Nor do we wonder to hear that it was the doing of the wicked and envious stepmother, on whom there straight falls a worse and a well-deserved weird. In King Henrie, too, it is the stepdame that has wrought the mischief. He is lying 'burd alane' in his hunting hall in the forest, when his grey dogs cringe and whine; the door is burst in, and
'A grisly ghost
Stands stamping on the floor.'
The manners of this Poltergeist are in keeping with her rough entrance on the scene; her ogreish appetite is not satisfied even when she had devoured his hounds, his hawks, and his steed. As in the Wife of Bath's Tale, and the Marriage of Sir Gawain and other legends of the same type, the knight's courtesy withstands every test, and he is rewarded for having given the lady her will:
'When day was come and night was gane
And the sun shone through the ha',
The fairest ladye that e'er was seen
Lay between him and the wa'.'
In most cases it is not wise or safe to give entertainment to these wanderers of the night, whether they come in fair shape or in foul. They are apt to prove to be of the race of the succubi, from whom a kiss means death or worse. More than one of our Scottish ballads are reminiscent of the beautiful old Breton lay, The Lord Nann, so admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast to the grave. Alison Gross is another of those Circes who, by incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the tempter is of the other sex. Thus The Demon Lover is a tale known in several versions in Scotland, and lately brought under notice by Mr. Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home, and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause:
'He turned him right and round about,
And the tear blindit his e'e;
"I would never have trodden on Irish ground
If it hadna been for thee."'
They have not sailed far, when his countenance changes, and he grows to a monstrous stature; the foul fiend is revealed. They are bound on a drearier voyage than that of True Thomas—to a Hades of ice and isolation that bespeaks the northern origin of the tale:
'"O whaten a mountain 's yon," she said,
"So dreary wi' frost and snow?"
"O yon 's the mountain of hell," he cried,
"Where you and I must go."
He strack the tapmast wi' his hand,
The foremast wi' his knee;
And he brake the gallant ship in twain
And sank her in the sea.'
Other spells and charms not a few, for the winning of love and the slaking of revenge, are known to the old balladists. We hear of the compelling or sundering power of the bright red gold and the cold steel. Lovers at parting exchange rings, as in Hynd Horn, gifted with the property of revealing death or faithlessness: