Old Mortality, Complete by Walter Scott (christmas read aloud .txt) 📗

sea, I was about to give my hand to another. My lord, it is ended between you and me; be the consequences what they will, she cannot marry whose union disturbs the repose of the dead.”

“Good Heaven!” said Evandale, as he paced the room, half mad himself with surprise and vexation, “her fine understanding must be totally overthrown, and that by the effort which she has made to comply with my ill-timed, though well-meant, request. Without rest and attention her health is ruined for ever.”

At this moment the door opened, and Halliday, who had been Lord Evandale’s principal personal attendant since they both left the Guards on the Revolution, stumbled into the room with a countenance as pale and ghastly as terror could paint it.

“What is the matter next, Halliday?” cried his master, starting up. “Any discovery of the—”

He had just recollection sufficient to stop short in the midst of the dangerous sentence.

“No, sir,” said Halliday, “it is not that, nor anything like that; but I have seen a ghost!”

“A ghost, you eternal idiot!” said Lord Evandale, forced altogether out of his patience. “Has all mankind sworn to go mad in order to drive me so? What ghost, you simpleton?”

“The ghost of Henry Morton, the Whig captain at Bothwell Bridge,” replied Halliday. “He passed by me like a fire-flaught when I was in the garden!”

“This is midsummer madness,” said Lord Evandale, “or there is some strange villainy afloat. Jenny, attend your lady to her chamber, while I endeavour to find a clue to all this.”

But Lord Evandale’s inquiries were in vain. Jenny, who might have given (had she chosen) a very satisfactory explanation, had an interest to leave the matter in darkness; and interest was a matter which now weighed principally with Jenny, since the possession of an active and affectionate husband in her own proper right had altogether allayed her spirit of coquetry. She had made the best use of the first moments of confusion hastily to remove all traces of any one having slept in the apartment adjoining to the parlour, and even to erase the mark of footsteps beneath the window, through which she conjectured Morton’s face had been seen, while attempting, ere he left the garden, to gain one look at her whom he had so long loved, and was now on the point of losing for ever. That he had passed Halliday in the garden was equally clear; and she learned from her elder boy, whom she had employed to have the stranger’s horse saddled and ready for his departure, that he had rushed into the stable, thrown the child a broad gold piece, and, mounting his horse, had ridden with fearful rapidity down towards the Clyde. The secret was, therefore, in their own family, and Jenny was resolved it should remain so.

“For, to be sure,” she said, “although her lady and Halliday kend Mr. Morton by broad daylight, that was nae reason I suld own to kenning him in the gloaming and by candlelight, and him keeping his face frae Cuddie and me a’ the time.”

So she stood resolutely upon the negative when examined by Lord Evandale. As for Halliday, he could only say that as he entered the garden-door, the supposed apparition met him, walking swiftly, and with a visage on which anger and grief appeared to be contending.

“He knew him well,” he said, “having been repeatedly guard upon him, and obliged to write down his marks of stature and visage in case of escape. And there were few faces like Mr. Morton’s.” But what should make him haunt the country where he was neither hanged nor shot, he, the said Halliday, did not pretend to conceive.

Lady Emily confessed she had seen the face of a man at the window, but her evidence went no farther. John Gudyill deponed nil novit in causa. He had left his gardening to get his morning dram just at the time when the apparition had taken place. Lady Emily’s servant was waiting orders in the kitchen, and there was not another being within a quarter of a mile of the house.

Lord Evandale returned perplexed and dissatisfied in the highest degree at beholding a plan which he thought necessary not less for the protection of Edith in contingent circumstances, than for the assurance of his own happiness, and which he had brought so very near perfection, thus broken off without any apparent or rational cause. His knowledge of Edith’s character set her beyond the suspicion of covering any capricious change of determination by a pretended vision. But he would have set the apparition down to the influence of an overstrained imagination, agitated by the circumstances in which she had so suddenly been placed, had it not been for the coinciding testimony of Halliday, who had no reason for thinking of Morton more than any other person, and knew nothing of Miss Bellenden’s vision when he promulgated his own. On the other hand, it seemed in the highest degree improbable that Morton, so long and so vainly sought after, and who was, with such good reason, supposed to be lost when the “Vryheid” of Rotterdam went down with crew and passengers, should be alive and lurking in this country, where there was no longer any reason why he should not openly show himself, since the present Government favoured his party in politics. When Lord Evandale reluctantly brought himself to communicate these doubts to the chaplain, in order to obtain his opinion, he could only obtain a long lecture on demonology, in which, after quoting Delrio and Burthoog and De L’Ancre on the subject of apparitions, together with sundry civilians and common lawyers on the nature of testimony, the learned gentleman expressed his definite and determined opinion to be, either that there had been an actual apparition of the deceased Henry Morton’s spirit, the possibility of which he was, as a divine and a philosopher, neither fully prepared to admit or to deny; or else that the said Henry Morton, being still in rerum natura, had appeared in his proper person that morning; or, finally, that some strong deceptio visus, or striking similitude of person, had deceived the eyes of Miss Bellenden and of Thomas Halliday. Which of these was the most probable hypothesis, the doctor declined to pronounce, but expressed himself ready to die in the opinion that one or other of them had occasioned that morning’s disturbance.

Lord Evandale soon had additional cause for distressful anxiety. Miss Bellenden was declared to be dangerously ill.

“I will not leave this place,” he exclaimed, “till she is pronounced to be in safety. I neither can nor ought to do so; for whatever may have been the immediate occasion of her illness, I gave the first cause for it by my unhappy solicitation.”

He established himself, therefore, as a guest in the family, which the presence of his sister, as well as of Lady Margaret Bellenden (who, in despite of her rheumatism, caused herself to be transported thither when she heard of her granddaughter’s illness), rendered a step equally natural and delicate. And thus he anxiously awaited until, without injury to her health, Edith could sustain a final explanation ere his departure on his expedition.

“She shall never,” said the generous young man, “look on her engagement with me as the means of fettering her to a union, the idea of which seems almost to unhinge her understanding.”