The knight turned slowly round about
All in the middle stream,
He stretched out his hand to that lady,
And loudly she did scream.
"O, this is Hallow-morn," he said,
"And it is your bridal day;
But sad would be that gay wedding
Were bridegroom and bride away.
But ride on, ride on, proud Margaret,
Till the water comes o'er your bree;
For the bride maun ride deep and deeper yet
Who rides this ford wi' me."'
But the perturbed spirit does not always thus revisit the glimpses of the moon to awaken conscience, to humble pride, or to wreak vengeance. More often it is the repinings and longings of passionate love that keep it from its rest. In märchen and ballad the ghost of the lover comes to complain that the tears which his betrothed sheds nightly fill his shroud with blood; when she smiles, it is filled with rose leaves. The mother steals from the grave to hap and comfort her orphan children; their harsh stepmother neglects and ill-treats them, and their exceeding bitter and desolate cry has penetrated beneath the sod, and reached the dead ear. In The Clerk's Sons o' Owsenford, and in that singular fragment of the same creepy theme, recovered by Scott, The Wife of Usher's Well, it is the yearning of the living mother that brings the dead sons back to their home:
'"Blaw up the fire, my maidens,
Bring water from the well!
For a' my house shall feast this nicht,
Since my three sons are well."'
The revenants, silent guests with staring eyes, wait and warm themselves by the fireside, while the 'carline wife' ministers to their wants, and spreads her 'gay mantle' over them to keep them from the cold, until their time comes:
'"The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,
The channerin' worm doth chide;
Gin we be missed out o' our place
A sair pain we must bide."
"Lie still, be still a little wee while,
Lie still but if we may;
Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes,
She 'll gae mad, ere it be day."
O it 's they 've taen up their mother's mantle,
And they 've hung it on a pin;
"O lang may ye hing, my mother's mantle,
Ere ye hap us again."'
A chill air as from the charnel-house seems to breathe upon us while reading the lines; the coldness, the darkness, and the horror of death have never been painted for us with more terrible power than in the 'Wiertz Gallery' of the old balladists.
We feel this also in the ballads of the type of Sweet William and May Margaret, quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, where the dead returns to claim back a plighted word; and at the same time we feel the strength of the perfect love that triumphs over death and casts out fear: