Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 13

by Unknown

They arrived at the court-room about eleven o'clock. An examination of witnesses had already been begun. As they entered the door of the room where they were to be placed, Menie saw passing through the lobby several neighbours; and between two men, in the act of taking him to be examined, she observed George Wallace, whose eyes seemed red and inflamed, and who exhibited a strong reluctance to proceed forward, requiring the efforts of the men to drag him before the examinator. The whole scene seemed nothing but a dream; and the trifling circumstance from which it originated invested it with a character strange and unnatural. It was nearly four o'clock before Menie was called in to be examined. When led before the judge, she looked wildly around her. A chair was set for her, and she sat down. The usual questions as to her name, and other matters, were put, and the more important part of the examination proceeded. She was asked whether she had at one time been on terms of intimacy with Michael M'Intyre, the city guardsman; whether she had not been in his society among the trees of Inverleith, on a night mentioned; whether she had not been courted by George Wallace of Inverleith Mains; whether she had not been renounced by him; whether the reason of such renouncement was not her prior intimacy with M'Intyre; whether she had not been confined to the house for a considerable period, and what was the reason of such confinement; whether she had not deposited a basket containing the dead child near the hedgerow in the loan leading to Canonmills; and whether she was not the mother of the child. Every question was answered according to her simple ideas of innocence and truth; but when she came to state that she found the basket on the road, carried it home without looking at it, and then replaced it in the situation in which she found it, and all this without being able properly to account for so unlikely and extraordinary a proceeding, the sheriff, prejudiced as he was against her, from her previous admission that she had been seen in the society of M'Intyre, a man of dissolute habits—that Wallace had not visited her for many weeks, in consequence, as she supposed, of that circumstance—and that she had not been in the habit of going out for a considerable period—viewed her statement as false, and entertained the strongest suspicions of her being guilty of the crime laid to her charge. She was accordingly committed to prison until further evidence might be procured, to throw more light on the mysterious transaction.

In the meantime, the circumstances of the case being of that inexplicable kind that stirs the curiosity of a prying public, the results of the precognition got abroad, and it was ascertained that a considerable part of the information afforded to the sheriff had been procured from Elspeth Grierson, the mother of Margaret Grierson, and from one of the men who had seen Menie in the arms of the city guardsman. The manner in which Wallace became implicated as an unwilling witness against his betrothed, was also a curious feature in the case. He had not been absent in the south so long as it had been represented, but had concealed his arrival at home with a view to watch the motions of her whom he yet loved, in spite of the suspicions he entertained against her; and having, on that eventful evening, seen Menie hurrying along with a basket in her hand, he had followed her, and seen her deposit the charge in the manner already mentioned. At the very moment when he was in the act of examining it, Elspeth Grierson came up, as if she had been returning from Canonmills, and helped him to undo the cloth in which the dead body of the child was wrapped; and thus was he painfully committed as a witness of what he had seen. The authorities soon after got intelligence of the circumstance; the child was taken to the office, and a great number of witnesses, chiefly pointed out by Elspeth Grierson (among the rest, George Wallace), were examined, previous to the interrogation of the supposed culprit herself.

The unhappy situation of the girl, and the apparently conflicting testimony of the witnesses, roused a sympathetic interest in many of her acquaintances, who, having set on foot a system of inquiry, induced or persuaded the fiscal to seek for the truth, rather than for an unilateral array of inculpative testimony. It was impossible, even on the part of the authorities, to deny the force of the facts, that Menie had been often seen by the neighbours during their visits, though she had kept the house in the day-time, in consequence of the shame produced by the reports circulated against her; that she had been on a visit to Canonmills on that evening when the child was exposed; that the rumours against her (with the exception of the facts attending the depositing of the corb) proceeded mainly from one source, which was a poisoned one; and that, in place of denying, as she might have done, all knowledge of the transaction, she had explained everything with a simplicity that was seldom exhibited by the votaries of vice. These things made a suitable impression, and the crown authorities were obliged to stop short in their proceedings, from the circumstance that they could find no proof of gravidity, and only one witness, Wallace himself—whose reluctance to give his testimony was looked upon, when contrasted with his ascertained inimical feelings towards her, as an affected exhibition of leniency to cover concealed hatred—could speak to the fact of the depositation of the child. All seemed enveloped in doubt; and, if there was a glimpse of certainty in regard to any part of the inexplicable case, it was that, that doubt itself would effectuate the ruin of the unfortunate prisoner, who could never claim again the respect that is due to innocence.

For six months she was confined within the narrow cells of a jail, and during every day of that period she was visited by her mother, whose endeavours to support the young and breaking heart of the victim, by the application of the balm that God has sent to the miserable, only tended to calm the spirit as it sunk in the ruins of a decaying constitution. She was at last liberated; but the freedom of the body only made more manifest the effects of the blasting power of prejudice and suspicion; and the intelligence, that was communicated to her some time afterwards, that Wallace had married Margaret Grierson, crowned the misery that enslaved her, and seemed to cut off all hope that she could ever again hold up her head among the daughters of men. Time passed, and realised that inherent condition of his power, which, as his progress continues, brings to the miserable the sad consolation of the woes of their enemies. The marriage of Wallace with Margaret Grierson was an unhappy one. The collision of adverse sentiments produced in the wife an infirmity of temper, which, in its exasperated moods, sought for relief in intoxication; and the domestic feuds at Inverleith Mains became a common topic of conversation among the inhabitants of Broughton. Such are the turns of fate that acknowledge the influence of a power whose ways we cannot comprehend; yet a still more extraordinary discovery was to be manifested to the child of misfortune. One night Menie and her mother were engaged in their evening exercise, heedless of the concerns of a world from which they were excluded, when the door opened with a loud noise, and George Wallace stood before them. His eyes were wild and bloodshot, a fever was in his blood, and his nerves, excited by some maniac passion, shook till his frame seemed convulsed, and the powers of judgment and will lay prostrate before the fiend that ruled his heart. Menie started up affrighted, and the mother laid her hand upon the book.

"I am compelled to be here," he cried, with a choking, unnatural voice, as he held forth his hands to the maiden; "and it is well I have come, for the quiet air o' this house o' innocence already quells the fever o' my heart. I have this moment left my wife; and I had a struggle to pass the water-dam, that shone in the mune to invite me to bury mysel and my grief in its still breast. But there is a God in heaven; and He it is wha has brought me here, to look ance mair on her I loved and ruined, and now can only save by my ain endless misery and shame. She lies yonder steeped in drink; but the power o' conscience has repelled the subtle poison, and she could speak in burnin words her crime and my eternal shame. Margaret Grierson it was—my wife—the mother o' my child—O God, help my words!—she has confessed, in her drunken madness, and my heart tells me it is the confession o' God's eternal truth, that the babe was hers—that her mother laid it by the hedgerow, a breathin victim, to hide her daughter's dishonour—and that it died there by suffocation. Let me speak it out, that this throbbin heart may be stilled. But it cannot—it never can be in this world—no—no—nor in the next."

And, groaning deeply, he threw himself on a chair, and rugged his hair like a maniac in the highest paroxysm of his disease. The unexpected and extraordinary statement rendered the women speechless. They looked at him, and at each other. Mutterings of prayer escaped from the lips of Euphan, and surprise and pity divided the empire of the heart of the daughter, who had never thought to see misery that equalled her own. There was no reason for the feeling of triumph, where the melancholy relief came from the ruins of one whom they had both loved and respected. He had been the only individual that ever influenced the heart of the one, and the other had fondly looked forward to him as the support and solace of her old age. Now he was a ruined, miserable man, and had no power to make amends for the wrong he had unintentionally committed. The calmness of the silence, and the relief that came from the unburdening of a secret that had been wrung from him by the pangs of conscience, brought him to a sense of the position in which he had placed himself. He had put himself and his wife in the power of those he had wronged, and returning reason brought with it the fears of self-preservation.

"What hae I done?" he again exclaimed, as he took his hand from his forehead, and looked into the face of Menie. "I hae condemned mysel and the wife o' my bosom—my conscience and a burnin revenge hae wrought this out o' me; but what shall be the consequence thereof? Will ye bring her to justice, the gallows—and me to a still deeper ruin and desolation than that which hang over this house o' innocent suffering? Say, Menie; speak, guid mother; our doom is in your hands. What says that blessed book on the merits o' forgiveness and the crime o' revenge?"

Euphan Dempster fixed her eyes on him calmly.

"Sair, sair hae ye wranged me, and that puir child o' misfortune, wha stands there unable to reply to ye, though the tears o' her grief and her pity speak in strange language the waes o' a broken heart. But sairer, far sairer, hae ye wranged yersel; for, though we 'have seen the travail which God hath given to the sons and daughters o' men,' we have been answered in the dark nights in which we cried and wept, by Him who 'maintains the cause o' the afflicted, and the right o' the poor;' but ye are left to the wrath o' yer ain spirit, that burns in yer heart, and even now lights up your eyes wi' a strange licht. Vainly would my daughter and I hae read this book, if we hadna learned to forgive our enemies. You hae naething to fear from us."

"And are thae the sentiments o' her wha was ance the life and light o' this stricken heart!" said Wallace, as he turned mournfully to Menie, who, pale and emaciated from her sorrow, stood before him, the ghost of what she was. "O God! can this be my Menie? Is a' that ruin o' health and beauty the doin o' him wha loved her as nae man ever loved woman? Are thae your sentiments, Menie? and am I, and is my miserable wife, safe in the keepin o' your forgiveness?"