The Bride of Lammermoor, Walter Scott [superbooks4u .txt] 📗
- Author: Walter Scott
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“Madam,” said Lucy, with unwonted energy, “urge me no farther; if this unhappy engagement be restored, I have already said you shall dispose of me as you will; till then I should commit a heavy sin in the sight of God and man in doing what you require.”
“But, my love, if this man remains obstinately silent——”
“He will not be silent,” answered Lucy; “it is six weeks since I sent him a double of my former letter by a sure hand.”
“You have not—you could not—you durst not,” said Lady Ashton, with violence inconsistent with the tone she had intended to assume; but instantly correcting herself, “My dearest Lucy,” said she, in her sweetest tone of expostulation, “how could you think of such a thing?”
“No matter,” said Bucklaw; “I respect Miss Ashton for her sentiments, and I only wish I had been her messenger myself.”
“And pray how long, Miss Ashton,” said her mother, ironically, “are we to wait the return of your Pacolet—your fairy messenger—since our humble couriers of flesh and blood could not be trusted in this matter?”
“I have numbered weeks, days, hours, and minutes,” said Miss Ashton; “within another week I shall have an answer, unless he is dead. Till that time, sir,” she said, addressing Bucklaw, “let me be thus far beholden to you, that you will beg my mother to forbear me upon this subject.”
“I will make it my particular entreaty to Lady Ashton,” said Bucklaw. “By my honour, madam, I respect your feelings; and, although the prosecution of this affair be rendered dearer to me than ever, yet, as I am a gentleman, I would renounce it, were it so urged as to give you a moment’s pain.”
“Mr. Hayston, I think, cannot comprehend that,” said Lady Ashton, looking pale with anger, “when the daughter’s happiness lies in the bosom of the mother. Let me ask you, Miss Ashton, in what terms your last letter was couched?”
“Exactly in the same, madam,” answered Lucy, “which you dictated on a former occasion.”
“When eight days have elapsed, then,” said her mother, resuming her tone of tenderness, “we shall hope, my dearest love, that you will end this suspense.”
“Miss Ashton must not be hurried, madam,” said Bucklaw, whose bluntness of feeling did not by any means arise from want of good-nature; “messengers may be stopped or delayed. I have known a day’s journey broke by the casting of a foreshoe. Stay, let me see my calendar: the twentieth day from this is St. Jude’s, and the day before I must be at Caverton Edge, to see the match between the Laird of Kittlegirth’s black mare and Johnston the meal-monger’s four-year-old-colt; but I can ride all night, or Craigie can bring me word how the match goes; and I hope, in the mean time, as I shall not myself distress Miss Ashton with any further importunity, that your ladyship yourself, and Sir William, and Colonel Douglas will have the goodness to allow her uninterrupted time for making up her mind.”
“Sir,” said Miss Ashton, “you are generous.”
“As for that, madam,” answered Bucklaw, “I only pretend to be a plain, good-humoured young fellow, as I said before, who will willingly make you happy if you will permit him, and show him how to do so.” Having said this, he saluted her with more emotion than was consistent with his usual train of feeling, and took his leave; Lady Ashton, as she accompanied him out of the apartment, assuring him that her daughter did full justice to the sincerity of his attachment, and requesting him to see Sir William before his departure, “since,” as she said, with a keen glance reverting towards Lucy, “against St. Jude’s day, we must all be ready to sign and seal.”
“To sign and seal!” echoed Lucy, in a muttering tone, as the door of the apartment closed—“to sign and seal—to do and die!” and, clasping her extenuated hands together, she sunk back on the easy-chair she occupied, in a state resembling stupor.
From this she was shortly after awakened by the boisterous entry of her brother Henry, who clamorously reminded her of a promise to give him two yards of carnation ribbon to make knots to his new garters. With the most patient composure Lucy arose, and opening a little ivory cabinet, sought out the ribbon the lad wanted, measured it accurately, cut it off into proper lengths, and knotted it into the fashion his boyish whim required.
“Dinna shut the cabinet yet,” said Henry, “for I must have some of your silver wire to fasten the bells to my hawk’s jesses,—and yet the new falcon’s not worth them neither; for do you know, after all the plague we had to get her from an eyrie, all the way at Posso, in Mannor Water, she’s going to prove, after all, nothing better than a rifler: she just wets her singles in the blood of the partridge, and then breaks away, and lets her fly; and what good can the poor bird do after that, you know, except pine and die in the first heather-cow or whin-bush she can crawl into?”
“Right, Henry—right—very right,” said Luch, mournfully, holding the boy fast by the hand, after she had given him the wire he wanted; “but there are more riflers in the world than your falcon, and more wounded birds that seek but to die in quiet, that can find neither brake nor whin-bush to hide their head in.”
“Ah! that’s some speech out of your romances,” said the boy; “and Sholto says they have turned your head. But I hear Norman whistling to the hawk; I must go fasten on the jesses.”
And he scampered away with the thoughtless gaiety of boyhood, leaving his sister to the bitterness of her own reflections.
“It is decreed,” she said, “that every living creature, even those who owe me most kindness, are to shun me, and leave me to those by whom I am beset. It is just it should be thus. Alone and uncounselled, I involved myself in these perils; alone and uncounselled, I must extricate myself or die.”
What doth ensue
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair,
And at her heel, a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures, and foes to life?
Comedy of Errors.
As some vindication of the ease with which Bucklaw (who otherwise, as he termed himself, was really a very good-humoured fellow) resigned his judgment to the management of Lady Ashton, while paying his addresses to her daughter, the reader must call to mind the strict domestic discipline which, at this period, was exercised over the females of a Scottish family.
The manners of the country in this, as in many other respects, coincided with those of France before the Revolution. Young women of the higher rank seldom mingled in society until after marriage, and, both in law and fact, were held to be under the strict tutelage of their parents, who were too apt to enforce the views for their settlement in life without paying any regard to the inclination of the parties chiefly interested. On such occasions, the suitor expected little more from his bride than a silent acquiescence in the will of her parents; and as few opportunities of acquaintance, far less of intimacy, occurred, he made his choice by the outside, as the lovers in the Merchant of Venice select the casket, contented to trust to chance the issue of the lottery in which he had hazarded a venture.
It was not therefore surprising, such being the general manners of the age, that Mr. Hayston of Bucklaw, whom dissipated habits had detached in some degree from the best society, should not attend particularly to those feelings in his elected bride to which many men of more sentiment, experience, and reflection would, in all probability, have been equally indifferent. He knew what all accounted the principal point, that her parents and friends, namely, were decidedly in his favour, and that there existed most powerful reasons for their predilection.
In truth, the conduct of the Marquis of A——, since Ravenswood’s departure, had been such as almost to bar the possibility of his kinsman’s union with Lucy Ashton. The Marquis was Ravenswood’s sincere but misjudging friend; or rather, like many friends and patrons, he consulted what he considered to be his relation’s true interest, although he knew that in doing so he ran counter to his inclinations.
The Marquis drove on, therefore, with the plentitude of ministerial authority, an appeal to the British House of Peers against those judgments of the courts of law by which Sir William became possessed of Ravenswood’s hereditary property. As this measure, enforced with all the authority of power, was new in Scottish judicial proceedings, though now so frequently resorted to, it was exclaimed against by the lawyers on the opposite side of politics, as an interference with the civil judicature of the country, equally new, arbitrary, and tyrannical. And if it thus affected even strangers connected with them only by political party, it may be guessed what the Ashton family themselves said and thought under so gross a dispensation. Sir William, still more worldly-minded than he was timid, was reduced to despair by the loss by which he was threatened. His son’s haughtier spirit was exalted into rage at the idea of being deprived of his expected patrimony. But to Lady Ashton’s yet more vindictive temper the conduct of Ravenswood, or rather of his patron, appeared to be an offence challenging the deepest and most immortal revenge. Even the quiet and confiding temper of Lucy herself, swayed by the opinions expressed by all around her, could not but consider the conduct of Ravenswood as precipitate, and even unkind. “It was my father,” she repeated with a sigh, “who welcomed him to this place, and encouraged, or at least allowed, the intimacy between us. Should he not have remembered this, and requited it with at least some moderate degree of procrastination in the assertion of his own alleged rights? I would have forfeited for him double the value of these lands, which he pursues with an ardour that shows he has forgotten how much I am implicated in the matter.”
Lucy, however, could only murmur these things to herself, unwilling to increase the prejudices against her lover entertained by all around her, who exclaimed against the steps pursued on his account as illegal, vexatious, and tyrannical, resembling the worst measures in the worst times of the worst Stuarts, and a degradation of Scotland, the decisions of whose learned judges were thus subjected to the review of a court composed indeed of men of the highest rank, and who were not trained to the study of any municipal law, and might be supposed specially to hold in contempt that of Scotland. As a natural consequence of the alleged injustice meditated towards her father, every means was restored to, and every argument urged to induce Miss Ashton to break off her engagement with Ravenswood, as being scandalous, shameful, and sinful, formed with the mortal enemy of her family, and calculated to add bitterness to the distress of her parents.
Lucy’s spirit, however, was high, and, although unaided and alone, she could have borne much: she could have endured the repinings of her father; his murmurs against what he called the tyrannical usage of the ruling party; his ceaseless charges of ingratitude against Ravenswood; his endless lectures on the various means by which contracts may be voided and annulled; his quotations from the civil, municipal, and the canon law; and his prelections upon the patria potestas.
She might have borne also in patience, or repelled with scorn, the bitter taunts and occasional violence of her brother, Colonel Douglas Ashton, and the impertinent and intrusive interference of other friends and relations. But it was beyond her power effectually to withstand or elude the constant and unceasing persecution of Lady Ashton, who, laying every other wish aside, had bent the whole efforts of her powerful mind to break her daughter’s contract with Ravenswood, and to place a perpetual bar between the lovers, by effecting Lucy’s union with Bucklaw. Far more deeply skilled than her husband in the recesses of
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