Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume VIII Part 2

"The lid was lifted up, and a deep and angry voice said, 'Mortal!

wherefore hast thou summoned me before the time I commanded thee? Was not thy wish granted? Steel shall not wound thee--cords bind thee--hemp hang thee--nor water drown thee. Away!'

"'Stay!' exclaimed Soulis--'add, nor fire consume me!'

"'Ha! ha!' cried the spirit, in a fit of horrid laughter, that made even the sorcerer tremble. '_Beware of a coming wood!_' And, with a loud clang, the lid of the chest fell, and the noise as of thunder beneath his feet was repeated.

"'Beware of a coming wood!' muttered Soulis to himself; 'what means the fiend?'

"He hastened from the dungeon without locking the door behind him, and as he hurried from it, he drew the key from his bosom, and flung it over his left shoulder, crying 'Keep it, spirit!'

"He shut himself up in his chamber to ponder on the words of his familiar, and on the extirpation of his followers; and he thought not of Marion and her bridegroom until daybreak, when, with a troubled and a wrathful countenance, he entered the apartment where they were fettered.

"'How now, fair maiden,' he began; 'hast thou considered well my words?--wilt thou be my willing bride, and let young Branxholm live? or refuse, and look thy fill on his smooth face as his head adorns the point of my good spear?'

"'Rather than see her thine,' exclaimed Walter, 'I would thou shouldst hew me in pieces, and fling my mangled body to your hounds.'

"'Troth! and 'tis no bad thought,' said the sorcerer; 'thou mayest have thy wish. Yet, boy, ye think that I have no mercy: I will teach thee that I have, and refined mercy too. Now, tell me truly, were I in thy power as thou art in mine, what fate would ye award to Soulis?'

"'Then truly,' replied Walter, 'I would hang thee on the highest tree in Branxholm Woods.'

"'Well spoken, young Strong-bow,' returned Soulis; 'and I will show thee, though ye think I have no mercy, that I am more merciful than thou.' Ye would choose for me the highest tree, but I shall _give thee the choice of the tree from which you may prefer your body to hang_, and from whose top the owl may sing its midnight song, and to which the ravens shall gather for a feast. And thou, pretty face,' added he, turning to Marion, 'sith you will not, even to save him, give me thine hand, i'faith, if I may not be thy husband, I will be thy priest, and celebrate your marriage, for I will bind your hands together, and ye shall hang on the next branch to him.'

"'For that I thank thee,' said the undaunted maiden.

"He then called together his four remaining armed men, and placing halters round the necks of his intended victims, they were dragged forth to the woods around the Hermitage, where Walter was to choose the fatal tree.

"Now a deep mist covered the face of the earth, and they could perceive no object at the distance of half a bow-shot before them; and ere he had approached the wood where he was to carry his merciless project into execution--

"'The wood comes towards us!' exclaimed one of his followers.

"'What!--_the wood comes!_' cried Soulis, and his cheek became pale, and he thought on the words of the demon--'_Beware of a coming wood!_'--and, for a time, their remembrance, and the forest that seemed to advance before him, deprived his arm of strength, and his mind of resolution, and before his heart recovered, the followers of the house of Branxholm, to the number of fourscore, each bearing a tall branch of a rowan-tree in their hands,[11] as a charm against his sorcery, perceived, and raising a loud shout, surrounded him.

[Footnote 11: It is probable that the legend of the "_coming wood_,"

referred to in the traditions respecting Lord Soulis, is the same as that from which Shakspere takes Macbeth's charm--

"Till Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane."

The circ.u.mstances are similar.]

"The cords with which the arms of Marion and Walter were bound were instantly cut asunder. But, although the odds against him were as twenty to one, the daring Soulis defied them all. Yea, when his followers were overpowered, his single arm dealt death around.

"Now, there was not a day pa.s.sed that complaints were not brought to King Robert, from those residing on the Borders, against Lord Soulis, for his lawless oppression, his cruelty, and his wizard-craft. And, one day, there came before the monarch, one after another, some complaining that he had brought diseases on their cattle, or destroyed their houses by fire, and a third, that he had stolen away the fair bride of Branxholm's heir, and they stood before the king, and begged to know what should be done with him. Now, the king was wearied with their importunities and complaints, and he exclaimed, peevishly and unthinkingly, '_boil him, if you please, but let me hear no more about him_.' But,

"'It is the curse of kings to be attended By slaves that take their humour for a warrant;'

and, when the enemies of Soulis heard these words from the lips of the king, they hastened away to put them in execution; and with them they took a wise man, one who was learned in breaking the spells of sorcery,[12] and with him he carried a scroll, on which was written the secret wisdom of Michael the Wizard; and they arrived before Hermitage Castle, while its lord was contending single-handed against the retainers of Branxholm, and their swords were blunted on his buckler, and his body received no wounds. They struck him to the ground with their lances; and they endeavoured to bind his hands and his feat with cords, but his spells snapped them asunder as threads.

[Footnote 12: Dr. Leyden represents this personage as being "True Thomas, Lord of Ersylton;" but the Rhymer was dead before the time fixed by tradition of the death of Lord Soulis, which took place in the time of Robert the Bruce, who came to the crown in 1308, and the Rhymer was dead before 1299, for in that year his son and heir granted a charter to the convent of Soltra, and in it he describes himself _Filius et haeves Thomae Rymour de Erceldon_.]

"'Wrap him in lead,' cried the wise man, 'and boil him therewith, according to the command of the king, for water and hempen cords have no power over his sorcery.'

"Many ran towards the castle, and they tore the lead from the turrets, and they held down the sorcerer, and rolled the sheets around him in many folds, till he was powerless as a child, and the foam fell from his lips in the impotency of his rage. Others procured a caldron, in which it was said many of his incantations were performed, and the cry was raised--

"'Boil him on the Nine-stane rig!'

"And they bore him to where the stones of the Druids are to be seen till this day, and the two stones are yet pointed out from which the caldron was suspended. They kindled piles of f.a.ggots beneath it, and they bent the living body of Soulis within the lead; and thrust it into the caldron, and, as the flames arose, the flesh and the bones of the wizard were consumed in the boiling lead. Such was the doom of Soulis.

"The king sent messengers to prevent his hasty words being carried into execution, but they arrived too late.

"In a few weeks there was mirth, and music, and a marriage feast in the bowers of Branxholm, and fair Marion was the bride."

HARDEN'S REVENGE.

From a state of high civilisation, it is curious to look back upon the manners and modes of life of our ancestors of barbarous times; and the contrast never can be presented in stronger hues than in the picture of the lives of the old Borderers, who so completely realised Hobbes'

theory of the beginning of society (fighting and stealing for their daily bread), and that of the quiet, sedate men of industry and peace of these days, whose blood never rises beyond the degree of the heat of a money-making ambition. A shiver comes over us, when we read of the son killed in a feud, carried in to his mother a corpse; of the father of a family, and the laird of many broad acres, laid before his weeping wife and children, the dead victim of a strife with his next neighbour; of families rendered houseless and homeless, often by a marauding kinsman; of the never-ceasing turmoil, strife, cruelty, and revenge, of the whole inhabitants of that distracted part of our country. We read, pause, tremble, and hug ourselves in the happy thought that we have been born in more auspicious times, when the sword is turned into the ploughshare, the castle into the granary, and the fire of enmity softened and changed into the fervour of love and friendship. Yet, alas! if we carry our thoughts farther, how little may we have to felicitate ourselves on in the pictured contrast? Rudeness has its evils; but is civilisation without them? If the household of the Border chief was begirt with dangers of rieving and spoliation, the domestic _lares_ kept it free from the inebriated and demoralised son, whom the genius of civilisation sends from the city haunts of pollution, to lift his hand against his parent. If the _ingenium perfervidum_, of a roving life carried the husband from the arms of the wife, perhaps to be brought home a corpse, she seldom witnessed in him the victim of any of the thousand civilised crimes which render the common thief, the fraudulent bankrupt, the swindler, the gambler, the disloyal-spouse, the drunkard, worse than dead to her. If a well-directed revenge might deprive the inmates of the turret of a rude home, the strength was, at least, free from the inroads of the messenger or poinder, whose warrant has a crueller edge than the falchion of an enemy. We advocate not the cause of robbery, though dignified by the name of war or revenge, or coloured by the hues of a chivalric spirit of daring; but, when we look around us, and see how much civilisation has accomplished for our bodies and our intellects, and how little for our hearts or our morals, we hesitate to condemn our ancestors for crimes which they were taught to believe as virtues, to attribute to them an unhappiness which they viewed as the mere chance of war, and to laud the civilised doings of our own times, when the criminal has not the excuse of a want of proper education to palliate his offences against the laws of his country. We are led into these remarks by some rising reminiscences of the doings of old Wat Scott of Harden, the most gnarled, most crooked, and st.u.r.diest stem of the tree of that old family. He lived in the fifteenth century, the hottest period of Border warfare, and occupied the old seat of the family, Harden Castle--a place of considerable strength, situated on the beetling brink of a dark and precipitous dell, not far from the river Borthwick, and facing a small rivulet which brawled past to meet the larger stream. The place was suitable to the castle and its possessor; for the stronghold contained in security the st.u.r.dy riever, and the glen was a species of _ma.s.sy more_ for the cattle which he _made_ his own upon the good old legitimate principle of _might_, so much despised in these days of statutory legislation, when the acts of Parliament extend to twenty times the size of the Bible.

Many anecdotes and stories have been recorded of Walter Scott of Harden; and we ourselves, we believe, have, in prior parts of our work, noticed him favourably. There can be little doubt, indeed, that he was a perfect man--that is, according to the estimate of qualities in the times in which he lived, as gallant in love as he was bold in war; and surely, letting the latter rest on his undisputed fame, the former could not be better proved than by his having, when still a fine bold riever, wooed and won the "Flower of Yarrow," Mary Scott, the daughter of Philip Scott of Dryhope--a young maiden, whose poetical appellation, expressive as it is, would go small way in carrying to the minds of those curious in beauties the perfections she enjoyed from nature. Of the manner in which Harden conducted his operations on the heart of this famous beauty, it may be difficult now to speak with that certainty which is applicable to his seizure and appropriations of his neighbours' live stock generally; but, judging from the a.n.a.logy of the boldness of his other exploits, and from the circ.u.mstance that his father-in-law stipulated in the marriage-contract that he was "to find Harden in horse meat and man's meat, at his tower of Dryhope, for a year and a day, but that (as five barons pledge), at the expiry of that period, his son-in-law should remove _without attempting to continue in possession by force_,"[13] it may be presumed that the riever was not, in this instance, lost or forgotten in the lover. Old Dryhope _knew_ him from the early fame he had acquired; and, while he had no objection to give him the Flower of Yarrow for his wife, he saw the necessity of providing against the occurrence which would, in all likelihood, have taken place, of Walter taking up his residence at Dryhope Tower, and becoming laird, at the same time that he kept a firm hold of Harden and his other lands. The spirit of _appropriation_, in short, was so strong and overpowering in the heart of the bold chief, that, as was frequently alleged of him, it was dangerous to let him sit down on a creepy stool belonging, to a _bona fide_ proprietor; for three minutes' occupancy seemed to produce in him all the effects of the long positive prescription; and he never looked at an article of man's making, or nature's production, without considering whether it were a moveable or a fixture.

[Footnote 13: The contract is extant in the charter-chest of the present representative. Neither Harden nor the Flower of Yarrow could write their names.--ED.]

The only period of Harden's life in which his peculiar notions of _meum_ and _tuum_ were lost sight of, was during the sweet moon of his marriage with Mary Scott. For one lunation, the poor Border proprietors were safe; and, if the Harden motto, _Cornua reparabit Phoebe_, had any meaning in it, it was the only moon of his life that did not light him forth to commit some depredation. His marriage, with the slight exception already stated, had no such effect in modifying his appropriating spirit, as marriages now-a-days produce on reclaimed rogues or roues, for Mary Scott although the fairest of all the fair women of her time, had the same relish for cooking other people's kye, that her husband Walter felt in bringing them home. There was not a wife in all the Borders that served up "the feast of spurs" to her lord with greater regularity, and more attention to the rules of proper hussyskep, than the Flower of Yarrow. If Walter came in crying for supper--

"Haste ye, my dame--what cheer the night?

I look to see your table dight; For I hae been up since peep o' light, Driving the dun deer merrilie"--

Her reply was just as spirited and ready;--

"Are ye sae keen set, Wat? 'Tis weel-- I'faith, ye'll find a dainty meal; For it's a' o' the guid Rippon steel, And ye maun digest it manfullie."

The spirit of the riever, inborn, and strengthened by education and example, became, in the case of Harden, as it did in that of many a one else of the Border lairds, a regular household duty; and perhaps a more peaceable husband than he might have felt a difficulty in resisting the authority of so fair a governess as Mary Scott.

In the course of a long period, occupied by Harden in his daily duty and pastime of overturning the rights of moveable property--and sure he must have been a happy man whose hobby was his duty--his helpmate bore him no fewer than six sons, who inherited the spirit of their father, and the beauty of their mother. They came all to man's estate, and there was not one of them who disgraced the principles of education which their father took so much care to instil into them, as well by precept as by the example daily laid before them, of levying black mail, and keeping the dark glen well filled with the cattle of their neighbours. It was the ambition of Harden that each of his sons should be an independent proprietor, who might rieve, in after times, on his own account; and, at the time when our story properly begins, he could count four fine properties which he intended for the inheritance of four of the six youths. Two remained to be provided for, and a point soon came to be mooted at the fireside of Harden Castle--how two fitting lairdships might be acquired for them, so that it might never come to be said, by posterity, that Wat of Harden was unable to steal, or win by power or purchase, a good domain for every one of the sons of the Flower of Yarrow. The great difficulty, of course, lay in the nature of the thing to be acquired, because, unhappily, an estate could not be carried away; and there had already begun to be introduced a practice on the Borders of regulating the rights of land by pieces of parchment skins, whereby the outside of a sheep--a creature itself easily conveyable--was made to vest a right in the land on which it grazed. No doubt, the charter chest might be carried away, and Walter had courage enough to enable him to accomplish that object; but still there remained many difficulties in the way; doubles of the charters were apt to make their appearance at a future day, and the best fire that could be produced at Harden Castle was not sufficient to burn out the vestiges of proprietorship which the sword of its master could so easily overturn.

As his years increased, the anxiety of the old laird waxed stronger and stronger on the subject which lay nearest to his heart. He had often cast his eye on the property of Gilmanscleugh, not far distant; and he had even counted the broad acres, to ascertain if they would make a suitable inheritance for one of his sons. It belonged, also, to a family of Scotts--a circ.u.mstance that increased its peculiar fitness for the purpose he had so long cherished, as his son would still be a Scott of Gilmanscleugh, and the injustice of the appropriation would be diminished, by his being chief of the clan, and having a species of superiority over its proprietor. By an unfortunate agreement of tempers, the two families had long remained on a sort of friendly footing; and Harden had never been able to bring about such a feud as might give him a pretext for denouncing Gilmanscleugh at head-quarters, when he might have got the envied property forfeited, and a grant of it to himself. No doubt, he had often taken from Gilmanscleugh his kye, but what neighbour had been fortunate enough to escape, and what victim of his cupidity dared to resent an injury where resentment would have brought upon his head an evil a thousand times greater than that attempted to be avenged?

It was even a species of favour conferred on a small proprietor to have a theft committed upon him by old Harden, because he was generally sure to be protected against more unscrupulous aggressors by the old lion, who liked to preserve what he himself might come to require; and so Gilmanscleugh, like many others, had suffered meekly the contributions laid upon him--for the double object of retaining his old chief's friendship, and preserving the rest of his stock from the hands of the other marauders, who were continually roaming about to take whatever they could violently lay hands upon. The situation of Harden was, therefore, that of the wolf in the fable; but he had never yet been able to come to the resolution of a.s.serting that the lamb had rendered the descending water muddy to him who drank further up the stream. On this important subject he did not disdain to take the advice of Mary, who could see no reason, any more than Walter himself, why the chief of the Scotts should not be able to provide a landed portion for two of his sons, when the whole of Liddesdale and the Debateable Land contained so much good ground lying ready for the taking. She, moreover, was also partial to Gilmanscleugh, and only lamented that it was not large enough to form two good properties; though that, of course, was no reason why it should not be taken, _quantum et quale_, for one of her sons, leaving the other to be provided for by some other estate out of the many that lay around them.

"By my faith, Mary," said Walter, "if Gilmanscleugh had four legs to it, it should not be long the property of its present master."

"And if my Walter had the arms he used to have," replied she, "it should not be long ere it was Harden's. My power hath faded. Formerly, if the Flower of Yarrow had asked Harden to give her Gilmanscleugh for a jointure, it would have been hers ere next morn heard the c.o.c.k crow in Harden glen, but years bring fears."

"Not to Harden, Mary, love. He knoweth not the meaning of the vile word.

Your dished spurs make me as sharp-set now, as they did when the cook was the fairest maid in Yarrow.[14] It is these sheep-skin rights, la.s.s, that prevent me from bestowing Gilmanscleugh on one of our sons."

[Footnote 14: Mary Scott is well known to have been as famous for the cooking of spurs as for her beauty.]