CHAPTER XIV.

THE OGRE OF ANGUS.

"I snuff up the smell of a corse from afar-- Whither goest thou, wild steed? Whither fliest, cavalier? Does the warrior seek for the pathway of war? Does the wild steed seek for pasture here? The wind of the desert here battles alone-- None but serpents inhabit the wilderness stone-- None but skeletons slumber upon the ground, And the vultures in solitude hover around." _From the Polish of Mickiewics_.

The gun which was fired from the _Yellow Frigate_ before she sailed from her moorings at Dundee attracted the attention of many in the town, and among others Hew Borthwick, who, at a bench outside the gate, had been teaching the constables men-at-arms, who loitered about the king's lodging (as St. Margaret's Palace was sometimes named), various tricks with cards and dice. Hurrying down St. Clement's Wynd with others, to the beach, he saw the frigate under full sail, standing down the river.

"What the devil's i' the wind now?" was his first thought; "if Sir Andrew encounters Howard on the high seas, our special plan will assuredly be blown up like a soap-bubble! Can Gair have suspected us? Impossible! the fellow knew nothing, save that we boarded a ship--and what of that? Well, well, let those laugh who win this desperate game. But it looks ill, yonder old grampus putting to sea in such haste," he continued, after a pause; "I must een hie me to Broughty, and see Sir Patrick."

In those days there were but two hostelries in Dundee, and as neither of these had confidence enough in human virtue to entrust our worshipful knight with a horse, he was obliged to depart on foot for Broughty, passing out of the town by the shore instead of the Seagate and market-place, for which he had a decided aversion; and, indeed, wretch as he was, he could never pass through the latter without a shudder, as it recalled certain passages in the history of his family, with which we may now acquaint the reader.

In many ancient records, but chiefly that old and quaint chronicle of Scotland written by Robert Lindesay, Laird of Pitscottie, we are informed, that about thirty-eight years before the time of our story, there was a strange being named Ewain Gavelrigg, who dwelt among the Sidlaw hills in Angus, and who with his whole family was accused of the strange and horrible crime of eating human flesh!

At the foot of the mountains, he occupied a small hut, walled with turf and thatched with heather, at a place called Uach-dair Tir--now _Auchtertyre_; but his chief haunt was that savage pass in the Sidlaws, known as the Glack of Newtyle, where he waylaid, robbed, and slew the solitary travellers who chanced to be benighted in that wild and lonely district, which then lay between Dundee and Strathmore. Several who had escaped him, and reached either the Castle of Bailie-Craig, which was close by, or that of the Constable of Dundee, related how they had been encountered by a man of frightful aspect and vast stature, armed with a great mace and poniard. All accounts of him were similar. He was entirely clad in homespun grey, with rough deer-skin shoes and galligaskins; a broad belt of cowhide encircled his waist, and his head, which was ever destitute of bonnet, was protected by a forest of matted black hair. A blow from his clenched hand was sufficient to brain a mountain bull, or smite a charger to the earth; and those who escaped from him, averred that they saw him sucking the blood from the wounds of those he had slain, and rending asunder their limbs like the branches of a withered bush, while he picked their bones, as a marmoset might pick those of a chicken.

In that age of credulity and marvel, such stories made a terrible impression on the people. The whole of Angus rang with them--and others were constantly being added, each more startling than the last. The men of Strathmore, the light Lindesays, the vassals of Glammis, and even the valiant Sutors of Forfar, never ventured abroad alter night-fall, save in parties of three or four, and always well armed with their quarter staves or two-handed swords.

Twice had men of undoubted valour and veracity averred that they had slain him; one an arrow-maker of Dundee, by a wound he had given him in the throat; another who was a sword-slipper of Banff, by a thrust he had given him in the breast; but they were taunted as bootless boasters, for this strange and uncouth being was still haunting the pass of the Sidlaws.

A succession of these incredible stories excited the wonder and kindled the chivalry of Sir James Scrimegeour of Dudhope, the young constable of Dundee; and attended only by Lord Drummond--then Sir John of that ilk--well mounted and in full armour, on St. John's night in the year 1440, he rode to the Glack of Newtyle, and there, like a paladin of old, blew three blasts with his bugle-horn. The night was unusually dark, and the broad sheet lightning was reddening the sky behind the black peak of Kinpurnie, which is eleven-hundred feet in height, and is the highest of the Sidlaw range. The narrow-bridle path which led through the Glack was buried in obscurity, and clumps of stunted firs which grew in the morasses waved mournfully in the wind that sang down the mountain pass and through their wiry foliage.

With their chargers shod with felt, the knights rode softly on, and as challenger, Scrimegeour, the royal standard-bearer, was a bowshot in front of Sir John Drummond.

By the first blast of his bugle the erne was roused from its eyry among the cliffs of Kinpurnie; by the second the warder at Bailie-Craig was wakened from his sleep, and the hirsels lowed on the hills; but the third had scarcely been tossed among the mountain echoes by the wind, when between him and that midnight sky, which every instant was reddened by the bright but silent lightning, the valiant Scrimegeour saw a gigantic figure arise as if from the ground, with its long hair waving wildly, while it brandished a mace, which was furnished with a studded ball of steel, that swung at the end of an iron chain.

"Ewain Gavelrigg--man or fiend--come on!" exclaimed the knight, and though every pulse in his body for a moment stood still, he dashed forward to the combat.

By one blow of this iron mace, which descended like a thunder-bolt, the brains of the horse were dashed back into its rider's face, and the rider himself hurled prostrate on the path. Then the vampire or demon of Uach-dair Tir strode over him, brandishing his tremendous weapon, and uttering a succession of wild shouts of laughter. Grasping by the throat the half-stunned constable of Dundee, and compressing his gorget of steel as if it had been a lady's ruff of lace, he would have slain him there but for the valour of his companion, and a vow he had made to build a chapel in honour of St. John, if he escaped. Moreover, it is related, that he was almost suffocated by the inconceivable odour that pervaded the body of his herculean conqueror. While the latter, exulting in his victory, and laughing like a hyæna, was half strangling and half dragging the discomfited Scrimegeour towards the pine woods, he neither heard nor saw Drummond, who with his light Barbary courser, shod by soft felt, advanced over the velvet sward that bordered the wayside, but noiselessly, like the tall shadow of a man and horse.

The long sharp lance of Drummond was in the rest, and urged by the full force of a galloping steed and the thrust of a powerful arm, the head of steel and a yard of the tough ash pole, were driven through the body of the midnight marauder, who expired with a frightful cry.

When day broke and the body of this strange man was examined, it was found to be vast in its strength and proportion, but terrible in aspect; and multiplied by a hundred-fold, the odour of dead carrion pervaded it. When stripped, it was found to have _four_ wounds, from all of which the black blood had been freely flowing; viz: those where Drummond's lance had pierced the back and breast, and those inflicted by the barbed shaft of the arrow-maker, and the sword of the dalmascar.

Two wild and haggard-looking women, his wife and daughter, came from their hut at Uach-dair Tir, and as a boon begged to have the body for interment, and as a refusal would have been deemed unknightly, it was freely bestowed by the valiant Laird of Dudhope, who first hewed off the hand which had grasped him by the throat, and nailed it on the western gate of Dundee, where the skeleton fingers were to be seen in the days of James IV.

In accordance with his vow, he endowed and dedicated a beautiful little chapel to St. John the Evangelist, which he built at the Sklait-hewchs, upon a rock near the burgh; but the walls of this fair oratory had barely been raised three feet in height, when again the travellers, who in that unruly age were hardy enough to traverse the wilds between Dundee and Strathmore, were found murdered and mutilated; children disappeared, desperate conflicts were fought and pools of blood found in the Glack of Newtyle, and all Angus was stricken with consternation by tidings that the wild man of the Sidlaws had come alive again!

By sound of trumpet at the burgh crosses, Sir Alexander Livingstone, of Calender, governor to the young King James I., proclaimed a general crusade against him. The hut at Uach-dair Tir was levelled and destroyed, when, in a chamber, or vault below it, there were found an incredible number of bones, which the credulity of the time magnified to a perfect hecatomb of human remains. Dudhope brought a hundred lances on horseback, the Lindesays of Crawford and the Abbot of Aberbrothwick a thousand each; the Laird of Bailie Craig brought a band of gallant archers; a general hunt began; the whole country was searched between Stenton Craig and Edzel Kirk, till, deep in a chasm of the Sidlaw hills, the sleuth bratches of Dudhope discovered Ewain Gavelrigg, who made a desperate and frantic resistance, slew eight men and three horses--after threatening all the rest with dire vengeance, even if he should be slain; but he was at last overborne by blunted spears, for the knights wished to capture and not to slay him; and for a charm each had tied to his lance's head a rosemary branch, with a twig of the rowan tree.

Having but _one hand_ to fight with, he was soon bound hard and fast by cords and chains, slung under a horse's belly, and thus conveyed to Dundee, where he was sentenced by the Constable to be burned at the market-cross, together with his wife, daughter, and son, a little child, to make sure that none of a brood so terrible should ever come alive again.

Jellon Borthwick, a prebend of Dunkeld, pled hard to have the child delivered to him; and his boon was granted; but the others were burned in succession: first Gavelrigg, then his wife, and next their daughter, who was also accused, whether truly or falsely we know not, of having eaten the flesh of many children.

"When she was coming to the place of execution," saith Robert Lindesay in his Chronicle, "thair gathered an hudge multitud of people, and especiallie of vomen, cursing her for being so unhappie as to committ such damnable deidis; to whom she turned with an ireful countenance, saying--

"'_Whairfoir chyde ye me, as if I had committed an unworthie act? Give me credence and trow me, if ye had experience of eating of mens and womens flesch, ye wald think it so delitious, that ye wald never forbear it agane!_'

"So without any signe of repentance," concludes the historian, "this vnhappie traitour deid in the sight of the people."

Her ashes, with those of her terrible parents, were scattered on the waters of the Tay; and a black whin-stone in the causewayed market-place long remained to indicate the spot where they perished. Hew Borthwick was the child whom the priest saved: hence it was that he shuddered to pass through the central street of Dundee. The good old prebend, who had given him his own name, reared him for the Church, in the hope that through his piety and prayers the atrocious lives of his parents might in some measure be atoned for; but Hew broke his vows, and came forth into the world, to fulfil the terrible mission for which fate seemed to destine him.

The people of Dundee and Angus knew not that he was the rescued child of the terrible Ewain Gavelrigg, the ogre of the Sidlaws: for the secret was known only to the prebends of Dunblane; and animated either by pity for the wretch himself, or a sense of shame that their holy cloister had once been desecrated by his presence, they locked the secret in their own breasts,--unfortunately, we may add, for many of the actors in our drama, and most unfortunately indeed for the whole of Scotland, as the event proved.

An hour's walk along the rough and shingly beach brought Hew Borthwick to the gates of Broughty, the strong walls of which, when occupied by a gallant garrison, twice defied the Regent Arran with eight pieces of cannon and eight thousand infantry. The barbican, with its flanking towers and strong curtain wall was then well mounted by heavy culverins of yetlan iron, to sweep the river; but the smaller guns, which faced the salt marshes on the north, and the links of Moniefieth on the east, were composed of iron rings, enclosing malleable iron bars. Like other royal castles, it was garrisoned by a company of the king's _Wageours_, as the people named the enlisted soldiers of those military bands by which James III., at a time when standing armies were unknown, with a foresight far in advance of his age, provided for the security of the kingdom; especially towards the frontier of England.

Thus, in addition to the troops in the five great fortresses of the Lowlands, and to five hundred soldiers maintained in Berwick until its loss and betrayal by the Duke of Albany, James, with consent of his Parliament, made the Laird of Glengilt captain of a hundred archers and lances, who kept the castles of Blackadder, Hume, and Wedderburn; the Laird of Edmeston commanded as many royal archers and lances in the castles of Cessford, Ormiston, and Edgerston; the Laird of Cranston, a hundred lances and archers, in the Border Peels of Jedburgh, Cocklaw, and Dolphinton; the Laird of Lamington had a hundred troopers under his orders in Hermitage; the Laird of Amisfield a hundred more in Castlemilk, Bellistower, and Annan. In Broughty, Kyneff had fifty archers, and fifty pikemen. All these troops, like the arquebussiers of the king's ships, were uniformly clad; the horsemen in steel jacks, and the infantry in blue surcoats, having St. Andrew's white cross upon the back and breast; under all these captains were lieutenants, who received from the exchequer, as the daily pay of their soldiers, eleven shillings and sixpence for every spear and bow. This organization was one of the many wise measures taken by this good king to ensure the safety of his southern frontier; but such a permanent force, however small, was eminently obnoxious to the feudal nobles.

The sentinels at the gate of Broughty, who knew that Borthwick, though a sorner and blackleg, was a dependent or follower of their captain, admitted him at once, and he was conducted up a bare stone staircase, through the large bleak and ill-furnished hall of the great tower, to an apartment, which was hung with arras, that had once displayed bright stripes of alternate crimson and gold, now faded to rusty green and sombre brown. A straw mat covered the stone floor; the furniture consisted of a buffet, encumbered by flasks, bowls, and drinking horns, swords, poniards, cards, chessmen, hawks' hoods, dog-whips, and a hundred other et-cetera, covered by dust; four clumsy armchairs, as many tripod stools, and an oak table, at which Sir James Shaw and Sir Patrick Gray were drinking the cheap Bordeaux wine which was then brought in by the Eastern Seas.

"Ho, ho! speak of the devil!"--said Gray, as Borthwick entered; "welcome! thou art the very man we have been wishing for," he added, kicking a stool towards him unceremoniously with his foot; "close the door and drop the arras, for we have something to talk of that others may not, must not, hear."

"The king's intended banquet to the nobles at Edinburgh?"

"Nay, nay; fill your horn first, my fine fellow," said Sir Patrick Gray; "'tis a thirsty affair, a walk in the sunshine along yonder sandy shore."

"Thanks, sir Captain--devil! I am thirsty," replied Borthwick; so he quaffed off a pot of wine; "I had not my purse at my girdle, and the rascally hostler in the Seagate would trust me with nothing more than a cup of cold water, and on that I lunched."

"So the Laird of Largo has sailed," said the Governor of Stirling, knitting his brows inquiringly.

"I ken not on what errand, sirs."

"If yonder villain of a boatman hath proved false, we shall all have to mount to ride, like Bordermen, when the spurs are on the platter and the houghs i' the pot," said Gray.

At this surmise they all changed colour, and Shaw looked as yellow as that English gold for which so many Scottish traitors were ever ready to sell their services and their souls.

"Well, I care not," said Gray; "for every man in this tower, though drawing the king's pay and drinking his ale, are mine own true men to the backbone; vassals of my barony, who will fight only under the banner that I choose to follow."

"I may say as much for his majesty's garrison in Stirling," said Sauchie; "but I would that Angus and Drummond were come hither; for now since this plebeian king of ours will neither march to fight in Brittany, nor to pray at St. John of Amiens, we must e'en devise other measures, or our pretty bubbles may be blown, if yonder old sea-horse, with his devilish _Yellow Frigate_, encounter Howard on the high seas."

"Then I trust in God that the Englishman may sink with all his papers, for he can never capture Wood!" replied the Captain of Broughty, with fervour. "A startling affair it will be, if Sir Andrew finds all the secrets contained in the iron-bound book of Master Kraft, the London Attorney, and lays them before King James and our enemies of the Privy Council."

"But our _Bond_ with Henry is in cipher."

"Those shaven monks and cunning clerks who write to James in Greek, Hebrew, and other damnable languages, soon find a key to our ciphers, believe me, Sir James."

"Then something must be done, for we know not what this night may bring forth," said Shaw, refilling his wine cup; "where are Wood's ships now?"

"Hull down, already," replied Borthwick, looking from a window which faced the Firth of Tay, whose blue waters were beginning to redden in the setting sun.

"By my soul! I could have laughed outright at the gravity with which Rothesay acceded to my proposal for the hand of Maggie Drummond," said Gray.

"What if she accept thee?" asked Sir James Shaw.

"Right well knew I there is but slender chance of that; but Borthwick, have you examined all the avenues to this damosel's chamber, so that we may have her by the time Howard returns?"

"By to-night I will have made sure, Sir Patrick; but if Howard is slain or taken by Sir Andrew, what then?"

"We must devise other means," said Shaw, with one of his deep, fierce glances; "by St. Andrew! I would give three of my best tenements in Stirling to have this suspense brought to an end."

"For one of those tenements,--yea, the smallest, Sir James," said Borthwick, "I will write such a letter to Montrose as shall dethrone the king."

"To Montrose----"

"Yea; but the letter must go to Angus."

"Doth the Lord Angus read?" asked Gray.

"A little; I saw him spelling over the legend on the castle gate."

"A letter!--and who will sign it?"

"I----"

"Thou! Borthwick;--fellow, thou laughest at us!"

"Under favour, Sir James, I never was more in earnest in my life. I will write, and sign it with the king's signature, and seal it with his seal, in such wise that not even he could detect the hand of a forger; then how much less the half-lettered Angus?"

"With the king's seal, say you?"

"His private signet, which I found this morning at the gate of St. Salvador's chapel, where the king must have dropped it, after mass."

"And this letter----"

"Will kindle a blaze through all Scotland."

"Art thou sure of this?" asked Shaw, with a grim joy that was blended with incredulity and contempt.

"Let the deed show."

"Hew Borthwick," said the traitor Shaw, "I know thee to be subtle as that serpent which of old beguiled our mother Eve. I know thee to love money, even as thine own soul, and I swear to thee by my part of Paradise, that if thy boasted letter achieves the promised end, thou shalt have, not one, but three of my best tenements in the Broad Wynd of Stirling, held of the Burgh by an armed man's service."

"'Tis a bargain; and thou, Sir Patrick Gray, art witness," said Borthwick, rising with joy beaming in his atrocious countenance.

"In that inner chamber are pens, parchment, and wax," said Gray; "away to thy clerking, for here come the Lord Angus and his friends."

As Borthwick retired to compose one of the most villanous forgeries ever made by a traitor's hand--unless we except the contents of that silver casket so famous in the history of Mary, or some of the letters of Secretary Stair,--a train of brilliant horsemen rode up the ascent to Broughty, and dismounted in the paved barbican.