In the majority of ballads of the Clerk Saunders class there is some base agent who betrays trust and brings death upon the lovers. 'Fause Foodrage' takes many forms in these ancient tales without changing type. He is the slayer of 'Lily Flower' in Jellon Graeme; and the boy whom he has preserved and brought up sends the arrow singing to his guilty heart. Lammiken, the 'bloodthirsty mason,' who must have a life for his wage, is another enemy within the house who finds his way through 'steekit yetts'; and he is assisted by the 'fause nourice.' In other ballads it is the 'kitchen-boy,' the 'little foot-page,' the 'churlish carle,' or the bower-woman who plays the spy and tale-bearer. In Glenkindie, 'Gib, his man,' is the vile betrayer of the noble harper and his lady. Sometimes, as in Gude Wallace, Earl Richard, and Sir James the Rose, it is the 'light leman' who plays traitor. But she quickly repents, and meets her fate in the fire or at the sword's point, in 'Clyde Water' or in 'the dowie den in the Lawlands o' Balleichan.' In Gil Morice, that ballad which Gray thought 'divine,' it is 'Willie, the bonnie boy,' whom the hero trusted with his message, that in malice and wilfulness brings about the tremendous catastrophe of the tale. He calls aloud in hall the words he was bid whisper in the ear of Lord Barnard's lady—to meet Gil Morice in the forest, and 'speir nae bauld baron's leave.'
'The lady stampéd wi' her foot
And winkéd wi' her e'e;
But for a' that she could say or do
Forbidden he wadna be.'
It is the angry and jealous baron who, in woman guise, meets and slays the youth who is waiting in gude greenwood, and brings back the bloody head to the mother.
Other fine ballads in which mother and son carry on tragic colloquy are Lord Randal and Edward. These versions of a story of treachery and blood, conveyed in the dark hints of a strange dialogue, have received many touches from later hands; but the germ comes down from the age of tradition. It has even been noted that, with the curious tenacity with which the ballad memory often clings to a detail while forgetting or mislaying essential fact, the food with which, in the version Burns recovered for Johnson's Museum, Lord Randal is poisoned—'eels boiled in broo'—is identical with that given to his prototype in the folk-ballads of Italy and other countries. The structure of this ballad, like the beautiful old air to which it is sung, bears marks of antiquity, and its wide diffusion militates against Scott's not very convincing suggestion that it refers to the alleged poisoning of the Regent Randolph. But it lacks the terrible and dramatic intensity of Son Davie, better known in the version transmitted, under the name of Edward, by Lord Hailes to Bishop Percy's Reliques. Here it is the murderer, and not the victim, who answers; and it is the questioning mother, and not the absent false love, with whom the curse is left as a legacy. Despair had never a more piercing utterance than this:
'"And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife?
Edward, Edward!
And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife
When ye gang over the sea, O?"
"The warld 's room, let them beg through life,
Mither, Mither!
The warld 's room, let them beg through life,
For them never mair will I see, O!"
"And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear?
Edward, Edward!
And what will ye leave to your ain mother dear,
My dear son, now tell me, O?"
"The curse o' hell from me shall ye bear,
Mither, Mither!
The curse o' hell from me shall ye bear,
Sic counsels ye gae me, O!"'
Although Yarrow be the favoured haunt on Scottish soil—may we not also say on the whole round of earth?—of the Romantic Ballad, and has coloured them, and taken colour from them, for all time, yet there are other streams and vales that only come short of being its rivals. 'Leader Haughs,' for instance, which the harp of Nicol Burne, the 'Last Minstrel' who wandered and sang in the Borderland, has linked indissolubly with Yarrow braes, know of ballad strains well-nigh as sweet as those of the neighbour water. But cheerfulness rather than sadness is their prevailing note. Auld Maitland, the lay which James Hogg's mother repeated to Scott, has its scene on Leader side, and at the 'darksome town'—a misnomer in these days—of Lauder. Long before the time of that tough champion, St. Cuthbert and True Thomas had wandered and dreamed and sang by Leader. It was a Lord Lauderdale who rode to Traquair to court, after the older fashion, Katherine Janferie:
'He toldna her father, he toldna her mither,
He toldna ane o' her kin;
But he whispered the bonnie may hersel',
And has her favour won.'