Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




Some people have a trick of describing incidents as having happened
within their own observation, when in fact they were at the time lying
asleep in bed, and disturbing the whole house with the snore of their
dormitory. Such is too often the character of the eyewitnesses of the
present age. Now, we would not claim personal acquaintance with an
incident we had not seen--no, not for a hundred guineas per sheet; and,
therefore, we warn the reader not to believe the following little story
about an eagle and child (by the way, that is the Derby crest, and a
favourite sign of inns in the north of England) on our authority. "I
tell the tale as 'twas told to me," by the schoolmaster of Naemanslaws,
in the shire of Ayr; and if the incident never occurred, then must he
have been one of the greatest liars that ever taught the young idea how
to shoot. For our single selves, we are by nature credulous. Many
extraordinary things happen in this life, and though "seeing is
believing," so likewise "believing is seeing," as every one must allow
who reads these our Recreations.

Almost all the people in the parish were leading in their meadow-hay
(there were not in all its ten miles square twenty acres of ryegrass)
on the same day of midsummer, so drying was the sunshine and the
wind,--and huge heaped-up wains, that almost hid from view the horses
that drew them along the sward, beginning to get green with second
growth, were moving in all directions towards the snug farmyards. Never
had the parish seemed before so populous. Jocund was the balmy air with
laughter, whistle, and song. But the Tree-gnomons threw the shadow of
"one o'clock" on the green dial-face of the earth--the horses were
unyoked, and took instantly to grazing--groups of men, women, lads,
lasses, and children collected under grove, and bush, and
hedgerow--graces were pronounced, some of them rather too tedious in
presence of the mantling milk-cans, bullion-bars of butter, and
crackling cakes; and the great Being who gave them that day their daily
bread, looked down from his Eternal Throne, well pleased with the piety
of his thankful creatures.

The great Golden Eagle, the pride and the pest of the parish, stooped
down, and away with something in his talons. One single sudden female
shriek--and then shouts and outcries as if a church spire had tumbled
down on a congregation at a sacrament. "Hannah Lamond's bairn! Hannah
Lamond's bairn!" was the loud fast-spreading cry. "The Eagle's taen aff
Hannah Lamond's bairn!" and many hundred feet were in another instant
hurrying towards the mountain. Two miles of hill and dale, and copse and
shingle, and many intersecting brooks, lay between; but in an incredibly
short time the foot of the mountain was alive with people. The eyrie was
well known, and both old birds were visible on the rock-ledge. But who
shall scale that dizzy cliff, which Mark Steuart the sailor, who had
been at the storming of many a fort, once attempted in vain? All kept
gazing, or weeping, or wringing of hands, rooted to the ground, or
running back and forwards, like so many ants, essaying their new wings,
in discomfiture. "What's the use--what's the use o' ony puir human
means? We have nae power but in prayer!" And many knelt down--fathers
and mothers thinking of their own babies--as if they would force the
deaf heavens to hear.

Hannah Lamond had been all this while sitting on a stone, with a face
perfectly white, and eyes like those of a mad person, fixed on the
eyrie. Nobody noticed her; for strong as all sympathies with her had
been at the swoop of the Eagle, they were now swallowed up in the agony
of eyesight. "Only last Sabbath was my sweet wee wean baptised in the
name o' the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" and on uttering
these words, she flew off through the brakes and over the huge stones,
up--up--up--faster than ever huntsman ran in to the death--fearless as a
goat playing among the precipices. No one doubted, no one could doubt,
that she would soon be dashed to pieces. But have not people who walk in
their sleep, obedient to the mysterious guidance of dreams, clomb the
walls of old ruins, and found footing, even in decrepitude, along the
edge of unguarded battlements, and down dilapidated stair-cases deep as
draw-wells or coal-pits, and returned with open, fixed, and unseeing
eyes, unharmed, to their beds at midnight? It is all the work of the
soul, to whom the body is a slave; and shall not the agony of a mother's
passion--who sees her baby, whose warm mouth had just left her breast,
hurried off by a demon to a hideous death--bear her limbs aloft wherever
there is dust to dust, till she reach that devouring den, and fiercer
and more furious than any bird of prey that ever bathed its beak in
blood, throttle the fiends that with their heavy wing would fain flap
her down the cliffs, and hold up her child in deliverance?

No stop--no stay--she knew not that she drew her breath. Beneath her
feet Providence fastened every loose stone, and to her hands
strengthened every root. How was she ever to descend? That fear, then,
but once crossed her heart, as up--up--up--to the little image made of
her own flesh and blood. "The God who holds me now from perishing--will
not the same God save me when my child is at my breast?" Down came the
fierce rushing of the Eagle's wings--each savage bird dashing close to
her head, so that she saw the yellow of their wrathful eyes. All at once
they quailed, and were cowed. Yelling, they flew off to the stump of an
ash jutting out of a cliff, a thousand feet above the cataract; and the
Christian mother, falling across the eyrie, in the midst of bones and
blood, clasped her child--dead--dead--no doubt--but unmangled and
untorn, and swaddled up just as it was when she laid it down asleep
among the fresh hay in a nook of the harvest-field. Oh! what pang of
perfect blessedness transfixed her heart from that faint, feeble
cry--"It lives! it lives! it lives!" and baring her bosom, with loud
laughter, and eyes dry as stones, she felt the lips of the unconscious
innocent once more murmuring at the fount of life and love. "O, thou
great and thou dreadful God! whither hast thou brought me--one of the
most sinful of thy creatures? Oh! save me lest I perish, even for thy
own name's sake! O Thou, who died to save sinners, have mercy upon me!"
Cliffs, chasms, blocks of stone, and the skeletons of old
trees--far--far down--and dwindled into specks a thousand creatures of
her own kind, stationary, or running to and fro! Was that the sound of
the waterfall, or the faint roar of voices? Is that her native
strath?--and that tuft of trees, does it contain the hut in which stands
the cradle of her child? Never more shall it be rocked by her foot! Here
must she die--and when her breast is exhausted--her baby too. And those
horrid beaks, and eyes, and talons, and wings will return, and her child
will be devoured at last, even within the dead arms that can protect it
no more.

Where, all this while, was Mark Steuart, the sailor? Half-way up the
cliffs. But his eyes had got dim, and his head dizzy, and his heart
sick--and he who had so often reefed the topgallant-sail, when at
midnight the coming of the gale was heard afar, covered his face with
his hands, and dared look no longer on the swimming heights. "And who
will take care of my poor bedridden mother?" thought Hannah, who,
through exhaustion of so many passions, could no more retain in her
grasp the hope she had clutched in despair. A voice whispered, "God."
She looked round expecting to see a spirit; but nothing moved except a
rotten branch, that, under its own weight, broke off from the crumbling
rock. Her eye--by some secret sympathy with the inanimate
object--watched its fall; and it seemed to stop, not far off, on a small
platform. Her child was bound upon her shoulders--she knew not how or
when--but it was safe--and scarcely daring to open her eyes, she slid
down the shelving rocks, and found herself on a small piece of firm
root-bound soil, with the tops of bushes appearing below. With fingers
suddenly strengthened into the power of iron, she swung herself down by
brier, and broom, and heather, and dwarf-birch. There, a loosened stone
leapt over a ledge and no sound was heard, so profound was its fall.
There, the shingle rattled down the screes, and she hesitated not to
follow. Her feet bounded against the huge stone that stopped them; but
she felt no pain. Her body was callous as the cliff. Steep as the wall
of a house was now the side of the precipice. But it was matted with ivy
centuries old--long ago dead, and without a single green leaf--but with
thousands of arm-thick stems petrified into the rock, and covering it as
with a trellice. She felt her baby on her neck--and with hands and feet
clung to that fearful ladder. Turning round her head, and looking down,
she saw the whole population of the parish--so great was the
multitude--on their knees. She heard the voice of psalms--a hymn
breathing the spirit of one united prayer. Sad and solemn was the
strain--but nothing dirge-like--sounding not of death, but deliverance.
Often had she sung that tune--perhaps the very words--but them she heard
not--in her own hut, she and her mother--or in the kirk, along with all
the congregation. An unseen hand seemed fastening her fingers to the
ribs of ivy, and in sudden inspiration, believing that her life was to
be saved, she became almost as fearless as if she had been changed into
a winged creature. Again her feet touched stones and earth--the psalm
was hushed--but a tremulous sobbing voice was close beside her, and a
she-goat, with two little kids at her feet. "Wild heights," thought she,
"do these creatures climb--but the dam will lead down her kids by the
easiest paths; for in the brute creatures holy is the power of a
mother's love!" and turning round her head, she kissed her sleeping
baby, and for the first time she wept.

Overhead frowned the front of the precipice, never touched before by
human hand or foot. No one had ever dreamt of scaling it, and the Golden
Eagles knew that well in their instinct, as, before they built their
eyrie, they had brushed it with their wings. But the downwards part of
the mountain-side, though scarred, and seamed, and chasmed, was yet
accessible--and more than one person in the parish had reached the
bottom of the Glead's Cliff. Many were now attempting it--and ere the
cautious mother had followed her dumb guides a hundred yards, through
among dangers that, although enough to terrify the stoutest heart, were
traversed by her without a shudder, the head of one man appeared, and
then the head of another, and she knew that God had delivered her and
her child into the care of their fellow-creatures. Not a word was
spoken--she hushed her friends with her hands--and with uplifted eyes
pointed to the guides sent to her by Heaven. Small green plats, where
those creatures nibble the wildflowers, became now more
frequent--trodden lines, almost as plain as sheep-paths, showed that the
dam had not led her young into danger; and now the brushwood dwindled
away into straggling shrubs, and the party stood on a little eminence
above the stream, and forming part of the strath.

There had been trouble and agitation, much sobbing and many tears, among
the multitude, while the mother was scaling the cliffs--sublime was the
shout that echoed afar the moment she reached the eyrie--then had
succeeded a silence deep as death--in a little while arose that hymning
prayer, succeeded by mute supplication--the wildness of thankful and
congratulatory joy had next its sway--and now that her salvation was
sure, the great crowd rustled like a wind-swept wood. And for whose sake
was all this alternation of agony? A poor humble creature, unknown to
many even by name--one who had had but few friends, nor wished for
more--contented to work all day, here--there--anywhere--that she might
be able to support her aged mother and her child--and who on Sabbath
took her seat in an obscure pew, set apart for paupers, in the kirk.

"Fall back, and give her fresh air," said the old minister of the
parish; and the ring of close faces widened round her lying as in death.
"Gie me the bonny bit bairn into my arms," cried first one mother and
then another, and it was tenderly handed round the circle of kisses,
many of the snooded maidens bathing its face in tears. "There's no a
single scratch about the puir innocent, for the Eagle, you see, maun hae
stuck its talons into the lang claes and the shawl. Blin', blin' maun
they be who see not the finger o' God in this thing!"

Hannah started up from her swoon--and, looking wildly round, cried, "Oh!
the Bird--the Bird!--the Eagle--the Eagle!--the Eagle has carried off my
bonny wee Walter--is there nane to pursue?" A neighbour put her baby
into her breast; and shutting her eyes, and smiting her forehead, the
sorely bewildered creature said in a low voice, "Am I wauken--oh! tell
me if I'm wauken--or if a' this be but the wark o' a fever."

Hannah Lamond was not yet twenty years old, and although she was a
mother--and you may guess what a mother--yet--frown not, fair and gentle
reader--frown not, pure and stainless as thou art--to her belonged not
the sacred name of wife--and that baby was the child of sin and of
shame--yes--"the child of misery, baptised in tears!" She had
loved--trusted--been betrayed--and deserted. In sorrow and
solitude--uncomforted and despised--she bore her burden. Dismal had been
the hour of travail--and she feared her mother's heart would have
broken, even when her own was cleft in twain. But how healing is
forgiveness--alike to the wounds of the forgiving and the forgiven! And
then Hannah knew that, although guilty before God, her guilt was not
such as her fellow-creatures deemed it--for there were dreadful secrets
which should never pass her lips against the father of her child. So she
bowed down her young head, and soiled it with the ashes of
repentance--walking with her eyes on the ground as she again entered the
kirk--yet not fearing to lift them up to heaven during the prayer. Her
sadness inspired a general pity--she was excluded from no house she had
heart to visit--no coarse comment, no ribald jest accompanied the notice
people took of her baby--no licentious rustic presumed on her frailty;
for the pale, melancholy face of the nursing mother, weeping as she sung
the lullaby, forbade all such approach--and an universal sentiment of
indignation drove from the parish the heartless and unprincipled
seducer--if all had been known, too weak word for his crime--who left
thus to pine in sorrow, and in shame far worse than sorrow, one who till
her unhappy fall had been held up by every mother as an example to her
daughters.

Never had she striven to cease to love her betrayer--but she had
striven--and an appeased conscience had enabled her to do so--to think
not of him now that he had deserted her for ever. Sometimes his image,
as well in love as in wrath, passed before the eye of her heart--but she
closed it in tears of blood, and the phantom disappeared. Thus all the
love towards him that slept--but was not dead--arose in yearnings of
still more exceeding love towards his child. Round its head was gathered
all hope of comfort--of peace--of reward of her repentance. One of its
smiles was enough to brighten up the darkness of a whole day. In her
breast--on her knee--in its cradle, she regarded it with a perpetual
prayer. And this feeling it was, with all the overwhelming tenderness of
affection, all the invigorating power of passion, that, under the hand
of God, bore her up and down that fearful mountain's brow, and after the
hour of rescue and deliverance, stretched her on the greensward like a
corpse.

The rumour of the miracle circled the mountain's base, and a strange
story without names had been told to the Wood-ranger of the
Cairn-Forest, by a wayfaring man. Anxious to know what truth there was
in it, he crossed the hill, and making his way through the sullen crowd,
went up to the eminence, and beheld her whom he had so wickedly ruined,
and so basely deserted. Hisses, and groans, and hootings, and fierce
eyes, and clenched hands assailed and threatened him on every side.

His heart died within him, not in fear, but in remorse. What a worm he
felt himself to be! And fain would he have become a worm, that, to
escape all that united human scorn, he might have wriggled away in slime
into some hole of the earth. But the meek eye of Hannah met his in
forgiveness--an un-upbraiding tear--a faint smile of love. All his
better nature rose within him, all his worse nature was quelled. "Yes,
good people, you do right to cover me with your scorn. But what is your
scorn to the wrath of God? The Evil One has often been with me in the
woods; the same voice that once whispered me to murder her--but here I
am--not to offer retribution--for that may not--will not--must not
be--guilt must not mate with innocence. But here I proclaim that
innocence. I deserve death, and I am willing here, on this spot, to
deliver myself into the hands of justice. Allan Calder--I call on you to
seize your prisoner."

The moral sense of the people, when instructed by knowledge and
enlightened by religion, what else is it but the voice of God! Their
anger subsided into a stern satisfaction--and that soon softened, in
sight of her who alone aggrieved alone felt nothing but forgiveness,
into a confused compassion for the man who, bold and bad as he had been,
had undergone many solitary torments, and nearly fallen in his
uncompanioned misery into the power of the Prince of Darkness. The old
clergyman, whom all reverenced, put the contrite man's hand in hers,
whom he swore to love and cherish all his days. And, ere summer was
over, Hannah was the mistress of a family, in a house not much inferior
to a Manse. Her mother, now that not only her daughter's reputation was
freed from stain, but her innocence also proved, renewed her youth. And
although the worthy schoolmaster, who told us the tale so much better
than we have been able to repeat it, confessed that the wood-ranger
never became altogether a saint--nor acquired the edifying habit of
pulling down the corners of his mouth, and turning up the whites of his
eyes--yet he assured us that he never afterwards heard anything very
serious laid to his prejudice--that he became in due time an elder of
the Kirk--gave his children a religious education--erring only in making
rather too much of a pet of his eldest born, whom, even when grown up to
manhood, he never called by any other name than the Eaglet.




CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

THIRD CANTICLE.


The Raven! In a solitary glen sits down on a stone the roaming
pedestrian, beneath the hush and gloom of a thundery sky that has not
yet begun to growl, and hears no sounds but that of an occasional big
rain-drop, plashing on the bare bent; the crag high overhead sometimes
utters a sullen groan--the pilgrim, starting, listens, and the noise is
repeated, but instead of a groan, a croak--croak--croak! manifestly from
a thing with life. A pause of silence! and hollower and hoarser the
croak is heard from the opposite side of the glen. Eyeing the black
sultry heaven, he feels the warm plash on his face, but sees no bird on
the wing. By-and-by something black lifts itself slowly and heavily up
from a precipice, in deep shadow; and before it has cleared the
rock-range, and entered the upper region of air, he knows it to be a
Raven. The creature seems wroth to be disturbed in his solitude, and in
his strong straight-forward flight aims at the head of another glen; but
he wheels round at the iron barrier, and, alighting among the heather,
folds his huge massy wings, and leaps about as if in anger, with the
same savage croak--croak--croak! No other bird so like a demon--and
should you chance to break a leg in the desert, and be unable to crawl
to a hut, your life is not worth twenty-four hours' purchase. Never was
there a single hound in Lord Darlington's packs, since his lordship
became a mighty hunter, with nostrils so fine as those of that feathered
fiend, covered though they be with strong hairs or bristles, that grimly
adorn a bill of formidable dimensions, and apt for digging out
eye-socket and splitting skull-structure of dying man or beast. That
bill cannot tear in pieces like the eagle's beak, nor are its talons so
powerful to smite as to compress--but a better bill for
cut-and-thrust--- push, carte, and tierce--the dig dismal and the plunge
profound--belongs to no other bird. It inflicts great gashes; nor needs
the wound to be repeated on the same spot. Feeder foul and obscene! to
thy nostril upturned "into the murky air, sagacious of thy quarry from
afar," sweeter is the scent of carrion, than to the panting lover's
sense and soul the fragrance of his own virgin's breath and bosom, when,
lying in her innocence in his arms, her dishevelled tresses seem laden
with something more ethereally pure than "Sabean odours from the spicy
shores of Araby the Blest."

The Raven dislikes all animal food that has not a deathy smack. It
cannot be thought that he has any reverence or awe of the mystery of
life. Neither is he a coward; at least, not such a coward as to fear the
dying kick of a lamb or sheep. Yet so long as his victim can stand, or
sit, or lie in a strong struggle, the raven keeps aloof--hopping in a
circle that narrows and narrows as the sick animal's nostrils keep
dilating in convulsions, and its eyes grow dimmer and more dim. When the
prey is in the last agonies, croaking, he leaps upon the breathing
carcass, and whets his bill upon his own blue-ringed legs, steadied by
claws in the fleece, yet not so fiercely inserted as to get entangled
and fast. With his large level-crowned head bobbing up and down, and
turned a little first to one side and then to another, all the while a
self-congratulatory leer in his eye, he unfolds his wings, and then
folds them again, twenty or thirty times, as if dubious how to begin to
gratify his lust of blood; and frequently, when just on the brink of
consummation, jumps off side, back, or throat, and goes dallying about,
round and round, and off to a small safe distance, scenting, almost
snorting, the smell of the blood running cold, colder, and more cold. At
last the poor wretch is still; and then, without waiting till it is
stiff, he goes to work earnestly and passionately, and taught by horrid
instinct how to reach the entrails, revels in obscene gluttony, and
preserves, it may be, eye, lip, palate, and brain, for the last course
of his meal, gorged to the throat, incapacitated to return thanks, and
with difficulty able either to croak or to fly.

The Raven, it is thought, is in the habit of living upwards of a hundred
years, perhaps a couple of centuries. Children grow into girls, girls
into maidens, maidens into wives, wives into widows, widows into old
decrepit crones, and crones into dust; and the Raven who wons at the
head of the glen, is aware of all the births, baptisms, marriages,
deathbeds, and funerals. Certain it is--at least so men say--that he is
aware of the deathbeds and the funerals. Often does he flap his wings
against door and window of hut, when the wretch within is in extremity,
or, sitting on the heather-roof, croaks horror into the dying dream. As
the funeral winds its way towards the mountain cemetery he hovers aloft
in the air--or, swooping down nearer to the bier, precedes the corpse
like a sable saulie. While the party of friends are carousing in the
house of death, he too, scorning funeral-baked meats, croaks hoarse
hymns and dismal dirges as he is devouring the pet-lamb of the little
grandchild of the deceased. The shepherds maintain that the Raven is
sometimes heard to laugh. Why not, as well as the hyena? Then it is that
he is most diabolical, for he knows that his laughter is prophetic of
human death. True it is, and it would be injustice to conceal the fact,
much more to deny it, that Ravens of old fed Elijah; but that was the
punishment of some old sin committed by Two who before the Flood bore
the human shape, and who, soon as the Ark rested on Mount Ararat, flew
off to the desolation of swamped forests and the disfigured solitude of
the drowned glens. Dying Ravens hide themselves from daylight in
burial-places among the rocks, and are seen hobbling into their tombs,
as if driven thither by a flock of fears, and crouching under a remorse
that disturbs instinct, even as if it were conscience. So sings and says
the Celtic superstition--muttered to us in a dream--adding that there
are Raven ghosts, great black bundles of feathers, for ever in the
forest, night-hunting in famine for prey, emitting a last feeble croak
at the blush of dawn, and then all at once invisible.

There can be no doubt that that foolish Quaker, who some twenty years
ago perished at the foot of a crag near Red Tarn, "far in the bosom of
Helvyllyn," was devoured by ravens. We call him foolish, because no
adherent of that sect was ever qualified to find his way among mountains
when the day was shortish, and the snow, if not very deep, yet wreathed
and pit-falled. In such season and weather, no place so fit for a Quaker
as the fireside. Not to insist, however, on that point, with what glee
the few hungry and thirsty old Ravens belonging to the Red Tarn Club
must have flocked to the Ordinary! Without asking each other to which
part this, that, or the other croaker chose to be helped, the maxim
which regulated their behaviour at table was doubtless, "First come,
first served." Forthwith each bill was busy, and the scene became
animated in the extreme. There must have been great difficulty to the
most accomplished of the carrion in stripping the Quaker of his drab.
The broad-brim had probably escaped with the first intention, and after
going before the wind half across the unfrozen Tarn, capsized, filled,
and sunk. Picture to yourself so many devils, all in glossy black
feather coats and dark breeches, with waistcoats inclining to blue,
pully-hawlying away at the unresisting figure of the follower of Fox,
and getting first vexed and then irritated with the pieces of choking
soft armour in which, five or six ply thick, his inviting carcass was so
provokingly insheathed! First a drab duffle cloak--then a drab
wraprascal--then a drab broadcloth coat, made in the oldest
fashion--then a drab waistcoat of the same--then a drab under-waistcoat
of thinner mould--then a linen-shirt, somewhat drabbish--then a
flannel-shirt, entirely so, and most odorous to the nostrils of the
members of the Red Tarn Club. All this must have taken a couple of days
at the least; so, supposing the majority of members assembled about
eight A.M. on the Sabbath morning, it must have been well on to twelve
o'clock on Monday night before the club could have comfortably sat down
to supper. During these two denuding days, we can well believe that the
President must have been hard put to it to keep the secretary,
treasurer, chaplain, and other office-bearers, ordinary and
extraordinary members, from giving a sly dig at Obadiah's face, so
tempting in the sallow hue and rank smell of first corruption. Dead
bodies keep well in frost; but the subject had in this case probably
fallen from a great height, had his bones broken to smash, his flesh
bruised and mangled. The President, therefore, we repeat it, even
although a raven of great age and authority, must have had inconceivable
difficulty in controlling the Club. The croak of
"Order!--order!--Chair!--chair!"--must have been frequent; and had the
office not been hereditary, the old gentleman would no doubt have thrown
it up, and declared the chair vacant. All obstacles and obstructions
having been by indefatigable activity removed, no attempt, we may well
believe, was made by the seneschal to place the guests according to
their rank, above or below the salt, and the party sat promiscuously
down to a late supper. Not a word was tittered during the first
half-hour, till a queer-looking mortal, who had spent several years of
his prime of birdhood at old Calgarth, and picked up a tolerable command
of the Westmoreland dialect by means of the Hamiltonian system,
exclaimed, "I'se weel nee brussen--there be's Mister Wudsworth--Ho, ho,
ho!" It was indeed the bard, benighted in the Excursion from Patterdale
to Jobson's Cherry-Tree; and the Red Tarn Club, afraid of having their
orgies put into blank verse, sailed away in floating fragments beneath
the moon and stars.

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