Guy Mannering, Vol. I

S >> Sir Walter Scott >> Guy Mannering, Vol. I

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

A miserable hut gave him an opportunity to execute his purpose. He
found out the door with no small difficulty, and for some time
knocked without producing any other answer than a duet between a
female and a cur-dog, the latter yelping as if he would have
barked his heart out, the other screaming in chorus. By degrees
the human tones predominated; but the angry bark of the cur being
at the instant changed into a howl, it is probable something more
than fair strength of lungs had contributed to the ascendency.

'Sorrow be in your thrapple then!' these were the first articulate
words, 'will ye no let me hear what the man wants, wi' your
yaffing?'

'Am I far from Kippletringan, good dame?'

'Frae Kippletringan!!!' in an exalted tone of wonder, which we can
but faintly express by three points of admiration. 'Ow, man! ye
should hae hadden eassel to Kippletringan; ye maun gae back as far
as the whaap, and baud the whaap till ye come to Ballenloan, and
then--'

'This will never do, good dame! my horse is almost quite knocked
up; can you not give me a night's lodgings?'

'Troth can I no; I am a lone woman, for James he's awa to
Drumshourloch Fair with the year-aulds, and I daurna for my life
open the door to ony o' your gang-there-out sort o' bodies.'

'But what must I do then, good dame? for I can't sleep here upon
the road all night.'

'Troth, I kenna, unless ye like to gae down and speer for quarters
at the Place. I'se warrant they'll tak ye in, whether ye be gentle
or semple.'

'Simple enough, to be wandering here at such a time of night,'
thought Mannering, who was ignorant of the meaning of the phrase;
'but how shall I get to the PLACE, as you call it?'

'Ye maun baud wessel by the end o' the loan, and take tent o' the
jaw-hole.'

'O, if ye get to eassel and wessel again, I am undone! Is there
nobody that could guide me to this Place? I will pay him
handsomely.'

The word pay operated like magic. 'Jock, ye villain,' exclaimed
the voice from the interior, 'are ye lying routing there, and a
young gentleman seeking the way to the Place? Get up, ye fause
loon, and show him the way down the muckle loaning. He'll show you
the way, sir, and I'se warrant ye'll be weel put up; for they
never turn awa naebody frae the door; and ye'll be come in the
canny moment, I'm thinking, for the laird's servant--that's no to
say his body-servant, but the helper like--rade express by this
e'en to fetch the houdie, and he just staid the drinking o' twa
pints o' tippenny to tell us how my leddy was ta'en wi' her
pains.'

'Perhaps,' said Mannering, 'at such a time a stranger's arrival
might be inconvenient?'

'Hout, na, ye needna be blate about that; their house is muckle
eneugh, and decking time's aye canty time.'

By this time Jock had found his way into all the intricacies of a
tattered doublet and more tattered pair of breeches, and sallied
forth, a great white-headed, bare-legged, lubberly boy of twelve
years old, so exhibited by the glimpse of a rush-light which his
half-naked mother held in such a manner as to get a peep at the
stranger without greatly exposing herself to view in return. Jock
moved on westward by the end of the house, leading Mannering's
horse by the bridle, and piloting with some dexterity along the
little path which bordered the formidable jaw-hole, whose vicinity
the stranger was made sensible of by means of more organs than
one. His guide then dragged the weary hack along a broken and
stony cart-track, next over a ploughed field, then broke down a
slap, as he called it, in a drystone fence, and lugged the
unresisting animal through the breach, about a rood of the simple
masonry giving way in the splutter with which he passed. Finally,
he led the way through a wicket into something which had still the
air of an avenue, though many of the trees were felled. The roar
of the ocean was now near and full, and the moon, which began to
make her appearance, gleamed on a turreted and apparently a ruined
mansion of considerable extent. Mannering fixed his eyes upon it
with a disconsolate sensation.

'Why, my little fellow,' he said, 'this is a ruin, not a house?'

'Ah, but the lairds lived there langsyne; that's Ellangowan Auld
Place. There's a hantle bogles about it; but ye needna be feared,
I never saw ony mysell, and we're just at the door o' the New
Place.'

Accordingly, leaving the ruins on the right, a few steps brought
the traveller in front of a modern house of moderate size, at
which his guide rapped with great importance. Mannering told his
circumstances to the servant; and the gentleman of the house, who
heard his tale from the parlour, stepped forward and welcomed the
stranger hospitably to Ellangowan. The boy, made happy with half-
a-crown, was dismissed to his cottage, the weary horse was
conducted to a stall, and Mannering found himself in a few minutes
seated by a comfortable supper, for which his cold ride gave him a
hearty appetite.

CHAPTER II

Comes me cranking in,
And cuts me from the best of all my land
A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle, out

Henry IV, Part 1.

The company in the parlour at Ellangowan consisted of the Laird
and a sort of person who might be the village schoolmaster, or
perhaps the minister's assistant; his appearance was too shabby to
indicate the minister, considering he was on a visit to the Laird.

The Laird himself was one of those second-rate sort of persons
that are to be found frequently in rural situations. Fielding has
described one class as feras consumere nati; but the love of
field-sports indicates a certain activity of mind, which had
forsaken Mr. Bertram, if ever he possessed it. A good-humoured
listlessness of countenance formed the only remarkable expression
of his features, although they were rather handsome than
otherwise. In fact, his physiognomy indicated the inanity of
character which pervaded his life. I will give the reader some
insight into his state and conversation before he has finished a
long lecture to Mannering upon the propriety and comfort of
wrapping his stirrup-irons round with a wisp of straw when he had
occasion to ride in a chill evening.

Godfrey Bertram of Ellangowan succeeded to a long pedigree and a
short rent-roll, like many lairds of that period. His list of
forefathers ascended so high that they were lost in the barbarous
ages of Galwegian independence, so that his genealogical tree,
besides the Christian and crusading names of Godfreys, and
Gilberts, and Dennises, and Rolands without end, bore heathen
fruit of yet darker ages--Arths, and Knarths, and Donagilds, and
Hanlons. In truth, they had been formerly the stormy chiefs of a
desert but extensive domain, and the heads of a numerous tribe
called Mac-Dingawaie, though they afterwards adopted the Norman
surname of Bertram. They had made war, raised rebellions, been
defeated, beheaded, and hanged, as became a family of importance,
for many centuries. But they had gradually lost ground in the
world, and, from being themselves the heads of treason and
traitorous conspiracies, the Bertrams, or Mac-Dingawaies, of
Ellangowan had sunk into subordinate accomplices. Their most fatal
exhibitions in this capacity took place in the seventeenth
century, when the foul fiend possessed them with a spirit of
contradiction, which uniformly involved them in controversy with
the ruling powers. They reversed the conduct of the celebrated
Vicar of Bray, and adhered as tenaciously to the weaker side as
that worthy divine to the stronger. And truly, like him, they had
their reward.

Allan Bertram of Ellangowan, who flourished tempore Caroli primi,
was, says my authority, Sir Robert Douglas, in his Scottish
Baronage (see the title 'Ellangowan'), 'a steady loyalist, and
full of zeal for the cause of His Sacred Majesty, in which he
united with the great Marquis of Montrose and other truly zealous
and honourable patriots, and sustained great losses in that
behalf. He had the honour of knighthood conferred upon him by His
Most Sacred Majesty, and was sequestrated as a malignant by the
parliament, 1642, and afterwards as a resolutioner in the year
1648.' These two cross-grained epithets of malignant and
resolutioner cost poor Sir Allan one half of the family estate.
His son Dennis Bertram married a daughter of an eminent fanatic
who had a seat in the council of state, and saved by that union
the remainder of the family property. But, as ill chance would
have it, he became enamoured of the lady's principles as well as
of her charms, and my author gives him this character: 'He was a
man of eminent parts and resolution, for which reason he was
chosen by the western counties one of the committee of noblemen
and gentlemen to report their griefs to the privy council of
Charles II. anent the coming in of the Highland host in 1678.' For
undertaking this patriotic task he underwent a fine, to pay which
he was obliged to mortgage half of the remaining moiety of his
paternal property. This loss he might have recovered by dint of
severe economy, but on the breaking out of Argyle's rebellion
Dennis Bertram was again suspected by government, apprehended,
sent to Dunnotar Castle on the coast of the Mearns, and there
broke his neck in an attempt to escape from a subterranean
habitation called the Whigs' Vault, in which he was confined with
some eighty of the same persuasion. The apprizer therefore (as the
holder of a mortgage was then called) entered upon possession,
and, in the language of Hotspur, 'came me cranking in,' and cut
the family out of another monstrous cantle of their remaining
property.

Donohoe Bertram, with somewhat of an Irish name and somewhat of an
Irish temper, succeeded to the diminished property of Ellangowan.
He turned out of doors the Reverend Aaron Macbriar, his mother's
chaplain (it is said they quarrelled about the good graces of a
milkmaid); drank himself daily drunk with brimming healths to the
king, council, and bishops; held orgies with the Laird of Lagg,
Theophilus Oglethorpe, and Sir James Turner; and lastly, took his
grey gelding and joined Clavers at Killiecrankie. At the skirmish
of Dunkeld, 1689, he was shot dead by a Cameronian with a silver
button (being supposed to have proof from the Evil One against
lead and steel), and his grave is still called the Wicked Laird's
Lair.

His son Lewis had more prudence than seems usually to have
belonged to the family. He nursed what property was yet left to
him; for Donohoe's excesses, as well as fines and forfeitures, had
made another inroad upon the estate. And although even he did not
escape the fatality which induced the Lairds of Ellangowan to
interfere with politics, he had yet the prudence, ere he went out
with Lord Kenmore in 1715, to convey his estate to trustees, in
order to parry pains and penalties in case the Earl of Mar could
not put down the Protestant succession. But Scylla and Charybdis--
a word to the wise--he only saved his estate at expense of a
lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was,
however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated
the old cattle, where the family lived in their decadence as a
mouse (said an old farmer) lives under a firlot. Pulling down part
of these venerable ruins, he built with the stones a narrow house
of three stories high, with a front like a grenadier's cap, having
in the very centre a round window like the single eye of a
Cyclops, two windows on each side, and a door in the middle,
leading to a parlour and withdrawing-room full of all manner of
cross lights.

This was the New Place of Ellangowan, in which we left our hero,
better amused perhaps than our readers, and to this Lewis Bertram
retreated, full of projects for re-establishing the prosperity of
his family. He took some land into his own hand, rented some from
neighbouring proprietors, bought and sold Highland cattle and
Cheviot sheep, rode to fairs and trysts, fought hard bargains, and
held necessity at the staff's end as well as he might. But what he
gained in purse he lost in honour, for such agricultural and
commercial negotiations were very ill looked upon by his brother
lairds, who minded nothing but cock-fighting, hunting, coursing,
and horse-racing, with now and then the alternative of a desperate
duel. The occupations which he followed encroached, in their
opinion, upon the article of Ellangowan's gentry, and he found it
necessary gradually to estrange himself from their society, and
sink into what was then a very ambiguous character, a gentleman
farmer. In the midst of his schemes death claimed his tribute, and
the scanty remains of a large property descended upon Godfrey
Bertram, the present possessor, his only son.

The danger of the father's speculations was soon seen. Deprived of
Laird Lewis's personal and active superintendence, all his
undertakings miscarried, and became either abortive or perilous.
Without a single spark of energy to meet or repel these
misfortunes, Godfrey put his faith in the activity of another. He
kept neither hunters nor hounds, nor any other southern
preliminaries to ruin; but, as has been observed of his
countrymen, he kept a man of business, who answered the purpose
equally well. Under this gentleman's supervision small debts grew
into large, interests were accumulated upon capitals, movable
bonds became heritable, and law charges were heaped upon all;
though Ellangowan possessed so little the spirit of a litigant
that he was on two occasions charged to make payment of the
expenses of a long lawsuit, although he had never before heard
that he had such cases in court. Meanwhile his neighbours
predicted his final ruin. Those of the higher rank, with some
malignity, accounted him already a degraded brother. The lower
classes, seeing nothing enviable in his situation, marked his
embarrassments with more compassion. He was even a kind of
favourite with them, and upon the division of a common, or the
holding of a black-fishing or poaching court, or any similar
occasion when they conceived themselves oppressed by the gentry,
they were in the habit of saying to each other, 'Ah, if
Ellangowan, honest man, had his ain that his forbears had afore
him, he wadna see the puir folk trodden down this gait.'
Meanwhile, this general good opinion never prevented their taking
advantage of him on all possible occasions, turning their cattle
into his parks, stealing his wood, shooting his game, and so
forth, 'for the Laird, honest man, he'll never find it; he never
minds what a puir body does.' Pedlars, gipsies, tinkers, vagrants
of all descriptions, roosted about his outhouses, or harboured in
his kitchen; and the Laird, who was 'nae nice body,' but a
thorough gossip, like most weak men, found recompense for his
hospitality in the pleasure of questioning them on the news of the
country side.

A circumstance arrested Ellangowan's progress on the highroad to
ruin. This was his marriage with a lady who had a portion of about
four thousand pounds. Nobody in the neighbourhood could conceive
why she married him and endowed him with her wealth, unless
because he had a tall, handsome figure, a good set of features, a
genteel address, and the most perfect good-humour. It might be
some additional consideration, that she was herself at the
reflecting age of twenty-eight, and had no near relations to
control her actions or choice.

It was in this lady's behalf (confined for the first time after
her marriage) that the speedy and active express, mentioned by the
old dame of the cottage, had been despatched to Kippletringan on
the night of Mannering's arrival.

Though we have said so much of the Laird himself, it still remains
that we make the reader in some degree acquainted with his
companion. This was Abel Sampson, commonly called, from his
occupation as a pedagogue, Dominie Sampson. He was of low birth,
but having evinced, even from his cradle, an uncommon seriousness
of disposition, the poor parents were encouraged to hope that
their bairn, as they expressed it, 'might wag his pow in a pulpit
yet.' With an ambitious view to such a consummation, they pinched
and pared, rose early and lay down late, ate dry bread and drank
cold water, to secure to Abel the means of learning. Meantime, his
tall, ungainly figure, his taciturn and grave manners, and some
grotesque habits of swinging his limbs and screwing his visage
while reciting his task, made poor Sampson the ridicule of all his
school-companions. The same qualities secured him at Glasgow
College a plentiful share of the same sort of notice. Half the
youthful mob of 'the yards' used to assemble regularly to see
Dominie Sampson (for he had already attained that honourable
title) descend the stairs from the Greek class, with his lexicon
under his arm, his long misshapen legs sprawling abroad, and
keeping awkward time to the play of his immense shoulder-blades,
as they raised and depressed the loose and threadbare black coat
which was his constant and only wear. When he spoke, the efforts
of the professor (professor of divinity though he was) were
totally inadequate to restrain the inextinguishable laughter of
the students, and sometimes even to repress his own. The long,
sallow visage, the goggle eyes, the huge under-jaw, which appeared
not to open and shut by an act of volition, but to be dropped and
hoisted up again by some complicated machinery within the inner
man, the harsh and dissonant voice, and the screech-owl notes to
which it was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more
distinctly,--all added fresh subject for mirth to the torn cloak
and shattered shoe, which have afforded legitimate subjects of
raillery against the poor scholar from Juvenal's time downward. It
was never known that Sampson either exhibited irritability at this
ill usage, or made the least attempt to retort upon his
tormentors. He slunk from college by the most secret paths he
could discover, and plunged himself into his miserable lodging,
where, for eighteenpence a week, he was allowed the benefit of a
straw mattress, and, if his landlady was in good humour,
permission to study his task by her fire. Under all these
disadvantages, he obtained a competent knowledge of Greek and
Latin, and some acquaintance with the sciences.

In progress of time, Abel Sampson, probationer of divinity, was
admitted to the privileges of a preacher. But, alas! partly from
his own bashfulness, partly owing to a strong and obvious
disposition to risibility which pervaded the congregation upon his
first attempt, he became totally incapable of proceeding in his
intended discourse, gasped, grinned, hideously rolled his eyes
till the congregation thought them flying out of his head, shut
the Bible, stumbled down the pulpit-stairs, trampling upon the old
women who generally take their station there, and was ever after
designated as a 'stickit minister.' And thus he wandered back to
his own country, with blighted hopes and prospects, to share the
poverty of his parents. As he had neither friend nor confidant,
hardly even an acquaintance, no one had the means of observing
closely how Dominie Sampson bore a disappointment which supplied
the whole town with a week's sport. It would be endless even to
mention the numerous jokes to which it gave birth, from a ballad
called 'Sampson's Riddle,' written upon the subject by a smart
young student of humanity, to the sly hope of the Principal that
the fugitive had not, in imitation of his mighty namesake, taken
the college gates along with him in his retreat.

To all appearance, the equanimity of Sampson was unshaken. He
sought to assist his parents by teaching a school, and soon had
plenty of scholars, but very few fees. In fact, he taught the sons
of farmers for what they chose to give him, and the poor for
nothing; and, to the shame of the former be it spoken, the
pedagogue's gains never equalled those of a skilful ploughman. He
wrote, however, a good hand, and added something to his pittance
by copying accounts and writing letters for Ellangowan. By
degrees, the Laird, who was much estranged from general society,
became partial to that of Dominie Sampson. Conversation, it is
true, was out of the question, but the Dominie was a good
listener, and stirred the fire with some address. He attempted
even to snuff the candles, but was unsuccessful, and relinquished
that ambitious post of courtesy after having twice reduced the
parlour to total darkness. So his civilities, thereafter, were
confined to taking off his glass of ale in exactly the same time
and measure with the Laird, and in uttering certain indistinct
murmurs of acquiescence at the conclusion of the long and winding
stories of Ellangowan.

On one of these occasions, he presented for the first time to
Mannering his tall, gaunt, awkward, bony figure, attired in a
threadbare suit of black, with a coloured handkerchief, not over
clean, about his sinewy, scraggy neck, and his nether person
arrayed in grey breeches, dark-blue stockings, clouted shoes, and
small copper buckles.

Such is a brief outline of the lives and fortunes of those two
persons in whose society Mannering now found himself comfortably
seated.

CHAPTER III

Do not the hist'ries of all ages
Relate miraculous presages
Of strange turns in the world's affairs,
Foreseen by astrologers, soothsayers,
Chaldeans, learned genethliacs,
And some that have writ almanacks?

Hudibras.

The circumstances of the landlady were pleaded to Mannering,
first, as an apology for her not appearing to welcome her guest,
and for those deficiencies in his entertainment which her
attention might have supplied, and then as an excuse for pressing
an extra bottle of good wine. 'I cannot weel sleep,' said the
Laird, with the anxious feelings of a father in such a
predicament, 'till I hear she's gotten ower with it; and if you,
sir, are not very sleepery, and would do me and the Dominie the
honour to sit up wi' us, I am sure we shall not detain you very
late. Luckie Howatson is very expeditious. There was ance a lass
that was in that way; she did not live far from hereabouts--ye
needna shake your head and groan, Dominie; I am sure the kirk dues
were a' weel paid, and what can man do mair?--it was laid till her
ere she had a sark ower her head; and the man that she since
wadded does not think her a pin the waur for the misfortune. They
live, Mr. Mannering, by the shoreside at Annan, and a mair decent,
orderly couple, with six as fine bairns as ye would wish to see
plash in a saltwater dub; and little curlie Godfrey--that's the
eldest, the come o' will, as I may say--he's on board an excise
yacht. I hae a cousin at the board of excise; that's Commissioner
Bertram; he got his commissionership in the great contest for the
county, that ye must have heard of, for it was appealed to the
House of Commons. Now I should have voted there for the Laird of
Balruddery; but ye see my father was a Jacobite, and out with
Kenmore, so he never took the oaths; and I ken not weel how it
was, but all that I could do and say, they keepit me off the roll,
though my agent, that had a vote upon my estate, ranked as a good
vote for auld Sir Thomas Kittlecourt. But, to return to what I was
saying, Luckie Howatson is very expeditious, for this lass--'

Here the desultory and long-winded narrative of the Laird was
interrupted by the voice of some one ascending the stairs from the
kitchen story, and singing at full pitch of voice. The high notes
were too shrill for a man, the low seemed too deep for a woman.
The words, as far as Mannering could distinguish them, seemed to
run thus:--

Canny moment, lucky fit!
Is the lady lighter yet?
Be it lad, or be it lass,
Sign wi' cross and sain wi' mass.

'It's Meg Merrilies, the gipsy, as sure as I am a sinner,' said
Mr. Bertram. The Dominie groaned deeply, uncrossed his legs, drew
in the huge splay foot which his former posture had extended,
placed it perpendicularly, and stretched the other limb over it
instead, puffing out between whiles huge volumes of tobacco smoke.
'What needs ye groan, Dominie? I am sure Meg's sangs do nae ill.'

'Nor good neither,' answered Dominie Sampson, in a voice whose
untuneable harshness corresponded with the awkwardness of his
figure. They were the first words which Mannering had heard him
speak; and as he had been watching with some curiosity when this
eating, drinking, moving, and smoking automaton would perform the
part of speaking, he was a good deal diverted with the harsh
timber tones which issued from him. But at this moment the door
opened, and Meg Merrilies entered.

Her appearance made Mannering start. She was full six feet high,
wore a man's great-coat over the rest of her dress, had in her
hand a goodly sloethorn cudgel, and in all points of equipment,
except her petticoats, seemed rather masculine than feminine. Her
dark elf-locks shot out like the snakes of the gorgon between an
old-fashioned bonnet called a bongrace, heightening the singular
effect of her strong and weather-beaten features, which they
partly shadowed, while her eye had a wild roll that indicated
something like real or affected insanity.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21