“Troth, hinny,” answered the Nereid, “if they let naebody but papists come there, it’ll no be muckle o’ a show in this country, for the auld harlot, as honest Mr. Blattergowl ca’s her, has few that drink o’ her cup o’ enchantments in this corner o’ our chosen lands.—But what can ail them to bury the auld carlin (a rudas wife she was) in the night-time?—I dare say our gudemither will ken.”
Here she exalted her voice, and exclaimed twice or thrice, “Gudemither! gudemither!” but, lost in the apathy of age and deafness, the aged sibyl she addressed continued plying her spindle without understanding the appeal made to her.
“Speak to your grandmither, Jenny—Od, I wad rather hail the coble half a mile aff, and the nor-wast wind whistling again in my teeth.”
“Grannie,” said the little mermaid, in a voice to which the old woman was better accustomed, “minnie wants to ken what for the Glenallan folk aye bury by candle-light in the ruing of St. Ruth!”
The old woman paused in the act of twirling the spindle, turned round to the rest of the party, lifted her withered, trembling, and clay-coloured hand, raised up her ashen-hued and wrinkled face, which the quick motion of two light-blue eyes chiefly distinguished from the visage of a corpse, and, as if catching at any touch of association with the living world, answered, “What gars the Glenallan family inter their dead by torchlight, said the lassie?—Is there a Glenallan dead e’en now?”
“We might be a’ dead and buried too,” said Maggie, “for onything ye wad ken about it;”—and then, raising her voice to the stretch of her mother-in-law’s comprehension, she added,
“It’s the auld Countess, gudemither.”
“And is she ca’d hame then at last?” said the old woman, in a voice that seemed to be agitated with much more feeling than belonged to her extreme old age, and the general indifference and apathy of her manner—“is she then called to her last account after her lang race o’ pride and power?—O God, forgie her!”
“But minnie was asking ye,” resumed the lesser querist, “what for the Glenallan family aye bury their dead by torch-light?”
“They hae aye dune sae,” said the grandmother, “since the time the Great Earl fell in the sair battle o’ the Harlaw, when they say the coronach was cried in ae day from the mouth of the Tay to the Buck of the Cabrach, that ye wad hae heard nae other sound but that of lamentation for the great folks that had fa’en fighting against Donald of the Isles. But the Great Earl’s mither was living—they were a doughty and a dour race, the women o’ the house o’ Glenallan—and she wad hae nae coronach cried for her son, but had him laid in the silence o’ midnight in his place o’ rest, without either drinking the dirge, or crying the lament. She said he had killed enow that day he died, for the widows and daughters o’ the Highlanders he had slain to cry the coronach for them they had lost, and for her son too; and sae she laid him in his gave wi’ dry eyes, and without a groan or a wail. And it was thought a proud word o’ the family, and they aye stickit by it—and the mair in the latter times, because in the night-time they had mair freedom to perform their popish ceremonies by darkness and in secrecy than in the daylight—at least that was the case in my time; they wad hae been disturbed in the day-time baith by the law and the commons of Fairport—they may be owerlooked now, as I have heard: the warlds changed—I whiles hardly ken whether I am standing or sitting, or dead or living.”