He had finished working, he said, on the evening after the ball, and was just putting on his coat preparatory to leaving the shop, when the superintendent called him into his writing-room, where he found three persons sitting at a table half covered with bottles. Rob Williamson, the weaver, was one of them; the other two were the clerk of the brewery and the foreman of the hemp manufactory; and they were all arguing together on some point of divinity. The superintendent cleared a seat for him beside himself, and filled his glass thrice in succession, by way of making up for the time he had lost—nothing could be more untrue than that the superintendent was proud! They then all began to speak about morals and Mr. Ross; the clerk was certain that, what with his harbour and his piggery, and his heathen temples and his lacewomen, he would not leave a rag of morality in the place; and Rob was quite as sure he was no friend to the gospel. He a builder of Gaelic kirks, forsooth! had he not, yesterday, put up a Popish Dagon of a cross, and made the silly mason bodies worship it for the sake o’ a dram? And then, how common ale-drinking had become in the place since he had built his brewery—in his young days they drank naething but gin;—and what would their grandfathers have said to a whigmaleerie of a ball! “I sipped and listened,” continued Jamie, “and thought the time couldna have been better spent at an elder’s meeting in the kirk; and as the night wore later, the conversation became more edifying still, until at length all the bottles were emptied, when we sallied out in a body, to imitate the old reformers by breaking the cross. ‘We may suffer, Jamie, for what we have done,’ said Rob to me, as we parted for the night; ‘but remember it was duty, Jamie—it was duty. We have been testifying wi’ our hands, an’ when the hour o’ trial comes, we mauna be slow in testifying wi’ our tongues too.’ He wasna slack, the deceitfu’ bodie!” concluded Jamie, “in trying to stop mine.” And thus closed the evidence. The Agent was no vindictive man; he dismissed his two superintendents and the clerk, to find for themselves a more indulgent master; but the services of Jamie Banks he still retained, and the first employment which he found for him after his release, was the fashioning of four iron bars for the repair of the cross.
The Agent, in the closing scene of his life, was destined to experience the unhappiness of blighted hope. He had an only son, a weak and very obstinate young man, who, without intellect enough to appreciate his well-calculated schemes, and yet conceit enough to sit in judgment on them, was ever showing his spirit by opposing a sort of selfish nonsense, that aped the semblance of common sense, to the expansive and benevolent philosophy of his father. But the old man bore patiently with his conceit and folly. Like the great bulk of the class who attain to wealth and influence through their own exertions, he was anxiously ambitious to live in his posterity, and be the founder of a family; and he knew it was quite as much according to the nature of things, that a fool might be the father, as that he should be the son, of a wise man. He secured, therefore, his lands to his posterity by the law of entail; did all that education and example could do for the young man; and succeeded in getting him married to a sweet amiable Englishwoman, the daughter of a bishop. But, alas! his precautions and the hopes in which he indulged, proved equally vain. The young man, only a few months after his marriage, was piqued when at table by some remark of his father regarding his mode of carving—some slight allusion, it is said, to the maxim, that little men cannot afford to neglect little matters; and rising with much apparent coolness from beside his wife, he stepped into an adjoining room, and there blew out his brains with a pistol. The stain of his blood may still be seen in two large brownish-coloured blotches on the floor.
It was impossible that so sad an event should have occurred in this part of the country fifty years ago, without exciting as marked an interest in the supernatural world as in our own. For weeks before, strange unearthly sounds had been heard after nightfall from among the woods of the hill. The forester, when returning homewards in the stillness of evening, had felt the blood curdling round his heart, as low moans, and faint mutterings, and long hollow echoes, came sounding along the pathways, which then winded through the thick wood like vaulted passages through an Egyptian cemetery; and boys of the town who had lingered among the thickets of the lower slopes until after sunset, engaged in digging sweet-knots or pig-nuts, were set a-scampering by harsh sudden screams and loud whistlings, continued in one unvaried note for minutes together. On the evening that preceded the commission of the rash act, a party of schoolboys had set out for the hill to select from among the young firs some of the straightest and most slender, for fishing-rods; and aware that the forester might have serious objections to any such appropriation of his master’s property, they lingered among the rocks below till the evening had set in; when they stole up the hill-side, and applied themselves to the work of choosing and cutting down, in a beautiful little avenue which leads from the edge of the precipices into the recesses of the wood. All at once there arose, as if from the rock-edge, a combination of the most fearful sounds they had ever heard;—it seemed as if every bull in the country had congregated in one little spot, and were bellowing together in horrid concert. The little fellows looked at one another, and then, as if moved by some general impulse—for they were too panic-struck to speak—they darted off together like a shoal of minnows startled from some river-side by a shadow on the bank. The terrible sounds waxed louder and louder, like the sounds of the dread horn which appalled Wallace at midnight in the deserted fortress, after the death of Faudon; and, long ere they had reached the town, the weaker members of the party began to fall behind. One little fellow, on finding himself left alone, began to scream in utter terror, scarce less loudly than the mysterious bellower in the wood; but he was waited for by a bold, hardy boy—a grandchild and name-son of old Sandy Wright the boatman—who had not even relinquished his rod, and who afterwards did his country no dishonour when, in like fashion, he grasped his pike at the landing in Egypt. To him I owe the story. He used to say, it was not until he had reached with his companions the old chapel of St. Regulus, a full mile from the avenue, that the sounds entirely ceased. They were probably occasioned by some wandering bittern, of that species whose cry is said by naturalists to resemble the interrupted bellowings of a bull, but so much louder that it may be distinctly heard at a mile’s distance.
George Ross survived his son for several years, and he continued, though a sadder and graver man, to busy himself with all his various speculations as before. It was observed, however, that he seemed to care less than formerly for whatever was exclusively his own—for his fine house and his beautiful lands—and that he chiefly employed himself in maturing his several projects for the good of his country-folk. Time at length began to set his seal on his labours, by discovering their value; though not until death had first affixed his to the character of the wise and benevolent projector. He died full of years and honour, mourned by the poor, and regretted by every one; and even those who had opposed his innovations with the warmest zeal, were content to remember him, with all the others, as “the good laird.”
CHAPTER XXXI.
“Friends, No-man kills me; No-man in the hour
Of sleep oppresses me with fraudful power.
If no man hurt thee, but the hand divine
Inflict disease, it fits thee to resign.”
—Odyssey.