There was an obvious reluctance on the part of the guests to be the next in consulting the oracle of the tent.
“Gude news are welcome to some folks, if they came frae the deil himsell,” said Mistress Baby Yellowley, addressing the Lady Glowrowrum,—for a similarity of disposition in some respects had made a sort of intimacy betwixt them—“but I think, my leddy, that this has ower mickle of rank witchcraft in it to have the countenance of douce Christian folks like you and me, my leddy.”
“There may be something in what you say, my dame,” replied the good Lady Glowrowrum; “but we Hialtlanders are no just like other folks; and this woman, if she be a witch, being the Fowd’s friend and near kinswoman, it will be ill taen if we haena our fortunes spaed like a’ the rest of them; and sae my nieces may e’en step forward in their turn, and nae harm dune. They will hae time to repent, ye ken, in the course of nature, if there be ony thing wrang in it, Mistress Yellowley.”
While others remained under similar uncertainty and apprehension, Halcro, who saw by the knitting of the old Udaller’s brows, and by a certain impatient shuffle of his right foot, like the motion of a man who with difficulty refrains from stamping, that his patience began to wax rather thin, gallantly declared, that he himself would, in his own person, and not as a procurator for others, put the next query to the Pythoness. He paused a minute—collected his rhymes, and thus addressed her:
Claud Halcro.
“Mother doubtful, Mother dread,
Dweller of the Fitful-head,
Thou hast conn’d full many a rhyme,
That lives upon the surge of time:
Tell me, shall my lays be sung,
Like Hacon’s of the golden tongue,
Long after Halcro’s dead and gone?
Or, shall Hialtland’s minstrel own
One note to rival glorious John?”
The voice of the sibyl immediately replied, from her sanctuary,
Norna.
“The infant loves the rattle’s noise;
Age, double childhood, hath its toys;
But different far the descant rings,
As strikes a different hand the strings.
The Eagle mounts the polar sky—
The Imber-goose, unskill’d to fly,
Must be content to glide along,
Where seal and sea-dog list his song.”
Halcro bit his lip, shrugged his shoulders, and then, instantly recovering his good-humour, and the ready, though slovenly power of extemporaneous composition, with which long habit had invested him, he gallantly rejoined,