“I have waited for this, day, Robin-a-Ree, as I would have waited for my ain wedding—and it has come. Ye are richt to believe this man, whom ye have come to meet, and whase bread ye have broken, that he will reduce your rents; for he never broke his word.”
Then there was a cry to put her down, accompanied by shouts—“We do believe our excellent landlord.”
“So did I believe him,” continued she, “when I put my faith and troth in his hands, and yielded to his desires, on condition o’ his promise that I should stand in the place o’ this braw bride. That promise he falsely broke; and will he keep that which he has this day made to ye?”
“Yes, yes!” they shouted again.
“Never!” she screamed. “Believe me, wha stand here a wretched victim o’ his falsehood, whase love he sought and won, whase peace he has destroyed, whase heart he tried to break—tried—ay, but only tried; for he has changed it to the tongue o’ the harry adder that basks i’ the moss on the swamps o’ the Ken. I have hated the yellow-wamed ask that sleeps i’ the mud o’ the lazy Nith, the moon-baying tyke, the charking whutthroat, and the taed that carries its poison on its back amang the seggs o’ the Solway. Ay, sair, sair, have I hated them, wi’ a’ the hate o’ a heart that had only twa pairts—ane for lovin’ and ane for hatin’; but waur—ten thousand times waur, and tens o’ tens, do I hate the vile and loathsome reptile, wha, puttin’ on the appearance o’ man, and coverin’ his lyin’ tongue wi’ the Almighty’s words o’ promised faith, wiles frae the trustin’, lovin’, defenceless woman a’ that she has to care for on earth, and wha yet hasna courage enough to stab her to the heart, and end her misery and her life thegither. But, thanks to the power wha befriends the miserable, and brings oot o’ the destroyed a spirit a thousand times stronger, to feed the heart which love has betrayed!—sweeter to me—ay, hear me, hear the victim o your worshipped idol—sweeter to me is that poison than would be to me his kisses, now sour as the green bullister. But the day lengthens frae the shortest to the longest, and, as the earth turns, they wha, but some hours syne, stood upon oor heads, shall as mony hours after, lie under our feet. So may the day o’ Mary Lee’s joy follow the nicht o’ her grief—and that joy will be revenge!”
As the last word, “revenge,” (says our legend) rang round the silent scene, the excited damsel waved her hand and disappeared. The effect of her speech was electric. Every one looked at his neighbour, mutterings and whisperings ran round the company, and glances of a suspicious nature were thrown upon Ashley. Some of his friends, for the sake of saving him, suggested that the woman was insane; and the company, glad to find a pretext for disbelieving the charge brought in so extraordinary a manner against their landlord, adopted the suggestion. Ashley, however, was struck deeper than he would avow, or than might have been expected, in the case of a man dead to ordinary pity, and to the moral sense. Rising from his seat, he again thanked the company for their attention, and retired.
Next day a messenger called at the house of Mary’s father, and requested to see her. He was commissioned, he said, to give her—provided she would receive it with grace and favour—renouncing the ill-will she bore to Ashley—a considerable sum of money, amounting to two hundred merks. Contrary to the man’s own expectation, the girl seized the money with the greatest avidity; but without uttering a syllable wherefrom he might draw an inference that she was placated in any degree by the gift. As soon as he retired, she locked the money in her trunk, apostrophising the despised and worshipped dust, with the spirit of an enraptured Mammon—“Lie there till vengeance needs ye.”
Time rolled on without producing any change on Mary Lee. At “The Castle,” things were different. The old man died, and Robert succeeded to the estates. He gradually softened down to the condition of a sober-minded husband, and experienced the ordinary effects of early ribaldry and dissipation, in a deep, heart-felt regret, and a wish to make amends to heaven and earth for an abuse of the gifts of both. He had one son, whose name was Hector, whom he loved with all the devotion of a father. Being an only son, the boy was, as usual, spoiled, both by his father and mother; having concentrated on himself affections which, in other circumstances, might have been, with advantage to parents and child, spread over a family of sons and daughters. To such an extent was affection carried, in the case of this spoiled child, that the mother would scarcely let him out of her sight. With his heart also garnered up in his son, and happy in the possession of a kind, gentle, though constitutionally weak wife, Robert Ashley might have been pronounced as happy as the regret produced by the loss of the best part of his life would permit him to be.
Meanwhile, as regarded the victim of his seduction, Ashley conceived he had now little to fear, seeing she had received his peace-offering, and had, it was reported, contracted an intimacy with Hans Gerstendorf, a German smuggler, who had been in the practice of running his good frau, Unsere Mutter, an old lugger, into the port of Fairhaven, with contraband goods. The report was, to a certain extent, true. Hans had conceived an affection for the still beautiful Mary, and it was certain that she had, in some degree, unbent her stern misanthropy in favour of the German, though with what aim, or for what object, the gossips of Fairhaven knew not. It was not without credence among some, that Hans, whose appearance justified the suspicion, had used some unlawful means—and fancy supplied German charms—to open the heart which all supposed shut against human efforts. Speculation, however, might rack itself with curiosity—Mary’s attentions to the foreigner remained unaccounted for. She often visited his craft, and this supplied others, less indulgent, with the idea that the German charm was nothing else than good Hollands; yet those who knew Mary Lee better ridiculed the suspicion as unworthy of her character; for her sobriety, in the midst of her unearthly feelings, was never questioned. One thing, amidst all this doubt, remained certain, and that was that, whatever favour Hans Gerstendorf had in the eyes of the relentless fair one, no other person ever saw her smile, and few heard her speak. The same gloomy melancholy haunted her, the same bitterness of scorn of all social relations, was observable in her eye, and trembled on her lip.
On a day, a horseman, well-mounted, arrived in Fairhaven, in a state of breathless anxiety and haste. He called for a number of the fishermen of the village, and requested them to fly with him to the Fisher’s Cairn, a mile beyond the village, to give them assistance in searching for the body of Hector Ashley, who, he said, had fallen into the Solway, and was supposed to have perished. Then the fishermen seized their dead drags, and ran with their greatest speed to the place pointed out. On arriving there, they found a number of persons collected, among whom was Robert Ashley, apparently occupied in searching for the body of the drowned youth. The clothes of the boy lay on the top of the cairn, from whence it was supposed and reported that he had been bathing, at that part of the Solway which was full of dangerous eddies, and had perished. The father stood in a state bordering on despair, witnessing the unavailable efforts, on the part of the people, to recover his son. Every exertion was used—the dead drags applied in every direction—and the fatal announcement made, that the body was irrecoverable. The tide was receding, and it was the opinion of the fishermen, that the body must have been carried, by the eddies, into some of the deep clefts of the rock, from which it was, in all likelihood, impossible to extricate it. The people gradually disappeared, with the exception of one or two, who undertook to wait the receding of the tide; and Robert Ashley, the disconsolate parent, was conveyed home, in a state of insensibility, to witness the second grief of a mother wailing for the loss of her only child. As the carriage which conveyed Ashley home passed through the village, Mary Lee was sitting, in her usual melancholy mood, at her father’s door. On observing the crowd, she suddenly started up, and, with a loud laugh, pointed to Ashley, and retreated into the house. The circumstance caught the attention of the crowd, and formed a part of the melancholy theme which fate had supplied to the evening gossips of Fairhaven. Some hours afterwards, it was reported that the tide had receded to its utmost extent, and no trace could be found of the lost heir of “The Castle.”