Now, it happened that honest Angus M’Guire and Donald M’Nair, two brawny Highlanders, were that day busily occupied in distilling a drop of good whisky, in a subterraneous distillery, to which the hole wherein Gustavus had laid his wife, led by a covered and concealed passage; and it was in no other than this very place that Julia had been so plentifully supplied with the liquor by which she was so often inebriated. Sitting by the mouth of the worm or serpent, which gave forth drop by drop the poison, stronger and more hurtful than ever came from the mouth of the Snake of Lerna, they heard a strange noise on the ground over their heads, as Gustavus was busy about the details of his interment, and shook with unfeigned terror, as if they had been on the point of being discovered in their illicit operations. By and by they heard a rumbling in the mouth of the cavern, as if some one had been in the act of descending, and, rising and seizing each a pistol and a sword, they stood on the defensive, prepared to slay the first gauger that should set his face into their subterraneous dominions. But the never an exciseman appeared: in place of that, to them, most fearful of all mortal beings, they saw the identical coffin in which Julia M’Iver had been laid, fall with a heavy sound upon the floor of their dark habitation.
Terror-struck, twenty times more than if they had seen the ghost of a murdered exciseman, they stood with their hair forcing up their bonnets on their head, and stared till their eyes seemed ready to burst from the sockets, at the dreadful object of their fears. A faint light glimmered through the cave, and was reflected from the rows of white buttons with which the black vision was studded; and all the horrid features of the grim apparition were displayed by that kind of dim light by which they could be seen to advantage. They could speak not a word to each other; and their mutual looks excited by sympathy a greater mutual fear than ever; and so they still stood and looked, and wondered, and would have moved their bodies to take a closer survey, but could not for very nervousness—albeit any one of them would have knocked a gauger on the head in an instant. But it was clear, even to themselves, that they could not thus stand staring at a coffin for ever; and it is not unlikely that this prospective impossibility supplied the place of courage; and so, Donald being the less timid of the two, gradually approached and surveyed their extraordinary visiter. Beckoning his friend Angus forward, he proceeded to force open the lid.
“The corpse o’ Julia M’Iver, our goot customer,” said he, “as sure as my name’s Tonald M’Nair!” And Angus, bending his head down, and holding his hands up, acknowledged the apparent truth. “Murtered py Custaphus, py Cot!” added he, “and puried here to hide the plack, purning shame!”
And they sat down by the coffin, and stared at each other and at the dead beauty, lost in deep cogitation as to what they should do. Their thoughts both took the same direction.
“What is to pe done?” muttered they both at the same instant.
“We cannot inform, and we cannot take the pody to Custaphus,” again said Donald; “for that would tiscover us.”
“To pe surely na,” said Angus; “put we can pury her, cannot we, Tonald?”
“Ay, that we can,” answered the latter; “and that we will, too, as surely as my grandmother was puried in the houf o’ Kepplemechan.”
“Ay, or as mine was puried in Fochapers kirkyard,” rejoined Angus; “but we maun let the nicht fa’ first, or it may pe said that we were the murterers o’ the puir cratur. Ochone! put this is a tam pad world. We maun hae a quaich to keep up oor courage.”
And so they set about preparing themselves for the work they had in prospect, by drinking of their own spirits by the side of the coffin; every now and then looking in the face of Julia, and lamenting the unhappy fate of their former visiter, with whom they had drunk many a good bumper, and enjoyed much good fun and frolic.