第78章 HEATHERCAT(2)

When he was liberated and came back,with his fingers singed,in December 1680,and late in the black night,my lady was from home.He came into the house at his alighting,with a riding-rod yet in his hand;and,on the servant-maid telling him,caught her by the scruff of the neck,beat her violently,flung her down in the passageway,and went upstairs to his bed fasting and without a light.It was three in the morning when my lady returned from that conventicle,and,hearing of the assault (because the maid had sat up for her,weeping),went to their common chamber with a lantern in hand and stamping with her shoes so as to wake the dead;it was supposed,by those that heard her,from a design to have it out with the good man at once.The house-servants gathered on the stair,because it was a main interest with them to know which of these two was the better horse;and for the space of two hours they were heard to go at the matter,hammer and tongs.Montroymont alleged he was at the end of possibilities;it was no longer within his power to pay the annual rents;she had served him basely by keeping conventicles while he lay in prison for her sake;his friends were weary,and there was nothing else before him but the entire loss of the family lands,and to begin life again by the wayside as a common beggar.She took him up very sharp and high:called upon him,if he were a Christian?and which he most considered,the loss of a few dirty,miry glebes,or of his soul?Presently he was heard to weep,and my lady's voice to go on continually like a running burn,only the words indistinguishable;whereupon it was supposed a victory for her ladyship,and the domestics took themselves to bed.The next day Traquair appeared like a man who had gone under the harrows;and his lady wife thenceforward continued in her old course without the least deflection.

Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint,and suffered his wife to go on hers without remonstrance.He still minded his estate,of which it might be said he took daily a fresh farewell,and counted it already lost;looking ruefully on the acres and the graves of his fathers,on the moorlands where the wild-fowl consorted,the low,gurgling pool of the trout,and the high,windy place of the calling curlews -things that were yet his for the day and would be another's to-morrow;coming back again,and sitting ciphering till the dusk at his approaching ruin,which no device of arithmetic could postpone beyond a year or two.He was essentially the simple ancient man,the farmer and landholder;he would have been content to watch the seasons come and go,and his cattle increase,until the limit of age;he would have been content at any time to die,if he could have left the estates undiminished to an heir-male of his ancestors,that duty standing first in his instinctive calendar.And now he saw everywhere the image of the new proprietor come to meet him,and go sowing and reaping,or fowling for his pleasure on the red moors,or eating the very gooseberries in the Place garden;and saw always,on the other hand,the figure of Francis go forth,a beggar,into the broad world.

It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate;took every test and took advantage of every indulgence;went and drank with the dragoons in Balweary;attended the communion and came regularly to the church to Curate Haddo,with his son beside him.The mad,raging,Presbyterian zealot of a wife at home made all of no avail;and indeed the house must have fallen years before if it had not been for the secret indulgence of the curate,who had a great sympathy with the laird,and winked hard at the doings in Montroymont.This curate was a man very ill reputed in the countryside,and indeed in all Scotland.'Infamous Haddo'is Shield's expression.But Patrick Walker is more copious.'Curate Hall Haddo,'says he,SUB VOCE Peden,'or HELL Haddo,as he was more justly to be called,a pokeful of old condemned errors and the filthy vile lusts of the flesh,a published whore-monger,a common gross drunkard,continually and godlessly scraping and skirling on a fiddle,continually breathing flames against the remnant of Israel.But the Lord put an end to his piping,and all these offences were composed into one bloody grave.'No doubt this was written to excuse his slaughter;and I have never heard it claimed for Walker that he was either a just witness or an indulgent judge.At least,in a merely human character,Haddo comes off not wholly amiss in the matter of these Traquairs:not that he showed any graces of the Christian,but had a sort of Pagan decency,which might almost tempt one to be concerned about his sudden,violent,and unprepared fate.

II -FRANCIE

FRANCIE was eleven years old,shy,secret,and rather childish of his age,though not backward in schooling,which had been pushed on far by a private governor,one M'Brair,a forfeited minister harboured in that capacity at Montroymont.

The boy,already much employed in secret by his mother,was the most apt hand conceivable to run upon a message,to carry food to lurking fugitives,or to stand sentry on the skyline above a conventicle.It seemed no place on the moorlands was so naked but what he would find cover there;and as he knew every hag,boulder,and heather-bush in a circuit of seven miles about Montroymont,there was scarce any spot but what he could leave or approach it unseen.This dexterity had won him a reputation in that part of the country;and among the many children employed in these dangerous affairs,he passed under the by-name of Heathercat.

How much his father knew of this employment might be doubted.