Auld Ringan Oliver died in 1736. He sleeps among the martyrs in
Greyfriars Churchyard.
A LEGEND OF NORHAM
In the days, now happily remote, when folks, provided as for a picnic, laboriously travelled great distances in order to be present at the execution of some unhappy wretch; in the days when harmless old women, whose chief fault may probably have been that they were poor and friendless, and perhaps by age and privation rendered little better than half-witted, were baited, and dragged by an ignorant and credulous populace to a fiery or to a watery death, there survived in Scotland yet another barbarous custom not unworthy to take rank with witch-burning. It was a custom so pitiless and revolting that the mind shrinks from its contemplation, for if its victims were not necessarily frail old women, they were yet human beings guilty of no crime, innocent perhaps of all but misfortune.
The study of medicine in those days was in its infancy, and many were the strange virtues attributed to certain herbs, vast the powers claimed for certain things in nature. Aconitum (or wolf's-bane) for example, was reputed to "prevail mightily against the bitings of Scorpions, and is of such force that if the Scorpion pass by where it groweth, and touch the same, presently he becometh dull, heavy, and senseless, and if the same Scorpion by chance touch the White Hellebore, he is presently delivered from his drowiness." A certain root, too, was of sovereign efficacy in the prevention of rabies in human beings who had been bitten by a mad dog. In Gerard's Herbal, a medical work published in 1596—"Gathered by John Gerarde of London, Master in Chirurgerie"—it is laid down that "the root of the Briar-bush is a singular remedy found out by oracle against the biting of a mad dog." Then, as now, rabies was regarded with a sickening dread, but in that remote day there had arisen no Pasteur, and dread too frequently degenerated into panic, and panic, as it ever does, revealed itself in brutality.
In olden days the remedies generally administered to patients suffering from the bite of a dog were many and curious, and probably by the average patient they were regarded in reality rather as something in the nature of a charm than as medicines. Doubtless they gave confidence to the person who had been bitten, and, so far, were good. But in very many cases they got the credit of being infallible remedies solely because in most instances the dog which had given the bite was no more afflicted with rabies than was the person whom it bit; probably it was some poor, hunted, frightened beast which had lost its master, and against which some panic-stricken individual had raised the senseless cry of "mad dog."
One remedy prescribed by a famous physician who lived so late as mid-eighteenth century, was "ash-coloured ground liver-wort a half-ounce, black pepper a quarter-ounce," to be taken, fasting, in four doses, the patient having been bled prior to beginning the cure. Thereafter for a month, each morning he must plunge into a cold spring or river, in which he must be dipped all over, but must stay no longer than half a minute. Finally, to complete the cure, he must for a fortnight longer enter the river or spring three times a week. It is all eminently simple, and tends at least to show that our ancestors after all were not wholly ignorant of the virtues of cold water. Amongst other remedies, also, was a medicine composed of cinnabar and musk, an East Indian specific, and one of powdered Virginian snake-root, gum asafoetida, and gum camphire, mixed and taken as a bolus. So far, at least, if the various treatments did little good, they did no great harm. Brutality began where a person had been bitten by a dog that really was mad, and when undoubted symptoms of hydrophobia had shown themselves. Then it was no uncommon practice to deliberately bleed the unhappy patient to death, or, worse still, to smother him between mattresses or feather beds. Necessarily, a custom so monstrous opened wide the door to crimes of violence, and doubtless many a person whose presence was found to be inconvenient to relatives, or whose permanent absence would further certain desires or plans of those relatives, was opportunely found to be suffering from an attack of hydrophobia, and came to his end miserably in some such fashion as has been indicated. The popular mind was credulous to an extent inconceivable at the present day, and the mere accusation of madness was seized on and swallowed with an avidity that discouraged investigation of individual cases.
In the Border, if all tales are true, at least one crime of this nature was perpetrated.
Not far from Norham Castle, it is said that there stood till well on in the eighteenth century a large mansion, of which no trace now remains. As the story goes, the place once belonged to an old Border family, but the folly and extravagance of more than one generation had brought in their train what these failings ever must bring, and evil times fell on that house. Piece by piece, one after the other, the ancient possessions passed away from their former owners, sacrificed to gratify some passing whim or to pay some foolishly contracted debt, till, finally, the house itself and what land remained had also been flung into the melting-pot, and the last male heir of the old line, with his only child, a daughter, sat homeless in their old home, awaiting the hour which should bring with it the new owner, and to them the sorrow of for ever quitting scenes dear to them from infancy.
By the dying embers of a wood fire they two lingered one December night, wrapped in no pleasant thoughts, and idly listening to the shrill piping of a wind that dismally foretold the coming of snow. The father was a man well advanced in life, on whose good-looking, weak face dissipation had set its seal; the daughter, a woman of six or seven and twenty, who preserved more than all her father's good looks, but—as is so often the case in the females of a decadent family—who, in her expression, showed no trace of weakness. Indeed, if a fault could be found in face or figure, it was that the former for a woman told of too much firmness and resolution, qualities which circumstances might very readily develop into obstinacy, and even into cruelty. Her mother had died when Helen was but an infant, and thus it chanced that, as a child, her upbringing had been left pretty well to nature, aided (or perhaps hampered) only by the foolish indulgence of an ignorant and not very high-principled nurse, in whom fidelity was perhaps the only virtue, and who now, in her old age, almost alone of a once large staff of servants, still clung to "her bairn," and to the fallen fortunes of her master. Of education the child received but what little she chose to receive, and of discipline she knew nothing, for to the hopelessly weak father her will had too soon become law.
Naturally, Helen grew up headstrong and self-indulgent, recognising no rule but that of her own inclinations, and before her eighteenth birthday she had, without the knowledge of her father, engaged herself to a penniless youth of good family, the younger son of a neighbour. An entire lack of funds, however, seemed—at least to the lad—sufficient cause for delaying the marriage, and "to mak' the croon a pound," he went, not "to sea," but (as was then not uncommon with young Scotsmen) to the wars in High Germanie.