“Ay!” said the surprised mendicant; “how ken ye that sae weel?”
“Lord Glenallan told me himself,” answered the Antiquary; “so there is no delation—no breach of trust on your part; and as he wishes me to take her evidence down on some important family matters, I chose to bring you with me, because in her situation, hovering between dotage and consciousness, it is possible that your voice and appearance may awaken trains of recollection which I should otherwise have no means of exciting. The human mind—what are you about, Hector?”
“I was only whistling for the dog, sir,” replied the Captain “she always roves too wide—I knew I should be troublesome to you.”
“Not at all, not at all,” said Oldbuck, resuming the subject of his disquisition—“the human mind is to be treated like a skein of ravelled silk, where you must cautiously secure one free end before you can make any progress in disentangling it.”
“I ken naething about that,” said the gaberlunzie; “but an my auld acquaintance be hersell, or anything like hersell, she may come to wind us a pirn. It’s fearsome baith to see and hear her when she wampishes about her arms, and gets to her English, and speaks as if she were a prent book, let a-be an auld fisher’s wife. But, indeed, she had a grand education, and was muckle taen out afore she married an unco bit beneath hersell. She’s aulder than me by half a score years—but I mind weel eneugh they made as muckle wark about her making a half-merk marriage wi’ Simon Mucklebackit, this Saunders’s father, as if she had been ane o’ the gentry. But she got into favour again, and then she lost it again, as I hae heard her son say, when he was a muckle chield; and then they got muckle siller, and left the Countess’s land, and settled here. But things never throve wi’ them. Howsomever, she’s a weel-educate woman, and an she win to her English, as I hae heard her do at an orra time, she may come to fickle us a’.”
CHAPTER NINETEENTH
Life ebbs from such old age, unmarked and silent,
As the slow neap-tide leaves yon stranded galley.—
Late she rocked merrily at the least impulse
That wind or wave could give; but now her keel
Is settling on the sand, her mast has ta’en
An angle with the sky, from which it shifts not.
Each wave receding shakes her less and less,
Till, bedded on the strand, she shall remain
Useless as motionless.
Old Play.
As the Antiquary lifted the latch of the hut, he was surprised to hear the shrill tremulous voice of Elspeth chanting forth an old ballad in a wild and doleful recitative.
“The herring loves the merry moonlight,
The mackerel loves the wind,
But the oyster loves the dredging sang,
For they come of a gentle kind.”