Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume XXIII Part 8

"All right," said Aminadab of the first Secession. "'And I will cause their images to cease out of Noph.'"

"Ay, but I am 'wide,'" continued the cook.

"Three feet and a half across the bosom," said Aminadab, who was still in his reverie, with the secret idea still exercising a power over him, even after the tankard of ale.

"Wide in my mind and charities, ye fool, man," continued she, not disinclined this time to laugh; for she was proud of being jolly in the person. "I felt for poor Kalee. She wept incessantly at the loss of the cow's tail, and asked me if I had seen it, nay, implored me like a worshipper to try to recover it for her. I said, G.o.d forgive me, that I had seen it in the dung-pit, and that George had carted it away. 'And didn't know de value!' cried Ady. 'Worth de necklace of diamonds;' and both she and Kalee broke out into such a yell as made the house ring.

Yet with all this, Kalee still loved the gloomy man. She would throw her jewelled arms about his neck, and hang upon him, with her feet off the ground, so little, light, and lithe. She was so like a sapling, you could have bent her any way. And when the love was in her heart, and it was never absent, she was really bonny. Our eyes hereaway are mere cinders to these glowing churley bits of flaming sulphur; and then that strange look of the shining face, just as if she yearned to enter into his very soul,--ay, as the souls of these black creatures go up and form a part of Brahma's spirit, that's all over the earth."

"All art," cried Aminadab, getting impatient of Janet's eloquence--eloquence, I say; for Janet was a superior woman, and, though a cook, a natural genius. "All art. 'And he made her to use enchantments, and deal with familiar spirits and wizards,'"

"No, no, man, it was all real nature. But it wasna real nature made him throw the poor black soul away, whose gold and jewels he had bartered his white, I should say yellow, rotten-livered body for. Ay, if she had been a man, I would have liked her better than him; for, as I hate the skin of an old hen when the fat becomes rancid and golden, so do I hate a yellow-faced man, with the devil sitting gnawing at his liver."

"The reason the devil's so bitter," said Aminadab.

"Ay, if you were to try a beef-steak off his rump or spare-rib, ye'll find it more like the absynth I use in the kitchen than the flesh of a capon or three-year old stot."

"Yea, I would be like unto him who was made to 'suck honey out of the living rock.'"

"The cruel man threw her away from him, just as if her tocher had been the weight of herself in copper, instead of gold. And oh! it was so easily done; for the creature was not only, as I have said, light, but she had such a touchiness when her glancing eye saw that her love was not returned by him she loved beyond all the earth, that you would have thought she shrunk all up into a tiny child, couring in the corner of the big drawing-room, so like a wounded bird."

"Yaw-aw-aw," yawned the Seceder, half asleep. "'And he gave up the ghost in the room, while he sought his meat to relieve his soul.'"

"Asleep and dreaming," cried Mrs. M'Pherson, who had got into the very spirit of description. "Away to the Scouring Burn, and never show your face here again."

But Aminadab soon pacified the wide-souled and wide-bodied cook, who, being of his own persuasion, really loved the man. Yes, she was a Seceder from the old faith; and such a Seceder! No wonder there was a blank among the congregation of mere bodies.

It was now well on to twelve, and Aminadab had that Cradle to pa.s.s, and the kirkyard to get through; all, too, with that idea in his head to which we have alluded, and which, we may as well tell, was no other than a vivid recollection of having seen this Brahma on a prior night. He had discharged the notion at the time as an illusion, though in general he had little power over his supernatural fears, which were to him not indeed supernatural, but very natural; so much so, as we have said, that a mere inanimate and dead, very dead burying-place, had been more than once the means of cutting him out of a savoury piece of pork, and a good Logie-brewed tankard. It was the allusion made by Janet that recalled the suspicion that he had seen "something." Ah, "something!" what a pregnant vocable--so mysterious, so provocative of curiosity--an "it!"--of all the words in our language, the most suggestive of a difference from the real being of flesh and blood, carrying a name got at the baptismal font, whereby it shall be known and pa.s.s current like a counter. And is it not at best only a counter, yea, a counterfeit? We are only to each other as signs of things which are not seen; and yet we laugh when we hear the "it," as if it might not be the very thing of which we are one of the signs! Is it not thus that we are all humbugged in this world of ours? For we take the sign for the thing; yea, talk to the sign, and love it, or hate it, or worship it--all the while being as ignorant as mules, "ne pictum quidem vidit;" the very sign may be as far from the reality, as in philosophy we see it every day. And thus, all wandering and groping in the dark, the blind leading the blind, we screech like owls at a spark of light from the real fountain beyond Aldebaran.

And the owls were more busy than pleasant that night in the deep woods of Balgay Hill. It was a sign that the moon was not kindly to their heavy eyes. The scene, as Aminadab issued from the postern, might have been felt as beautiful, from the very awe which it inspired. But Aminadab was no lover of Nature, especially if he saw in her recesses any hiding-places for such beings as Brahma, more mysterious to him from knowing nothing at all about him, except that he was some Ashtoreth, or Chemosh, or Milcom, in a new form, let loose from h.e.l.l, to disturb the pure souls of Seceders destined for heaven. The full moon fell on the hollow in the hills, surmounted by the dark woods of Balgay right aface of him, the house of Logie behind, and the declinations on either side, in one of which lay the little Golgotha. There, in the midst of the hollow, stood, grim and desolate, the dark brick-built Cradle, casting its shadow to the south; the four-corner prominences shooting out like horns, and so unlike the habitation of a human being, yea, unlike any composition of brick and lime ever reared by the hand of a genius for house-making. The shadow lay on the gra.s.s like those ghastly sun-pictures so called, yet more like moon-born things; and then the solemn silence, only relieved to be deepened by the occasional to-hoo!

was oppressive to him, as if a medium for some footsteps to startle him into superst.i.tion. Yet he was drawn towards the horrid dungeon in spite of his very self. Janet's story would come at last, he thought, to a termination which would justify his own suspicions. And even there before him was evidence in the same direction; for having thrown himself, as if by an effort, into the shade of the dungeon, he could see beyond its verge, and by, as it were, looking round the corner, the body of the dark-faced Aditi. She had, no doubt, come stealthily from the house, and was postured in an att.i.tude far deeper in humiliation and adjuration than we practise in our land. Her face was covered by her hands; for, in truth, she could see nothing through these mere light-permitting slips of a brick's width, wherewith this horrible hole was supplied, as if by a relaxation of severity in its last stage of perfect inhumanity. No, nothing could be seen, but something might be heard; yea, the most piteous moans that ever burst from an oppressed heart, and yet so soft, so uncomplaining, as if the sufferer found no fault with aught in the world but herself. Then Aditi's sounds were something like responses, rising as the internal sounds rose, and as they died away--a jabbering wail of an Eastern tongue. Aminadab, blunt though he was, and fonder of pork than poetry, and of scriptural quotations--which he had always at his tongue's end for conclaves of weavers--than impa.s.sioned sentiments, rising at the inspiring touch of this strange world's endless and ever-occurring occasions, was impressed. He looked over the dark abode, up at the moon, then at the prostrate Ady, and thought of the distance between that prisoner and the gay palace where she was brought up, with its paradise of flowers, and aromas, and singing birds of gold and azure--far away, far away. And then that blood-written oath--oh, so literally fulfilled and obeyed! But the thought was evanescent from very fear. Nor was his nervousness unjustified; for, even as he turned his head, he saw a figure wrapped up in a dark cloak, and surmounted by a white coil of pure linen, as he thought, emerging from the clump of thick trees that stood on the north end of the burying-ground. The figure, having run as it were in fear so far forward, no sooner saw the projecting head of Aminadab, than it turned and retreated. At the same instant Ady rose, as if disturbed, and ran to the house. Yet the moaning did not cease. It seemed interminable; or, if to be terminated by the absence of Ady, the sufferer did not know she was gone. And oh, these wails!--Aminadab fled and took them along with him, nor did they ever leave him.

Even when he went to bed they were fresh upon his ear, claiming precedence to the vision of his eye; though that, too, a.s.serted its authority as something miraculous--whether the Eastern mystery itself, or some tutelary genius brought from heaven by the shriek of man's cruelty. Nor could he rest for the thought that, humble as he was, he was surely taken there that he might go to the powers of earth to ask them to aid the powers of heaven. Why, that Cradle had been built within the limits of civilisation. Even the mason was known: the bricks were not Egyptian bricks, nor the mortar foreign, nor the wood a tree from the heart of Africa; and yet, why was it there--nay, why was the use of it not inquired into? If Jeshurun had waxed fat and kicked against the Lord of heaven, was there no lord of earth that could tame this yellow-livered worshipper of Baal, who yet was received among the chiefs of Israel to drink the pure juice of the grape, and make a G.o.d of his belly, and to sing obscene songs? Even in that house there was riot and debauchery upon the spoils of that woman, encaged like a beast, and at the world's end from her natural protectors.

Yea, our good soul Aminadab became bold. He was privileged, if not called. But then that Brahma--that incarnation of a power confessed by millions on millions of people possessed of souls, and therefore something in G.o.d's reckonings! It was no illusion. Twice he had seen the mysterious being. How did he come hither to the Ultima Thule, as it were, of the known world? Why did he come just at a juncture when the daughter of a king of his own favoured people was immured in a dungeon, and calling for his help? Because he must have known that a spark of the spirit that belonged to him, and would go back to him, was threatened to be extinguished by power in a land owing no obedience to him. But didn't that same moon shine on the children of Brahma as well as on the children of Christ? and were there no powers in heaven but what we confessed? How philosophical all this in a Scouring Burn weaver in hysterics! Yet there are greater men than Aminadab who could not explain such things. Ah, well; to the honour of poor Aminadab, it was for once not pork he sought at Logie House. Next night at ten he was in the parlour; but how did he get there, and Brahma in these very woods?

Aminadab very probably could not have told himself; yet there he was.

"Come again so soon, Aminadab?"

"Ay," replied he. "'Though a man may fall, he may be raised up again.' I stumbled in front of my friend, but she will not kick me; yea, she will lift me up."

"Be silent," she said. "You were seen last night near the Cradle, where no one dare approach. None of the servants go there save me; and even Ady, if she goes, it is by stealth. Ah, you know something now; but there's one thing you don't know, and that is, that rich men can pay watchers to discover those who search into their iniquities."

"Whatever I know," said Aminadab, "I am ignorant of this: why that dungeon, containing a human being, can keep its place at the distance of a mile from a town with 30,000 inhabitants."

"But they don't know it, lad. Be you quiet, and pick that leg of a chicken; that is better than the knowledge that kills. There is not one of the magistrates would dare to touch a hair on Mr. Fletcher's head, no, for all that lies in the power of Brahma."

"But why do you keep the secret? 'The steps of a good woman are ordered by the Lord;' but does He order you to step to the Cradle?"

"I do it for good," said she, "because I can soften griefs that are unbearable; and cooks have something in their power. But if I were to say a word to Fletcher, I would be turned away, and another might treat the prisoner worse."

"But why would not the powers interfere?"

"Because bailies love a dinner and fine wines; and it is easier to wink than think, and easier to think than get themselves out of trouble by acting on their thoughts. Will that satisfy you? It is a strange business; but the world's a strange place, and strange men and women live therein. Meat and drink and honour are better than wisdom. Look to your plate, Aminadab. Oh! I wish I knew less; but I saw what was coming when I saw George Cameron begin to build what he said was to be like a cradle. Did I not recollect what Kalee told me about the blood-bond? Did we not all witness the growing gloom gathering day by day over his face?

Then separate beds. Then no more companionship, out or in. The gloom for ever, and the tears of Kalee for ever and ever, and the terror and anguish of poor soul Aditi! Ah! yes; but he never struck her, never upbraided her; and at length she shrunk from him as if from a serpent.

And this he could not bear: it made his dun-yellow black, Aminadab!

Then, when the Cradle was finished, and a truckle and a table and a chair were put in, he called me to him, and said, with a horrid smile on his face, 'M'Pherson, you are a Highlander, and staunch to your master.

I am true to my word. Yes, I signed a bond, when I married Kalee, that I would treat her as a father would a child whom he rocked in a cradle. I have obeyed. Kalee goes into the Cradle to-night. You are to give her child's food; but you cannot rock the Cradle. Let the winds which drive in past Balgay woods do that if they can. My honour is pure. Swear to obey me.'

"I could not say no, and look on that face. Kalee has been in that dungeon, fed by me, and has never seen her children for a whole year."

"The vengeance of the Lord hangeth over the wicked by a burnt thread,"

said Aminadab.

"Yes, who was to know that her own protector, even the great spirit of her land, was to come here to help her? He was seen last night again! He wanders about and about--flits. .h.i.ther and thither. He needs no rest--no food. He is independent of rain, and wind, and thunder, and storms."

"But he does not help her," said Aminadab.

"His time is coming. Kalee is dying."

"Dying!"

"Ay, dying. Then Brahma will claim that which is a part of himself, and then will be the time of his return to his chosen people."

"Horrible!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Aminadab. The chicken stood untasted. "Does Mr.

Fletcher know this?"

"Why, to be sure, haven't I told him? But may not a child die in its own cradle, and the father continue feasting with the lords and the lairds, drinking and swearing, and debauching, when he knows that his honour is discharged,--ay, and the blood-bond paid?"

"And the body, when she dies--"

"Will be in Logie burying-ground; ay, and strange people from the East, a long way beyond where our sun rises, with black faces and bleeding hearts, will come and bend over the little grave, and weep for the daughter of their prince. Ah! Aminadab, grief makes a learned woman of me, a poor servant; but I cannot save Kalee, none can save her now.

Consumption has set in; and bad air, and a rejected love, and a mother's yearning will do the work. I was with her now with my cruse--all alone with her; for no one dare approach. She knows she's dying. She asked for the children--

"'Will you not let me see my boys?'

"I shook my head.

"'And will Fletcher not see me before I die, to receive my last kiss?'

"I shook my head.

"'And Aditi, who will return to my father's palace, is she to be kept from me to the end?'

"I shook my head."

"And will no one watch?" said Aminadab.

"Yes, I will watch all night; but it will be unknown to Fletcher. No one can speak to him now. He goes. .h.i.ther and thither. He has no rest yet; the gloom is deeper than ever."