'"But again, dear love, and again, dear love,
Will you never love me again?
Alas! for loving you so well,
And you not me again."'
From Edinburgh wandered Leezie Lindsay, kilting her coats of green satin to follow her Lord Ronald Macdonald the weary way to the Highland Border; and to its plainstanes came the faithful Lady of Gicht to ransom her Geordie:
'My Geordie, O my Geordie,
The love I bear my Geordie!
For the very ground I walk upon
Bears witness I lo'e Geordie.'
And these regions of the North have as much of the 'blood-red wine' of ballad romance coursing through them as Tweedside or Lothian, although it may be of harsher and coarser flavour. Space does not allow of doing justice to the Northern Ballads, some of them simple strains, made familiar by sweet airs, like Hunting Tower, or Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, or the Banks of the Lomond; others, and these chiefly from the wintry side of Cairn o' Mount, 'bleak and bare' as that wilderness of heather; still others, and from the same quarter, gallant, warm-hearted, light-stepping tunes as ever were sung—Glenlogie, for instance:
'There were four-and-twenty nobles
Rode through Banchory fair;
And bonnie Glenlogie
Was flower o' them there.'
For the most part they are variants, many of them badly mutilated in the rhymes, that are familiar, under other names, farther south. They gather about the family history and the family trees of the great houses—the Gordons for choice—planted by Dee and Don and Ythan, where Gadie runs at the 'back o' Benachie,' and in the Bog o' Gicht; and they tell of love adventures and mischances that have befallen the Lords of Huntly or Aboyne, the Lairds of Drum or Meldrum, and even the humble Trumpeter of Fyvie.
CHAPTER VI
THE HISTORICAL BALLAD
'It fell about the Lammas tide,
When the muirmen win their hay,
The doughty Douglas bound him to ride
Into England, to drive a prey.'
The Battle of Otterburn.