‘Captain,’ said Dinmont, in a half whisper, ‘I wish she binna uncanny! her words dinna seem to come in God’s name, or like other folks’. Od, they threep in our country that there ARE sic things.’
‘Don’t be afraid, my friend,’ whispered Bertram in return.
‘Fear’d! fient a haet care I,’ said the dauntless farmer; ‘be she witch or deevil, it’s a’ ane to Dandie Dinmont.’
‘Haud your peace, gudeman,’ said Meg, looking sternly over her shoulder; ‘is this a time or place for you to speak, think ye?’
‘But, my good friend,’ said Bertram, ‘as I have no doubt in your good faith or kindness, which I have experienced, you should in return have some confidence in me; I wish to know where you are leading us.’
‘There’s but ae answer to that, Henry Bertram,’ said the sibyl. ‘I swore my tongue should never tell, but I never said my finger should never show. Go on and meet your fortune, or turn back and lose it: that’s a’ I hae to say.’
‘Go on then,’ answered Bertram; ‘I will ask no more questions.’
They descended into the glen about the same place where Meg had formerly parted from Bertram. She paused an instant beneath the tall rock where he had witnessed the burial of a dead body and stamped upon the ground, which, notwithstanding all the care that had been taken, showed vestiges of having been recently moved. ‘Here rests ane,’ she said; ‘he’ll maybe hae neibours sune.’
She then moved up the brook until she came to the ruined hamlet, where, pausing with a look of peculiar and softened interest before one of the gables which was still standing, she said in a tone less abrupt, though as solemn as before, ‘Do you see that blackit and broken end of a sheeling? There my kettle boiled for forty years; there I bore twelve buirdly sons and daughters. Where are they now? where are the leaves that were on that auld ash tree at Martinmas! The west wind has made it bare; and I’m stripped too. Do you see that saugh tree? it’s but a blackened rotten stump now. I’ve sate under it mony a bonnie summer afternoon, when it hung its gay garlands ower the poppling water. I’ve sat there, and,’ elevating her voice, ‘I’ve held you on my knee, Henry Bertram, and sung ye sangs of the auld barons and their bloody wars. It will ne’er be green again, and Meg Merrilies will never sing sangs mair, be they blythe or sad. But ye’ll no forget her, and ye’ll gar big up the auld wa’s for her sake? And let somebody live there that’s ower gude to fear them of another warld. For if ever the dead came back amang the living, I’ll be seen in this glen mony a night after these crazed banes are in the mould.’
The mixture of insanity and wild pathos with which she spoke these last words, with her right arm bare and extended, her left bent and shrouded beneath the dark red drapery of her mantle, might have been a study worthy of our Siddons herself. ‘And now,’ she said, resuming at once the short, stern, and hasty tone which was most ordinary to her, ‘let us to the wark, let us to the wark.’