Chapter 16

We see only the uncertain glimmer of their dwelling through the low-lying mist; and therefore we cannot describe it, as if it were clearly before our eyes. But should you ever chance to angle your way up to HILLFOOT, admire Allan Easton's flower-garden, and the jargonelle pear-tree on the southern gable. The climate is somewhat high, but it is not cold; and, except when the spring-frosts come late and sharp, there do all blossoms and fruits abound, on every shrub and tree native to Scotland. You will hardly know how to distinguish--or rather, to speak in clerkly phrase, to analyse the sound prevalent over the fields and air; for it is made up of that of the burn, of bees, of old Susan's wheel, and the hum of the busy school. But now it is the play-hour, and Allan Easton comes into his kitchen for his frugal dinner. Brush up your Latin, and out with a few of the largest trouts in your pannier. Susan fries them in fresh butter and oatmeal--the greyhaired pedagogue asks a blessing--and a merrier man, within the limits of becoming mirth, you never passed an hour's talk withal. So much for Allan Easton and Susan his spouse.

You look as if you wished to ask who inhabits the Cottage--on the left hand yonder--that stares upon us with four front windows, and pricks up its ears like a new-started hare? Why, sir, that was once a Shooting-box. It was built about twenty years ago, by a sporting gentleman of two excellent double-barrelled guns, and three stanch pointers. He attempted to live there, several times, from the 12th of August till the end of September, and went pluffing disconsolately among the hills from sunrise to sunset. He has been long dead and buried; and the Box, they say, is now haunted. It has been attempted to be let furnished, and there is now a board to that effect hung out like an escutcheon. Picturesque people say it ruins the whole beauty of the glen; but we must not think so, for it is not in the power of the ugliest house that ever was built to do that, although, to effect such a purpose, it is unquestionably a skilful contrivance. The window-shutters have been closed for several years, and the chimneys look as if they had breathed their last. It stands in a perpetual eddy, and the ground shelves so all around it, that there is barely room for a barrel to catch the rain-drippings from the slate-eaves. If it be indeed haunted, pity the poor ghost! You may have it on a lease, short or long, for merely paying the taxes. Every year it costs some pounds in advertisements. What a jointure-house it would be for a relict! By name, WINDY-KNOWE.

Nay, let us not fear to sketch the character of its last inhabitant, for we desire but to speak the truth. Drunkard, stand forward, that we may have a look at you, and draw your picture. There he stands! The mouth of the drunkard, you may observe, contracts a singularly sensitive appearance--seemingly red and rawish; and he is perpetually licking or smacking his lips, as if his palate were dry and adust. His is a thirst that water will not quench. He might as well drink air. His whole being burns for a dram. The whole world is contracted into a caulker. He would sell his soul in such extremity, were the black bottle denied him, for a gulp. Not to save his soul from eternal fire, would he, or rather could he, if left alone with it, refrain from pulling out the plug, and sucking away at destruction. What a snout he turns up to the morning air, inflamed, pimpled, snubby, and snorty, and with a nob at the end on't like one carved out of a stick by the knife of a schoolboy--rough and hot to the very eye--a nose which, rather than pull, you would submit even to be in some degree insulted. A perpetual cough harasses and exhausts him, and a perpetual expectoration. How his hand trembles! It is an effort even to sign his name: one of his sides is certainly not by any means as sound as the other; there has been a touch of palsy there; and the next hint will draw down his chin to his collar-bone, and convert him, a month before dissolution, into a slavering idiot. There is no occupation, small or great, insignificant or important, to which he can turn, for any length of time, his hand, his heart, or his head. He cannot angle--for his fingers refuse to tie a knot, much more to busk a fly. The glimmer and the glow of the stream would make his brain dizzy--to wet his feet now would, he fears, be death. Yet he thinks that he will go out--during that sunny blink of a showery day--and try the well-known pool in which he used to bathe in boyhood, with the long, matted, green-trailing water-plants depending on the slippery rocks, and the water-ousel gliding from beneath the arch that hides her "procreant cradle," and then sinking like a stone suddenly in the limpid stream. He sits down on the bank, and fumbling in his pouch for his pocket-book, brings out, instead, a pocket-pistol. Turning his fiery face towards the mild, blue, vernal sky, he pours the gurgling brandy down his throat--first one dose, and then another--till, in an hour, stupefied and dazed, he sees not the silvery crimson-spotted trouts, shooting, and leaping, and tumbling, and plunging in deep and shallow; a day on which, with one of Captain Colley's March-Browns, in an hour we could fill our pannier. Or, if it be autumn or winter, he calls, perhaps, with a voice at once gruff and feeble, an old Ponto, and will take a pluff at the partridges. In former days, down they used to go, right and left, in potato or turnip-field, broomy brae or stubble--but now his sight is dim and wavering, and his touch trembles on the trigger. The covey whirrs off, unharmed in a single feather--and poor Ponto, remembering better days, cannot conceal his melancholy, falls in at his master's heel, and will range no more. Out, as usual, comes the brandy-bottle--he is still a good shot when his mouth is the mark; and having emptied the fatal flask, he staggers homewards, with the muzzles of his double-barrel frequently pointed to his ear, both being on full cock, and his brains not blown out only by a miracle. He tries to read the newspaper--just arrived--but cannot find his spectacles. Then, by way of variety, he attempts a tune on the fiddle; but the bridge is broken, and her side cracked, and the bass-string snapped--and she is restored to her peg among the cobwebs. In comes a red-headed, stockingless lass, with her carrots in papers, and lays the cloth for dinner--salt beef and greens. But the Major's stomach scunners at the Skye-stot--his eyes roll eagerly for the hot-water--and in a couple of hours he is dead-drunk in his chair, or stoitering and staggering, in aimless dalliance with the scullion, among the pots and pans of an ever-disorderly and dirty kitchen. Mean people, in shabby sporting velveteen dresses, rise up, as he enters, from the dresser, covered with cans, jugs, and quaichs, and take off their rusty and greasy napless hats to the Major; and, to conclude the day worthily and consistently, he squelches himself down among the reprobate crew, takes his turn at smutty jest and smuttier song, which drive even the jades out of the kitchen--falls back insensible, exposed to gross and indecent practical jokes from the vilest of the unhanged--and finally is carried to bed on a hand-barrow, with hanging head and heels, like a calf across a butcher's cart, and, with glazed eyes and lolling tongue, is tumbled upon the quilt--if ever to awake it is extremely doubtful; but if awake he do, it is to the same wretched round of brutal degradation--a career, of which the inevitable close is an unfriended deathbed and a pauper's grave. O hero! six feet high, and once with a brawn like Hercules--in the prime of life too--well born and well bred--once bearing the king's commission--and on that glorious morn, now forgotten or bitterly remembered, thanked on the field of battle by Picton, though he of the fighting division was a hero of few words--is that a death worthy of a man--a soldier--and a Christian? A dram-drinker! Faugh! faugh! Look over--lean over that stile, where a pig lies wallowing in mire--and a voice, faint and feeble, and far off, as if it came from some dim and remote world within your lost soul, will cry, that of the two beasts, that bristly one, agrunt in sensual sleep, with its snout snoring across the husk-trough, is, as a physical, moral, and intellectual being, superior to you, late Major in his Majesty's ---- regiment of foot, now dram-drinker, drunkard, and dotard, and self-doomed to a disgraceful and disgusting death ere you shall have completed your thirtieth year. What a changed being from that day when you carried the colours, and were found, the bravest of the brave, and the most beautiful of the beautiful, with the glorious tatters wrapped round your body all drenched in blood, your hand grasping the broken sabre, and two grim Frenchmen lying hacked and hewed at your feet! Your father and your mother saw your name in the "Great Lord's" Despatch; and it was as much as he could do to keep her from falling on the floor, for "her joy was like a deep affright!" Both are dead now; and better so, for the sight of that blotched face and those glazed eyes, now and then glittering in fitful frenzy, would have killed them both, nor, after such a spectacle, could their old bones have rested in the grave.

Alas, Scotland--ay, well-educated, moral, religious Scotland can show, in the bosom of her bonny banks and braes, cases worse than this; at which, if there be tears in heaven, the angels weep. Look at that greyheaded man, of threescore and upwards, sitting by the wayside! He was once an Elder of the Kirk, and a pious man he was, if ever piety adorned the temples--"the lyart haffets, wearing thin and bare," of a Scottish peasant. What eye beheld the many hundred steps, that one by one, with imperceptible gradation, led him down--down--down to the lowest depths of shame, suffering, and ruin! For years before it was bruited abroad through the parish that Gabriel Mason was addicted to drink, his wife used to sit weeping alone in the spence when her sons and daughters were out at their work in the fields, and the infatuated man, fierce in the excitement of raw ardent spirits, kept causelessly raging and storming through every nook of that once so peaceful tenement, which for many happy years had never been disturbed by the loud voice of anger or reproach. His eyes were seldom turned on his unhappy wife except with a sullen scowl, or fiery wrath; but when they did look on her with kindness, there was also a rueful self-upbraiding in their expression, on account of his cruelty; and at sight of such transitory tenderness, her heart would overflow with forgiving affection, and her sunk eyes with unendurable tears. But neither domestic sin nor domestic sorrow will conceal from the eyes and the ears of men; and at last Gabriel Mason's name was a byword in the mouth of the scoffer. One Sabbath he entered the kirk in a state of miserable abandonment, and from that day he was no longer an elder. To regain his character seemed to him, in his desperation, beyond the power of man, and against the decree of God. So he delivered himself up, like a slave, to that one appetite, and in a few years his whole household had gone to destruction. His wife was a matron, almost in the prime of life, when she died; but as she kept wearing away to the other world, her face told that she felt her years had been too many in this. Her eldest son, unable, in pride and shame, to lift up his eyes at kirk or market, went away to the city, and enlisted into a regiment about to embark on foreign service. His two sisters went to take farewell of him, but never returned; one, it is said, having died of a fever in the Infirmary--just as if she had been a pauper; and the other--for the sight of sin, and sorrow, and shame, and suffering, is ruinous to the soul--gave herself up, in her beauty, an easy prey to a destroyer, and doubtless has run her course of agonies, and is now at peace. The rest of the family dropt down, one by one, out of sight, into inferior situations in far-off places; but there was a curse, it was thought, hanging over the family, and of none of them did ever a favourable report come to their native parish; while he, the infatuated sinner, whose vice seemed to have worked all the woe, remained in the chains of his tyrannical passion, nor seemed ever, for more than the short term of a day, to cease hugging them to his heart. Semblance of all that is most venerable in the character of Scotland's peasantry! Image of a perfect patriarch, walking out to meditate at eventide! What a noble forehead! Features how high, dignified, and composed! There, sitting in the shade of that old wayside tree, he seems some religious Missionary, travelling to and fro over the face of the earth, seeking out sin and sorrow, that he may tame them under the word of God, and change their very being into piety and peace. Call him not a hoary hypocrite, for he cannot help that noble--that venerable--that apostolic aspect--that dignified figure, as if bent gently by Time, loth to touch it with too heavy a hand--that holy sprinkling over his furrowed temples of the silver-soft, and the snow-white hair--these are the gifts of gracious Nature all--and Nature will not reclaim them, but in the tomb. That is Gabriel Mason--the Drunkard! And in an hour you may, if your eyes can bear the sight, see and hear him staggering up and down the village, cursing, swearing, preaching, praying--stoned by blackguard boys and girls, who hound all the dogs and curs at his heels, till, taking refuge in the smithy or the pot-house, he becomes the sport of grown clowns, and, after much idiot laughter, ruefully mingled with sighs, and groans, and tears, he is suffered to mount upon a table, and urged, perhaps, by reckless folly to give out a text from the Bible, which is nearly all engraven on his memory--so much and so many other things effaced for ever--and there, like a wild Itinerant, he stammers forth unintentional blasphemy, till the liquor he has been allowed or instigated to swallow smites him suddenly senseless, and, falling down, he is huddled off into a corner of some lumber-room; and left to sleep--better far for such a wretch were it to death.

Let us descend, then, from that most inclement front, into the lown boundaries of the HOLM. The farm-steading covers a goodly portion of the peninsula shaped by the burn, that here looks almost like a river. With its outhouses it forms three sides of a square, and the fourth is composed of a set of jolly stacks, that will keep the thrashing-machine at work during all the winter. The interior of the square rejoices in a glorious dunghill (O, breathe not the name!) that will cover every field with luxuriant harvests--twelve bolls of oats to the acre. There the cattle--oxen yet "lean, and lank, and brown as is the ribbed sea-sand," will, in a few months, eat themselves up, on straw and turnip, into obesity. There turkeys walk demure--there geese waddle, and there the feathery-legged king of Bantam struts among his seraglio, keeping pertly aloof from double-combed Chanticleer, that squire of dames, crowing to his partlets. There a cloud of pigeons often descends among the corny chaff, and then whirrs off to the uplands. No chained mastiff looking grimly from the kennel's mouth, but a set of cheerful and sagacious collies are seen sitting on their hurdies, or "worrying ither in diversion." A shaggy colt or two, and a brood mare, with a spice of blood, and a foal at her heels, know their shed, and evidently are favourites with the family. Out comes the master, a rosy-cheeked carle, upwards of six feet high, broad-shouldered, with a blue bonnet and velveteen breeches--a man not to be jostled on the crown o' the causey, and a match for any horse-couper from Bewcastle, or gypsy from Yetholm. But let us into the kitchen. There's the wife--a bit tidy body--and pretty withal--more authoritative in her quiet demeanour than the most tyrannical mere housekeeper that ever thumped a servant lass with the beetle. These three are her daughters. First, Girzie, the eldest, seemingly older than her mother--for she is somewhat hard-favoured, and strong red hair dangling over a squint eye is apt to give an expression of advanced years, even to a youthful virgin. Vaccination was not known in Girzie's babyhood, but she is, nevertheless, a clean-skinned creature, and her full bosom is white as snow. She is what is delicately called a strapper, rosy-armed as the morning, and not a little of an Aurora about the ankles. She makes her way, in all household affairs, through every impediment, and will obviously prove, whenever the experiment is made, a most excellent wife. Mysie, the second daughter, is more composed, more genteel, and sits sewing--with her a favourite occupation, for she has very neat hands; and is, in fact, the milliner and mantua-maker for all the house. She could no more lift that enormous pan of boiling water off the fire than she could fly, which in the grasp of Girzie is safely landed on the hearth. Mysie has somewhat of a pensive look, as if in love--and we have heard that she is betrothed to young Mr Rentoul, the divinity student, who lately made a speech before the Anti-patronage Society, and therefore may reasonably expect very soon to get a kirk. But look--there comes dancing in from the ewe-bughts the bright-eyed Bessy, the flower of the flock, the most beautiful girl in Almondale, and fit to be bosom-burd of the Gentle Shepherd himself! O that we were a poet, to sing the innocence of her budding breast! But--heaven preserve us!--what is the angelic creature about? Making rumbledethumps! Now she pounds the potatoes and cabbages as with pestle and mortar! Ever and anon licking the butter off her fingers, and then dashing in the salt! Methinks her laugh is out of all bounds loud--and, unless my eyes deceived me, that stout lout whispered in her delicate ear some coarse jest, that made the eloquent blood mount up into her not undelighted countenance. Heavens and earth!--perhaps an assignation in the barn, or byre, or bush aboon Traquair. But the long dresser is set out with dinner--the gudeman's bonnet is reverently laid aside--and if any stomach assembled there be now empty, it is not likely, judging from appearances, that it will be in that state again before next Sabbath--and it is now but the middle of the week. Was it not my Lord Byron who liked not to see women eat? Poo--poo--nonsense! We like to see them not only eat--but devour. Not a set of teeth round that kitchen-dresser that is not white as the driven snow. Breath too, in spite of syboes, sweet as dawn-dew--the whole female frame full of health, freshness, spirit, and animation! Away all delicate wooers, thrice-high-fantastical! The diet is wholesome--and the sleep will be sound; therefore eat away, Bessy--nor fear to laugh, although your pretty mouth be full--for we are no poet to madden into misanthropy at your mastication; and, in spite of the heartiest meal ever virgin ate, to us these lips are roses still; "thy eyes are lode-stars, and thy breath sweet air." Would for thy sake we had been born a shepherd-groom! No--no--no! For some few joyous years mayest thou wear thy silken snood unharmed, and silence with thy songs the linnet among the broom, at the sweet hour of prime. And then mayest thou plight thy troth--in all the warmth of innocence--to some ardent yet thoughtful youth, who will carry his bride exultingly to his own low-roofed home--toil for her and the children at her knees, through summer's heat and winter's cold--and sit with her in the kirk, when long years have gone by, a comely matron, attended by daughters acknowledged to be fair--but neither so fair, nor so good, nor so pious, as their mother.

What a contrast to the jocund Holm is the ROWAN-TREE-HUT--so still, and seemingly so desolate! It is close upon the public road, and yet so low, that you might pass it without observing its turf-roof. There live old Aggy Robinson, the carrier, and her consumptive daughter. Old Aggy has borne that epithet for twenty years, and her daughter is not much under sixty. That poor creature is bed-ridden and helpless, and has to be fed almost like a child. Old Aggy has for many years had the same white pony--well named Samson--that she drives three times a-week, all the year round, to and from the nearest market-town, carrying all sorts of articles to nearly twenty different families, living miles apart. Every other day in the week--for there is but one Sabbath either to herself or Samson--she drives coals, or peat, or wood, or lime, or stones for the roads. She is clothed in a man's coat, an old rusty beaver, and a red petticoat. Aggy never was a beauty, and now she is almost frightful, with a formidable beard, and a rough voice--and violent gestures, encouraging the overladen enemy of the Philistines. But as soon as she enters her hut, she is silent, patient, and affectionate, at her daughter's bedside. They sleep on the same chaff-mattress, and she hears, during the dead of the night, her daughter's slightest moan. Her voice is not rough at all when the poor old creature is saying her prayers; nor, we may be well assured, is its lowest whisper unheard in heaven.

Your eyes are wandering away to the eastern side of the vale, and they have fixed themselves on the Cottage of the SEVEN OAKS. The grove is a noble one; and, indeed, those are the only timber-trees in the valley. There is a tradition belonging to the grove, but we shall tell it some other time; now, we have to do with that mean-looking Cottage, all unworthy of such magnificent shelter. With its ragged thatch it has a cold cheerless look--almost a look of indigence. The walls are sordid in the streaked ochre-wash--a wisp of straw supplies the place of a broken pane--the door seems as if it were inhospitable--and every object about is in untended disorder. The green pool in front, with its floating straws and feathers, and miry edge, is at once unhealthy and needless; the hedgerows are full of gaps, and open at the roots; the few garments spread upon them seem to have stiffened in the weather, forgotten by the persons who placed them there; and half-starved young cattle are straying about in what once was a garden. Wretched sight it is; for that dwelling, although never beautiful, was once the tidiest and best-kept in all the district. But what has misery to do with the comfort of its habitation?