Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume XII Part 12

Time hurried on; and the new proprietor of Inshannock had begun to feel the effect of its rapid transit: he was no longer the vigorous man of forty; and as he pa.s.sed towards the period of threescore, the effects of age told severely upon him.

For a series of years, Donald Campbell had been very much exposed to the depredations of a set of caterans or gipsies, who frequently kept him in a state of siege in his tower.

This tower was of the true Scottish fabric, divided into three storeys: the highest of which contained the dormitories; the second or middle served as a general refectory; and the lowest contained his cattle, which required this lodgment at night, or very few would have been found next morning.

The leader of the gipsies frequented the fairs on the north side of the Frith, well mounted--paying at inns and ferries like a gentleman; and attended by bands of gillies, whose green coats, cudgels, and knives, were sufficiently feared by the tenantry of the Lennox. The gipsy chieftain had also a grim cur of the true black-faced breed, famous for collecting and driving off sheep, and therefore distinguished by his own name. In the darkest cleughs or ravines, or in the deepest snow, this faithful animal had never been known to abandon the flock commited to his care, or to fail in tracing a fugitive. But, as sight and strength began to fail, the four-footed chieftain was deposed, imprisoned in a byre loft, and finally sentenced to be drowned.

In one of those drear midnights so awful to travellers in the Highlands, a man, wrapped in a large coa.r.s.e plaid, strode from a stone ridge, on the border of Loch Lomond, into a boat which he had drawn from its covert. He rowed resolutely and alone, looking carefully to the right and to the left, till he suffered the tide to bear his little bark into a gorge or gulf, so narrow, deep, and dark, that no escape but death seemed to await him. Precipices, rugged with dwarf shrubs and broken granite, rose more than a hundred feet on each side, sundered only by the stream, which a thirsty season had reduced to a sluggish and shallow pool. The boatman, poising himself erect on his staff, drew three times the end of a strong chain which hung among the underwood. In a few minutes a basket descended from the pinnacle of the cliff; and, having moored his boat, he placed himself in the wicker carriage, and was safely drawn into a crevice high in the fissure of a rock, into which he disappeared.

The boat was moored; but the adventurer had not observed that it contained another pa.s.senger. Underneath a plank, laid artfully along its bottom, and shrouded in his plaid of the darkest green, another man had been lurking more than an hour before the owner of the boat entered it, and remained hidden by the darkness of the night.

His purpose was answered. He had now discovered--what he had sacrificed many a perilous night to obtain a knowledge of--the mode by which the owner of the Tower of Gloom gained access to his impregnable fortress unsuspected. He instantly unmoored the boat, and rowed slowly back across the loch to an island near the centre. He rested on its oars, and looked down into the transparent water. "It is there still," he said to himself; and drawing close among the rocks, leaped on dry land. A dog of the true shepherd breed sat waiting under the bushes, and ran before him till they descended together under an archway of stones and withered branches. "Watch the boat," said the Highlander to his faithful guide, who sprang immediately away to obey him. Meanwhile his master lifted up one of the grey stones, took a bundle from beneath it, and equipped himself in such a suit as a trooper of Campbell's regiment usually wore.

He then looked at the edge of his dirk, and returned to his boat.

Having thus acquired an accurate knowledge of the secret mode of access to the tower, the stranger returned to the place where he had seen the basket descending for the purpose of conveying its present possessor to the tower; climbing up its rough face with the activity acquired by mountain warfare, he hung among furze and broken rocks like a wild cat, till he found the crevice through which the basket had seemed to issue.

It was artfully concealed by tufts of heather; but creeping on his hands and knees, he forced his way into the interior. There the deepest darkness confounded him, till he had laid his hands on a chain which he rightly guessed to be the same he had seen hanging on the side of the lake when Campbell landed. One end was coiled up; but he readily concluded that the end must have some communication with the keep; and he followed its course, till he found it inserted in what seemed a subterraneous wall. A crevice behind the pulley admitted a gleam of light; but, striving to raise himself, he leaned too forcibly on the chain, and he was somewhat startled to hear the sound of a deep-toned bell.

Donald Campbell was sitting alone in the chamber, from the windows of which, fifteen years before, his betrayed friend, Reginald Grahame, had precipitated himself into the lake below. His eyes were fixed on the blazing logs on the hearth. The thoughts of former times were flitting before him: he pondered on the days of his youth, before ambition and avarice had fixed their poisoned arrows in his heart; ere the world had banished those notions of virtue and religion that his excellent parents had, in his boyhood, so unceasingly inculcated. Many minor delinquencies had he committed; but the crime which now preyed upon his mind was the betrayal of his friend, embittered as it was by the reflection of the sordid motive that induced it.

In this state of mind he was startled by one of those figures which fancy so frequently suggests to a disordered mind. In the ma.s.ses of the burning embers, he traced the outline of a face: imagination lent its aid; and he recognised a resemblance of Reginald. He started up:--"Avaunt, base mockery; am I to be daunted with a mere figment of the brain? Alas! trifles now disturb me. If I have sinned, I have suffered: the loss of my only son has been the penalty. I have paid for my misdeeds." So saying, he sat back on his chair quite exhausted; and at that moment the bell rung. At the deep and hollow sound he cast his eyes fearfully round, but made no attempt to rise, though he stretched his hand towards a staff which lay near him. The stranger saw the tremor of the dismayed Lord of the Tower; and, putting his lips to the crevice, murmured, "Father," in a low and supplicating tone. That word made Campbell tremble. But when the other added, "Father! father! save me,"

he sprang to the wall, drew back the iron bolts of a narrow door, invisible to any eye but his own, and gave admission to the m.u.f.fled man, who leaped eagerly in. Years had pa.s.sed since Campbell had seen his son, and many rumours had been spread that the younger Campbell had not really perished, but had engaged in the service of the Pretender. The hopes and love of the father all revived in one moment; and the sudden apparition--the appeal for mercy--had full effect on his imagination.

The voice, eyes, and figure of the stranger resembled his son: all else might and must be changed by the lapse of so many years. He wept like an infant on his shoulder, grasped his hand a hundred times, and forgot to blame him for the rash disloyalty he had shown to his father's cause.

Roderick, in explanation, mentioned a variety of circ.u.mstances explanatory of the reasons of his evasion: how he had escaped, after the battle of Culloden, to France, where he had endeavoured to earn a scanty livelihood; and how he had at last resolved to revisit his native land, in hopes of obtaining the forgiveness of his father. His narrative was much abridged, by the fond delight of the old man weeping and rejoicing over the return of his prodigal son.

Old Campbell eagerly asked by what happy chance he had discovered the secret entrance, and whether any present danger threatened him. Roderick answered the first question by repeating what our readers are already acquainted with; and he added, in answer to the second, that he feared nothing but the emissaries of the government, from whom he could not be better concealed than in the Tower of Gloom. Old Campbell agreed with joyful eagerness, but presently added--

"Roderick, my boy, we must trust in Annette: she's too near in kin to betray you; and ye were to have been her spouse."

Then he explained that his niece was the only one person in his household acquainted with the secret of the basket and the bell; that by her help he could provide a mattress and provisions for his son; but without it he would be forced to hazard the most dangerous inconveniences.

Roderick was commanded to return into the cavern pa.s.sage, while his delighted father prepared his kinswoman for her new guest; and he listened greedily to catch the answers Annette gave to her uncle's tale.

He heard the hurry of her steps preparing, as he supposed, a larger supper for the old laird's table, with the simplicity and hospitality of a Highland maiden. He was not mistaken. When the bannocks, and grouse, and claret were arranged, Campbell presented his restored son to the mistress of the feast. Roderick was pale and dumb as he looked upon her.

She came before him like a dream of some lovely picture remembered in his youth; and with her came some remembrance of his former self. The old laird, forgetting that his niece had been but a child, and his son a stripling, when they parted, indulged the joy of his heart, by asking Annette a thousand times whether she remembered her betrothed husband; and urging his son, since he was still unmarried, to pledge his promised bride.

Annette, whose predilections in favour of her cousin had been created by a.s.sociation--for she remembered him as far back as her recollections went--rejoiced at his reappearance, after so long an interval, and seemed by no means disinclined to listen to her uncle's proposition.

Besides the persons just mentioned, there were present in the apartment an old woman, and a dog, also evidently advanced in years. The latter, upon the entrance of Roderick, saluted him with a loud bark; but, strange to say, suddenly paused in the middle of his hostile demonstrations, and, after smelling for half-a-minute, as if he was investigating what sort of person the intruder was, quietly retreated to his place by the fireside, apparently satisfied that all was right.

The fire on the hearth was replenished, and burned cheerfully.

Immediately opposite to the dog, on one side of the ingle, sat the woman. She was aged, and bent almost double, with no apparent sense of sight or hearing, though her eyes were fixed on the spindle she was twirling; and sometimes, when the laird raised his voice, she put her lean hand on the hood that covered her ears.

"Do you not remember poor old Moome?" said Annette; and the laird led his supposed son towards the superannuated crone, though without expecting any mark of recognition. Whether she had noticed anything that had pa.s.sed, could not be gathered from her idiot laugh; and she had almost ceased to speak. Therefore, as if only dumb domestic animals had been sitting by his hearth, Campbell pursued his arrangements for his son's safety, advising him to sleep composedly in the wooden panelled bed that formed a closet off this chamber, without regarding the half-living skeleton, who never left her corner. He gave him his blessing, and departed, taking with him his niece and the key of this dreary room, promising to return and watch by his bedside. He came back in a few minutes; and, while Roderick couched himself on his mattress, took his station by the fire and fell fast asleep, overcome with joy.

The embers gradually sunk on the hearth, and the light diminished in proportion. Roderick, who had lain awake for some time, began to feel the approach of sleep; and, whilst in a state of transition, he observed, by the dying embers of the fire, the old woman cautiously rise, and, removing the dirk from the side of her sleeping master, approach his bed with cautious step and silent tread. The astonishment of Roderick at beholding this infirm creature advance, with a purpose so evidently hostile, was so great, that, in place of jumping from his couch, and wresting the weapon from the hands of its weak and attenuated possessor, he lay fascinated, as birds are said to be by the eyes of the rattlesnake, until the actual advent of the apparent a.s.sa.s.sin. The motions of the beldame were carefully watched in a quarter which she little suspected; for she barely reached the couch on which her intended victim reposed, and was about to raise her arm to strike, than the aged dog sprang at her throat, and brought her to the ground, from which she never rose again: the frail thread of her existence had been snapped by the suddenness of the onset.

This unexpected occurrence awoke the lord of the tower, who, springing up, beheld the nurse lying on the ground, with the dog growling over her.

This at once aroused Roderick from his trance; and he briefly explained to his father the singularly mysterious scene he had witnessed, and the fact of his rescue by the wonderful sagacity of the dog.

The father was perfectly amazed that such an attempt should have been made on the life of his son by one whom he naturally supposed would, as his va.s.sal, have rather died a thousand deaths than have touched a hair of the head of the son of her chief. The only plausible ground he could a.s.sign for this murderous attempt was the insanity of the old woman, who, perhaps, perplexed by the unexpected appearance of a stranger in a place where none had heretofore been, had, by some hallucination, fancied him a robber; and, under this impression, had boldly gone forward to do battle for the laird.

"Dear Roderick," said the father, "this is a sad welcome to the Tower of Gloom. If I was superst.i.tious, I should augur something bad from this event. Poor Moome! she had long been a faithful servant, and I could have wished her fate different. We must conceal it from Annette. She will be sufficiently unhappy as it is; and it would be cruel to add to her annoyance by disclosing the strange fact that she had perished in attempting the life of her benefactor's son. Once more, good-night, dear boy."

So saying, he pressed his son's forehead to his lips, and, removing the body, left Roderick to his own thoughts.

Poor Annette was shocked exceedingly by the unexpected death of the nurse; but sorrow is said to be near akin to love; and, in the delicate attentions of her cousin Roderick, the fair Celt felt her grief strangely soothed, and her bosom experience sensations to which it had previously been a stranger.

Old Campbell witnessed the progress of this pa.s.sion with great delight, and gave the young couple every opportunity for studying "_la belle pa.s.sion_:" indeed, the necessary confinement of Roderick in the tower threw them so much together, that it was no wonder they became attached to each other.

The scene from the top of the tower was magnificent: the clear and pellucid water of the fairest of Scotland's lakes at its feet; the isles with which its gla.s.sy bosom was studded, looked like so many fairy bowers; and the magnificent range of mountains to the northward, added to the grandeur of a scene, the beauty of which words can but inadequately express. Often, at night, by the light of the silvery moon, the cousins would repair to this favourite seat, where Roderick would speak

"Of moving accidents by flood and field; Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach; Of being taken by the insolent foe, And sold to slavery;"

whilst Annette listened breathless, but delighted, to his words.

It was here that he first ventured to breathe of love. Seizing the guitar from his cousin's hand, he poured forth his feelings in the following verses:--

"Impell'd by angry fate's decree In foreign lands to roam, With heavy heart I bid adieu To happiness and home.

"I braved the perils of the land, The dangers of the sea; But every suffering is repaid By one kind look from thee."

It is unnecessary to trouble our readers with all the love-pa.s.sages between the two lovesick swains, which, although exceedingly interesting to the parties themselves, is anything but agreeable to any one else. It is sufficient to say, that Annette yielded her heart to her cousin, and that her uncle rejoiced at the surrender. A change for the better was evident in Roderick. He was no longer the gloomy repulsive individual that he once was. His manners gradually softened; and even the coldness with which he originally repelled his father's kindness began to disappear. He had been barely a fortnight in the tower, when he expressed an urgent desire to be allowed to leave it for a short time.

Old Campbell was not a little surprised at this, and represented the great risk he ran in leaving a place of security, and exposing himself to the chance of apprehension: he also expressed some curiosity to know what engagement could lure him from his father's house at such a time.

Roderick replied, that, were the business his own, he would not have scrupled to have explained everything to his father; but, as any disclosure would compromise other persons, he could not, as a man of honour, betray a trust that had been confided in him. The laird, whose notions of honour were somewhat lax, was not altogether convinced by this reasoning; but he did not press his opposition farther, and Roderick was allowed to depart.

After the absence of a week, Roderick returned, and was welcomed in the most affectionate manner by his father and cousin. Some time afterwards he again left the tower for a few days; but these absences became less and less, as his love prospered. One day his father, who had been from home for some time, returned, and calling his son and niece to his presence, said--

"My dear Roderick, you are now a free man--I hold here a free pardon for all offences. The interest of our chief with government has effected this. The Duke of Argyle is ever ready to a.s.sist his clansmen; and the faults and errors of the son have been overlooked in the services of the father. No obstacle longer remains to your nuptials with my beloved niece: take her from my hand as the greatest treasure I can give you."

Roderick's pa.s.sion was equal to her rapture. Here was every obstacle removed. He could again appear in the world as a free agent, and the husband of one whose beauty was her least recommendation.

"Father," he exclaimed, "I know not how to express my grat.i.tude for these favours. Henceforth you shall----" And here he paused--a blush came over his haughty features, and the sentence was left unfinished.

A week before the nuptials, the old man took his son aside.

"Roderick, I have something for your private ear."

"I attend."

"It is painful for a father to declare his unworthiness to his own offspring; but it must be. A bitter remorse has for many years soured my existence. My wealth is considerable; but it is a burden to me, because it originated in--blood!"

Roderick answered not.

"You must have heard that this tower once belonged to another?"

The son started.

"I have."