“Can you get me a guide there?” said Morton.
“Your honour will rest here a’ the night? Ye’ll hardly get accommodation at Bessie’s,” said Niel, whose regard for his deceased wife’s relative by no means extended to sending company from his own house to hers.
“There is a friend,” answered Morton, “whom I am to meet with there, and I only called here to take a stirrup-cup and inquire the way.”
“Your honour had better,” answerd the landlord, with the perseverance of his calling, “send some ane to warn your friend to come on here.”
“I tell you, landlord,” answered Morton, impatiently, “that will not serve my purpose; I must go straight to this woman Maclure’s house, and I desire you to find me a guide.”
“Aweel, sir, ye’ll choose for yoursell, to be sure,” said Niel Blane, somewhat disconcerted; “but deil a guide ye’ll need if ye gae doun the water for twa mile or sae, as gin ye were bound for Milnwoodhouse, and then tak the first broken disjasked-looking road that makes for the hills,—ye’ll ken ’t by a broken ash-tree that stands at the side o’ a burn just where the roads meet; and then travel out the path,—ye canna miss Widow Maclure’s public, for deil another house or hauld is on the road for ten lang Scots miles, and that’s worth twenty English. I am sorry your honour would think o’ gaun out o’ my house the night. But my wife’s gude-sister is a decent woman, and it’s no lost that a friend gets.”
Morton accordingly paid his reckoning and departed. The sunset of the summer day placed him at the ash-tree, where the path led up towards the moors.
“Here,” he said to himself, “my misfortunes commenced; for just here, when Burley and I were about to separate on the first night we ever met, he was alarmed by the intelligence that the passes were secured by soldiers lying in wait for him. Beneath that very ash sate the old woman who apprised him of his danger. How strange that my whole fortunes should have become inseparably interwoven with that man’s, without anything more on my part than the discharge of an ordinary duty of humanity! Would to Heaven it were possible I could find my humble quiet and tranquillity of mind upon the spot where I lost them!”
Thus arranging his reflections betwixt speech and thought, he turned his horse’s head up the path.
Evening lowered around him as he advanced up the narrow dell which had once been a wood, but was now a ravine divested of trees, unless where a few, from their inaccessible situation on the edge of precipitous banks, or clinging among rocks and huge stones, defied the invasion of men and of cattle, like the scattered tribes of a conquered country, driven to take refuge in the barren strength of its mountains. These too, wasted and decayed, seemed rather to exist than to flourish, and only served to indicate what the landscape had once been. But the stream brawled down among them in all its freshness and vivacity, giving the life and animation which a mountain rivulet alone can confer on the barest and most savage scenes, and which the inhabitants of such a country miss when gazing even upon the tranquil winding of a majestic stream through plains of fertility, and beside palaces of splendour. The track of the road followed the course of the brook, which was now visible, and now only to be distinguished by its brawling heard among the stones or in the clefts of the rock that occasionally interrupted its course.