He heard not the hoarse Louga crashing down its ice-blocks to the Baltic Sea; but the gentle murmur of the Earn, flowing from the wooded hills of Comrie towards the broad blue bosom of the Tay—the Earn, where many a time and oft he had lured the brown trout and the speckled salmon from the deep, dark pools, near the old battle-cross of Dupplin and the Birks of Invermay. Again he had heard the leaves rustle pleasantly in the summer woods, where he had nutted and birdnested when a boy; and he had seen, in a vivid dream, his glorious native valley where it narrows at Dunira; and far beyond, the blue ridges of the mighty Grampians, lifting their summits, alp on alp, to the clouds, eternal and unchanged as when the foiled legions of Julius Agricola fled along their slopes in rout and disorder.
On the death of his parents his small paternal estate of a few hundreds per annum would have become, as all might have supposed, his inheritance; but the relation before mentioned—the paternal uncle, Gamaliel, a man of the strictest probity, and of that which was equally valued in Scotland, extreme sanctimony; one who, on the funeral day, had shed abundance of tears at the uncertainty of life, and had excelled even the minister in prayer and "in warsling wi' the diel" (i.e., wrestling with Satan)—suddenly produced a will, by which, to the profound astonishment of all, the entire estate was left to him as a return for certain loans and sums advanced to the deceased, of which, however, no proof could be found; but it was a veritable death-bed will, written accurately by a notary, and duly signetted with the autograph of "John Balgonie of yt Ilk."
Though tremulous and shaky,—strangely so,—and rather unlike the usual signature of the deceased laird, three men there were, accounted good, worthy, and religious men, who solemnly deposed to having seen "the hand of the dead man pen those four words."
It was a case which made some noise in those days, because thirty-six hours after the alleged signature was given John Balgonie died.
The law of Scotland requires that, after framing and signing such a deed, the testator must have been able to go once at least to church or market. How it came to pass we know not now, but the dispute, though without a basis, was brought before the Supreme Court by some friends of the orphan, for there were not a few persons in Strathearn who alleged that John Balgonie's hand had certainly traced the signature which was sworn to so solemnly as his,—but had done so after death: the pen being placed in the fingers of the corpse, which were guided by those of the pious and worthy merchant of Dundee, who wanted his nephew's little patrimony in aid of certain speculations of his own.
Pending a decision, the bereaved boy was removed to the busy town on Tay side, and was left to solace his sorrows at school, prior, as he supposed, to becoming a drudge in his affectionate uncle's counting-house, when the last of his slender inheritance had been frittered away in the fangs of the law.
One day—poor Charlie never forgot it—his worthy Uncle Gam returned from Edinburgh by the packet. The case had been decided against him, and the Court was about to name trustees to look after the estate of the orphan boy: so that boy learned long after. Mr. Gamaliel Balgonie was unusually grave, stern, and abstracted; but he deliberately seated himself at his desk, and while humming, as was his wont, a verse of a psalm, he penned a letter addressed to the captain of a vessel then lying in the harbour, and gave it to his nephew for immediate delivery, desiring him to wait for the answer.
Charlie remarked that Uncle Gam did not, according to his usual careful custom, keep any copy of this letter, and that it was written in a hand so unlike his usual penmanship as to be completely disguised.
The boy, then in his fifteenth year, started on his errand with alacrity. It was better to be out amid the bustle of the sunlighted quays, than drudging with a quill in the sombre merchant's office in a narrow gloomy alley of Dundee. He soon found the ship, which was moored at some distance from the shore, with her fore-topsails loose, and blue-peter flying at the fore, to indicate that she was ready for sea; yet Charlie had no suspicion of the trap into which he was running, or the cruel fate that awaited him.
The skipper, a rough, surly, and brutal-looking man, eyed the boy keenly, while tearing the letter into minute fragments, after he had perused it, with a grim smile of satisfaction. He then went to a locker, where he poured out a glass of something that seemed to be port-wine.