Chapter 9
As the dawn rose over the grey sea, making even the dark rocks of the Farnes like a garden where only pink roses grew, the Princess Margaret would be on the battlements looking out, always looking out, for her father and brother to return. At sunset, when the sea was golden and the plain stretched purple away to the south, landward and seaward her eyes would still gaze. And at night, when the silver moon made a path on the sea, the Princess would listen longingly to the lap of the waves, and strain her beautiful eyes through the darkness for the sails of the ship that should bring the two that she loved safe home again. But when the day came when the King, her father, returned, and led through the gate the lady who was his bride, there were many who knew that it would have been well for the Princess had she still been left in her loneliness. Gracious indeed was her welcome to her mother's supplanter, for she loved her father, and this was the wife of his choice.
"Oh! welcome, father," she said, and handed to him the keys of the castle of which she had kept such faithful ward, and, holding up a face as fresh and fragrant as a wild rose at the dawn of a June day, she kissed her step-mother.
"Welcome, my step-mother," she said, "for all that's here is yours."
Many a gallant Northumbrian lord was there that day, and many a lord from the southern land was in the King's noble retinue. One of them it was who spoke what the others thought, and to the handsome Queen who had listened already overmuch to the praises her husband sang of his daughter, the Princess Margaret, the words were as acid in a wound. "Meseemeth," said he, "that in all the north country there is no lady so fair, nor none so good as this most beautiful Princess."
Proudly the Queen drew herself up, and from under drooped eyelids, with the look of a hawk as it swoops for its prey, she made answer to the lord from the south.
"I am the Queen," she said; "ye might have excepted me." Then, turning swift, like a texel that strikes its quarry, she said to the Princess: "A laidley worm shalt thou be, crawling amongst the rocks; a laidley worm shalt thou stay until thy brother, Wynd, comes home again."
So impossible seemed such a threat to the Princess that her red lips parted over her white teeth, and she laughed long and merrily. But those who knew that the new Queen had studied long all manner of wicked spells and cruel magic were filled with dread, for greatly they feared that the fair Princess's joyous days were done.
The Farne Islands were purple-black in a chill grey sea, and the waves that beat on the rocks beneath the castle seemed to have a more dolorous moan than common when next evening came. The joyous Princess, jingling her big bunch of keys and smiling a welcome to her father's guests, had gone as completely as though she lay buried beside the drowned mariners, for whom the silting sand under the waves makes a safe graveyard all along that bleak and rugged coast; but a horror--a crawling, shapeless, loathsome thing--writhed itself along the pathway from cliff to village, and sent the terror-striken peasants shrieking into their huts and battering at the castle gates for sanctuary. The old ballad tells us that:
"For seven miles east and seven miles west, And seven miles north and south, No blade of grass or corn could grow, So venomous was her mouth."
Like an embodied plague, the bewitched Princess preyed on the people of her father's kingdom, who daily brought to the cave, where she coiled herself up at night to sleep, a terrified tribute of the milk of seven cows. All over the North Country spread the dread of her name, but now she was no longer the lovely Princess Margaret, but the Laidley Worm of Spindleston-Heugh.
"Word went east, and word went west, And word is gone over the sea, That a Laidley Worm in Spindleston-Heughs Would ruin the North Countrie."
Far over the sea, with his thirty-three bold men-at-arms, the Princess's brother, "Childe Wynd," was carving a career for himself with his sword. Nothing on earth did Childe Wynd fear, yet ever and again, when success in battle had been his, he would have a heavy heart, dreading he knew not what, and often he longed to see again the castle on the high rock by the sea, and the fair little sister with whom so many happy days had been spent amongst the blue grass and on the yellow sand of the dunes at Bamborough. To his camp came rumour of the strange monster that was devastating his father's lands, and down to the coast he hastened with his men, a great home-sickness dragging at his heart--home-sickness, and a terror that all was not well with Margaret. Some rough, brown-faced mariners, whose boat had not long before nearly suffered wreck on the rocks of the Northumbrian coast, were able to tell the Prince that rumour spoke truth, and that a laidley worm was laying waste his father's kingdom. Of the Princess they could give no tidings, but the Prince needed no words from them to tell him that all was not well.
"We have no time now here to waste, Hence quickly let us sail: My only sister Margaret Something, I fear, doth ail."
And so, with haste, they built a ship, a ship for a Prince of Faery, for its masts were made of the rowan tree, against which no evil witchcraft could prevail, and its sails were of fluttering silk. With fair winds and kindly waves the Prince and his men soon sped across the sea, and gladly they saw again the square towers of the castle King Ida had built, proudly looking down on the fields of restless water that only the bravest of the King's husbandmen durst venture to plough. From her turret window the Queen watched the sails of the gallant ship gleaming in the sun, and knew full well that Prince Wynd was nearly home again. Speedily she summoned all the witch wives along with whom she worked her wicked magic, and set them to meet the ship, to use every spell they knew that could bring shipwreck, and disaster, and death, and to rid her of the youth whom she had always dreaded. But they returned to her despairingly. No spell was known to them that could work against a ship whose masts were made of the rowan tree. Then, casting aside magic, the Witch Queen dispatched a boat-load of armed men to meet the ship, to board it, and to slay all that they could. Little cared Wynd and his men for a boat-load of warriors, and few there were left alive in the boat, and those sore wounded, when Wynd's ship came to anchor in the shallows under the dark cliff.
But here a more dangerous adversary met Prince Wynd. Threshing through the water came the horrible, writhing thing that Northumbrians knew as the Laidley Worm; and ever as they would have beached the ship, the huge serpent beat them off again, till all the sea round them was a welter of froth and slime and blood. Then Childe Wynd ordered his men to take their long oars once more and bring the ship farther down the coast and beach her on Budle sand. Down the coast they went, while the Queen eagerly watched from the battlements, and the Laidley Worm followed them fast along the shore, and all the folk of Bamborough scrambled up the cliff side, and, holding on by jagged bits of crags and tough clumps of grass and of yellow tansy, kept a precarious foothold, waiting, wide-eyed, to see what would be the outcome of the fray. As near the sandy beach of Budle as they durst venture their ship came Prince Wynd and his thirty-three men, then the rowers sat still, and the Prince leapt out, shoulder deep, into the water, and waded to the shore. Like a wounded tiger that has been baulked of its prey but gets it into its power at last, the Laidley Worm came to meet him, and all who watched thought his last hour had come. But like the white flash of a sea-bird's wings as it dives into the blue sea, the Prince's broad sword gleamed and fell on the loathsome monster's flat, scaly head, and in a great voice he cried aloud on all living things to witness that if this creature of evil magic did him any harm, he would strike her dead. Then there befell a great wonder, for in human voice, but all hoarse and strange and ugly, as though almost too great were the effort for human soul to burst through brute form, the Laidley Worm spoke to her conqueror: "Oh! quit thy sword and put aside thy bow!" it moaned--so moans the sea through the crash of the waves on nights when the storm strews the beach of the North Country with wreckage--"Oh! quit thy sword, for, poisonous monster though I be, no scaith will I do thee." Then those who heard the wonder felt sure that the Worm sought by subtilty to destroy their Prince, for still as a white, dead man he stood, and gazed at the brute that shivered before him like a whipped dog that would fain lick his master's feet. But again it spoke, in that terrible, fearsome voice of mortal pain:
"Oh! quit thy sword and bend thy bow, And give me kisses three; If I'm not won ere the sun go down, Won I shall never be."
Brave men, well-proved soldiers, were Childe Wynd's three-and-thirty, but they cried out aloud to him, and some let go of their oars and sprang shoulder-deep in the sea that they might drag their lord back from this noisome horror that would destroy him. Prince Wynd's heart gave a great stound, and back rushed the blood into his face, that had been so pale and grim, and none was quick enough to come between him and what his heart had told his mind, and what his mind most gladly willed. As though he were kissing for the first time the one he loved, and she the fairest of the land, so did he bow his head in courtly fashion, and three times kiss with loving lips the Laidley Worm of Spindleston-Heugh. And at the third kiss a great cry of wonder rose from his men, for lo, the Laidley Worm had vanished, as fades an evil dream when one awakes, and in its place there stood the fairest maid in all England, their own dear Princess Margaret. With laughter and with tears did Childe Wynd and his sister then embrace; but when the Princess had told her tale, her brother's brow grew dark, and on his sword he vowed to destroy the vile witch who had been his gentle sister's cruel enemy. With tears and with laughter, and with gladsome shoutings the folk of Bamborough came in haste to greet their Prince and Princess, and to speed them up to the castle, where the King, their father, welcomed them full joyously. But there were angry murmurs from the men of Northumbria, who called for vengeance on her who had so nearly ruined their dear land, and who had striven to slay both Prince and Princess. Childe Wynd held up his hand: "To me belongs the payment," he said, and the men laughed loud when they saw his stern face, for those were days when grim and bloody deeds were gaily done, and blithe they were to think of torture for the Witch Queen. Cowering in a corner of her bower in the turret, white-faced and haggard, they found her, and dragged her out to Childe Wynd. But no speedy end by a clean sword blade was to be hers, nor any slower death by lingering torture.
"Woe be to thee, thou wicked witch!" said the Prince; and she shivered and whimpered piteously, for well she knew that in far-off lands across the sea Childe Wynd had studied magic, and that for her were designed eternal terrors.
"Woe be to thee, thou wicked witch, An ill death mayst thou dee; As thou my sister hast lik'ned, So lik'ned shalt thou be.
I will turn you into a toad, That on the ground doth wend; And won, won, shalt thou never be, Till this world hath an end."
To the fairy days of long, long ago belong Prince Wynd and the Princess Margaret and the wicked Witch Wife. But still in the country near Bamborough, as maids go wandering in the gloaming down by the yellow sands and the rough grass where the sea-pinks grow, they will be suddenly startled by a horrible great dun-coloured thing that moves quickly towards them, as though to do them a harm. With loudly beating hearts they run home to tell that they have encountered the venomous toad that hates all virtuous maidens, who once was a queen, her who created the Laidley Worm of Spindleston-Heugh.
A BORDERER IN AMERICA
It would be matter for wonder if, in the histories of old Border families, record of strange personal experiences did not at times crop up. Sons of the Border have wandered far, and have sojourned in many lands, and borne their part in many an untoward event. But it is not likely that any can lay claim to adventures more strange and romantic than those which, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, befell a youthful member of one of the most ancient of these Border clans. This story of his adventures is literally true, as the family records prove, but the descendants of the person to whom they happened prefer that he should not figure in the tale under his own name. For convenience, therefore, it must suffice here to call him Andrew Kerr.
The responsibilities of life began early in his day. A boy who would now find himself in a very junior form at school, was then considered old enough to serve his Majesty in a marching regiment, or left his home to engage in business whilst yet his handwriting had scarcely emerged from childhood's clumsy formation, and veritable infants served as midshipmen in ships of war. Young Kerr was no exception to this general rule. Long before the boy had reached the age of sixteen he was shipped off to New York, there to join an uncle who, in order to engage in commerce, had lately retired from the 60th "Royal American" Regiment, then a famous colonial corps.
Those were stirring times, and for a passenger the voyage to America was no hum-drum affair devoid of excitement or peril. We were at war with France and Spain. Every white sail, therefore, that showed above the horizon meant the coming of a possible enemy; no day passed, in some part of which there might not chance to arise the necessity to employ every device of seamanship if escape were to be effected should the enemy prove too big to fight, or in which there was not at least the possibility of smelling powder burned in earnest.
Nor were danger and excitement necessarily ended with the ship's arrival in New York harbour. We were still fighting the French in Canada; men yet told grim tales of Braddock's defeat and of the horrors of Indian warfare. To him whom business or duty took far from the sea-board into the country of the savage and treacherous Iroquois, there was the ever-present probability that he would some day--perhaps many times--be compelled to fight for his life, with the certainty that, if disabled by wounds he fell into the enemy's hands, the scalp would be torn from his skull ere death could put an end to his sufferings; whilst capture meant, almost for a certainty, the being eventually put to death after undergoing the most hideous tortures that the cruelty of the Redskins could devise. To the colonists, "the only good Indian was a dead Indian"; and doubtless, by the newly-landed Andrew Kerr, the order at once to proceed up-country with a convoy in charge of military stores must have been received with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, his boyish love of adventure would be amply satisfied, while, on the other, there were risks to be faced which might well have caused more than uneasiness to many an older man--risks which the boy's acquaintances possibly were at no pains to conceal, which, indeed, a few of them would probably take pleasure in painting in the gloomiest of colours. But duty was duty, and the lad had too great a share of Border stubbornness and grit to let himself be badly scared by such tales as were told to him.
The destination of the convoy was Fort Detroit. In those far-off days New York was but a little city of some twenty thousand inhabitants, and the western part of New York State was quite outside the bounds of civilisation. To reach the Canadian frontier there were then two great routes of military communication--one, up the Hudson River, and so by way of Lakes George and Champlain and down the Richelieu to the St. Lawrence; the other, by the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, then by way of Lake Oneida and the Oswego River to the first of the great lakes, Lake Ontario; thence the journey to Fort Detroit would be chiefly by canoe, up Lakes Ontario and Erie. Between the last military post at the head of the Mohawk, however, and the mouth of the Oswego River, there was a great gap in which no military post had been established. Thus the route of the convoy to which Kerr was attached necessarily took them through country overrun by hostile Indian tribes.
No mishap, however, befell the party; probably they were too strong, too wary and well skilled in Indian warfare, to give the enemy a chance of ambushing or taking them by surprise on their march through the woods.
At Fort Detroit, it was found that a small exploring party, under a Captain Robson, was about to set out with the object of determining whether or not certain rivers and lakes were navigable, and young Kerr, boylike, eagerly volunteered to join the expedition.
Here began his strange adventures. The party, all told, consisted but of eleven persons--Captain Robson, Sir Robert Davers, six soldiers, two sailors, and young Kerr. Apparently they did not think it necessary to take with them any colonists, or Indian scouts. It is a curious characteristic of the average Britisher who finds himself in a new land, that he appears to regard it as an axiom that he must necessarily know much more than the average colonist; can, in fact, teach that person "how to suck eggs." The colonist, of course, on his part--and in the majority of cases with justice--regards the "new chum," or "tender foot," as a somewhat helpless creature. But the Britisher despises, or at least he used to despise, the mere colonist. Hence have arisen not a few disasters. The little--travelled Britisher does not readily learn that local conditions in all countries are not the same, that dispositions and customs which suit one are totally out of place and useless in another. That was how General Braddock made so terrible and absolute a fiasco of his expedition; it was the custom of the British army to fight standing in line--(and, in truth, many a notable victory had they won before, and many have they won since, in that formation)--therefore fight thus in line they must, no matter what the nature of the country in which they fought. Hence, in dense forest, surrounded by yelling savages, our men stood up to be shot by a foe whom they never saw till it was too late, and panic had set in amongst the few survivors. Had our troops been taught to adapt themselves to circumstances and to fight as the colonists fought, as the French in Canada had learned to fight, as the Red Indians fought, taking every advantage of cover, Braddock need not thus unnecessarily have lost nearly seventy per cent, of his force. In matters appertaining to war or to fighting, it was beneath the dignity, most unhappily it was beneath the dignity, of a British general to regard as of possible value the opinion of a mere colonial, no matter how experienced in Indian fighting the latter might be, or how great his knowledge of the country. It was that, no doubt, which induced Braddock to disregard the opinion, and to pooh-pooh the knowledge of his then A.D.C. George Washington. Yet it was nothing but Washington's knowledge that saved the van of Braddock's defeated force.
In like manner, had this little exploring expedition been accompanied by colonists experienced in Indian ways, or had they chosen to make use of Indian scouts, disaster might have been averted. As it was, almost on the threshold of their journey they were ambushed, and cut off by the Redskins. Robson, Davers, and two of the men were speedily picked off by the concealed enemy, or were killed in the final rush of the painted, yelling savages. The little force was scattered to the winds. One or two, taking to the water, under cover of the darkness, and protected by that Providence which sometimes watches over helpless persons, eventually reached safety. But young Kerr was not amongst these fortunate ones. For him, experiences more trying were in store. In the last mêlée he fell into the hands of a grim-looking, powerfully-built warrior, who bound him to a tree, and in that most unpleasant predicament the lad for a time remained, from moment to moment anticipating for himself the treatment he saw being dealt out on the bodies of his friends. His youth saved him. Too young to be considered by the Indians as fit to be a warrior, his scalp was not added to the other bloody trophies of victory; for him was reserved the fate of slavery, the disgrace (from an Indian point of view) of performing menial offices, of doing the work usually performed by squaws. Kerr's captor, a warrior named Peewash, of the tribe of the Chippeways, dragged his prisoner home to his wigwam. There the boy was stripped naked, painted as Indians were painted, his head clean shaved except for one tuft on top called "the scalp lock," which amongst the Indians it was the custom to leave in order to facilitate the operation of scalping by their enemies should the owners chance to fall in battle. A scalp was the recognised trophy of victory. It was not regarded as absolutely necessary to kill an enemy; if his scalp could be torn from his head, no more was required, and not infrequently a wounded man was left scalpless on the ground, writhing in speechless agony, to linger and die miserably.
After undergoing the preliminaries of an Indian toilet, young Kerr had moccasins given to him, and a blanket to wear--a costume perhaps more convenient than becoming--and he entered on a round of duties new and strange. He was not, after a time, unkindly treated by Peewash and his squaw. But the work was far from pleasant, and many were the terrible sights forced on his unwilling notice at this time. Once, when the little garrison of Detroit sent out a small party, which, making a dash at the Indian camp, succeeded in killing a Chippeway Chief, the Redskins in revenge tortured and killed Captain Campbell, a Scot, who had been captured by the Ottawas. Such sights filled the boy with sick horror, and with a not unnatural dread of the fate which might yet await himself. Rather than remain to furnish in his own person the leading feature of an Indian festival, it was surely better, he thought, to die in attempting escape.
As it chanced later, a French trader--these tribes were the allies of the French--arrived in camp, and remained there some time. Moved to pity by the boy's unhappy condition, this man, with some difficulty, persuaded Peewash to sell the lad to him for goods to the value of £40. Great was Kerr's exultation; once more he was free, free too without having had to face the terrible ordeal of attempting to escape from these murderous Indian devils. All would now be well, for assuredly he, or his friends, would repay to the Frenchman the ransom money. The boy felt as if his troubles were already over; in a day or two at longest he would sleep again under the flag of his own land; perhaps even, at no distant date, he might once more gaze on scenes for which throughout his captivity his soul had hungered, see, once more, Cheviot lying blue in the distance, the Eildons with their triple crown, hear the ripple of the Border streams. What tales of adventure he would have to tell.
Alas! he counted without his hosts. The Chippeways when they heard of the transaction would have none of it. The captive boy had been the property of the tribe, they said, and they refused to part with him; he must be given up by the Frenchman. And the latter had no choice but to comply.