Part 47 (2/2)

”I have often heard,” said the Udaller, ”that she was quite mad, with all her wisdom, and all her knowledge of the seasons; and, by the bones of my namesake, the Martyr, I begin now to believe it most a.s.suredly! I know no more how to steer than if I had lost my compa.s.s. Had I known this before we set out, I think I had remained at home; but now that we have come so far, and that Norna expects us”----

”Expects us, father!” said Brenda; ”how can that be possible?”

”Why, that I know not--but she that can tell how the wind is to blow, can tell which way we are designing to ride. She must not be provoked;--perhaps she has done my family this ill for the words I had with her about that lad Mordaunt Mertoun, and if so, she can undo it again;--and so she shall, or I will know the cause wherefore. But I will try fair words first.”

Finding it thus settled that they were to go forward, Brenda endeavoured next to learn from her father whether Norna's tale was founded in reality. He shook his head, groaned bitterly, and, in a few words, acknowledged that the whole, so far as concerned her intrigue with a stranger, and her father's death, of which she became the accidental and most innocent cause, was a matter of sad and indisputable truth. ”For her infant,” he said, ”he could never, by any means, learn what became of it.”

”Her infant!” exclaimed Brenda; ”she spoke not a word of her infant!”

”Then I wish my tongue had been blistered,” said the Udaller, ”when I told you of it!--I see that, young and old, a man has no better chance of keeping a secret from you women, than an eel to keep himself in his hold when he is sniggled with a loop of horse-hair--sooner or later the fisher teazes him out of his hole, when he has once the noose round his neck.”

”But the infant, my father,” said Brenda, still insisting on the particulars of this extraordinary story, ”what became of it?”

”Carried off, I fancy, by the blackguard Vaughan,” answered the Udaller, with a gruff accent, which plainly betokened how weary he was of the subject.

”By Vaughan?” said Brenda, ”the lover of poor Norna, doubtless!--what sort of man was he, father?”

”Why, much like other men, I fancy,” answered the Udaller; ”I never saw him in my life.--He kept company with the Scottish families at Kirkwall; and I with the good old Norse folk--Ah! if Norna had dwelt always amongst her own kin, and not kept company with her Scottish acquaintance, she would have known nothing of Vaughan, and things might have been otherwise--But then I should have known nothing of your blessed mother, Brenda--and that,” he said, his large blue eyes s.h.i.+ning with a tear, ”would have saved me a short joy and a long sorrow.”

”Norna could but ill have supplied my mother's place to you, father, as a companion and a friend--that is, judging from all I have heard,” said Brenda, with some hesitation. But Magnus, softened by recollections of his beloved wife, answered her with more indulgence than she expected.

”I would have been content,” he said, ”to have wedded Norna at that time. It would have been the soldering of an old quarrel--the healing of an old sore. All our blood relations wished it, and, situated as I was, especially not having seen your blessed mother, I had little will to oppose their counsels. You must not judge of Norna or of me by such an appearance as we now present to you--She was young and beautiful, and I gamesome as a Highland buck, and little caring what haven I made for, having, as I thought, more than one under my lee. But Norna preferred this man Vaughan, and, as I told you before, it was, perhaps, the best kindness she could have done to me.”

”Ah, poor kinswoman!” said Brenda. ”But believe you, father, in the high powers which she claims--in the mysterious vision of the dwarf--in the”----

She was interrupted in these questions by Magnus, to whom they were obviously displeasing.

”I believe, Brenda,” he said, ”according to the belief of my forefathers--I pretend not to be a wiser man than they were in their time,--and they all believed that, in cases of great worldly distress, Providence opened the eyes of the mind, and afforded the sufferers a vision of futurity. It was but a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of the boat, with reverence,”--here he touched his hat reverentially; ”and, after all the s.h.i.+fting of ballast, poor Norna is as heavily loaded in the bows as ever was an Orkneyman's yawl at the dog-fis.h.i.+ng--she has more than affliction enough on board to balance whatever gifts she may have had in the midst of her calamity. They are as painful to her, poor soul, as a crown of thorns would be to her brows, though it were the badge of the empire of Denmark. And do not you, Brenda, seek to be wiser than your fathers.

Your sister Minna, before she was so ill, had as much reverence for whatever was produced in Norse, as if it had been in the Pope's bull, which is all written in pure Latin.”

”Poor Norna!” repeated Brenda; ”and her child--was it never recovered?”

”What do I know of her child,” said the Udaller, more gruffly than before, ”except that she was very ill, both before and after the birth, though we kept her as merry as we could with pipe and harp, and so forth;--the child had come before its time into this bustling world, so it is likely it has been long dead.--But you know nothing of all these matters, Brenda; so get along for a foolish girl, and ask no more questions about what it does not become you to enquire into.”

So saying, the Udaller gave his st.u.r.dy little palfrey the spur, and cantering forward over rough and smooth, while the pony's accuracy and firmness of step put all difficulties of the path at secure defiance, he placed himself soon by the side of the melancholy Minna, and permitted her sister to have no farther share in his conversation than as it was addressed to them jointly. She could but comfort herself with the hope, that, as Minna's disease appeared to have its seat in the imagination, the remedies recommended by Norna might have some chance of being effectual, since, in all probability, they would be addressed to the same faculty.

Their way had hitherto held chiefly over moss and moor, varied occasionally by the necessity of making a circuit around the heads of those long lagoons, called voes, which run up into and indent the country in such a manner, that, though the Mainland of Zetland may be thirty miles or more in length, there is, perhaps, no part of it which is more than three miles distant from the salt water. But they had now approached the north-western extremity of the isle, and travelled along the top of an immense ridge of rocks, which had for ages withstood the rage of the Northern Ocean, and of all the winds by which it is buffeted.

At length exclaimed Magnus to his daughters, ”There is Norna's dwelling!--Look up, Minna, my love; for if this does not make you laugh, nothing will.--Saw you ever any thing but an osprey that would have made such a nest for herself as that is?--By my namesake's bones, there is not the like of it that living thing ever dwelt in, (having no wings and the use of reason,) unless it chanced to be the Frawa-Stack off Papa, where the King's daughter of Norway was shut up to keep her from her lovers--and all to little purpose, if the tale be true;[16] for, maidens, I would have you to wot that it is hard to keep flax from the lowe.”[17]

FOOTNOTES:

[14] It is worth while saying, that this motto, and the ascription of the beautiful ballad from which it is taken to the Right Honourable Lady Ann Lindsay, occasioned the ingenious auth.o.r.ess's acknowledgment of the ballad, of which the Editor, by her permission, published a small impression, inscribed to the Bannatyne Club.

[15] A light-armed vessel of the seventeenth century, adapted for privateering, and much used by the Dutch.

[16] The _Frawa-Stack_ or Maiden-Rock, an inaccessible cliff, divided by a narrow gulf from the Island of Papa, has on the summit some ruins, concerning which there is a legend similar to that of Danae.

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