“Fair fa’ your sonsy face, and the blessing of Saint Ronald upon you!” said Swertha, in a tone betwixt coaxing and jesting; “would you keep a puir body frae mending hersell, and sae muckle gear lying on the loose sand for the lifting?—Hout, Maister Mordaunt, a ship ashore is a sight to wile the minister out of his very pu’pit in the middle of his preaching, muckle mair a puir auld ignorant wife frae her rock and her tow. And little did I get for my day’s wark—just some rags o’ cambric things, and a bit or twa of coorse claith, and sic like—the strong and the hearty get a’ thing in this warld.”
“Yes, Swertha,” replied Mordaunt, “and that is rather hard, as you must have your share of punishment in this world and the next, for robbing the poor mariners.”
“Hout, callant, wha wad punish an auld wife like me for a wheen duds?—Folk speak muckle black ill of Earl Patrick; but he was a freend to the shore, and made wise laws against ony body helping vessels that were like to gang on the breakers.[33]—And the mariners, I have heard Bryce Jagger say, lose their right frae the time keel touches sand; and, moreover, they are dead and gane, poor souls—dead and gane, and care little about warld’s wealth now—Nay, nae mair than the great Jarls and Sea-kings, in the Norse days, did about the treasures that they buried in the tombs and sepulchres auld langsyne. Did I ever tell you the sang, Maister Mordaunt, how Olaf Tryguarson garr’d hide five gold crowns in the same grave with him?”
“No, Swertha,” said Mordaunt, who took pleasure in tormenting the cunning old plunderer—“you never told me that; but I tell you, that the stranger whom Norna has taken down to the town, will be well enough to-morrow, to ask where you have hidden the goods that you have stolen from the wreck.”
“But wha will tell him a word about it, hinnie?” said Swertha, looking slyly up in her young master’s face—“The mair by token, since I maun tell ye, that I have a bonny remnant of silk amang the lave, that will make a dainty waistcoat to yoursell, the first merry-making ye gang to.”
Mordaunt could no longer forbear laughing at the cunning with which the old dame proposed to bribe off his evidence by imparting a portion of her plunder; and, desiring her to get ready what provision she had made for dinner, he returned to his father, whom he found still sitting in the same place, and nearly in the same posture, in which he had left him.
When their hasty and frugal meal was finished, Mordaunt announced to his father his purpose of going down to the town, or hamlet, to look after the shipwrecked sailor.
The elder Mertoun assented with a nod.
“He must be ill accommodated there, sir,” added his son,—a hint which only produced another nod of assent. “He seemed, from his appearance,” pursued Mordaunt, “to be of very good rank—and admitting these poor people do their best to receive him, in his present weak state, yet”——
“I know what you would say,” said his father, interrupting him; “we, you think, ought to do something towards assisting him. Go to him, then—if he lacks money, let him name the sum, and he shall have it; but, for lodging the stranger here, and holding intercourse with him, I neither can, nor will do so. I have retired to this farthest extremity of the British isles, to avoid new friends, and new faces, and none such shall intrude on me either their happiness or their misery. When you have known the world half a score of years longer, your early friends will have given you reason to remember them, and to avoid new ones for the rest of your life. Go then—why do you stop?—rid the country of the man—let me see no one about me but those vulgar countenances, the extent and character of whose petty knavery I know, and can submit to, as to an evil too trifling to cause irritation.” He then threw his purse to his son, and signed to him to depart with all speed.