She extended her hand, but I clasped her to my bosom. She sighed as
she extricated herself from the embrace which she permitted, escaped
to the door which led to her own apartment, and I saw her no more.
Months pass, in a mist of danger and intrigue, before the lovers meet again in the dusk and the solitude.
"Mr. Francis Osbaldistone," cries the girl's voice through the
moonlight, "should not whistle his favourite airs when he wishes to
remain undiscovered."
And Diana Vernon—for she, wrapped in a horseman's cloak, was the
last speaker—whistled in playful mimicry the second part of the
tune, which was on my lips when they came up.
Surely there was never, in story or in song, a lady so loving and so light of heart, save Rosalind alone. Her face touches Frank's, as she says goodbye for ever "It was a moment never to be forgotten, inexpressibly bitter, yet mixed with a sensation of pleasure so deeply soothing and affecting as at once to unlock all the floodgates of the heart."
She rides into the night, her lover knows the hysterica passio of poor Lear, but "I had scarce given vent to my feelings in this paroxysm ere I was ashamed of my weakness."
These were men and women who knew how to love, and how to live. All men who read "Rob Roy" are innocent rivals of Frank Osbaldistone. Di Vernon holds her place in our hearts with Rosalind, and these airy affections, like the actual emotions which they mimic, are not matters for words. This lady, so gay, so brave, so witty and fearless, so tender and true, who "endured trials which might have dignified the history of a martyr, . . . who spent the day in darkness and the night in vigil, and never breathed a murmur of weakness or complaint," is as immortal in men's memories as the actual heroine of the White Rose, Flora Macdonald. Her place is with Helen and Antigone, with Rosalind and Imogen, the deathless daughters of dreams. She brightens the world as she passes, and our own hearts tell us all the story when Osbaldistone says, "You know how I lamented her."
In the central interest, which, for once, is the interest of love, "Rob Roy" attains the nobility, the reserve, the grave dignity of the highest art. It is not easy to believe that Frank Osbaldistone is worthy of his lady; but here no man is a fair judge. In the four novels—"Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The Antiquary," and "Rob Roy"—which we have studied, the hero has always been a young poet. Waverley versified; so did Mannering; Lovel "had attempted a few lyrical pieces;" and, in Osbaldistone's rhymes, Scott parodied his own
blast of that dread horn
On Fontarabian echoes borne.
All the heroes, then, have been poets, and Osbaldistone's youth may have been suggested by Scott's memories of his own, and of the father who "feared that he would never be better than a gangrel scrapegut." Like Henry Morton, in "Old Mortality," Frank Osbaldistone is on the political side taken by Scott's judgment, not by his emotions. To make Di Vernon convert him to Jacobitism would have been to repeat the story of Waverley. Still, he would have been more sympathetic if he had been converted. He certainly does not lack spirit, as a sportsman, or "on an occasion," as Sir William Hope says in "The Scots' Fencing Master," when he encounters Rashleigh in the college gardens. Frank, in short, is all that a hero should be, and is glorified by his affection.
Of the other characters, perhaps Rob Roy is too sympathetically drawn. The materials for a judgment are afforded by Scott's own admirable historical introduction. The Rob Roy who so calmly "played booty," and kept a foot in either camp, certainly falls below the heroic. His language has been criticised in late years, and it has been insisted that the Highlanders never talked Lowland Scotch. But Scott has anticipated these cavils in the eighteenth chapter of the second volume. Certainly no Lowlander knew the Highlanders better than he did, and his ear for dialect was as keen as his musical ear was confessedly obtuse. Scott had the best means of knowing whether Helen MacGregor would be likely to soar into heroics as she is apt to do. In fact, here "we may trust the artist."