Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 21

by Unknown

But George Gourlay was not content, neither then nor for several nights; nor even in that hour when, having watched guidwife Christian as she lay on the liver side, and heard the "snurr, snurr," of her deepest sleep, and listened to the corresponding knurr of the old timepiece as it beat hoarsely the key-stone hour between the night and the day, he slipt noiselessly out of bed, and listened again to ascertain whether his stealthy movement had disturbed his wife. All safe—nor sound anywhere within the house, or even in the Wynd, where midnight orgies of the new-comers sometimes annoyed the remaining grandees not yet gone over the Loch; no, nor rap, rap, upwards from the spirits in the deserted house right below him, inviting him by the call of "Let me out." Most opportune silence,—not even broken by guidwife Christian's Baudron watching with brain-lighted eyes at some hole in a meat-press. And dark too, not less than Cimmerian, save only for a small rule of moonlight, which, penetrating a circular hole in the shutter, played fitfully, as the clouds went over its source, on a point of the red curtains—sometimes disappearing altogether. By a little groping he got his hose; nor more would he venture to search for, but finding his way by touch of the finger, he reached the kitchen, where he lighted the end of a small dip. A sorry glimmer indeed; but it enabled him to lay his hands on a bunch of crooked instruments, which he lifted so stealthily that even a mouse would have continued nibbling forbidden cheese, and been not a whit alarmed. Then there was the more dangerous opening of the door leading to the tortuous stair—dangerous, for that quick ear ben the house, which knew the creak as well as she did the accents of Geordie Gourlay. Ah, tutum silentii præmium! has he not gone through all this, and reached the stair without a sneeze or sigh of mortal to disturb him!

So far was he fortunate; and slipshod in worsted of wife Christian's own working, who so little thought, as she pleased herself with the reflection of the softness for his feet, that she was to be cheated thereby, he slipped gently down the steps on this enterprise he had revolved in his mind for years and years of bygone time. Come to the identical old door. He had examined it often by candle-light before; and as for the rusty hasp and staple, and appended padlock, he knew them well, with all their difficulties to even smith's hands of his horny manipulation. He laid down the glimmering candle and paused. What a formidable object of occlusion, that door by which no one had entered for twenty years! Geordie knew nothing of the old notion, that time fills secret and vacant recesses with terrified ghosts, frightened away from the haunts of men; yet he had strange misgivings, which, being the instinctive suggestions of a rude mind, had a better chance for being true to nature. Perhaps the cold night air, to which his shirt offered small impediment, helped his tremulousness; and that was not diminished when, on seizing the padlock, a scream from some drunken unfortunate in the Wynd struck on his ear and died away in the midnight silence. Nor was he free from the pangs of conscience, as he thought of the injunctions of guidwife Christian, and, more than these, the sanctions of morality and the laws; but then he was not a thief,—only an antiquary, searching into a dungeon of time-hallowed curiosities and relics. He laid his hard hand on the rusty padlock. He was accustomed to the screech of old bolts, but that now was as if it came from some of Vulcan's chains whereby he caught the old thieves. The key-hole was entirely filled up with red rust, which, like silence stuffing up the mouth, had kept the brain-works unimpaired; so it needed no long time till, through his cunning crooks, he heard the nick of the receding bolt. A tug brought up the hasp, and now all ought to have been clear; but it was otherwise. Time, with his warpings and accumulating glues, had been there too long—the door would not give way, even to a smith's right hand; but Geordie had a potency in his back, before which other unwilling impediments of the same kind, sometimes with a debtor's resistance at the other side, had given way. That potency he applied; and the groan of the hinges responding fearfully to his ears, the vision was at length realized, of that door standing open for the passage of human beings.

So far committed, Geordie's courage came with a drawing up of his muscles; and muttering between his teeth, which risped like files, "I will face any one except the devil," he lifted the candle, the glimmer of which paled in the thick air of the opening. He waved it up and down before he entered; but it seemed as if the weak rays could not find their way in the dense atmosphere—enough, notwithstanding, to show him dimly a long lobby. He snorted as the accumulated must stimulated his nostrils; but there was more than must—the smell was that of an opened grave which had been covered with moil for a century. Yet his step was instinctively forward,—the small light flitting here and there like the fitful gleam of a magic lantern. Half groping with the left hand, as he held the candle with his right, he soon began to discover particulars. There were three doors, opening no doubt to rooms, on his left; and as the light—becoming accustomed, like men's eyes, to the dark—shone forwards towards the end, he saw another door, which was open. Desperate men—and Geordie was now wound up—aim at the farthest extremities. He made his way forward, laying down each stocking-clad foot as if in fear of being heard by the family below, whose hysterics at a tread above them at midnight, and in that house, would lead to inquiry and detection.

He came at length to the open door at the end of the lobby, and ventured in. He was presently in the middle of the kitchen, holding the candle up to see as far around him as he could. Geordie had never read of those scenes of enchantment where veritable men and women, with warm blood in their veins, were, on being touched by a wand, changed into statues with the very smile on their faces which they wore at the moment of transmutation; in which state they were to remain for a hundred years, till the wand was broken by a fairy, when they would all start into their old life. No matter if he had not, for here there was no change: the kitchen was as it had been left, twenty years before. The plate-rack, with the china set all along in regular order—no change there; nor on the row of pewter jugs, one of which stood on the dresser, with a bottle alongside, and a screw with the cork still on its spiral end. No doubt some one had been drinking just on the eve of the cessation of the living economy. A square fir-table stood in the middle, supplied with plates ready to be carried to the dining-room; and these plates were certainly not to have been supplied with imaginary meals, like those in the Eastern tale, for, as he held the candle down towards the grate, yet half filled with cinders, he saw the horizontal spit with the skeleton of a goose stuck on it. The motion of the spit had been suspended when the works ran out, and Baudron had feasted upon the flesh when it became cold. Nay, that cat, no doubt cherished, lay extended in anatomy before the fireplace. Nor could it be doubted that the roast had not been ready; for the axe lay beside a piece of coal half splintered, for the necessities of the diminished fire. An industrious house too, wherein the birr of the wheel and the sneck of the reel had sounded: the pirn was half filled, and the wisp, from which the thread had been drawn, lay over the back of a chair, as it had been taken from the waist of the servant maid. But why should not the sluttish girl's bed have been made at a time of the day when a goose was roasting for dinner? Nor did Geordie try to answer, because the question was as far from his wondering mind, as the time when he stood there himself enchanted was from the period of that marvellous dereliction.

With eyes rounder, and wider, and considerably glegger, than when he left goodwife Christian snoring in her bed, so unconscious of what her husband was to see, he retraced his steps to the kitchen-door, and turning to the right, opened that next to him. It was the dining-room. He peered about as his wonder still grew. The long oak-table, in place of the modern sideboard, ran along the farther end, whereon were decanters and two silver cups; and not far from these a salver, with a shrivelled lump, hard as whinstone, and of the form of a loaf, with a knife lying alongside. The very cushion of the settee opposite to the fireplace had preserved upon it the indentation of a human head. But much less wonderful was the cloth-covered table, with salt-cellars and spice-boxes, and plates, with knives and forks appropriated to each; for had not Geordie seen the goose at the fire in the kitchen! The indispensable pictures, too, were all round on the dingy walls—every one a portrait—staring through dust; and a special one of a female, with voluminous silks, and a high flour-starched toupee, claimed the charmed eye of the blacksmith. Even in the vertigo of his wonder, he looked stedfastly at that beautiful face; nor did the painted eye look less stedfastly at him, as if, after twenty years, it was again charmed by the vision of a living man, to the withdrawing of that eye from the figure alongside of her, so clearly that of her husband. That they were master and mistress of this very house he would have concluded, if he had been calm enough to think; but he was, alas, still under the soufflé of the bellows of romantic wonder.

Where next, if he could take his eye off that beautiful countenance? There was a middle door leading into another room: he would persevere and still explore. Holding up the fast-diminishing candle, he looked in. There was a female figure there, standing in the dark, beside a bed. It was arrayed in a long gown, reaching to the feet, of pure white (as accords). It moved. Geordie could see it plainly: it was the only thing with living motion in all that still and dreary habitation. Hitherto his hair had kept wonderfully flat and sleek, but now it began to crisp, and swirm, and rise on end; while his legs shook, and the trembling had made the glimmer oscillate in every direction, whereby sometimes it turned away from the figure, again to illuminate it sparingly, and again to vibrate off. He could not, notwithstanding his terror, recede; nay, he tried ineffectually to fix the ray on the very thing that thrilled him through every nerve. Verily, he would even go forward, under the charm of his fear, which, like other morbid feelings, would feed on the object which produced it. First a step, and then a step. The glimmer was again off the mark; and when he got to the bed, the figure was gone—according to the old law.

But the bed was too certainly there, with its deep green curtains, which were drawn close, indicating midnight; and yet the goose at the fire, and the table laid! Nor could Geordie explain the physical anomaly, probably for the reason that he did not try. His candle was wasting away with those endless oscillations: the figure in white itself had run off with the half of the short stump; and he feared again to be left in the dark, where he would have a difficulty in finding his way out. Yet he felt he must draw these deep green curtains: the broad hand of Fate was upon his shoulders. He seized them hysterically, and pulled them aside far enough to let in his head and the candle hand. A dark counterpane was covered quarter-inch thick with dust; but the odour was not now of must, it was a choking flesh and bone rot, scarcely bearable; even the light felt the heaviness, and almost died away in his tremulous fingers. There were clothes beneath the counterpane, and a long, narrow tumulus down the middle, as if a body were there, of half its usual size; but little more was visible, till the eye was turned to the top where the pillow lay, half up which the dark counterpane was drawn. There was a head on the pillow, partly covered by the coverlet, partly by a round-eared mutch—once, no doubt, white as snow, now brown as a Norway rat's back; yet Geordie would peer, and peer, till he saw an orbless socket of pure white bone, and a portion of two rows of white teeth clenched. An undoing of the clothes would have shown him—how much more? But his shaking was now a palsy of the brain, and he could not undo the suspected horror. He turned suddenly; and, as the green curtain fell with a flap, the dip lost its flame, and a black reek vied with that heavy cadaverousness. He was in the dark.

Such is the effect of degrees, that, as he groped and groped in a place where he had lost all landmarks, and the topography had become a confusion, he could have wished to see again the figure in white; which, from its own light, could surely, as a spirit, lead him out. His brain got into a swirl. If the white figure was the spirit of that thing which he had seen so partially in the bed, would it not return to flit about its own old tenement? yet not a trail of that white light cast a glance anywhere. Groping and groping, knocking his head against unknown things, he turned and turned, but could not find the lobby. He had got through another door, but not that leading outwards. He must have got into another room; for he felt and grasped things he had not heretofore seen. Then the noise he had made had such a dreary sound, falling on his strained, nerve-strung ear! His hand shrunk at everything he touched, as if it had been a deaf adder, or deadly nag—above all, a shock of hair, from which he recoiled more than ever yet, till the devious turns round and round obliterated every recollection of what he had understood of localities. So far he must have retraced his steps; for he had again the green curtain in his left hand without knowing it, and the right went slap upon that round-eared mutch, and the bone that was under the same. Recalled a little to his senses, he got at length to the kitchen, circumambulated and circummanipulated the table, and groped his way to the door in the end of the lobby, through which he had first entered. All safe now by the lines of the two walls, he hugged the outer door as if it had been a twenty years' absent friend, a father, or a wife.

Nor did he take time to relock the padlock. He had, besides, lost his crooked instruments. Ah! how sweet to get into a warm bed safe and sound, after having fancied that from such a white figure hovering round dry bones he had heard—for Geordie had read plays—

"I am that body's spirit,
Doomed for a certain time to walk the night;
And for the day confined, to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away."