COURTESY, THE PAGE COMPANY
FROM AN ETCHING BY C. O. MURRAY
MEG MERRILIES DIRECTS BERTRAM TO THE CAVE—"guy mannering"
WALTER SCOTT
Guy Mannering
TWO
GUY MANNERING, a young Englishman traveling through Scotland, stopped one night at the home of the Laird of Ellangowan. When the Laird learned that the young man had studied astrology, he begged him to cast the horoscope of his son, who had been born that night. What was Mannering's dismay to find that two catastrophes overhung the lad, one at his fifth, and the other at his twenty-first year! He told the father, however, that he might be warned; and later went his way.
The fortunes of the Laird of Ellangowan, Godfrey Bertram, waned rapidly. In addition to this, his son, Harry, at the age of five, was kidnapped. It was impossible to learn whether the child was alive or dead. The boy's mother died from the shock; and some years later the Laird himself followed her, leaving his daughter Lucy penniless.
In the meanwhile, Guy Mannering had become Colonel Mannering. He had married and had a daughter, Julia. She had fallen in love with a young officer, named Vanbeest Brown, who had served in India under Colonel Mannering. The colonel objected to him as a suitor, because of the obscurity of his birth.