Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

Her sister’s son was a saddler, a sagacious, well-informed man, truthful and honest, and as little imaginative as may be. He was employed at the time at the Mains of Invergordon—some six or seven miles from Cromarty—and slept in an apartment of the old castle, since burnt down. No one could be less influenced by superstitious beliefs of the period; and yet when, after scaling the steep circular stair that led to his solitary room, he used to shut the ponderous door and pass his eye along the half-lighted walls, here and there perforated by a narrow arched window, there was usually something in the tone of his feelings which served to remind him that there is a dread of the supernatural too deeply implanted in man’s nature to be ever wholly eradicated. On going to bed one evening, and awakening as he supposed after a short slumber, he was much surprised to see the room filled as with a greyish light, in which the walls and the floor could be seen nearly as distinctly as by day. Suddenly the door fell open and there entered a tall young man in black, his hat wrapped up in crape, and with muslin weepers on his sleeves. Another and another entered, attired after the same fashion, until their number might, as he supposed, amount to about fifty. He lay gazing at them in astonishment, conscious of a kind of indistinct wish to ascertain whether he was in reality waking or asleep—a feeling of common enough experience in the dreams of imperfect slumber—when the man who had first come in, gliding up to his bedside, moved his lips as if addressing him, and passing off entered the staircase and disappeared. A second then came up, and heartily shaking him by the hand, also quitted the apartment, followed by all the others in the order in which they had entered, but without shutting the door; and the last recollection of the sleeper was of an emotion of intense terror, which seemed wholly to overpower him when gazing on the dark opening of the stair beyond. It was broad daylight ere he awoke, and his first glance, as the dream of the previous evening flashed on his mind, was at the door, which sure enough lay open. “I must have missed slipping on the latch,” he said, “or some of the servants must have entered during the night;—but how strange a coincidence!” The particulars of his dream—and it cost him no slight effort to deem it such—employed his thoughts until evening; when, setting out for his mother’s, he found his aunt Isabel, in much grief and dejection, seated beside the fire. He had taken his place beside her, and was striving as he best could to lighten the melancholy which he saw preying on her spirits, when a young man, bespattered with travel, and apparently much fatigued, entered the apartment. Isabel started from her seat, and clasping her hands with a fearful presentiment of some overwhelming calamity, inquired of him what had happened at Minitarf? He stood speechless for a few seconds as if overcome by some fearful emotion, and then bursting into tears, “Your son John,” he said, “died this morning!” The poor woman fainted away.

“For the two last days of the sale,” said the messenger, “there was a marked alteration in John’s manner and appearance. There was a something so fixed-like in his expression, and so mournful in his way of looking at things; and then his face was deadly pale, and he took scarce any food. It was evident that the misfortunes of his family preyed deeply on his mind. Yester evening,” continued the lad, “he complained for the first time of being unwell, and retired to bed before the usual hour. The two servant-maids rose early in the morning to prepare for leaving the place, and were surprised, on entering the ‘ha’,’ to find him sitting in the great arm-chair fronting the fire. His countenance had changed during the night; he looked much older, and very like his father; and he was so weak that he could hardly sit up in the chair. The girls were alarmed, and would have called for assistance, but he forbade them. ‘My watch,’ he said, ‘hangs over my pillow; go tell me what o’clock it is.’ It was just twenty minutes past four. ‘Well,’ said he, when they had told him, ‘it is the last hour to me! there is a crook in my lot; but it’s God’s doing, not man’s.’ And, leaning back in the chair, he never spake more.” The messenger had seen the corpse laid on the bed, and wrapped up in a winding-sheet, before setting out on his melancholy journey. Need I say aught of the feelings of Isabel? The saddler and his mother strove to persuade her to remain with them till at least after the funeral, but she would not; she would go and take one last look of her son, she said—of her only son, for the other was a murderer. Early, therefore, on the following morning, the saddler hired a small yawl to bring her across the Firth, and, taking his place in the stern beside her, the boatmen bent them to their oars, and the hill of Nigg soon lessened behind them.

After clearing the bay, however, their progress was much impeded by adverse currents; there came on a chill drizzling rain, and the wind, which was evidently rising, began, after veering about oftener than once, to blow right ahead, and to raise a short tumbling sea. Grief of itself is cold and comfortless, and the widow, wrapped up in her cloak, sat shivering in the bottom of the yawl, drenched by the rain and the spray. But she thought only of her son and her husband. The boatmen toiled incessantly till evening; and when night came on, dark and boisterous, they were still two long miles from their landing-place—the effluence of the Nairn. Directly across the mouth of the river there runs a low dangerous bar, and as they approached they could hear the roaring of the breakers above all the hoarse sighings of the wind, and the dash of the lesser waves that were bursting around them. “There,” said the saddler, as his eye caught a few faint lights that seemed twinkling along the beach; “there is the town of Nairn right abreast of us; but has not the tide fallen too low for our attempting the bar?” The boatmen replied in the negative, and in a minute after they were among the breakers. For a single instant the skiff seemed riding on the crest of an immense wave, which came rolling from the open sea, and which, as it folded over and burst into foam, dashed her forward like an arrow from the string. She sank, however, as it receded, till her keel grated against the bar beneath. Another huge wave came rolling behind, and, curling its white head like the former, rushed over her stern, filling her at once to the gunwale, and at the same instant propelling her into the deep water within. The saddler sprang from his seat, and raising his aunt to the hinder thwart, and charging her to hold fast, he shouted to the boatmen to turn the boat’s head to the shore. In a few minutes after, they had landed.

Poor Isabel, well-nigh insensible—for grief and terror, added to cold and fatigue, had prostrated all her energies, bodily and mental—was carried to the town and lodged in the house of an acquaintance. When morning came she was unable to leave her bed, and so the saddler had to set out for Minitarf alone, which he reached about noon; and on being recognised as a cousin of the deceased, he was ushered into the room where the body lay. He seated himself on the edge of the bed, and raising the coffin-lid, gazed for a few seconds on the face of the dead; on hearing a footstep approaching the door, he replaced the cover. There entered a genteel-looking young man dressed for the funeral; but not the apparition of an inhabitant of the other world would have started the saddler more. He recognised in the stranger the young man of his dream. Another person entered, and him he also recognised as the man who had shaken hands with him; and who now, on being introduced to him as a relative of the deceased tacksman of Minitarf, sure enough, grasped him warmly by the hand. As the room filled around him with the neighbouring farmers attired in their soberest and best, he felt as if he still dreamed, for these were the very men whom he had seen in the old castle; and it was almost mechanically, when the coffin was carried out and laid on the bier, that, as the nearest relative of the dead he took his place as chief mourner. As the funeral proceeded, however, he collected his scattered thoughts. “Have I indeed had experience,” said he to himself, “of one of those mysterious intimations of coming evil, the bare possibility of which few thinking men, in these latter times, seem disposed to credit on testimony alone? And little wonder, truly, that they should be so sceptical; for, for what purpose could such a warning have been given? It has enabled me to ward off no impending disaster;—nay, it has told its story so darkly and doubtfully, that the event alone has enabled me to interpret it. Could a purpose so idle have employed an agent of the invisible world? And yet,” thought he again, as the train of his cogitations found way into the deeper recesses of his mind, “an end has been accomplished by it, and a not unimportant end either. The evil has befallen as certainly and heavily as if there had been no previous warning; but, is my mind in every respect the same? Something has been accomplished. And surely He who in His providence cares for all my bodily wants, without sinking, in the littleness of the object cared for, aught of the greatness of His character, might, without lessening in aught His character for wisdom, have taken this way of making me see, more distinctly than in all my life before, that there is indeed an invisible world, and that all the future is known to Him.” There was seriousness in the thought, and never did he feel more strongly that the present scene of things is not the last, than when bending over the open grave he saw the corpse lowered down and heard the earth falling hollow on the coffin-lid.

But why dwell longer on the details of a story so mournful! The saddler, on his return to Nairn, found the widow in the delirium of a fever, from which she never recovered. Her younger son was seen in the West Indies ten years after, a miserable slave-driver, with a broken constitution and an unquiet mind. And there he died—no one caring where or how. I am not fond of melancholy stories; but “to purge the heart by pity and terror” is the true end of tragedy—an end which the gorgeous creations of the poets are not better suited to accomplish than the domestic tragedies which we see every day enacting around us. It is well, too, to note how immensely the folly and knavery of mankind add to the amount of human suffering; and how, according to the wise saying of the Preacher, “One sinner destroyeth much good.”

CHAPTER XXVIII.

“Alack-a-day! it was the school-house indeed; but, to be sure, sir, the squire has pulled it down, because it stood in the way of his prospects.”—Mackenzie.

THE OLD SCHOOL AND WHAT IT PRODUCED.

The old school of Cromarty was situated in a retired little corner, behind the houses where the parish burying-ground bordered on the woods of the old castle. It was a low, mean-looking building, with its narrow latticed windows, which were half buried in the thatch, opening on the one side to the uncouth monuments of the churchyard, and on the other, through a straggling line of willows which fringed the little stream in front, to the ancient timeworn fortalice perched on the top of the hill. Mean, however, as it seemed—and certainly no public edifice could owe less to the architect—it formed one of Knox’s strongholds of the Reformation, and was erected by the united labours of the parishioners, agreeably to the scheme laid down in the First Book of Discipline, long previous to the Education Act of 1646. It had become an old building ere the Restoration, and fell into such disrepair during the reign of Episcopacy, that for a time it no longer sheltered the scholars. I find it enacted in the summer of 1682, by the Kirk-Session—for, curious as it may seem, even the curates in the north of Scotland had their kirk-sessions and their staffs of elders—that “the hail inhabitants of the burgh, especially masons and such as have horse, do repayre and bigg the samin in the wonted place, and that the folk upland do provide them with feal and diffiot.” And, in the true spirit of the reign of Charles II., a penalty of four pounds Scots enforced the enactment.

The scheme of education drawn up by our first Reformers was stamped by the liberality of men who had learned from experience that tyranny and superstition derive their chief support from ignorance. Almost all the knowledge which books could supply at the time was locked up in the learned languages; and so it was necessary that these languages even the common people should acquire. It was appointed, therefore, “that young men who purposed to travail in some handicraft for the good of the commonwealth, should first devote ane certaine time to Grammar and the Latin tongue, and ane certaine time to the other tongues and the study of philosophy.” Even long after the enactment, when we had got authors of our own in every department of literature, and a man could have become learned, if knowledge be learning, simply as an English reader, an acquaintance with Latin formed no unimportant part of a common Scotch education. Our fathers pursued the course which circumstances had rendered imperative in the days of their great-grandfathers, merely because their great-grandfathers had pursued it, and because people find it easier to persist in hereditary practices than to think for themselves. And so the few years which were spent in school by the poorer pupils of ordinary capacity, were absurdly frittered away in acquiring a little bad Latin and a very little worse Greek. So strange did the half-learning of our common people (derived in this way) appear to our southern neighbours, that there are writers of the last century who, in describing a Scotch footman or mechanic, rarely omit making his knowledge of the classics an essential part of his character. The barber in Roderick Random quotes Horace in the original; and Foote, in one of his farces, introduces a Scotch valet, who, when some one inquires of him whether he be a Latinist, indignantly exclaims, “Hoot awa, man! a Scotchman and no understand Latin!”