle Brown was fain to secure Wasp from the other dogs, who, with ardour corresponding more to their own names than to the hospitable temper of their owner, were much disposed to use the intruder roughly.
In about a minute a stout labourer was patting Dumple, and introducing him into the stable, while Mrs. Dinmont, a well-favoured buxom dame, welcomed her husband with unfeigned rapture. ‘Eh, sirs! gudeman, ye hae been a weary while away!’
CHAPTER XXIV
Liddell till now, except in Doric lays,
Tuned to her murmurs by her love-sick swains,
Unknown in song, though not a purer stream
Rolls towards the western main
Art of Preserving Health.
The present store-farmers of the south of Scotland are a much more refined race than their fathers, and the manners I am now to describe have either altogether disappeared or are greatly modified. Without losing the rural simplicity of manners, they now cultivate arts unknown to the former generation, not only in the progressive improvement of their possessions but in all the comforts of life. Their houses are more commodious, their habits of life regulated so as better to keep pace with those of the civilised world, and the best of luxuries, the luxury of knowledge, has gained much ground among their hills during the last thirty years. Deep drinking, formerly their greatest failing, is now fast losing ground; and, while the frankness of their extensive hospitality continues the same, it is, generally speaking, refined in its character and restrained in its excesses.
‘Deil’s in the wife,’ said Dandie Dinmont, shaking off his spouse’s embrace, but gently and with a look of great affection; ‘deil’s in ye, Ailie; d’ye no see the stranger gentleman?’
Ailie turned to make her apology-’Troth, I was sae weel pleased to see the gudeman, that-but, gude gracious! what’s the matter wi’ ye baith?’ for they were now in her little parlour, and the candle showed the streaks of blood which Dinmont’s wounded head had plentifully imparted to the clothes of his companion as well as to his own. ‘Ye’ve been fighting again, Dandie, wi’ some o’ the Bewcastle horse-coupers! Wow, man, a married man, wi’ a bonny family like yours, should ken better what a father’s life’s worth in the warld’; the tears stood in the good woman’s eyes as she spoke.
‘Whisht! whisht! gudewife,’ said her husband, with a smack that had much more affection than ceremony in it; ‘never mind, never mind; there’s a gentleman that will tell you that, just when I had ga’en up to Lourie Lowther’s, and had bidden the drinking of twa cheerers, and gotten just in again upon the moss, and was whigging cannily awa hame, twa landloupers jumpit out of a peat-hag on me or I was thinking, and got me down, and knevelled me sair aneuch, or I could gar my whip walk about their lugs; and troth, gudewife, if this honest gentleman hadna come up, I would have gotten mair licks than I like, and lost mair siller than I could weel spare; so ye maun be thankful to him for it, under God.’ With that he drew from his side-pocket a large greasy leather pocket-book, and bade the gudewife lock it up in her kist.
‘God bless the gentleman, and e’en God bless him wi’ a’ my heart; but what can we do for him, but to gie him the meat and quarters we wadna refuse to the poorest body on earth-unless (her eye directed to the pocketbook, but with a feeling of natural propriety which made the inference the most delicate possible), unless there was ony other way-’ Brown saw, and estimated at its due rate, the mixture of simplicity and grateful generosity which took the downright way of expressing itself, yet qualified with so much delicacy; he was aware his own appearance, plain at best, and now torn and spattered with blood, made him an object of pity at least, and perhaps of charity. He hastened to say his name was Brown, a captain in the-regiment of cavalry, travelling for pleasure, and on foot, both from motives of independence and economy; and he begged his kind landlady would look at her husband’s wounds, the state of which he had refused to permit him to examine. Mrs. Dinmont was used to her husband’s broken heads more than to the presence of a captain of dragoons. She therefore glanced at a table-cloth not quite clean, and conned over her proposed supper a minute or two, before, patting her husband on the shoulder, she bade him sit down for ‘a hard-headed loon, that was aye bringing himsell and other folk into collie-shangies.’
When Dandie Dinmont, after executing two or three caprioles, and cutting the Highland fling, by way of ridicule of his wife’s anxiety, at last deigned to sit down and commit his round, black, shaggy bullet of a head to her inspection, Brown thought he had seen the regimental surgeon look grave upon a more trifling case. The gudewife, however, showed some knowledge of chirurgery; she cut away with her scissors the gory locks whose stiffened and coagulated clusters interfered with her operations, and clapped on the wound some lint besmeared with a vulnerary salve, esteemed sovereign by the whole dale (which afforded upon fair nights considerable experience of such cases); she then fixed her plaster with a bandage, and, spite of her patient’s resistance, pulled over all a night-cap, to keep everything in its right place. Some contusions on the brow and shoulders she fomented with brandy, which the patient did not permit till the medicine had paid a heavy toll to his mouth. Mrs. Dinmont then simply, but kindly, offered her assistance to Brown.
He assured her he had no occasion for anything but the accommodation of a basin and towel.
‘And that’s what I should have thought of sooner,’ she said; ‘and I did think o’t, but I durst na open the door, for there’s a’ the bairns, poor things, sae keen to see their father.’
This explained a great drumming and whining at the door of the little parlour, which had somewhat surprised Brown, though his kind landlady had only noticed it by fastening the bolt as soon as she heard it begin. But on her opening the door to seek the basin and towel (for she never thought of showing the guest to a separate room), a whole tide of white-headed urchins streamed in, some from the stable, where they had been seeing Dumple, and giving him a welcome home with part of their four-hours scones; others from the kitchen, where they had been listening to old Elspeth’s tales and ballads; and the youngest, half-naked, out of bed, all roaring to see daddy, and to inquire what he had brought home for them from the various fairs he had visited in his peregrinations. Our knight of the broken head first kissed and hugged them all round, then distributed whistles, penny-trumpets, and gingerbread, and, lastly, when the tumult of their joy and welcome got beyond bearing, exclaimed to his guest-’This is a’ the gude-wife’s fault, Captain; she will gie the bairns a’ their ain way.’
‘Me! Lord help me,’ said Ailie, who at that instant entered with the basin and ewer, ‘how can I help it? I have naething else to gie them, poor things!’
Dinmont then exerted himself, and, between coaxing, threats, and shoving, cleared the room of all the intruders excepting a boy and girl, the two eldest of the family, who could, as he observed, behave themselves ‘distinctly.’ For the same reason, but with less ceremony, all the dogs were kicked out excepting the venerable patriarchs, old Pepper and Mustard, whom frequent castigation and the advance of years had inspired with such a share of passive hospitality that, after mutual explanation and remonstrance in the shape of some growling, they admitted Wasp, who had hitherto judged it safe to keep beneath his master’s chair, to a share of a dried-wedder’s skin, which, with the wool uppermost and unshorn, served all the purposes of a Bristol hearth-rug.
The active bustle of the mistress (so she was called in the kitchen, and the gudewife in the parlour) had already signed the fate of a couple of fowls, which, for want of time to dress them otherwise, soon appeared reeking from the gridiron, or brander, as Mrs. Dinmont denominated it. A huge piece of cold beef-ham, eggs, butter, cakes, and barley-meal bannocks in plenty made up the entertainment, which was to be diluted with home-brewed ale of excellent quality and a case-bottle of brandy. Few soldiers would find fault with such cheer after a day’s hard exercise and a skirmish to boot; accordingly Brown did great honour to the eatables. While the gudewife partly aided, partly instructed, a great stout servant girl, with cheeks as red as her top-knot, to remove the supper matters and supply sugar and hot water (which, in the damsel’s anxiety to gaze upon an actual live captain, she was in some danger of forgetting), Brown took an opportunity to ask his host whether he did not repent of having neglected the gipsy’s hint.
‘Wha kens?’ answered he; ‘they’re queer deevils; maybe I might just have ‘scaped ae gang to meet the other. And yet I ‘ll no say that neither; for if that randy wife was coming to Charlie’s Hope, she should have a pint bottle o’ brandy and a pound o’ tobacco to wear her through the winter. They’re queer deevils; as my auld father used to say, they’re warst where they’re warst guided. After a’, there’s baith gude and ill about the gipsies.’
This, and some other desultory conversation, served as a ‘shoeing-horn’ to draw on another cup of ale and another ‘cheerer,’ as Dinmont termed it in his country phrase, of brandy and water. Brown then resolutely declined all further conviviality for that evening, pleading his own weariness and the effects of the skirmish, being well aware that it would have availed nothing to have remonstrated with his host on the danger that excess might have occasioned to his own raw wound and bloody coxcomb. A very small bed-room, but a very clean bed, received the traveller, and the sheets made good the courteous vaunt of the hostess, ‘that they would be as pleasant as he could find ony gate, for they were washed wi’ the fairy-well water, and bleached on the bonny white gowans, and bittled by Nelly and herself, and what could woman, if she was a queen, do mair for them?’
They indeed rivalled snow in whiteness, and had, besides, a pleasant fragrance from the manner in which they had been bleached. Little Wasp, after licking his master’s hand to ask leave, couched himself on the coverlet at his feet; and the traveller’s senses were soon lost in grateful oblivion.
