Chapter 13

The case was hedged with difficulties. Violent diseases require strong remedies. I recollected that James H---- said, on a former occasion, that he was the suitor of the young woman, and wished to wed her. I came to a resolution on the instant--firm, decided, and sound. I told him that, if he wished to save the father and the daughter, he must accelerate his intended marriage with the latter, even in the midst of the unfortunate circumstances in which she was placed, and under the unfavourable auspices of an event of joy being shadowed with a cloud of sorrow. This would give him a claim on the daughter; and if the old man would not permit his son-in-law to remain in the house, and assist him as formerly with the labours of his land, he could threaten to take her from him altogether--a threat that would not, in all likelihood, fail to make him consent to his becoming an inmate in the house. The young man was pleased with an advice that quadrated with his wishes, and left me, to consult with some other friends on the propriety of instantly following it.

I heard the banns proclaimed next Sunday in the parish church, and was somewhat surprised at the rapidity with which my advice had been adopted, and the plan put into execution. The intelligence was promptly communicated to me by the bridegroom himself, who informed me also that the fact of the proclamation of the banns had been communicated to his uncle, who had expressed himself strongly against the match. He had, in fact, taken up a strong prejudice against his nephew, in consequence of the latter's interference with his purpose of self-immolation. He had never allowed the young man to come near him since the day on which he had taken the razor out of his hands by force; and the intelligence that he was to marry his daughter, and deprive him of her society, roused him to fury. He denounced the union, and said that it added another drop of bitterness to the cup of his misery, which was already overflowing. I told the young man that the anger into which his uncle had been thrown would, in all likelihood, do him more good than harm: it might stimulate a mind, dead or dormant, from the effects of brooding over imaginary evils, which produced ten times more self-murders than the real misfortunes of life. He told me the marriage would not, on account of his uncle's anger, be put off; that it was fixed for the 15th of the month, and would be celebrated in private. I informed him that I required to go to a distant part of the country, and could not, for some time, see his uncle, and that he must endeavour, by all means, to support and comfort the unhappy bride in her watchful care over her unfortunate father, who, according to his account, was still under the cloud from which he threatened every instant to draw down the lightning that was to strike him to death.

When I returned from my journey, I called again upon the unfortunate man, in the hope of finding some amelioration in his condition, as well as that of his daughter. I found him still in bed, though he had been up and out on several occasions since I visited him. I saw no signs of improvement. I endeavoured to get him engaged in a conversation about his own condition; but I saw that, in place of being fond of dwelling on the state of his mind, talking of his sorrows, and contemplating the purpose he entertained against his existence, he showed an utter repugnance to the subject, having become perfectly taciturn, sullen, and morose, giving me monosyllables for answers, and sometimes not deigning even to show that he attended to me, or understood me. The only thing that seemed to interest him was his daughter's marriage--looking dark and gloomy when the subject was broached, and muttering indistinct words of reproach and anger. The condition of his daughter was changed; but it was only a new form of anguish. Some days previous, she had observed him with another razor in his hand; but he had secreted it somewhere, and all her efforts had as yet been ineffectual to get it. Her watch had therefore been more unremitting--her apprehensions were increased, while her strength was greatly diminished. She was reduced to a shadow; the pale skin that covered her face seemed to be in contact with the bones; while her eyes burned with fever and excitement. Yet _her marriage_ was fixed to take place two or three days after! She could not avoid it; she had pledged her word, and her father's safety depended in a great degree upon it. She could bear her condition no longer--all her powers of suffering were worn out; and if her father would not permit her husband to remain in the house, she would, she said, allow the latter to exercise what authority he pleased, in endeavouring, by force, to save his father-in-law and his wife from the ruin that seemed to await them. The gloom that enveloped her mind was deepened by the contrast of the light of a happiness she had long sighed for, now changed into a refinement of peculiar pain. She shuddered when she thought of her marriage with the man she loved, and feared that the power of Heaven would fall on her, for presuming to bring joy into the chamber of mourning, if not death. As she spoke, tears moistened her burning eye, and ran down her thin, pallid cheeks. She wished the ceremony over, as an evil to be endured, and then fate must take its course, though she feared the termination would be miserable, as well for her father as for her. His life was hanging by a thread; hers was worn out by watching, fainting, and suffering, till it was on the very eve of leaving the body, which was no longer able to support or contain it. These were the misfortunes in the inside of the house; but there were others without-doors. The landlord had sequestrated the stock belonging to her father--a circumstance that had plunged him deeper in his despondency and misery, and explained the very altered state in which I had found him. The attorney, a hard man, _laughed_ at the _device_ of threatened self-murder, resorted to for the purpose of exciting his sympathy, and robbing his client's pocket.

"Yes," she concluded, "he _laughed_"--and she repeated the word "laughed" with a hysterical action of the throat, as if it choked her, and next moment burst into tears.

Two days afterwards, a man on horseback arrived at my door, and rapped with great violence; his horse was heated, and foaming at the mouth, as if it had been hard pressed, and he himself was flushed and excited. He told me, in a hurried manner, that I was wanted instantly at George B----'s; he had been sent to me by another man, and could tell me nothing beyond the fact that something very alarming had taken place, and that, if I did not hasten thither on the instant, and with my very greatest speed, I could be of no use. I took with me what I conceived might be wanted, for my suspicions were more communicative than the messenger, and proceeded, with all the expedition in my power, to the house where I had lately seen so much suffering.

On my entering the house, a most extraordinary spectacle presented itself. On the small truckle-bed that stood opposite the door in the kitchen lay a female figure, dressed in white, with both her hands wrapped up in cloth, from which issues of blood rolled on the bed; and her face, not less pale than her dress, was spotted and besmeared with the same element. It was Margaret B---- in her _marriage dress_. A young woman, her bridesmaid, was beside her, looking in her face as if to see whether life was still in her body. A young man, also dressed as if for the marriage, hurried me to the apartment of George B----, where a scene not less awful was presented to me. The unhappy man was lying in the middle of the floor, on his back, with his throat cut, and James H----, in his bridegroom clothes, was bending over him, with his hands busily occupied in stanching a wound that would have let out ten lives, if he had had as many to destroy; the floor was literally swimming in blood, and on a chair in the corner of the room lay the fatal instrument, still open. My services were useless: the man was dead; his attendants were engaged in stopping blood already curdled with death. I hurried to the patient that was still living. She had lost almost the whole blood of her body, and it was difficult to detect in her any symptoms of life. I unloosed the cloths from her hands; they were cut in a fearful manner--the blade of the razor, which she had, in her struggles with her parent, endeavoured to wrest from him, having been _whisked_ through them when hard clenched. No one had been in the house; her marriage-dress was still incomplete--her bosom bare, and her head uncovered; a proof that she had been called from the mirror wherein she saw a half-dressed bride, to see a father kill himself by his own hand against her efforts to save him. Her screams were heard by the bridesmaid and bridegroom, as they approached the house; but, before they entered, the struggle was nearly over; they found her bending over the body of her father, which lay on the floor, grasping the open wound with her hands. So spoke the attendants as I dressed the wounds. I took up several arteries; but there was one in the left wrist which, for a long period, defied my efforts, unassisted as I was with professional aid, to stem its torrent. I succeeded at last--so, at least, I thought--in my endeavours to stop all the issues. Vain thought! _Death_ had stopped them!

This was the first time I had seen a _dead bride_.

THE GHOST OF HOWDYCRAIGS.

"_They_ gather round, and wonder at the tale Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly."--BLAIR.

After all that has been written, printed, and circulated, in the way of "Statistical Accounts," "Topographical Descriptions," "Guides to Picturesque Scenery," &c., there are still large tracts of country in Scotland of which comparatively little is known. While certain districts have risen, all at once, into notoriety, and occupied for a time the efforts of the press and the attention of the public, there are others, perhaps little inferior to them in point of scenery, through which no traveller has passed, no writer drawn his pen, and upon which no printer has inked his types. Among other neglected regions, the Ochil Hills may be mentioned--at least the eastern part of them. These, so far as we know, have not been fruitful of battles, and consequently the historian has had nothing to say concerning them. They are traversed by few roads; the few that do exist are nearly impassable, except to pedestrians of a daring disposition; and the novelist, never having seen them, has not thought of making them the home of his imaginary heroes. They have given birth to no poet of eminence--none such has condescended to celebrate them in his songs; and, except to the few scattered inhabitants who nestle in their hollows, they are nearly unknown.

This, however, is not the fault of the hills themselves, but of the circumstances just alluded to; for here heroes might have found a field on which to spill whole seas of blood; novelists might have found all the variation of hill, valley, rock, and stream, with which they usually ornament their pages; and Ossian himself, had it been his fortune to travel in the district, might have found "grey mist" and "brown heath" to his heart's content, and, in the proper season, as much snow as would have served to deck out at least half-a-dozen "Morvens" in their winter coat. These hills, on the east and south, rise from the adjoining country by a gradual slope, surmounted, in some instances, by thriving plantations, while, in others, the plough and harrow have reached what appears to be their summit. On the north, they are terminated by a rocky front, which runs nearly parallel to the river Tay, and afterwards to the Earn, thus forming the southern boundary of Strathearn, which is perhaps one of the most fertile districts in Scotland. The elevation on this side is partly composed of the rocky front just mentioned; partly of a cultivated slope at its base; and partly of a green acclivity above, which, when seen from the plain below, seems to crown the whole, while it conceals from the eye those barren altitudes and dreary regions which lie behind. But, after having surmounted this barrier, the prospect which then opens may be regarded as a miniature picture of those more lofty mountain-ranges which are to be found in other parts of the island. Here the ground again declines a little, forming a sort of shoulder upon the ascent, as if the Great Architect of nature had intended thereby to secure the foundation of the superstructure which he was about to rear above. It then rises into frowning eminences, on which nothing seems to vegetate except coarse heath, a few stunted whin-bushes, and, here and there, an _astrogalus_, a _lotus carniculatus_; or a white _orchus_. Those, however, with the exception of the first, are too scanty to produce any effect upon the colouring of the landscape; and the whole looks withered, brown, and, in some instances, even black, in the distance. But, on passing these barren altitudes, or on penetrating one of the gorges by which the central district communicates with the country around, and of which there are several, the eye is saluted with extensive tracts of plantation--some composed of the light-green larch, others of the sombre-looking Scottish pine; and, where the soil is more favourable to the growth of corn, portions of cultivated land, interspersed with streams, giving a fresher green to their banks, clumps of trees standing in sheltered positions, and the isolated habitations of men.

The last of these may be said to constitute a sort of _little world_, enclosed by a mountain rampart of its own--holding little or no communication with the great world without; and consequently escaping all the contamination which such intercourse is supposed to imply. But, if its inhabitants had escaped the contamination, it were reasonable to infer that they had missed that stimulus which mind derives from mind, when brought into close contact; and also many of those improvements and more correct modes of thinking which almost every passing year brings forth. In such a region, children must travel far for education; and men, not unfrequently, live and die in the prejudices in which they were nursed. To conclude this imperfect sketch, it may be observed that the scenery of these hills is bleak, rather than bold; barren, rather than wild; and though some parts of them possess a sort of dreary interest, in general they can lay no claim to that quality which has been denominated the _sublime_.

The particular district of Fifeshire in which the following incidents occurred lies between the villages of Strathmiglo and Auchtermuchty on the south, and those of Newburgh and Abernethy on the north. From the last of these places, which is still known as the metropolis of the ancient Pictish empire, a deep and narrow gorge, called _Abernethy Glen_, stretches southward amongst the Ochils for more than a mile. On leaving the open fertile country below, and getting into this pass, the contrast is striking. In some places the footpath winds along the face of a bank so steep, that, but for the circumstance of its being composed of earth, it might have almost been termed a precipice; and here, if the passenger should miss his footing, it would be nearly impossible for him to stop himself till he reached the bottom, in which a turbulent stream brawls and foams over rocks and stones, disturbing the silence and the solitude of the place with sounds which have a tendency to inspire feelings of superstitious fears. The scene, from its nature and situation, appears to be well suited for those transactions which, according to popular brief, "surpass Nature's law;" and it has been regarded as the favourite haunt of _witches_, _fairies_, _ghosts_, and other mysterious beings, from time immemorial. Numbers of the inhabitants of the village below had been scared, in their nocturnal rambles, by the orgies of these uncouth neighbours; many a belated traveller had seen strange sights, and heard stranger sounds, in this haunted dell; many a luckless lad, in journeying through it, to see the mistress of his heart, had met such adventures as to drive love nearly out of his head for whole weeks to come; and even maids, upon whom the sun went down in the dangerous pass, had seen things at the mention of which they shook their heads, and seemed unable to speak. Nor were there awanting instances of individuals who, in returning at the "witching time of night" from a delightful interview, in the course of which the marriage-day was settled, had been so terrified that they forgot every word of what had been said; and, when the minister and the marriage-guests arrived, behold they were found in the barn or in the field, or, what was worse, they had gone upon a journey, and were not to be found at all. Those of the villagers who had not seen and heard of these unearthly doings for themselves, had been told of them by their mothers and grandmothers; and thus one generation after another went forth into the world completely armed against sceptics and unbelievers of all sorts. If any one ventured to doubt the veracity of these statements, or to call in question the cogency of the arguments by which they supported them, they had only to appeal to the testimony of their fathers and grandfathers, their mothers and grandmothers, and the most sceptical were convinced at once. No man durst venture to cast the shadow of a doubt upon such incontrovertible evidence, because to have done so would have been to implicate their relations in the charge of speaking beside the truth, and these, they said, "were decent, respectable folk, and never kenned for lee'rs in their lives."

In this metropolis, and near the scene of these memorable events, Nelly Kilgour was born--the exact date of her birth we do not pretend to determine, though it must have been some time in the eighteenth century--and had lived, running about, going to school, and serving sundry of the lieges who were indwellers thereof, till she had arrived at years of discretion--in other words, till she had seen three-and-thirty "summers," as a poet would say, and nearly the same number of winters, as our reader may guess. It has been said that there are three distinct questions which a woman naturally puts to herself at three different periods of her life. The first is--"Who will I take?"--a most important question, no doubt; and we may reasonably suppose that it occurs about the time when the attentions of the other sex first awaken her to a sense of her own charms, and she is thus ready to look upon every one who smiles on her as a lover, and every young fellow who contemplates her face while talking to her as anxious to become her husband. The second question, which is scarcely less important, is--"Who will I get?" and this, we may again suppose, begins to be repeated seriously, after she has seen the same individual smile upon half-a-dozen damsels on the same day, and after she has learned that it is possible for an unmarried man to contemplate her own fair face with the deepest interest, and converse with her on the most interesting subjects on Monday morning, and then go and do the same to another on Tuesday evening. But the last, and perhaps the most important, as it certainly is the most perplexing of these questions, is--"_Will I get onybody ava?_" and this, there can be little doubt, begins to force itself upon her attention, after the smiles of her admirers have become so faint that they are no longer able to climb over the nose; when, instead of talking of love, they begin to yawn, and speak about the weather; in short, after she becomes conscious that her charms are at a discount, and that those who are coming up behind her are every day stealing away her sweethearts.

Through the whole of the previous stages Nelly Kilgour had passed; and she had now arrived at this important question, which, as has been just said, is the last a woman can put to herself. She had seen her admirers, one after another, come and look in her face, and continue their visits, their smiles, and their conversation for a season, and then go away and leave her, as if they had got nothing else to do. She had spent a considerable portion of her life, as has been already observed, in serving the lieges in and about the place of her nativity--to no purpose, as it appeared; at least, in so far as the getting of the husband was concerned, nothing had been effected. The proper season for securing this desideratum of the female world was fast wearing away; something, she saw, must of necessity be done; and, thinking that women, like some other commodities, might sell better at a distance than at home, she engaged herself as a servant on the little farm of _Howdycraigs_--a place situated among that portion of the Ochils already noticed.

When she entered upon this engagement, which was to last for a year, she was spoken of as "a weel _reikit_ lass"--the meaning of which phrase is, that she had already provided what was considered a woman's part of the furnishing of a house; and some of the sober matrons "wondered what had come owre a' the lads noo," and said, "they were sure Nelly Kilgour wad mak a better wife than ony o' thae young glaikit hizzies wha carried a' their reikin to the kirk on their back ilka Sabbath." But, of Nelly's being made a wife, there was no prospect; she was _three-and-thirty_; so far as was known, no lover had ever ventured to throw himself upon his knees before her, begging to be permitted to kiss her _foot_, and threatening, at the same time, to _hang himself_, if she did not consent to be his better half; still there was no appearance of any one doing so; and those who delighted in tracing effects back to their proper causes, began to recollect that her mother, "when she was a thoughtless lassie," had once given some offence to one of the witches, who were accused of holding nightly revels in the glen; and the witch, by way of retaliation, had said, that "the bairn unborn would maybe hae cause to rue its mother's impudence." Nelly had been born after this oracular saying was uttered; and the aged dames who remembered it doubted not that this was the true cause of her celibacy. And when they heard that she was engaged to go to Howdycraigs at Martinmas, and that Jock Jervis was engaged to go there also, they said that, "if it hadna been for the witch's ill _wisses_, they were sure Nelly would mak baith a better sweetheart and a better wife to Jock, than that licht-headed limmer, Lizzy Gimmerton."