Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 13

Excerpt

In the year 1785, a young and beautiful woman, whose dress and features bespoke her to be a native of Spain, was observed a few miles beyond Ponteland, on the road which leads to Rothbury. She appeared faint and weary; dimness was deepening over the lustre of her dark eyes, and their glance bespoke anxious misery. Her raiment was of the finest silk; but time had caused its colour to fade; and it hung around her a tattered robe—an ensign of present poverty and wretchedness, a ruined remnant of prouder days that were past. She walked feebly and slowly along, bearing in her arms an infant boy; and she was observed, at intervals, to sit down, press her pale lips to her child's cheek, and weep. Several peasants, who were returning from their labours in the fields, stood and spoke to her; but she gazed on them with wild looks of despair, and she answered them in a strange language, which they did not understand.

"She has been a lady, poor thing," said some of them.

"Ha!" said others, who had less charity in their breasts, "they have not all been ladies that wear tattered silk in strange fashions."

Some inquired at her if she were hungry; if she wanted a lodging; or where she was going. But, like the mother of Thomas à Beckett, to all their inquiries she answered them but one word that they understood, and that word was "Edinburgh!"

Some said, "the poor creature is crazed;" and when she perceived that they comprehended her not, she waved her hand impatiently for them to depart, and pressing her child closer to her bosom, she bent her head over him, and sighed. The peasants, believing from her gestures that she desired not their presence, left her, some pitying, all wondering. Within an hour, some of them returned to the place where they had seen her, with the intent of offering her shelter for the night; but she was not to be found.

On the following morning, one Peter Thornton, a farmer, went into his stackyard before his servants were astir, and his attention being aroused by the weeping and wailing of a child, he hastened toward the spot from whence the sound proceeded. In a secluded corner of the yard, he beheld a woman lying, as if asleep, upon some loose straw; and a child was weeping and uttering strange sounds of lamentation on her bosom. It was the lovely, but wretched-looking foreigner whom the peasants had seen on the evening before. Peter was a blunt, kind-hearted Englishman; he resembled a piece of rich though unpolished metal. He approached the forlorn stranger; and her strange dress, her youth, the stamp of misery that surrounded her, and the death-like expression of her features, moved him, as he gazed upon her and her child, almost to tears.

"Get up, woman," said he; "why do you lie there? Get up, and come wi' me; ye seem to be ill, and my wife will get ye something comfortable."

But she spoke not, she moved not, though the child screamed louder at his presence. He called to her again; but still she remained motionless.

"Preserve us!" said he, somewhat alarmed, "what can have come owre the woman? I daresay she is in a trance! She sleeps sounder there in the open air, and upon the bare straw, wi' her poor bairn crying like to brak its heart upon her breast, than I could do on a feather-bed, wi' everything peace and quietness around me. Come, waken, woman," he added; and he bent down, and took her by the hand. But her fingers were stiff and cold—there was no sign of life upon her lips, neither was there breath in her nostrils.

"What is this?" exclaimed Peter, in a tone of horror—"a dead woman in my stackyard! Has there been a murder at my door through the night? I'll gie a' that I am worth as a reward to find it out!" And, leaving the child screaming by the side of its dead mother, he rushed breathless into the house, exclaiming, "Oh, wife! wife!—Jenny, woman!—I say, Jenny, get up! Here has been bloody wark at our door! What do ye think?—a dead woman lying in our stackyard, wi' a bonny bairn screaming on her breast!"

"What's that ye say, Peter!" cried his wife, starting up in terror; "a dead woman!...