Part 4

The sons came forward, and, taking the body by the head and feet, carried it into the tower, where, having placed it, they stood around, silently looking on what was, an hour before, their beloved brother, in the heyday of youth and beauty.

"Who hath done this deed?" inquired the mother, as she looked on the pale face of her son, with feelings too deep for tears.

"Gilmanscleugh," answered Walter.

The word operated like electricity on the minds of the sons, as they stood silently looking at the corpse. Revenge had for a moment been clouded by grief, and the talismanic influence of the name of the destroyer drew aside the vapours, and exposed again the fiery sun of their resentment. A simultaneous movement carried their hands to their swords, and every face was turned to the door; but the eye of old Walter, looking askance through a bush of shaggy grey brows, watched keenly every motion; and, as they rushed out to raise the cry of destruction to Gilmanscleugh and its master, he called them back, and hurried them into a side-room with grated windows and a strong door, where were contained, as in a stronghold, the title-deeds of Harden, and other valuable things which required security. "Let us consult, my bold youths, let us consult," he said, as he pushed the last one in; and the moment they were all fairly enclosed, he turned the key in the lock, and put it into his pocket.

"Give me the Forester's bloody doublet," he cried to his wife, "with the hole made by Gilmanscleugh's sword in the right breast."

"What mean ye, Wat?" answered Mary, as, lifting her eyes from the face of the corpse, she noticed these extraordinary proceedings on the part of her husband. "Why do you lock up our five sons, when vengeance calls them to Gilmanscleugh? and why ask ye for the bloody vest, which should be the pennon to fly over the smoking ruins of the destroyer's tower? If you are to stop revenge, lock up the mother with her sons; for my heart beats with the pulsations of man's courage, and I will cease to feel as a woman till this blood be avenged. If thou wilt not lead on our sons to Gilmanscleugh, let me undertake the task; and mark well the issue of a woman's foray, when a son's bloody doublet hangs on the point of the spear."

"Recollect ye not your words, Mary?" answered Wat, hurriedly. "Said ye not that Gilmanscleugh would serve for both our sons? That one lying there is satisfied; by the powers of revenge, the other shall not be disappointed. The doublet! come, wife, the doublet!--and see that you give our sons meat enough, through the west hole of the strong-room, to keep their blood warm and their hearts glowing for three days. Let our dead Forester lie there for that time; but turn his head to Gilmanscleugh. The doublet! come, quick!"

Mary could not understand the meaning of these words; but she well knew that the resolutions of her husband, when determined, were founded on prudence and principle, and beyond the affecting capabilities of mortal man; so she proceeded to take from the body of her son the doublet, which was stained with blood, and perforated in the right breast by the sword which had deprived him of life. Having removed it, she handed it to Walter, who, holding it up to the light, looked through the hole, and, with that strange mixture of a peculiar humour with the deepest seriousness of human nature for which he was remarkable, declared, with a grim smile, that he saw through it the lands of Gilmanscleugh, and the Harden arms over the door of the old tower; then, wrapping up the vestment, he hurried to the outer court, and, binding it to the front of his saddle, mounted, and clapping spurs to his horse, was, in a few moments, away at a hard gallop over the hills.

Confused by these abrupt and incomprehensible proceedings, Mary had not been able to make the necessary effort to get an explanation, though it is doubtful if all her entreaties would have been successful in wringing from the determined and cunning old chief what were his intentions. Returning to the apartment where the dead body lay, she found there a duty which would occupy the time till her husband returned--in watching the corpse of her beloved Forester, and tracing in his rigid, pallid features the traces of those expressions of his beautiful face which used to extend so much influence over the hearts of his father and mother, and bring love to him from all sides on the rapid wings of sympathetic attraction. On one side lay the corpse she had to watch; at the other were her five remaining sons, enclosed as prisoners, and prevented from executing the revenge with which she burned, or extending to her the comforting and assuasive assistance of their presence and conversation. As she looked on the face of the corpse, she heard the impatient murmurings of her sons, who, burning to get forth to satisfy the yearnings of their hearts, demanded of her, through a small opening in the door, what was the intention of their father in thus keeping them from so just and necessary an object as the vindication of the honour of Harden, and the taking of blood for blood.

"We shall not be balked of our revenge, mother," cried the youngest. "The Forester's blood cries more loudly than the voice of our father. Call the retainers, and break open the door, that we may get free. Haste, good mother!"

"Haste! haste!" added other voices.

"I cannot disobey Harden's commands," replied she, "though the face of this fair corpse seems to beckon me to the satisfaction of a mother's heart, at the price of a wife's rebellion. My Forester's glazed eyes are fixed on me, and say, 'Open, and let my brothers free, that my blood may be avenged.' I cannot obey. Three days you must remain there--three days must the Forester lie in his shroud--then will Harden be back, and he will bring with him the bloody doublet to hang on the point of your spears."

"Whither is our father gone?" rejoined the impatient youths.

"I know not, but these were his words," replied she. "I am to watch my Forester's body, and feed you through the west bole, for three days."

"We cannot survive three days unrevenged, mother," said another. "We will take on ourselves the responsibility of release. Send us Wat's John, and he will break down this door. Bethink ye, good mother, that Gilmanscleugh may fly, and the Forester's ghost may wander for twenty moons in Harden's Glen, upbraiding his five brothers for not avenging his death."

"I cannot disobey your father," again said she.

"Then we will force our freedom, mother," cried the third son.

"Disobedient boy, say not the word," answered she. "Wait the three days, and, if you will, nurse during that time your fire; for, if I am not deceived, your father will require of you as much avenging wrath as you have to bestow, when his horn sounds again his return to Harden."

With difficulty did Mary prevail on the impetuous youths to refrain from an effort to effect their freedom. For the three appointed days, she sat in the room by the side of her dead son; and at every meal-hour she handed in the food necessary for the sustenance of her prisoners. Nor did she conceive that she had any title to rest from her watchful labour, or to cease her care of the dead body, even during the hours of night, till she saw his death avenged. The midnight lamp was regularly trimmed, and hung upon the wall, that its glimmering flame might fall upon the pale face of the youth, as he lay rolled up in the shroud which his mother had prepared for him, while sitting by the bier. At the solemn hour of midnight, she sat silent and sad, looked now in the face of the dead, listened to hear if any sound of a horn without announced the approach of her husband, or of a messenger from him, and then inclined her ear, to catch the broken words of revenge muttered by her sons in their sleep, or the strains of mournful lamentations for the death of their brother, which the energy of their grief forced from them at those intervals when their revenge was overcome by the more intense feeling. Groans and sighs, muttered oaths, sobs, and expressions of impatience, mixed or separate, told continually the workings of their minds. The speech of the dreamer was often mixed with the conversation of those awake; but so well acquainted was the mother with the sounds of their voices, that she could distinguish the one from the other. The question was often put by one who slept--"Are the three days past yet?" and those awake gave him the answer he could not hear. Then some of them seemed to clutch his neighbour in his dreams, and call out, that he had now caught him, and would avenge on him the death of the Forester, accompanying his speech with a struggle, as if he were in the act of stabbing Gilmanscleugh. Another would call to the mother, to know the hour; and, when she told him that it was midnight, or an hour past midnight, he would sigh deeply, as if he felt the hours of the three days winged with lead. Then again, a victim of nightmare groaned with fear, at the vision of the Forester's ghost, and cried, that it would not have long to walk the glen, for that the three days were fast on the wing. The shrill scream of a passing eagle or solitary owl, wakening those who slumbered in a half sleep, was mistaken for their father's horn, and an appeal to the mother was required to rectify the mistake. All these things passed in her hearing, and threw a gloom over her mind, which was not relieved by the look which she every moment stole at the dead face, as it shone white as the shroud in the light of the lamp: but she stood the trial, and continued her watch. The beam of a deadly revenge indicated the steadfastness with which she adhered to her resolution never to rest till she knew that Gilmanscleugh had expiated by his life the murder of her son.

Since the departure of Harden, no intelligence had come from him; and so strange had been his conduct when he went away, that his wife had often to combat the rising thought, that the fate of his favourite son had unsettled his intellects, and driven him away from the scene of his loss, in some wild dream of superstitious retribution. The locking up of his sons was the very reverse of the conduct which his revengeful nature might have dictated; and the taking with him the bloody doublet, through the sword-hole in which he declared he saw the lands of Gilmanscleugh his own, was far more like the act of a madman, than that of one who had duties to perform to himself, to his wife and children, on that sorrowful occasion, more serious and difficult than he had ever yet been called upon to fulfil. These thoughts rising throughout the dark night, when her ears were pained by the strange noises proceeding from the excitement of her sons, and her eye had nothing to rest on but the dead body of him who lay stretched by her side, stung her with anguish, and filled her heart with boding anticipations of terror. The third night was on the wing; and, though twelve o'clock had passed, there was no appearance of her husband. Her sons had become more than ordinarily restless, and said that, if their father did not make his appearance in the morning, they would disregard all authority, and call to the retainers to break down the door with battle-axes, and set them at liberty. She heard them in silence, and trembled to communicate to them the thoughts that had been passing through her mind as to the sanity and safety of their father. In a little, the restless prisoners began to fall over into their troubled sleep, and the moon, newly risen, sent in through the small windows a bright beam, that lay on the face of the corpse. She had wrought up her mind almost to a conviction that her husband had, in a fit of madness, thrown himself into the Borthwick, or otherwise committed suicide, and figured to her diseased fancy his body placed alongside of her son's, and with that same pale beam resting on it, and exhibiting to her the features which she had so long looked on with delight, made rigid by the grasp of death. Every sound was now hushed, with the exception of the occasional broken mutterings of her sons, and the notes of the winged inhabitants of the upper parts of the tower, who cawed their hoarse omens to the midnight wanderer in the forest. Every thought that rose in her mind was charged with a double portion of awe; and cold shivers, in opposition to her efforts to be firm, ran over her from head to heel, and precipitated her farther and farther into the depths of her fancied evils. Superstition might have borrowed a thousand aids from the circumstances in which she was placed; but, though she was beyond the influence of the direct operation of that power, the thoughts of evil which she had some reason for indulging, borrowed a part of their dark hue from the clouds in which the mystic goddess is generally enshrined: the individual would indeed have been more than woman who could have sat in the situation in which she was placed, and measured her evils with the gauge of calm reason.

While sunk in these gloomy reflections, a shrill blast of a horn reverberated among the hills. "That is our father's horn!" cried the sons, who awoke with the sound; and Mary herself knew the signal of the approach of her husband. She rose from the side of the corpse, and, looking forth from the window, saw, by the moon's light, Harden himself hastening towards the tower. In a moment he bounded from his horse, and in another he appeared before his wife.

"To horse! to horse! my sons!" he shouted, as he came forward. "Now for Gilmanscleugh, with the fire and the sword of Harden's revenge!"

A loud shout from the chamber where the sons lay announced the relief which this statement brought to their frenzied minds. The door was opened, and the prisoners were set at liberty. Without waiting for refreshment, the old chief, having cast a look on the dead body, hurried with his liberated sons to the court, where every retainer was summoned to attend his master. A large party was assembled in a very short time, and, with the moon as their guide, the cavalcade, making the castle ring with Harden's war-cry, issued with rapid steps out of the ballium, and took the road to Gilmanscleugh. They arrived at the place of their destination while the moon shone still clear in the heavens; and Harden's sons observed that their father now took no precautions, as was usual in his night attacks, to prevent the assailed party from knowing his approach. He marched them silently, deliberately, and boldly up in front of the tower of Gilmanscleugh, where Scott, who had fondly imagined that his act had not been traced to him, was residing in a security that had been daily increasing, but was now so soon to be ended. The whole party were ranged in front of the devoted tower, and Harden's horn was sounded for entrance. Scott appeared at the window, and asked the pleasure of Harden, and the purpose of his call at that unusual hour, though he well knew to what he owed the fearful visit.

"I have a paper, under the king's hand, to read to thee, Gilmanscleugh," replied Harden.

"We had better read it in the mornin," replied Scott. "Our lights are out in the tower. I will wait ye at yer ain time; but let it be in the licht o' day."

"The moon is Harden's time," rejoined the chief. "If thou wilt not let us in to read it, here, in the light of this torch, brought for the occasion, thou shalt hear the words of majesty. I am only the royal commissioner, and must do my duty."

The torch was held up, and Harden calling forth one of his retainers, who had been a clerk in a convent, ordered him to read a royal charter which he put into his hands. The man obeyed, and read the document which purported, in the few words of these old land rights, that the king, for the love and favour he bore to Walter Scott of Harden, had conveyed and settled upon him and his heirs the lands, tower, and appurtenances of Gilmanscleugh, which formerly belonged to William Scott, but had fallen to the crown by escheat, in consequence of the constructive rebellion of the said William Scott, in killing the son of Harden, known by the name of the Forester, when engaged in hunting on his father's lands. The charter gave, in addition, full power to the said Walter Scott to take immediate possession of the property, and to adopt all necessary steps for ejecting the former proprietor and his family from the same.

"Thou hast heard read the king's writ," cried the chief. "What sayest thou to the royal authority? I come here peaceably to demand the possession of Gilmanscleugh. If you will consent to depart, and give me up the key of the tower, I will pass my honour for the safety of thee and thine. If not, I will enforce the king's authority. Take a quarter-of-an-hour to decide. I will wait the decision."

This announcement produced surprise on all hands, as well to the unhappy proprietor, who was to be deprived of his lands that had come to him from his ancestors, as to the sons of Harden, who were to be deprived of that species of revenge they had burned for, and considered to be the only one suited to the occasion which called for it--the life of the slayer. While Gilmanscleugh retired to consider of the proposal, the sons of Harden crowded round him, and implored him to retract his condition of extending safety to the person of the murderer of their brother. The old chief--who had already counted all the advantages and disadvantages of the bargain, and saw how much better were the broad acres of Gilmanscleugh, which the king had given him for the loss of his son, than the life of its master, which, although he took, he could make nothing of, seeing that it would vanish in the act of capture--replied calmly, to their warm entreaties, that the lands were his revenge, and a very good revenge, too; but he promised them that, if Scott did not immediately comply with his request, they would have their pleasure of him and his whole household, to kill, or wound, or burn, or hang, as they chose. This addition roused the spirits and restored the hopes of the sons, who could not suppose that a man would give up his property in the easy manner anticipated by their father. Yet so it turned out; for in a short time Scott appeared again, and stated that, upon condition of him and his household being permitted to go forth safe and free, he would instantly deliver to him the key of the tower. The bargain was struck; and in a short time the extraordinary scene was witnessed of a whole family leaving the home of their fathers on a quarter-of-an-hour's notice, and wandering away to beg a habitation and a meal from those who were their dependants. Scott's wife had in her arms a sucking child, and three other children held by her garments, and cried bitterly as they passed on through the fierce troop, who looked the daggers of a disappointed revenge. A sister of his wife's tended a sickly son of Scott's, who was borne forth on a board carried by two of his retainers; and there was seen, hobbling along, with a long piked staff in her hand, the laird's mother, who had gone to Gilmanscleugh sixty years before, and born in it seven sons and three daughters. Then came Scott himself, with the keys in his hand, at the sight of whom Harden's sons moved involuntarily forward, as the instinctive desire of revenge for a moment overcame the command of their father. The keys were handed forth in dead silence; and the servants of the ejected laird wiped their eyes as they beheld the melancholy scene. They wandered slowly and reluctantly away. Harden looked back as the last of them were disappearing in the wood. "Revenge enough," he muttered--"revenge enough, and to spare." He then entered and took possession of the tower, in which he left as many of his men as were sufficient to guard it. He then returned with his sons and a part of his troop to Harden, where he found Mary Scott still sitting by the side of her dead son, in conformity with a custom among the Borderers, derived from the land of Odin, that the corpse of a murdered relative should not be committed to the earth till his death was avenged. She looked up in the face of Harden as he entered, and the blue eye of the Flower of Yarrow searched wistfully for tokens of a deed of stern retribution. Such is the power of custom and education, that one of the fairest of women, who, if she had lived in the nineteenth century, might have been a Lady Fanny, and shrunk, according to fashion, from the sight of a murdered worm, deemed it necessary, from duty, and felt it as consonant to the feelings of her sex, to look her disappointment at not observing, on the clothes or arms of her husband and sons, the signs of a wrong righted by blood.

"Is it thus that Harden comes, with bright steel and unsullied clothes, from the house of the murderer of his fairest son?" cried she. "Look at that corpse, and blush deep as the crimson that dyes the lily-lire of our boy. Is there no vengeance, Walter? Is there no satisfaction, my sons?"

"Whether, Mary," replied Harden, "would you accept a charter to the lands of Gilmanscleugh to Harden and his heirs for ever, or the life's blood of its master, as a satisfaction for the death of our boy who lies there, killed by his hand?"

"I would rather enjoy the lands," replied she, "and let the murderer enjoy, if he can, the life that is spared to him. Our revenge is double; for, while life may be painful to him, the lands will yield us pleasure in after years."

"Here, then," said he, "is a charter to the lands of Gilmanscleugh"--holding out the parchment. "I got it from the king as my satisfaction; and now we may indeed say, as you strangely predicted, that Gilmanscleugh hath served both of our sons."

On the following day, the unfortunate son of Harden was buried; and, long afterwards, the lands of Gilmanscleugh remained in the family under the name of Harden's Revenge.

THE PHYSIOGNOMIST'S TALE.