CHAPTER XXIII.
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 regretwith which Ravenswood left the seat which had belonged to his ancestors.The terms in which Lady Ashton's billet was couched rendered itimpossible for him, without being deficient in that spirit of which heperhaps had too much, to remain an instant longer within its walls.The Marquis, who had his share in the affront, was, nevertheless, stillwilling to make some efforts at conciliation. He therefore suffered hiskinsman to depart alone, making him promise, however, that he would waitfor him at the small inn called the Tod's Hole, situated, as our readersmay be pleased to recollect, half-way betwixt Ravenswood Castle andWolf's Crag, and about five Scottish miles distant from each. Here theMarquis proposed to join the Master of Ravenswood, either that night orthe next morning. His own feelings would have induced him to have leftthe castle directly, but he was loth to forfeit, without at least oneeffort, the advantages which he had proposed from his visit to the LordKeeper; and the Master of Ravenswood was, even in the very heat of hisresentment, unwilling to foreclose any chance of reconciliation whichmight arise out of the partiality which Sir William Ashton had showntowards him, as well as the intercessory arguments of his noble kinsman.He himself departed without a moment's delay, farther than was necessaryto make this arrangement.
At first he spurred his horse at a quick pace through an avenue of thepark, as if, by rapidity of motion, he could stupify the confusion offeelings with which he was assailed. But as the road grew wilder andmore sequestered, and when the trees had hidden the turrets of thecastle, he gradually slackened his pace, as if to indulge the painfulreflections which he had in vain endeavoured to repress. The path inwhich he found himself led him to the Mermaiden's Fountain, and to thecottage of Alice; and the fatal influence which superstitious beliefattached to the former spot, as well as the admonitions which hadbeen in vain offered to him by the inhabitant of the latter, forcedthemselves upon his memory. "Old saws speak truth," he said to himself,"and the Mermaiden's Well has indeed witnessed the last act of rashnessof the heir of Ravenswood. Alice spoke well," he continued, "and I amin the situation which she foretold; or rather, I am more deeplydishonoured--not the dependant and ally of the destroyer of my father'shouse, as the old sibyl presaged, but the degraded wretch who hasaspired to hold that subordinate character, and has been rejected withdisdain."
We are bound to tell the tale as we have received it; and, consideringthe distance of the time, and propensity of those through whose mouthsit has passed to the marvellous, this could not be called a Scottishstory unless it manifested a tinge of Scottish superstition. AsRavenswood approached the solitary fountain, he is said to have met withthe following singular adventure: His horse, which was moving slowlyforward, suddenly interrupted its steady and composed pace, snorted,reared, and, though urged by the spur, refused to proceed, as if someobject of terror had suddenly presented itself. On looking to thefountain, Ravenswood discerned a female figure, dressed in a white, orrather greyish, mantle, placed on the very spot on which Lucy Ashtonhad reclined while listening to the fatal tale of love. His immediateimpression was that she had conjectured by which path he would traversethe park on his departure, and placed herself at this well-known andsequestered place of rendezvous, to indulge her own sorrow and hisparting interview. In this belief he jumped from his horse, and,making its bridle fast to a tree, walked hastily towards thefountain, pronouncing eagerly, yet under his breath, the words, "MissAshton!--Lucy!"
The figure turned as he addressed it, and displayed to his wonderingeyes the features, not of Lucy Ashton, but of old blind Alice. Thesingularity of her dress, which rather resembled a shroud than thegarment of a living woman; the appearance of her person, larger, asit struck him, than it usually seemed to be; above all, the strangecircumstance of a blind, infirm, and decrepit person being found aloneand at a distance from her habitation (considerable, if her infirmitiesbe taken into account), combined to impress him with a feeling of wonderapproaching 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 advancedtowards her, Alice, or her apparition, moved or glided backwards towardsthe thicket, still keeping her face turned towards him. The trees soonhid the form from his sight; and, yielding to the strong and terrificimpression that the being which he had seen was not of this world, theMaster of Ravenswood remained rooted to the ground whereon he hadstood when he caught his last view of her. At length, summoning up hiscourage, he advanced to the spot on which the figure had seemed tobe seated; but neither was there pressure of the grass nor any othercircumstance to induce him to believe that what he had seen was real andsubstantial.
Full of those strange thoughts and confused apprehensions which awakein the bosom of one who conceives he has witnessed some preternaturalappearance, the Master of Ravenswood walked back towards his horse,frequently, however, looking behind him, not without apprehension, as ifexpecting that the vision would reappear. But the apparition, whetherit was real or whether it was the creation of a heated and agitatedimagination, returned not again; and he found his horse sweating andterrified, as if experiencing that agony of fear with which the presenceof a supernatural being is supposed to agitate the brute creation. TheMaster mounted, and rode slowly forward, soothing his steed from timeto time, while the animal seemed internally to shrink and shudder, asif expecting some new object of fear at the opening of every glade.The rider, after a moment's consideration, resolved to investigate thematter further. "Can my eyes have deceived me," he said, "and deceivedme for such a space of time? Or are this woman's infirmities butfeigned, in order to excite compassion? And even then, her motionresembled not that of a living and existing person. Must I adopt thepopular creed, and think that the unhappy being has formed a league withthe powers of darkness? I am determined to be resolved; I will not brookimposition 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 pleasantand the sun was high. He approached the hut, and heard from within thesobs 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. Itwas indeed a house of solitude and sorrow. Stretched upon her miserablepallet lay the corpse of the last retainer of the house of Ravenswoodwho still abode on their paternal domains! Life had but shortlydeparted; and the little girl by whom she had been attended in her lastmoments was wringing her hands and sobbing, betwixt childish fear andsorrow, over the body of her mistress.
The Master of Ravenswood had some difficulty to compose the terrorsof the poor child, whom his unexpected appearance had at first ratherappalled than comforted; and when he succeeded, the first expressionwhich the girl used intimated that "he had come too late." Uponinquiring the meaning of this expression, he learned that the deceased,upon the first attack of the mortal agony, had sent a peasant to thecastle to beseech an interview of the Master of Ravenswood, and hadexpressed the utmost impatience for his return. But the messengers ofthe poor are tardy and negligent: the fellow had not reached the castle,as was afterwards learned, until Ravenswood had left it, and had thenfound too much amusement among the retinue of the strangers to return inany haste to the cottage of Alice. Meantime her anxiety of mind seemedto increase with the agony of her body; and, to use the phrase ofBabie, her only attendant, "she prayed powerfully that she might seeher master's son once more, and renew her warning." She died just as theclock in the distant village tolled one; and Ravenswood remembered, withinternal shuddering, that he had heard the chime sound through the woodjust before he had seen what he was now much disposed to consider as thespectre of the deceased.
 
; It was necessary, as well from his respect to the departed as in commonhumanity to her terrified attendant, that he should take some measuresto relieve the girl from her distressing situation. The deceased,he understood, had expressed a desire to be buried in a solitarychurchyard, near the little inn of the Tod's Hole, called the Hermitage,or more commonly Armitage, in which lay interred some of the Ravenswoodfamily, and many of their followers. Ravenswood conceived it his dutyto gratify this predilection, commonly found to exist among the Scottishpeasantry, and despatched Babie to the neighbouring village to procurethe assistance of some females, assuring her that, in the mean while, hewould 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 foundhimself sitting a solitary guard over the inanimate corpse of her whosedismissed spirit, unless his eyes had strangely deceived him, had sorecently manifested itself before him. Notwithstanding his naturalcourage, the Master was considerably affected by a concurrence ofcircumstances so extraordinary. "She died expressing her eager desireto see me. Can it be, then," was his natural course of reflection--"canstrong and earnest wishes, formed during the last agony of nature,survive its catastrophe, surmount the awful bounds of the spiritualworld, and place before us its inhabitants in the hues and colouring oflife? And why was that manifested to the eye which could not unfold itstale to the ear? and wherefore should a breach be made in the lawsof nature, yet its purpose remain unknown? Vain questions, which onlydeath, 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 whosefeatures he felt unwilling any longer to dwell. He then took his placein an old carved oaken chair, ornamented with his own armorial bearings,which Alice had contrived to appropriate to her own use in the pillagewhich took place among creditors, officers, domestics, and messengers ofthe law when his father left Ravenswood Castle for the last time. Thusseated, he banished, as much as he could, the superstitious feelingswhich the late incident naturally inspired. His own were sad enough,without the exaggeration of supernatural terror, since he found himselftransferred from the situation of a successful lover of Lucy Ashton, andan honoured and respected friend of her father, into the melancholyand solitary guardian of the abandoned and forsaken corpse of a commonpauper.
He was relieved, however, from his sad office sooner that he couldreasonably have expected, considering the distance betwixt the hut ofthe deceased and the village, and the age and infirmities of three oldwomen who came from thence, in military phrase, to relieve guard uponthe body of the defunct. On any other occasion the speed of thesereverend sibyls would have been much more moderate, for the first waseighty years of age and upwards, the second was paralytic, and the thirdlame of a leg from some accident. But the burial duties rendered to thedeceased 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 andenthusiastic as it certainly is, or from the recollection of the ancientCatholic opinions, when the funeral rites were always considered as aperiod of festival to the living; but feasting, good cheer, and eveninebriety, were, and are, the frequent accompaniments of a Scottishold-fashioned burial. What the funeral feast, or "dirgie," as it iscalled, was to the men, the gloomy preparations of the dead body for thecoffin were to the women. To straight the contorted limbs upon a boardused for that melancholy purpose, to array the corpse in clean linen,and over that in its woollen shroad, were operations committed always tothe old matrons of the village, and in which they found a singular andgloomy delight.
The old women paid the Master their salutations with a ghastly smile,which reminded him of the meeting betwixt Macbeth and the witches onthe blasted heath of Forres. He gave them some money, and recommended tothem the charge of the dead body of their contemporary, an office whichthey willingly undertook; intimating to him at the same time thathe must leave the hut, in order that they might begin their mournfulduties. Ravenswood readily agreed to depart, only tarrying to recommendto them due attention to the body, and to receive information wherehe was to find the sexton, or beadle, who had in charge the desertedchurchyard of the Armitage, in order to prepare matters for thereception of Old Alice in the place of repose which she had selected forherself.
"Ye'll no be pinched to find out Johnie Mortsheugh," said the eldersibyl, and still her withered cheek bore a grisly smile; "he dwells nearthe Tod's Hole, an house of entertainment where there has been mony ablythe birling, for death and drink-draining are near neighbours to aneanither."
"Ay! and that's e'en true, cummer," said the lame hag, propping herselfwith a crutch which supported the shortness of her left leg, "for I mindwhen the father of this Master of Ravenswood that is now standing beforeus sticked young Blackhall with his whinger, for a wrang word said owertheir wine, or brandy, or what not: he gaed in as light as a lark, andhe 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 theMaster'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 busyinghimself with adjusting the girths of the saddle, he could not avoidhearing, through the hedge of the little garden, a conversationrespecting 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 byway of fumigation in the chimney of the cottage. The paralytic wretch,almost exhausted by the journey, was left guard upon the corpse, lestwitches or fiends might play their sport with it.
The following law, croaking dialogue was necessarily overheard by theMaster of Ravenswood:
"That's a fresh and full-grown hemlock, Annie Winnie; mony a cummer langsyne wad hae sought nae better horse to flee over hill and how, throughmist 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 theLord Keeper and the grit folk, that hae breasts like whinstane. Theyprick us and they pine us, and they pit us on the pinnywinkles forwitches; and, if I say my prayers backwards ten times ower, Satan willnever 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 himmony a time, and I think the day will come they will burn me for't. Butne'er mind, cummer! we hae this dollar of the Master's, and we'll senddoun for bread and for yill, and tobacco, and a drap brandy to burn, anda wee pickle saft sugar; and be there deil, or nae deil, lass, we'll haea 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 AnnieWinnie, "and a comely personage--broad in the shouthers, and narrowaround the lunyies. He wad mak a bonny corpse; I wad like to hae thestreiking 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 neverstraught him: dead-deal will never be laid on his back, make you yourmarket 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 beforehim, mony ane o' them?" "Ask nae mair questions about it--he'll no begraced sae far," replied the sage.
"I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Aislie Gourlay. But wha tell'd yethis?" "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 inquisitivecompanion.
"I hae it frae as sure a hand," said Ailsie, "and frae them that spaedhis fortune before the sark gaed ower his head."
"Hark! I hear his horse's feet riding aff," said the o
ther; "they dinnasound as if good luck was wi' them."
"Mak haste, sirs," cried the paralytic hag from the cottage, "and letus do what is needfu', and say what is fitting; for, if the dead corpsebinna 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 ordinaryprejudices about witchcraft, omens, and vaticination, to which his ageand country still gave such implicit credit that to express a doubt ofthem was accounted a crime equal to the unbelief of Jews or Saracens; heknew also that the prevailing belief, concerning witches, operatingupon the hypochondriac habits of those whom age, infirmity, and povertyrendered liable to suspicion, and enforced by the fear of death and thepangs of the most cruel tortures, often extorted those confessions whichencumber and disgrace the criminal records of Scotland during the 17thcentury. But the vision of that morning, whether real or imaginary,had impressed his mind with a superstitious feeling which he in vainendeavoured to shake off. The nature of the business which awaited himat the little inn, called Tod's Hole, where he soon after arrived, wasnot of a kind to restore his spirits.
It was necessary he should see Mortsheugh, the sexton of the oldburial-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 ofAlice was to be deposited. It was situated in the nook formed by theeddying sweep of a stream, which issued from the adjoining hills. A rudecavern in an adjacent rock, which, in the interior, was cut into theshape of a cross, formed the hermitage, where some Saxon saint had inancient times done penance, and given name to the place. The richAbbey of Coldinghame had, in latter days, established a chapel inthe neighbourhood, of which no vestige was now visible, though thechurchyard which surrounded it was still, as upon the present occasion,used for the interment of particular persons. One or two shatteredyew-trees still grew within the precincts of that which had once beenholy ground. Warriors and barons had been buried there of old, buttheir names were forgotten, and their monuments demolished. The onlysepulchral memorials which remained were the upright headstones whichmark the graves of persons of inferior rank. The abode of the sexton wasa solitary cottage adjacent to the ruined wall of the cemetery, but solow that, with its thatch, which nearly reached the ground, covered witha thick crop of grass, fog, and house-leeks, it resembled an overgrowngrave. On inquiry, however, Ravenswood found that the man of the lastmattock was absent at a bridal, being fiddler as well as grave-digger tothe vicinity. He therefore retired to the little inn, leaving a messagethat early next morning he would again call for the person whose doubleoccupation connected him at once with the house of mourning and thehouse of feasting.
An outrider of the Marquis arrived at Tod's Hole shortly after, with amessage, intimating that his master would join Ravenswood at that placeon the following morning; and the Master, who would otherwise haveproceeded to his old retreat at Wolf's Crag, remained there accordinglyto give meeting to his noble kinsman.