Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 05

by Unknown

I had occasion, about three years ago, to visit the ancient burgh of Fortrose. It was early in winter, the days were brief though pleasant, and the nights long and dark; and, as there is much in Fortrose which the curious traveller deems interesting, I had lingered amid its burying-grounds and its broken and mouldering tenements, till the twilight had fairly set in. I had explored the dilapidated ruins of the Chanonry of Ross; seen the tomb of old Abbot Boniface, and the bell blessed by the pope; run over the complicated tracery of the Runic obelisk which had been dug up, about sixteen years before, from under the foundations of the old parish church; and visited the low, long house, with its upper windows buried in the thatch, in which the far-famed Sir James Mackintosh had received the first rudiments of his education. And, in all this, I had been accompanied by a benevolent old man of the place, a mighty chronicler of the past, who, when a boy, had sat on the same form with Sir James, and who, on this occasion, had seemed quite as delighted in meeting with a patient and interested listener, as I had been in finding so intelligent and enthusiastic a storiest. There was little wonder, then, that twilight should have overtaken me in such a place, and in such company.

There are two roads which run between Cromarty and Fortrose; the one, the king's highway; the other, a narrow footpath that goes winding for several miles under the immense wall of cliffs which overhangs the northern shores of the Moray Frith, and then ascends to the top, by narrow and doubtful traverses along the face of an immense precipice, termed the Scarf's Crag. The latter route is by far the more direct and more pleasant of the two to the day traveller; but the man should think twice who proposes taking it by night. The Scarf's Crag has been a scene of frightful accidents for the last two centuries. It is not yet more than twelve years since a young and very active man was precipitated from one of its higher ledges to the very beach—a sheer descent of nearly two hundred feet; and a multitude of little cairns which mottle the sandy platform below, bear witness to the no unfrequent occurrence of such casualties in the remote past. With the knowledge of all this, however, I had determined on taking the more perilous road: it is fully two miles shorter than the other; and besides, in a life of undisturbed security, a slight admixture of that feeling which the sense of danger awakens, is a luxury which I have always deemed worth one's while running some little risk to procure. The night fell thick and dark while I was yet hurrying along the footway which leads under the cliffs, and, on reaching the Scarf's Crag, I could no longer distinguish the path, nor even catch the huge outline of the precipice between me and the sky. I knew that the moon rose a little after nine; but it was still early in the evening, and, deeming it too long to wait its rising, I set myself to grope for the path, when, on turning an abrupt angle, I was dazzled by a sudden blaze of light from an opening in the rock. A large fire of furze and brushwood blazed merrily from the interior of a low-browed but spacious cave, bronzing with dusky yellow the huge volume of smoke, which went rolling outwards along the roof, and falling red and strong on the face and hands of a thickset, determined-looking man, well nigh in his sixtieth year, who was seated before it on a block of stone. I knew him at once, as an intelligent, and, in the main, rather respectable gipsy, whom I had once met with, about ten years before, and who had seen some service as a soldier, it was said, in the first British expedition to Egypt. The sight of his fire determined me at once. I resolved on passing the evening with him till the rising of the moon; and, after a brief explanation, and a blunt, though by no means unkind invitation to a place beside his fire, I took my seat, fronting him, on a block of granite, which had been rolled from the neighbouring beach. In less than half-an-hour, we were on as easy terms as if we had been comrades for years, and, after beating over fifty different topics, he told me the story of his life, and found an attentive and interested auditor.

Who of all my readers is unacquainted with Goldsmith's admirable stories of the sailor with the wooden leg, and the poor half-starved Merry-Andrew! Independently of the exquisite humour of the writer, they are suited to interest us from the sort of cross vistas which they open into scenes of life, where every thought, and aim, and incident, has at once all the freshness of novelty and all the truth of nature to recommend it. And I felt nearly the same kind of interest in listening to the narrative of the gipsy. It was much longer than either of Goldsmith's stories, and perhaps less characteristic; but it presented a rather curious picture of a superior nature rising to its proper level through circumstances the most adverse; and, in the main, pleased me so well, that I think I cannot do better than present it to the reader.

"I was born, master," said the gipsy, "in this very cave, some sixty years ago, and so am a Scotchman like yourself. My mother, however, belonged to the Debatable-land, my father was an Englishman, and of my five sisters, one first saw the light in Jersey, another in Guernsey, a third in Wales, a fourth in Ireland, and the fifth in the Isle of Man. But this is a trifle, master, to what occurs in some families. It can't be now much less than fifty years since my mother left us, one bright sunny day, on the English side of Kelso and staid away about a week. We thought we had lost her altogether; but back she came at last, and, when she did come, she brought with her a small sprig of a lad, of about three summers or thereby. Father grumbled a little—we had got small fry enough already, he said, and bare enough and hungry enough they were at times; but mother shewed him a pouch of yellow pieces, and there was no more grumbling. And so we called the little fellow, Bill Whyte, as if he had been one of ourselves, and he grew up among us, as pretty a fellow as e'er the sun looked upon. I was a few years his senior; but he soon contrived to get half a foot a-head of me; and, when we quarrelled, as boys will at times, master, I always came off second best. I never knew a fellow of a higher spirit; he would rather starve than beg, a hundred times over, and never stole in his life; but then for gin-setting, and deer-stalking, and black-fishing, not a poacher in the country got beyond him; and when there was a smuggler in the Solway, who more active than Bill? He was barely nineteen, poor fellow, when he made the country too hot to hold him. I remember the night as well as if it were yesterday. The Catmaran lugger was in the Frith, d'ye see, a little below Carlaverock; and father and Bill, and some half dozen more of our men, were busy in bumping the kegs ashore, and hiding them in the sand. It was a thick smuggy night; we could hardly see fifty yards round us; and, on our last trip, master, when we were down in the water to the gunwale, who should come upon us, in the turning of a handspike, but the revenue lads from Kirkcudbright! They hailed us to strike in the devil's name. Bill swore he wouldn't. Flash went a musket, and the ball whistled through his bonnet. Well, he called on them to row up, and up they came; but no sooner were they within half-oar's length, than taking up a keg, and raising it just as he used to do the putting-stone, he made it spin through their bottom, as if the planks were of window glass; and down went their cutter in half a jiffy. They had wet powder that night, and fired no more bullets. Well, when they were gathering themselves up as they best could—and, goodness be praised! there were no drownings amongst them—we bumped our kegs ashore, hiding them with the others, and then fled up the country. We knew there would be news of our night's work; and so there was; for, before next evening, there were advertisements on every post for the apprehension of Bill, with an offered reward of twenty pounds. Bill was a bit of a scholar—so am I for that matter—and the papers stared him on every side.

"Jack," he said to me, "Jack Whyte, this will never do, the law's too strong for us now; and, if I dont make away with myself, they'll either have me tucked up, or sent over seas to slave for life. I'll tell you what I'll do. I stand six feet ion my stocking soles, and good men were never more wanted than at present. I'll cross the country this very night, and away to Edinburgh, where there are troops raising for foreign service. Better a musket than the gallows!"

"Well, Bill," I said, "I dont care though I go with you. I'm a good enough man for my inches, though I aint so tall as you, and I'm woundily tired of spoon-making."

And so off we set across the country that very minute, travelling by night only, and passing our days in any hiding hole we could find, till we reached Edinburgh, and there took the bounty. Bill made as pretty a soldier as one could have seen in a regiment; and, men being scarce, I wasn't rejected neither; and, after just three weeks' drilling—and plaguy weeks they were—we were shipped off, fully finished, for the south. Bonaparty had gone to Egypt, and we were sent after him to ferret him out; though we weren't told so at the time. And it was our good luck, master, to be put aboard of the same transport.

Nothing like seeing the world for making a man smart. We had all sort of people in our regiment—from the broken-down gentleman to the broken-down lamp lighter; and Bill was catching, from the best of them all he could. He knew he wasn't a gipsy, and had always an eye to getting on in the world; and, as the voyage was a woundy long one, and we had the regimental schoolmaster aboard, Bill was a smarter fellow at the end of it than he had been at the beginning. Well, we reached Aboukir Bay at last. You have never been in Egypt, master; but, just look across the Moray Frith here, on a sunshiny day, and you will see a picture of it, if you but strike off the blue Highland hills that rise behind, from the long range of low sandy hillocks that stretches away along the coast, between Findhorn and Nairn. I don't think it was worth all the trouble it cost us; but the king surely knew best. Bill and I were in the first detachment, and we had to clear the way for the rest. The French were drawn up on the shore, as thick as flies on a dead snake, and the bullets rattled round us like a shower of May-hail. It was a glorious sight, master, for a bold heart! The entire line of sandy coast seemed one unbroken streak of fire and smoke; and we could see the old tower of Aboukir, rising like a fiery dragon at the one end, and the straggling village of Rosetta, half cloud, half flame, stretching away on the other. There was a line of launches and gun-boats behind us, that kept up an incessant fire on the enemy, and shot and shell went booming over our heads. We rowed shorewards, under a canopy of smoke and flame; the water was broken by ten thousand oars; and, never, master, have you heard such cheering; it drowned the roar of the very cannon. Bill and I pulled at the same oar; but he bade me cheer, and leave the pulling to him.

"Cheer, Jack," he said, "Cheer!—I am strong enough to pull ten oars, and your cheering does my heart good."

I could see, in the smoke and the confusion, that there was a boat stove by a shell just beside us, and the man immediately behind me was shot through the head. But we just cheered and pulled all the harder; and the moment our keel touched the shore, we leaped out into the water, middle deep, and, after one well directed volley, charged up the beach with our bayonets fixed. I missed footing in the hurry, just as we closed, and a big whiskered fellow in blue, would have pinned me to the sand, had not Bill struck him through the wind-pipe, and down he fell above me; but when I strove to rise from under him, he grappled with me in his death agony, and the blood and breath came rushing through his wound in my face. Ere I had thrown him off, my comrades had broken the enemy, and were charging up the side of a sand hill, where there were two field-pieces stationed that had sadly annoyed us in the landing. There came a shower of grape shot, whistling round me, that carried away my canteen, and turned me half round; and when I looked up, I saw, through the smoke, that half my comrades were swept away by the discharge, and that the survivors were fighting desperately over the two guns, hand to hand with the enemy. Ere I got up to them, however—and trust me, master, I did'nt linger—the guns were our own. Bill stood beside one of them, all grim and bloody, with his bayonet dripping like an eaves-spout in a shower. He had struck down five of the French, besides the one he had levelled over me; and now, all of his own accord—for our sergeant had been killed—he had shotted the two pieces, and turned them on the enemy. They all scampered down the hill, master, on the first discharge—all save one brave, obstinate fellow, who stood firing upon us, not fifty yards away, half under cover of a sandbank. I saw him load thrice ere I could hit him, and one of his balls whisked through my hat; but I catched him at last, and down he fell—my bullet went right through his forehead. We had no more fighting that day. The French fell back on Alexandria, and our troops advanced about three miles into the country, over a dreary waste of sand, and then lay for the night on their arms.