Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer — Complete, Walter Scott [rainbow fish read aloud .txt] 📗

the entrance to their asylum. The opening, not larger than that of a fox-earth, lay in the face of the cliff directly behind a large black rock, or rather upright stone, which served at once to conceal it from strangers and as a mark to point out its situation to those who used it as a place of retreat. The space between the stone and the cliff was exceedingly narrow, and, being heaped with sand and other rubbish, the most minute search would not have discovered the mouth of the cavern without removing those substances which the tide had drifted before it. For the purpose of further concealment, it was usual with the contraband traders who frequented this haunt, after they had entered, to stuff the mouth with withered seaweed, loosely piled together as if carried there by the waves. Dirk Hatteraick had not forgotten this precaution.

Glossin, though a bold and hardy man, felt his heart throb and his knees knock together when he prepared to enter this den of secret iniquity, in order to hold conference with a felon, whom he justly accounted one of the most desperate and depraved of men. ‘But he has no interest to injure me,’ was his consolatory reflection. He examined his pocket-pistols, however, before removing the weeds and entering the cavern, which he did upon hands and knees. The passage, which at first was low and narrow, just admitting entrance to a man in a creeping posture, expanded after a few yards into a high arched vault of considerable width. The bottom, ascending gradually, was covered with the purest sand. Ere Glossin had got upon his feet, the hoarse yet suppressed voice of Hatteraick growled through the recesses of the cave:--

‘Hagel and donner! be’st du?’

‘Are you in the dark?’

‘Dark? der deyvil! ay,’ said Dirk Hatteraick; ‘where should I have a glim?’

‘I have brought light’; and Glossin accordingly produced a tinder-box and lighted a small lantern.

‘You must kindle some fire too, for hold mich der deyvil, Ich bin ganz gefrorne!’

‘It is a cold place, to be sure,’ said Glossin, gathering together some decayed staves of barrels and pieces of wood, which had perhaps lain in the cavern since Hatteraick was there last.

‘Cold? Snow-wasser and hagel! it’s perdition; I could only keep myself alive by rambling up and down this d--d vault, and thinking about the merry rouses we have had in it.’

The flame then began to blaze brightly, and Hatteraick hung his bronzed visage and expanded his hard and sinewy hands over it, with an avidity resembling that of a famished wretch to whom food is exposed. The light showed his savage and stern features, and the smoke, which in his agony of cold he seemed to endure almost to suffocation, after circling round his head, rose to the dim and rugged roof of the cave, through which it escaped by some secret rents or clefts in the rock; the same doubtless that afforded air to the cavern when the tide was in, at which time the aperture to the sea was filled with water.

‘And now I have brought you some breakfast,’ said Glossin, producing some cold meat and a flask of spirits. The latter Hatteraick eagerly seized upon and applied to his mouth; and, after a hearty draught, he exclaimed with great rapture, ‘Das schmeckt! That is good, that warms the liver!’ Then broke into the fragment of a High-Dutch song,--

Saufen Bier und Brantewein, Schmeissen alle die Fenstern ein; Ich bin liederlich, Du bist liederlich; Sind wir nicht liederlich Leute a?

‘Well said, my hearty Captain!’ cried Glossin, endeavouring to catch the tone of revelry,--

‘Gin by pailfuls, wine in rivers, Dash the window-glass to shivers! For three wild lads were we, brave boys, And three wild lads were we; Thou on the land, and I on the sand, And Jack on the gallows-tree!

That’s it, my bully-boy! Why, you’re alive again now! And now let us talk about our business.’

‘YOUR business, if you please,’ said Hatteraick. ‘Hagel and donner! mine was done when I got out of the bilboes.’

‘Have patience, my good friend; I’ll convince you our interests are just the same.’

Hatteraick gave a short dry cough, and Glossin, after a pause, proceeded.

‘How came you to let the boy escape?’

‘Why, fluch and blitzen! he was no charge of mine. Lieutenant Brown gave him to his cousin that’s in the Middleburgh house of Vanbeest and Vanbruggen, and told him some goose’s gazette about his being taken in a skirmish with the land-sharks; he gave him for a footboy. Me let him escape! the bastard kinchin should have walked the plank ere I troubled myself about him.’

‘Well, and was he bred a foot-boy then?’

‘Nein, nein; the kinchin got about the old man’s heart, and he gave him his own name, and bred him up in the office, and then sent him to India; I believe he would have packed him back here, but his nephew told him it would do up the free trade for many a day if the youngster got back to Scotland.’

‘Do you think the younker knows much of his own origin now?’

‘Deyvil!’ replied Hatteraick, ‘how should I tell what he knows now? But he remembered something of it long. When he was but ten years old he persuaded another Satan’s limb of an English bastard like himself to steal my lugger’s khan--boat--what do you call it? to return to his country, as he called it; fire him! Before we could overtake them they had the skiff out of channel as far as the Deurloo; the boat might have been lost.’

‘I wish to Heaven she had, with him in her!’ ejaculated Glossin.

‘Why, I was so angry myself that, sapperment! I did give him a tip over the side; but split him! the comical little devil swam like a duck; so I made him swim astern for a mile to teach him manners, and then took him in when he was sinking. By the knocking Nicholas I he’ll plague you, now he’s come over the herring-pond! When he was so high he had the spirit of thunder and lightning.’

‘How did he get back from India?’

‘Why, how should I know? The house there was done up; and that gave us a shake at Middleburgh, I think; so they sent me again to see what could be done among my old acquaintances here, for we held old stories were done away and forgotten. So I had got a pretty trade on foot within the last two trips; but that stupid hounds-foot schelm, Brown, has knocked it on the head again, I suppose, with getting himself shot by the colonel-man.’

‘Why were not you with them?’

‘Why, you see, sapperment! I fear nothing; but it was too far within land, and I might have been scented.’

‘True.