Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

For unconstrain’d he nothing tells for naught,

Nor is with prayers, or bribes, or flattery bought,

Surprise him first, and with strong fetters bind.”

—Georgics.

THE MERMAID.

Of all the old mythologic existences of Scotland—half earth, half air—there was none with whom the people of Cromarty were better acquainted than with the mermaid. Thirty years have not yet gone by since she has been seen by moonlight sitting on a stone in the sea, a little to the east of the town; and scarce a winter passed, forty years earlier, in which she was not heard singing among the rocks, or seen braiding up her long yellow tresses on the shore. Like her contemporaries the river-wraiths and fairies—like the nymphs and deities, too, of the Greeks and Romans—she was deemed scarcely less material than the favoured individuals of our own species, who, in the grey of the morning or at the close of evening, had marked her sitting on some desert promontory, or frolicking amid the waves of some solitary arm of the sea. But it is not so generally known, that though in some respects less potent even than men—than at least the very strong and very courageous—she had a power through her connexion with the invisible world over human affairs, and could control and remodel even the decrees of destiny. A robust, fearless man might treat her, it is said, as Ulysses did Circe, or Diomedes Venus; but then, more potent than these goddesses, she could render all his future undertakings either successful or unfortunate, or, if a seafaring man, could either bury him in the waves or protect him from their fury. It is said, too, that like the Proteus of classical mythology (and the coincidence, if merely such, is at least a curious one), she never exerted this power in a good direction except when compelled to it. She avoided in the daytime shores frequented by man, and when disturbed by him in her retreats, escaped into her native element; but if he succeeded in seizing and overpowering her, she always purchased her release by granting him any three wishes he might form, connected with either his own fortunes or those of his friends. Her strength, however, was superior to that of most men; and, if victorious in the struggle, she carried the unfortunate assailant with her into the sea.

THE STORY OF JOHN REID.

It is now nearly a hundred and twenty years since honest John Reid, the Cromarty shipmaster, was positively the most unhappy man in the place. He was shrewd, sensible, calculating, good-humoured, in comparatively easy circumstances, and at this time in his thirtieth year. The early part of his life had been spent abroad; he had voyaged over the wide Pacific, and traded to China and both the Indies; and to such purpose—for he was quite the sort of person one would most like to have for one’s grandfather—that in about fourteen years after sailing from Cromarty a poor ship-boy, he had returned to it with money enough to purchase a fine large sloop, with which he engaged in the lucrative trade carrying on at this period between Holland and the northern ports of Scotland. His good luck still followed him; nor was he of the class who are ingenious in discovering imaginary misfortunes. What is more, too, he was of so cool a temperament, that when nature rendered him capable of the softer passion at all, it seemed as if she had done so by way of after-thought, and contrary to her original intention. And yet, John Reid, with all his cool prudence, and his good humour and good fortune to boot, was one of the unhappiest men in the place—and all this because he had been just paying his addresses to one of its prettiest girls.

He had first seen Helen Stuart when indulging in a solitary walk on the hill of Cromarty, shortly after his return from the Indies. Helen was fully twelve years younger than himself, slightly but elegantly formed, with small regular features, and a complexion in which the purest white was blended with the most exquisite red. Never before had the sailor seen a creature half so lovely; he thought of her all the evening after, and dreamed of her all the night. But there was no corresponding impression on the other side; the maiden merely remembered that she had met in the wood with the newly-arrived shipmaster and described him to one of her companions as a strongly-built man of barely the middle size, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a set of irregular, good-humoured features, over which a tropical sun had cast its tinge of the deepest bronze. Helen was a village heiress, with a good deal of the pride of beauty in her composition, and a very little of the pride of wealth, and, with what was perhaps as unfavourable to the newly-formed passion of Reid as either, a romantic attachment to that most perfect man of the imagination, the maid’s husband—a prince in disguise, the Admirable Crichton in a revised edition, or the hero of an old ballad.

This dangerous, though shadowy rival of the true lover, who assumes in almost every feminine mind a shape of its own, was in the present instance handsome as Helen herself, with just such a complexion and such eyes and hair; and, excelling all men in fine clothes, fine speeches, and fine manners, he excelled them in parts, and wealth, and courage too. What had the robust, sunburned sailor of thirty to cast into the opposite scale? Besides, Helen, though she had often dreamed of courtship, had never seriously thought of marriage; and so, partly for the sake of her ideal suitor, partly through a girlish unwillingness to grapple with the realities of life, the real suitor was rejected. Grave natures, says Bacon, are ever the most constant in their attachments. Weeks and months passed away, and still there was an uneasy void in the mind of the sailor, which neither business nor amusement could fill—a something which differed from grief, without affecting him less painfully. He could think and dream of only Helen Stuart. Her image followed him into Holland among the phlegmatic Dutchmen, who never break their hearts for the sake of a mistress, and watched beside him for many a long hour at the helm. He ever saw her as he had first seen her on the hill; there were trees in the background, and the warm mellow flush of a setting sun, while in front there tripped lightly along a sylph-looking creature, with bright happy eyes, and cheeks glowing with crimson.