Wishing to know the peasant’s reason for avoiding the ruins, I thus addressed him:—
“This is a pretty spot, my aged friend, and the herbage looks so fresh and abundant, that I would advise thee to bring thy charge hither; and while she continues to browse, I would gladly listen to the history of thy white locks, for they seem to have been bleached in many tempests.”
“Ay, ay,” said the peasant, shaking his white head with a grave smile; “they have braved sundry tempests between sixteen and sixty; but touching this pasture, sir, I know of none who would like their cows to crop it: the aged cattle shun the place;—the bushes bloom, but bear no fruit,—the birds never build in the branches,—the children never come near to play,—and the aged never choose it for a resting-place; but, pointing it out as they pass to the young, tell them the story of its desolation. Sae ye see, sir, having nae gude-will to such a spot of earth myself, I like little to see a stranger sitting in such an unblessed place; and I would as good as advise ye to come ower wi’ me to the cowslip knoll—there are reasons mony that an honest man shouldna sit there.”
I arose at once, and seating myself beside the peasant on the cowslip knoll, desired to know something of the history of the spot from which he had just warned me. The old man looked on me with an air of embarrassment.
“I am just thinking,” said he, “that, as ye are an Englishman, I shouldna acquaint ye wi’ such a story. Ye’ll mak it, I’m doubting, a matter of reproach and vaunt when ye gae hame, how Willie Borlan o’ Caerlaverock told ye a tale of Scottish iniquity, that cowed a’ the stories in southern book or history.”
This unexpected obstacle was soon removed.
“My sage and considerate friend,” I said, “I have the blood in my bosom that will keep me from revealing such a tale to the scoffer and the scorner. I am something of a Caerlaverock man—the grandson of Marion Stobie of Dookdub.”
The peasant seized my hand—“Marion Stobie! bonnie Marion Stobie o’ Dookdub—whom I wooed sae sair, and loved sae lang!—Man, I love ye for her sake; and well was it for her braw English bridegroom that William Borlan—frail and faded now, but strong and in manhood then—was a thousand miles from Caerlaverock, rolling on the salt sea, when she was brided. Ye have the glance of her ee,—I could ken it yet amang ten thousand, gray as my head is. I will tell the grandson of bonnie Marion Stobie ony tale he likes to ask for; and the story of the Ghost and the Gowd Casket shall be foremost.”
“You may imagine then,” said the old Caerlaverock peasant, rising at once with the commencement of his story from his native dialect into very passable English—“you may imagine these ruined walls raised again in their beauty,—whitened, and covered with a coating of green broom; that garden, now desolate, filled with herbs in their season, and with flowers, hemmed round with a fence of cherry and plumtrees; and the whole possessed by a young fisherman, who won a fair subsistence for his wife and children from the waters of the Solway sea: you may imagine it, too, as far from the present time as fifty years. There are only two persons living now, who remember when the Bonne Homme Richard—the first ship ever Richard Faulder commanded—was wrecked on the Pelock sands: one of these persons now addresses you, the other is the fisherman who once owned that cottage,—whose name ought never to be named, and whose life seems lengthened as a warning to the earth, how fierce God’s judgments are. Life changes—all breathing things have their time and their season; but the Solway flows in the same beauty—Criffel rises in the same majesty—the light of morning comes, and the full moon arises now, as they did then;—but this moralizing matters little. It was about the middle of harvest—I remember the day well; it had been sultry and suffocating, accompanied by rushings of wind, sudden convulsions of the water, and cloudings of the sun:—I heard my father sigh and say, ‘Dool, dool to them found on the deep sea to-night; there will happen strong storm and fearful tempest!’
“The day closed, and the moon came over Skiddaw: all was perfectly clear and still; frequent dashings and whirling agitations of the sea were soon heard mingling with the hasty clang of the water-fowls’ wings, as they forsook the waves, and sought shelter among the hollows of the rocks. The storm was nigh. The sky darkened down at once; clap after clap of thunder followed; and lightning flashed so vividly, and so frequent, that the wide and agitated expanse of Solway was visible from side to side—from St Bees to Barnhourie. A very heavy rain, mingled with hail, succeeded; and a wind accompanied it, so fierce, and so high, that the white foam of the sea was showered as thick as snow on the summit of Caerlaverock Castle.