Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




The deep religion of that troubled time had sanctified the Strangers
almost into an angelic character; and when the little kirk-bells were
again heard tinkling through the air of peace (the number of the martyrs
being complete), the beauty with which their living foreheads had been
invested, reappeared to the eyes of imagination, as the Poets whom
Nature kept to herself walked along the moonlight hills. "The Blessed
Family," which had been as a household word, appertaining to them while
they lived, now when centuries have gone by, is still full of a dim but
divine meaning; the spirit of the tradition having remained, while its
framework has almost fallen into decay.

How beautifully emerges that sun-stricken Cottage from the rocks, that
all around it are floating in a blue vapoury light! Were we so disposed,
methinks we could easily write a little book entirely about the obscure
people that have lived and died about that farm, by name LOGAN BRAES.
Neither is it without its old traditions. One May-day long ago--some two
centuries since--that rural festival was there interrupted by a
thunderstorm, and the party of youths and maidens, driven from the
budding arbours, were all assembled in the ample kitchen. The house
seemed to be in the very heart of the thunder; and the master began to
read, without declaring it to be a religious service, a chapter of the
Bible; but the frequent flashes of lightning so blinded him, that he was
forced to lay down the Book, and all then sat still without speaking a
word; many with pale faces, and none without a mingled sense of awe and
fear. The maiden forgot her bashfulness as the rattling peals shook the
roof-tree, and hid her face in her lover's bosom; the children crept
closer and closer, each to some protecting knee, and the dogs came all
into the house, and lay down in dark places. Now and then there was a
convulsive, irrepressible, but half-stifled shriek--some sobbed--and a
loud hysterical laugh from one overcome with terror sounded ghastly
between the deepest of all dread repose--that which separates one peal
from another, when the flash and the roar are as one, and the thick air
smells of sulphur. The body feels its mortal nature, and shrinks as if
about to be withered into nothing. Now the muttering thunder seems to
have changed its place to some distant cloud--now, as if returning to
blast those whom it had spared, waxes louder and fiercer than
before--till the Great Tree that shelters the house is shivered with a
noise like the masts of a ship carried away by the board. "Look, father,
look--see yonder is an Angel all in white, descending from heaven!" said
little Alice, who had already been almost in the attitude of prayer, and
now clasped her hands together, and steadfastly, and without fear of the
lightning, eyed the sky. "One of God's Holy Angels--one of those who
sing before the Lamb!" And with an inspired rapture the fair child
sprung to her feet. "See ye her not--see ye her not--father--mother! Lo!
she beckons to me with a palm in her hand, like one of the palms in that
picture in our Bible, when our Saviour is entering into Jerusalem! There
she comes, nearer and nearer the earth--Oh! pity, forgive, and have
mercy on me, thou most beautiful of all the Angels--even for His name's
sake." All eyes were turned towards the black heavens, and then to the
raving child. Her mother clasped her to her bosom, afraid that terror
had turned her brain--and her father going to the door, surveyed an
ampler space of the sky. She flew to his side, and clinging to him
again, exclaimed in a wild outcry, "On her forehead a star! on her
forehead a star! And oh! on what lovely wings she is floating away, away
into eternity! The Angel, father, is calling me by my Christian name,
and I must no more abide on earth; but, touching the hem of her garment,
be wafted away to heaven!" Sudden as a bird let loose from the hand,
darted the maiden from her father's bosom, and with her face upward to
the skies, pursued her flight. Young and old left the house, and at that
moment the forked lightning came from the crashing cloud, and struck the
whole tenement into ruins. Not a hair on any head was singed; and with
one accord the people fell down upon their knees. From the eyes of the
child, the Angel, or Vision of the Angel, had disappeared; but on her
return to heaven, the Celestial heard the hymn that rose from those that
were saved, and above all the voices, the small sweet silvery voice of
her whose eyes alone were worthy of beholding a Saint Transfigured.

For several hundred years has that farm belonged to the family of the
Logans, nor has son or daughter ever stained the name--while some have
imparted to it, in its humble annals, what well may be called lustre.
Many a time have we stood when a boy, all alone, beginning to be
disturbed by the record of heroic or holy lives, in the kirkyard, beside
the GRAVE OF THE MARTYRS--the grave in which Christian and Hannah Logan,
mother and daughter, were interred. Many a time have we listened to the
story of their deaths, from the lips of one who well knew how to stir
the hearts of the young, till "from their eyes they wiped the tears that
sacred pity had engendered." Nearly a hundred years old was she that
eloquent narrator--the Minister's mother--yet she could hear a whisper,
and read the Bible without spectacles--although we sometimes used to
suspect her of pretending to be reading off the Book, when, in fact, she
was reciting from memory. The old lady often took a walk in the
kirkyard--and being of a pleasant and cheerful nature, though in
religious principle inflexibly austere, many were the most amusing
anecdotes that she related to us and our compeers, all huddled round
her, "where heaved the turf in many a mouldering heap." But the evening
converse was always sure to have a serious termination--and the
venerable matron could not be more willing to tell, than we to hear
again and again, were it for the twentieth repetition, some old tragic
event that gathered a deeper interest from every recital, as if on each
we became better acquainted with the characters of those to whom it had
befallen, till the chasm that time had dug between them and us
disappeared, and we felt for the while that their happiness or misery
and ours were essentially interdependent. At first she used, we well
remember, to fix her solemn spirit-like eyes on our faces, to mark the
different effects her story produced on her hearers; but ere long she
became possessed wholly by the pathos of her own narrative, and with
fluctuating features and earnest action of head and hands poured forth
her eloquence, as if soliloquising among the tombs.

"Ay, ay, my dear boys, that is the grave o' the Martyrs. My father saw
them die. The tide o' the far-ebbed sea was again beginning to flow, but
the sands o' the bay o' death lay sae dry, that there were but few spots
where a bairn could hae wat its feet. Thousands and tens o' thousands
were standing a' roun' the edge of the bay--that was in shape just like
that moon--and then twa stakes were driven deep into the sand, that the
waves o' the returning sea michtna loosen them--and my father, who was
but a boy like ane o' yourselves noo, waes me, didna he see wi' his ain
een Christian Logan, and her wee dochter Hannah, for she was but eleven
years auld--hurried alang by the enemies o' the Lord, and tied to their
accursed stakes within the power o' the sea. He who holds the waters in
the hollow o' his hand, thocht my father, will not suffer them to choke
the prayer within those holy lips--but what kent he o' the dreadfu'
judgments o' the Almighty? Dreadfu' as those judgments seemed to be, o'
a' that crowd o' mortal creatures there were but only twa that drew
their breath without a shudder--and these twa were Christian Logan and
her beautifu' wee dochter Hannah, wi' her rosy cheeks, for they blanched
not in that last extremity, her blue een, and her gowden hair, that
glittered like a star in the darkness o' that dismal day. 'Mother, be
not afraid,' she was heard to say, when the foam o' the first wave broke
about their feet--and just as these words were uttered, all the great
black clouds melted away from the sky, and the sun shone forth in the
firmament like the all-seeing eye of God. The martyrs turned their faces
a little towards one another, for the cords could not wholly hinder
them, and wi' voices as steady and as clear as ever they sang the psalm
within the walls o' that kirk, did they, while the sea was mounting
up--up from knee--waist--breast--neck--chin--lip--sing praises and
thanksgivings unto God. As soon as Hannah's voice was drowned, it seemed
as if her mother, before the water reached her own lips, bowed and gave
up the ghost. While the people were all gazing the heads of both martyrs
disappeared, and nothing then was to be seen on the face o' the waters,
but here and there a bit white breaking wave or silly sea-bird floating
on the flow o' the tide into the bay. Back and back had aye fallen the
people, as the tide was roarin' on wi' a hollow soun'--and now that the
water was high aboon the heads o' the martyrs, what chained that dismal
congregation to the sea-shore? It was the countenance o' a man that had
suddenly come down frae his hiding-place amang the moors--and who now
knew that his wife and daughter were bound to stakes deep down in the
waters o' the very bay that his eyes beheld rolling, and his ears heard
roaring--all the while that there was a God in heaven! Naebody could
speak to him--although they all beseeched their Maker to have
compassion upon him, and not to let his heart break and his reason fail.
'The stakes! the stakes! O Jesus! point out to me, with thy own scarred
hand, the place where my wife and daughter are bound to the stakes--and
I may yet bear them up out of the sand, and bring the bodies ashore--to
be restored to life! O brethren, brethren!--said ye that my Christian
and my Hannah have been for an hour below the sea? And was it from fear
of fifty armed men, that so many thousand fathers and mothers, and sons
and daughters, and brothers and sisters, rescued them not from such
cruel, cruel death?' After uttering mony mair siclike raving words, he
suddenly plunged into the sea, and, being a strong swimmer, was soon far
out into the bay--and led by some desperate instinct to the very place
where the stakes were fixed in the sand. Perfectly resigned had the
martyrs been to their doom--but in the agonies o' that horrible death,
there had been some struggles o' the mortal body, and the weight o' the
waters had borne down the stakes, so that, just as if they had been
lashed to a spar to enable them to escape from shipwreck, baith the
bodies came floatin' to the surface, and his hand grasped, without
knowing it, his ain Hannah's gowden hair--sairly defiled, ye may weel
think, wi' the sand--baith their faces changed frae what they ance were
by the wrench o' death. Father, mother, and daughter came a'thegither to
the shore--and there was a cry went far and wide, up even to the
hiding-places o' the faithfu' among the hags and cleuchs i' the moors,
that the sea had given up the living, and that the martyrs were
triumphant, even in this world, over the powers o' Sin and o' Death.
Yea, they were indeed triumphant;--and well might the faithfu' sing
aloud in the desert, 'O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy
victory?' for these three bodies were but as the weeds on which they lay
stretched out to the pitying gaze of the multitude, but their spirits
had gane to heaven to receive the eternal rewards o' sanctity and
truth."

Not a house in all the parish--scarcely excepting Mount Pleasant
itself--all round and about which our heart could in some dreamy hour
raise to life a greater multitude of dear old remembrances, all touching
ourselves, than LOGAN BRAES. The old people, when we first knew them, we
used to think somewhat apt to be surly--for they were Seceders--and
owing to some unavoidable prejudices, which we were at no great pains to
vanquish, we Manse-boys recognised something repulsive in that most
respectable word. Yet for the sake of that sad story of the Martyrs,
there was always something affecting to us in the name of Logan Braes;
and though Beltane was of old a Pagan Festival, celebrated with grave
idolatries round fires ablaze on a thousand hills, yet old Laurence
Logan would sweeten his vinegar aspect on May-day, would wipe out a
score of wrinkles, and calm, as far as that might be, the terrors of his
shaggy eyebrows. A little gentleness of manner goes a long way with such
young folk as we were all then, when it is seen naturally and easily
worn for our sakes, and in sympathy with our accustomed glee, by one who
in his ordinary deportment may have added the austerity of religion to
the venerableness of old age. Smiles from old Laurence Logan, the
Seceder, were like rare sun-glimpses in the gloom--and made the hush of
his house pleasant as a more cheerful place; for through the restraint
laid on reverent youth by feeling akin to fear, the heart ever and anon
bounded with freedom in the smile of the old man's eyes. Plain was his
own apparel--a suit of the hodden-grey. His wife, when in full dress,
did not remind us of a Quakeress, for a Quakeress then had we never
seen--but we often think now, when in company with a still, sensible,
cheerful, and comely-visaged matron of that sect, of her of Logan Braes.
No waster was she of her tears, or her smiles, or her words, or her
money, or her meal--either among those of her own blood, or the stranger
or the beggar that was within her gates. You heard not her foot on the
floor--yet never was she idle--moving about in doors and out, from
morning till night, so placid and so composed, and always at small cost
dressed so decently, so becomingly to one who was not yet old, and had
not forgotten--why should she not remember it?--that she was esteemed in
youth a beauty, and that it was not for want of a richer and younger
lover that she agreed at last to become the wife of the Laird of Logan
Braes.

Their family consisted of two sons and a niece;--and be thou who thou
mayest that hast so far read our May-day, we doubt not that thine eyes
will glance--however rapidly--over another page, nor fling it
contemptuously aside, because amidst all the chance and change of
administrations, ministries, and ministers in high places, there murmur
along the channels of our memory "the simple annals of the poor," like
unpolluted streams that sweep not by city walls.

Never were two brothers more unlike in all things--in mind, body,
habits, and disposition--than Lawrie and Willie Logan--and we see, as in
a glass, at this very moment, both their images. "Wee Wise Willie"--for
by that name he was known over several parishes--was one of those
extraordinary creatures that one may liken to a rarest plant, which
nature sows here and there--sometimes for ever unregarded--among the
common families of Flowers. Early sickness had been his lot--continued
with scarcely any interruption from his cradle to school-years--so that
not only was his stature stunted, but his whole frame was delicate in
the extreme; and his pale small-featured face, remarkable for large,
soft, down-looking, hazel eyes, dark-lashed in their lustre, had a sweet
feminine character, that corresponded well with his voice, his motions,
and his in-door pursuits--all serene and composed, and interfering with
the outgoings of no other living thing. All sorts of scholarship, such
as the parish schoolmaster knew, he mastered as if by intuition. His
slate was quickly covered with long calculations, by which the most
puzzling questions were solved; and ere he was nine years old, he had
made many pretty mechanical contrivances with wheels and pulleys, that
showed in what direction lay the natural bent of his genius. Languages,
too, the creature seemed to see into with quickest eyes, and with
quickest ears to catch their sounds--so that, at the same tender age, he
might have been called a linguist, sitting with his Greek and Latin
books on a stool beside him by the fireside during the long winter
nights. All the neighbours who had any books, cheerfully lent them to
"Wee Wise Willie," and the Manse-boys gave him many a supply. At the
head of every class he, of course, was found--but no ambition had he to
be there; and like a bee that works among many thousand others on the
clover-lea, heedless of their murmurs, and intent wholly on its own
fragrant toil, did he go from task to task--although that was no fitting
name for the studious creature's meditations on all he read or
wrought--no more a task for him to grow in knowledge and in thought,
than for a lily of the field to lift up its head towards the sun. That
child's religion was like all the other parts of his character--as prone
to tears as that of other children, when they read of the Divine Friend
dying for them on the cross; but it was profounder far than theirs, when
it shed no tears, and only made the paleness of his countenance more
like that which we imagine to be the paleness of a phantom. No one ever
saw him angry, complaining, or displeased; for angelical indeed was his
temper, purified, like gold in fire, by suffering. He shunned not the
company of other children, but loved all, as by them all he was more
than beloved. In few of their plays could he take an active share; but
sitting a little way off, still attached to the merry brotherhood,
though in their society he had no part to enact, he read his book on the
knoll, or, happy dreamer, sunk away among the visions of his own
thoughts. There was poetry in that child's spirit, but it was too
essentially blended with his whole happiness in life, often to be
embodied in written words. A few compositions were found in his own
small beautiful handwriting after his death--hymns and psalms. Prayers,
too, had his heart indited--but they were not in measured
language--framed, in his devout simplicity, on the model of our Lord's.
How many hundred times have we formed a circle round him in the
gloaming, all sitting or lying on the greensward, before the dews had
begun to descend, listening to his tales and stories of holy or heroic
men and women, who had been greatly good and glorious in the days of
old! Not unendeared to his imagination were the patriots, who, living
and dying, loved the liberties of the land--Tell--Bruce--or Wallace, he
in whose immortal name a thousand rocks rejoice, while many a wood bears
it on its summits as they are swinging to the storm. Weak as a reed that
is shaken in the wind, or the stalk of a flower that tremblingly
sustains its blossoms beneath the dews that feed their transitory
lustre, was he whose lips were so eloquent to read the eulogies of
mighty men of war riding mailed through bloody battles. What matters it
that this frame of dust be frail, and of tiny size--still may it be the
tenement of a lordly spirit. But high as such warfare was, it satisfied
not that thoughtful child--for other warfare there was to read of, which
was to him a far deeper and more divine delight--the warfare waged by
good men against the legions of sin, and closed triumphantly in the eye
of God--let this world deem as it will--on obscurest death-beds, or at
the stake, or on the scaffold, where a profounder even than Sabbath
silence glorifies the martyr far beyond any shout that from the immense
multitude would have torn the concave of the heavens.

What a contrast to that creature was his elder brother! Lawrie was
eighteen years old when first we visited Logan Braes, and was a perfect
hero in strength and stature--Bob Howie alone his equal--but Bob was
then in the West Indies. In the afternoons, after his work was over in
the fields or in the barn, he had pleasure in getting us Manse-boys to
accompany him to the Moor-Lochs for an hour's angling or two in the
evening, when the large trouts came to the gravelly shallows, and, as we
waded mid-leg deep, would sometimes take the fly among our very feet. Or
he would go with us into the heart of the great wood, to show us where
the foxes had their earths--the party being sometimes so fortunate as to
see the cubs disporting at the mouth of the briery aperture in the
strong and root-bound soil. Or we followed him, so far as he thought it
safe for us to do so, up the foundations of the castle, and in fear and
wonder that no repetition of the adventurous feat ever diminished, saw
him take the young starling from the crevice beneath the tuft of
wall-flowers. What was there of the bold and daring that Lawrie Logan
was not, in our belief, able to perform? We were all several years
younger--boys from nine to fifteen--and he had shot up into sudden
manhood--not only into its shape but its strength--yet still the boyish
spirit was fresh within him, and he never wearied of us in such
excursions. The minister had a good opinion of his principles, knowing
how he had been brought up, and did not discountenance his visits to the
Manse, nor ours to Logan Braes. Then what danger could we be in, go
where we might, with one who had more than once shown how eager he was
to risk his own life when that of another was in jeopardy? Generous and
fearless youth! To thee we owed our own life--although seldom is that
rescue now remembered--(for what will not in this turmoiling world be
forgotten?) when in pride of the newly-acquired art of swimming, we had
ventured--with our clothes on too--some ten yards into the Brother-Loch,
to disentangle our line from the water-lilies. It seemed that a hundred
cords had got entangled round our legs, and our heart quaked too
desperately to suffer us to shriek--but Lawrie Logan had his hand on us
in a minute, and brought us to shore as easily as a Newfoundland dog
lands a bit of floating wood.

But that was a momentary danger, and Lawrie Logan ran but small risk,
you will say, in saving us; so let us not extol that instance of his
intrepidity. But fancy to yourself, gentle reader, the hideous mouth of
an old coal-pit, that had not been worked for time immemorial, overgrown
with thorns, and briers, and brackens, but still visible from a small
mount above it, for some yards down its throat--the very throat of death
and perdition. But can you fancy also the childish and superstitious
terror with which we all regarded that coal-pit, for it was said to be a
hundred fathom deep--with water at the bottom--so that you had to wait
for many moments--almost a minute--before you heard a stone, first
beating against its sides--from one to the other--plunge at last into
the pool profound. In that very field, too, a murder had been
perpetrated, and the woman's corpse flung by her sweetheart into that
coal-pit. One day some unaccountable impulse had led a band of us into
that interdicted field--which we remember was not arable--but said to be
a place where a hare was always sure to be found sitting among the
binweeds and thistles. A sort of thrilling horror urged us on closer and
closer to the mouth of the pit--when Wee Wise Willie's foot slipping on
the brae, he bounded with inexplicable force along--in among the thorns,
briers, and brackens--through the whole hanging mat, and without a
shriek, down--down--down into destruction. We all saw it happen--every
one of us--and it is scarcely too much to say, that we were for a while
all mad with horror. Yet we felt ourselves borne back instinctively from
the horrible pit--and as aid we could give none, we listened if we could
hear any cry--but there was none--and we all flew together out of the
dreadful field, and again collecting ourselves together, feared to
separate on the different roads to our homes. "Oh! can it be that our
Wee Wise Willie has this moment died sic a death--and no a single ane
amang us a' greetin for his sake?" said one of us aloud; and then indeed
did we burst out into rueful sobbing, and ask one another who could
carry such tidings to Logan Braes? All at once we heard a clear, rich,
mellow whistle as of a blackbird--and there with his favourite collie,
searching for a stray lamb among the knolls, was Lawrie Logan, who
hailed us with a laughing voice, and then asked us, "Where is Wee
Willie?--hae ye flung him like another Joseph into the pit?" The
consternation of our faces could not be misunderstood--whether we told
him or not what had happened we do not know--but he staggered, as if he
would have fallen down--and then ran off with amazing speed--not towards
Logan Braes--but the village. We continued helplessly to wander about
back and forwards along the near edge of a wood, when we beheld a
multitude of people rapidly advancing, and in a few minutes they
surrounded the mouth of the pit. It was about the very end of the
hay-harvest--and many ropes that had been employed that very day in the
leading of the hay of the Landlord of the Inn, who was also an extensive
farmer, were tied together to the length of at least twenty fathom. Hope
was quite dead--but her work is often done by Despair. For a while there
was confusion all round the pit-mouth, but with a white fixed face and
glaring eyes, Lawrie Logan advanced to the very brink, with the rope
bound in many firm folds around him, and immediately behind him stood
his grey-headed father, unbonneted, just as he had risen from a prayer.
"Is't my ain father that's gaun to help me to gang doun to bring up
Willie's body? O! merciful God, what a judgment is this!
Father--father--Oh! lie doun at some distance awa frae the sicht o' this
place. Robin Alison, and Gabriel Strang, and John Borland 'ill haud the
ropes firm and safe. O, father--father--lie doun, a bit apart frae the
crowd; and have mercy upon him--O thou, great God, have mercy upon him!"
But the old man kept his place; and the only one son who now survived to
him disappeared within the jaws of the same murderous pit, and was
lowered slowly down, nearer and nearer to his little brother's corpse.
They had spoken to him of foul air, of which to breathe is death, but he
had taken his resolution, and not another word had been said to shake
it. And now, for a short time, there was no weight at the line, except
that of its own length. It was plain that he had reached the bottom of
the pit. Silent was all that congregation, as if assembled in divine
worship. Again, there was a weight at the rope, and in a minute or two,
a voice was heard far down the pit that spread a sort of wild
hope--else, why should it have spoken at all--and lo! the child--not
like one of the dead--clasped in the arms of his brother, who was all
covered with dust and blood. "Fall down on your knees--in the face o'
heaven, and sing praises to God, for my brother is yet alive!"

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