CHAPTER VII.

JULIA GETS INTO A PLEASANT PANDEMONIUM.

Now, it happened that honest Angus M’Guire and Donald M’Nair, two brawny Highlanders, were that day busily occupied in distilling a drop of good whisky, in a subterraneous distillery, to which the hole wherein Gustavus had laid his wife, led by a covered and concealed passage; and it was in no other than this very place that Julia had been so plentifully supplied with the liquor by which she was so often inebriated. Sitting by the mouth of the worm or serpent, which gave forth drop by drop the poison, stronger and more hurtful than ever came from the mouth of the Snake of Lerna, they heard a strange noise on the ground over their heads, as Gustavus was busy about the details of his interment, and shook with unfeigned terror, as if they had been on the point of being discovered in their illicit operations. By and by they heard a rumbling in the mouth of the cavern, as if some one had been in the act of descending, and, rising and seizing each a pistol and a sword, they stood on the defensive, prepared to slay the first gauger that should set his face into their subterraneous dominions. But the never an exciseman appeared: in place of that, to them, most fearful of all mortal beings, they saw the identical coffin in which Julia M’Iver had been laid, fall with a heavy sound upon the floor of their dark habitation.

Terror-struck, twenty times more than if they had seen the ghost of a murdered exciseman, they stood with their hair forcing up their bonnets on their head, and stared till their eyes seemed ready to burst from the sockets, at the dreadful object of their fears. A faint light glimmered through the cave, and was reflected from the rows of white buttons with which the black vision was studded; and all the horrid features of the grim apparition were displayed by that kind of dim light by which they could be seen to advantage. They could speak not a word to each other; and their mutual looks excited by sympathy a greater mutual fear than ever; and so they still stood and looked, and wondered, and would have moved their bodies to take a closer survey, but could not for very nervousness—albeit any one of them would have knocked a gauger on the head in an instant. But it was clear, even to themselves, that they could not thus stand staring at a coffin for ever; and it is not unlikely that this prospective impossibility supplied the place of courage; and so, Donald being the less timid of the two, gradually approached and surveyed their extraordinary visiter. Beckoning his friend Angus forward, he proceeded to force open the lid.

“The corpse o’ Julia M’Iver, our goot customer,” said he, “as sure as my name’s Tonald M’Nair!” And Angus, bending his head down, and holding his hands up, acknowledged the apparent truth. “Murtered py Custaphus, py Cot!” added he, “and puried here to hide the plack, purning shame!”

And they sat down by the coffin, and stared at each other and at the dead beauty, lost in deep cogitation as to what they should do. Their thoughts both took the same direction.

“What is to pe done?” muttered they both at the same instant.

“We cannot inform, and we cannot take the pody to Custaphus,” again said Donald; “for that would tiscover us.”

“To pe surely na,” said Angus; “put we can pury her, cannot we, Tonald?”

“Ay, that we can,” answered the latter; “and that we will, too, as surely as my grandmother was puried in the houf o’ Kepplemechan.”

“Ay, or as mine was puried in Fochapers kirkyard,” rejoined Angus; “but we maun let the nicht fa’ first, or it may pe said that we were the murterers o’ the puir cratur. Ochone! put this is a tam pad world. We maun hae a quaich to keep up oor courage.”

And so they set about preparing themselves for the work they had in prospect, by drinking of their own spirits by the side of the coffin; every now and then looking in the face of Julia, and lamenting the unhappy fate of their former visiter, with whom they had drunk many a good bumper, and enjoyed much good fun and frolic.

In this occupation, and exchanging many a comely sentiment on the wickedness of man, and the shortness and uncertainty of human life, they passed several hours, until it should be dark enough for the purpose of interring Julia in reality, which they would execute as surely as ever mortal was consigned to dust. They had drunk till their eyes began to reel in their heads, and till tears of mawkish and drunken sentimentality were dropping on the face of their merry boon companion, as she lay in her bier. A toast of exquisite pathos—“Here’s to the good cratur’s soul then!” had just escaped from Donald’s lips, when Julia opened her eyes, and, altogether unconscious where she lay, obeyed the first impulse of her wakening heart, by holding out her hand, and asking for a glass of the whisky which she saw them drinking with so much good will. Twenty ghosts in their winding sheets could not have produced a greater sensation; for the two Highlanders threw from them their quaichs, and, starting to their feet, flew, with a scream of terror that might have been heard upon the surface of the earth itself, into the farthest recesses of the dark abode.

“Heaven pe merciful to us!” they both muttered, as they crouched down beside the stove, and eyed fearfully the moving corpse, through the dim light that came from the half-concealed fire; and their fears had a small chance of being removed or alleviated by what they farther heard and saw; for, as they watched and trembled, they witnessed the rising terrors of Julia herself, who, looking around her, and seeing herself placed in the coffin, had never a shadow of doubt that she was actually buried, and that she was in the region appointed for the wicked daughters of men. She began to groan piteously; and, being yet only half sober, mixed up her thoughts of the lower regions with the feelings she cherished on earth, in such a grotesque manner, that it would have been impossible for an ordinary person to have heard her without at once trembling and laughing.

“And am I, of a surety, here at the long run,” she muttered, “among devils and devils’ dams, who will have never a qualm of mercy for me any more than they have for their other victims, who have broken the laws of the upper world?” And, sighing as deep as her stomach, she paused and again soliloquised:—“But did I not see my good friends, Angus M’Guire and Donald M’Nair, drinking by my side, even at this moment? There cannot be a doubt on’t, and they will be dead and damned too for a certainty; but, faith, I care not if I should be here after all, if I fare as they were faring even now, when I saw them with the quaichs in their very hands, as I have seen before in the distillery in the wood of Balmaclallan, so often when I was in the body. Ho! there! Donald M’Nair, it is no other than Julia Briggs that calls you, and she is as thirsty as fire can make her.”

The truth now began to dawn on the minds of the Highlanders. “She is no more tead than I am, or any living pody,” cried Donald, as he began to move from his dark hole. “I am coming, my tarling Julia; and, py te Holy Virgin, you shall not want what ye are now asking for!” And, pulling Angus along with him, he again approached the coffin, where he saw his old friend looking up from her prostrate position with a pair of as clear eyes as whisky ever illuminated. “Are ye tead or living, Julia?” cried Angus.

“I cannot tell you till I get a quaich,” answered Julia; and the medicine was on the instant administered by Donald, when all doubt on the mysterious subject having been dispelled, her friends lifted her from the coffin, and they set to work after their usual manner, which was no other than indulging in numerous potations. The recollection of Gustavus’s threat enabled her to explain everything; and as they sat carousing and singing in great glee, they laughed heartily at the circumstance of Gustavus having buried his wife in a distillery, with the view of curing her of a love of whisky.