Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume XIV Part 12

They endeavoured to soothe him; and for a few hours he forgot his shame in sleep--though not wholly, for his slumber was troubled, and in the midst of it he groaned, clenched his hands, and grated his teeth together. The remembrance of his folly was stronger than sleep. He awoke, and a sensation of horror awoke with him. The extravagance and the madness of which he had been guilty in the morning were at first only remembered as a disagreeable and confused dream, which he wished to chase from his thoughts, and was afraid to remember more vividly. But, as he saw the tears on the cheeks of his mother and his sister, as they sat weeping by his bedside, all the absurdities in which he had been an actor rushed painfully, if not distinctly, across his memory; and he covered his face with his hands, ashamed to look upon the light, or on his kindred's face. He was sick and fevered, and his throat was parched; yet the sense of shame lay on his heart so keenly, that he would not ask for a drop of water to cool his tongue. For five days he was confined to his bed; and the physician who had been called in to attend him dreaded an attack of brain fever. It was ordered that he should be kept calm; but there was a troubled fire in his breast that burned and denied him rest. On the sixth day, he ventured to whisper something in his sister's ear regarding Marion.

"Poor Marion!" she replied; "though she forgives you, her father forbids her to speak to you again, and has sent her to the north of Scotland, that she may not have an opportunity of seeing you."

He sat in agony and in silence for a few moments, and rising and taking his hat, walked feebly towards the door. But, ere he had opened it, he turned back, and throwing himself upon his seat, cried--

"I am ashamed for the sunlight to fall upon my face, or for the eyes of any one that I know to look upon me."

When the sun had set, and night began to fall grey upon the river, he again rose, and went towards the house of Marion's father.

"What want ye?" said the old man, angrily, as he entered; "away, ye disgrace o' kith and kin, and dinna let the shamefu shadow o' sic a ne'er-do-weel darken my door! Away wi' ye! Dinna come here--and let ae telling be as good as a hundred--for daughter o' mine shall never speak to ye again!"

"You will not," said George, "deal with me so harshly, because I have been guilty of one act of folly. They have a steady foot who never make a slip; and, ashamed as I am of my conduct, it certainly has not been so disgraceful as never to be forgiven."

"I have told ye once, and I tell ye again," cried the old man, more wrathfully, "that my daughter shanna speak to ye while she breathes. I hope she has a spirit above it. It would be a fine story for folk to talk about, that she had married a blackguard that was mayor at Tweedmouth feast!"

"I deserve your censure," returned George; "but surely there is nothing so heinous in what I have done as to merit the epithet you apply to me.

I acknowledge and am ashamed of my folly; what can I do more? And I have also suffered for it."

"Ye acknowledge your folly!" exclaimed the fisherman; "pray, sir, how could ye deny it? I saw it--the whole toun saw it--my poor daughter was a witness o' it; and yet ye have the impudence to stand there before me and say ye acknowledge it! And muckle mends it makes to say ye are sorry for it! I suppose, sir, the very murderer is sorry for his crime, when he stands condemned before the judge; but his sorrow, I reckon, is but a poor reason why he should be pardoned. Away wi' ye, I say--ye shall find no admission here. At ony rate, I have taken good care to have my silly bairn out o' your reach, and that she may be out o' the way o' the disgrace and the scandal that ye have brought upon us."

So saying, the speaker rudely closed the door in the face of his visiter.

George Mordington returned to his mother's house, gliding silently, as a ghost is said to move; for his cheek burned lest any one should look upon his face. On the following day, he prepared to set out for Gateshead; but before he went he placed the following letter, addressed to Marion Weatherly, into the hands of his sister, and which she was to give to her on her return:--

"MARION,--I cannot now call you _my_ Marion--I have disgraced you, I have dishonoured myself. Your advice, which I deemed unnecessary, was not only forgotten, but you know how it was insulted. I know you must despise me; and I blame you not--you have a right to do so. I have made myself contemptible in your eyes, but not more contemptible than my conduct has rendered me in my own. I blush to think of you, and your excellence renders my folly more despicable. Call it madness--call it what you will--for it was the infatuation, the frenzy, the insanity of an hour. Yet, dear Marion, by all the hours and scenes of happiness that are gone, by all that we have known together, and that we might yet know, cast me not off for ever! Had I been familiar with the nightly debauch, my degradation would have been less, my conduct not so extravagant. Think of me as one degraded by folly, but not abandoned to it. I have sinned, and that deeply; but my repentance is as bitter as my crime was ridiculous. Its remembrance chokes me. _Forgive me, Marion._ I write the words, but I could not utter them, for I find that I could not stand in your presence, and support the weight of the debas.e.m.e.nt which presses upon me as a galling load. Your father has treated me cruelly--I would say that he has insulted me, if it were possible to insult one who has so insulted himself. The only apology I can, or should, offer for the part I have acted ought to be, and must be, found in my future conduct. It is on this ground only that I ask and hope for your forgiveness."

So ran his letter; and having delivered it to his sister, under the promise that it should be given to Marion immediately on her return, he left his mother's house, and took his journey towards Gateshead.

On arriving at the office of his employers, they looked upon him as though they knew him not, and he perceived that the place at the desk which he had formerly occupied was filled by another; for there the tale of his follies had already reached: so true is it that evil rideth upon wings which outstrip the wind. His late master sent one of the junior clerks to inform him that he had no farther occasion for his services.

George stood as if a thunderbolt had smitten him; and he went forth disconsolate, and began to wander towards South Shields, while the thought haunted him what he should do, and to whom he should apply for a.s.sistance. He had ruined his character--he was without friends, almost without money, and he wandered in wretchedness, the martyr of his own folly. He thought of his mother, of his sister, and of the fair Marion, and wept; for he not only had drawn down misery upon his own head, but he had made them miserable also. He took up his lodgings in a mean public-house by the side of the river, and went round the public offices in Newcastle and Shields, seeking for employment, but without success.

In all of them he was known; in each, the tale of his indiscretion seemed to have been heard, for his entrance was greeted with a smile.

In a short time he began to be in want; and, like the prodigal, he would have "arisen and gone unto his father"--but he had no father's roof to receive him--no home, save the lowly habitation of his widowed mother--and he found himself left as an outcast on the earth. In his despair he applied to the captain of a vessel which was about to sail for America. During his father's lifetime, he had made some voyages with him, and obtained a knowledge of a seaman's duty. The skipper of the American trader, also, to whom he applied, having known him when a clerk in the merchant's office at Gateshead, agreed to take him on board, and give him, as he called it, a trial. George Mordington, accordingly, sailed for America, and several years pa.s.sed, and his mother heard nothing concerning him. The letter which he had left with his sister for Marion had been delivered to her, and as she read it she wept, and her heart whispered forgiveness. But days, months, and years dragged their slow course along, and no one heard tidings of him. She began to feel that, although she had forgiven him, he had forgotten her. Her father said she "was weel quit o' the ne'er-do-weel--that he had always determined that he should not speak to her again, and he was glad that he had not attempted it."

But his poor mother mourned for him as a stricken dove that is robbed of its young; the tears fell upon her pillow at midnight, as she wept for her son, her only son, the child of her heart and hopes. Anxious and fruitless were her inquiries after him. As the mist of morning vanisheth, so had he departed from her sight; and, like it, when the sun melteth it away, he was not.

Mrs Mordington had a brother who had been many years in India, and having returned to Britain, he took up his residence in Ayrshire. Being a widower, and without children, he sent for his sister and her daughter to reside with him. They remained as the inmates of his roof for more than ten years, and during that period she heard nothing of her lost son. But her brother, who was now an old man, died, leaving to her his property; and, regarding the place where her husband's bones lay as her home, she returned to Tweedmouth. There, however, she had not been long, when disease fell, as a withering blight, on the cheeks of her remaining child. Year followed year, and, as the leaves dropped from the trees, her daughter seemed ready to drop into the grave. Over her face consumption's fitful rainbow spread its beautiful but deadly streaks; and, though the widow now possessed affluence, she knew not happiness.

Her son was not, and her fair daughter was withering before her, as a flower on which the cankerworm had fixed its teeth. Yet, long the maiden lingered, until her aged mother almost hoped that they would go down into the grave together.

Eighteen years had pa.s.sed since the festival which had proved fatal to the early promise and the fond prospects of George Mordington.

Margaret's day had again come round, and the neighbours of the widow, with their children and friends around them, held a holiday. A slow and unwieldy vehicle, which was then the only land conveyance between Berwick and London, stopped in the village. A sunburned stranger alighted from it, and as he left the coach, a young maiden crossed his path. She seemed to be seventeen or eighteen years of age, and was dressed in a mourning-gown, with a white sarcenet hood over her head, being in the dress of one who was inviting guests to a funeral.

"Maiden," said the stranger, accosting her, "can you inform me where Mrs Mordington resides?"

"Yes, sir," she replied; "I am bidding for the funeral."

"For what funeral?" he exclaimed, eagerly.

"For her daughter's, sir," answered the maiden.

"My sister--my poor sister!" cried the stranger, clasping his hands together.

"Your sister!" said she, inquiringly gazing in his face, and throwing back her hood as she spoke.

"Heaven!" he exclaimed, and starting back; "your name, maiden--your name!" But he added, "I need not ask it; it is written on your features.

Your mother's name is Marion?"

"It is," replied the astonished and half-terrified girl.

"Show me to my mother's!" he cried, smiting his hand suddenly on his bosom. "Would that I had this day to be buried in the grave prepared for my sister!"

Afraid to cast upon him another glance, she conducted him to the house.

"It is here, sir," said she, pointing to the house.

His frame, his features were convulsed; they shook with agitation. He raised his hand and struck upon the door. It was opened by a woman dressed in the garb of mourning, and whose years might be described as being between youth and middle-age.

"Do I dream!" he exclaimed, starting back as he beheld her. "I am punished!--yes, I am now punished beyond the measure of my crime!

Marion, I am George Mordington!"

She clasped her hands together, a wild shriek escaped her lips, and she fell back as dead upon the floor. Others who sat with the corpse ran to her a.s.sistance; but his voice had reached an ear where its tones had lived as a memory that might never die.

"My son! my son!" cried the aged widow, and pressed forward to throw her arms around his neck.

"My mother!" he cried, springing from the ground, where he had sunk by the side of Marion.

The widow fell upon the breast of her son, and he wept aloud upon her neck.

Strangers raised Marion and conveyed her from the house. She had long believed George Mordington, the object of her early affections, was with the dead; and under this conviction, and in obedience to her father's command, she had given her hand to another. The maiden whom the betrothed husband of her youth had met on alighting from the coach was her daughter, and the features of the girl then were as the mother's had been when they last parted.

George Mordington accompanied his sister's corpse, as chief mourner, to the grave. The friends of his boyhood had forgotten the tale of his folly; but its consequences gnawed with fiercer agony in his heart than when he was first ashamed to behold his own face in a gla.s.s because of it. On the following day, it was stated that Marion was not expected to live, and she requested to speak with him before she died. He approached her bedside--she stretched her hand towards him. "Forgive me, George!"

she cried. "I knew not that you yet lived. I am the wife of one who has long deserted me; my heart has long been broken, and your appearance has severed the last cord that linked me with existence. But I leave behind me a daughter. When I am gone, there will be no parent to provide for her--no father whose roof will shelter or hand defend her. As you once loved me, protect my poor child!"

"I will! I will!" he exclaimed. "Farewell, Marion!" And he rushed from the house.

She lingered for a few weeks, and he followed her to the grave, as he had done his sister. Yet the remembrance of his early shame still haunted him, and he imagined that every eye in the place of his birth looked on him with derision. He gave his mother's furniture in presents to her neighbours; and, with her and the daughter of Marion, proceeded to London. The widow lived for a few years, and, at her death, he bequeathed upon the daughter of his adoption all that his mother possessed.

"Maiden," he said, "I cannot look upon thy face, but it reminds me of the happiness I have lost, of the misery I have brought on myself and upon others. Child of my Marion, farewell! I leave you, if not rich, above want. Be virtuous, as your mother was." And again crying, "Farewell!" he left her; and George Mordington was no more heard of by any who had known him. But, after the lapse of many years, there appeared in an American newspaper the following paragraph:--

"Died, at Washington, in the seventieth year of his age, George Mordington, Esq., a native of Berwick-upon-Tweed, a patriotic senator, and an upright judge."

A LEGEND OF HOLYROOD.

Once upon a time, when a good story had not ceased to have a beginning in this way, there lived a person called William Glenday, who was a sort of sub-equerry to Mary Queen of Scots; or rather he a.s.sumed that t.i.tle, because it sounded better than "head groom." This man was a widower, and lived with his daughter Mary, a very interesting young maiden, of about twenty years of age, in one of the houses within the precincts of the Abbey set apart for the Queen's household. William was a quaint Scotsman, shrewd and caustic in his remarks, like many of his nation. He was reputed rich, and somewhat addicted to making more than a proper display of his riches; in other words, he was "purse-proud." He was, however, a most loyal subject of the queen, whom he held to be a paragon of beauty. His daughter bore the same name; and it was even whispered that he had sought to trace a likeness between Mary Glenday and Mary Queen of Scots. What will the partiality of a father's love not accomplish?