The Antiquary — Complete, Walter Scott [best novels for beginners .TXT] 📗
- Author: Walter Scott
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“Then,” said M’Intyre, “this is the answer of Ossian:
Dare you compare your psalms, You son of a—”“Son of a what?” exclaimed Oldbuck.
“It means, I think,” said the young soldier, with some reluctance, “son of a female dog:
Do you compare your psalms, To the tales of the bare-arm’d Fenians”“Are you sure you are translating that last epithet correctly, Hector?”
“Quite sure, sir,” answered Hector, doggedly.
“Because I should have thought the nudity might have been quoted as existing in a different part of the body.”
Disdaining to reply to this insinuation, Hector proceeded in his recitation:
“I shall think it no great harm To wring your bald head from your shoulders—But what is that yonder?” exclaimed Hector, interrupting himself.
“One of the herd of Proteus,” said the Antiquary—“a phoca, or seal, lying asleep on the beach.”
Upon which M’Intyre, with the eagerness of a young sportsman, totally forgot both Ossian, Patrick, his uncle, and his wound, and exclaiming—“I shall have her! I shall have her!” snatched the walking-stick out of the hand of the astonished Antiquary, at some risk of throwing him down, and set off at full speed to get between the animal and the sea, to which element, having caught the alarm, she was rapidly retreating.
Not Sancho, when his master interrupted his account of the combatants of Pentapolin with the naked arm, to advance in person to the charge of the flock of sheep, stood more confounded than Oldbuck at this sudden escapade of his nephew.
“Is the devil in him,” was his first exclamation, “to go to disturb the brute that was never thinking of him!”—Then elevating his voice, “Hector—nephew—fool—let alone the Phoca—let alone the Phoca!— they bite, I tell you, like furies. He minds me no more than a post. There—there they are at it—Gad, the Phoca has the best of it! I am glad to see it,” said he, in the bitterness of his heart, though really alarmed for his nephew’s safety—“I am glad to see it, with all my heart and spirit.”
In truth, the seal, finding her retreat intercepted by the light-footed soldier, confronted him manfully, and having sustained a heavy blow without injury, she knitted her brows, as is the fashion of the animal when incensed, and making use at once of her fore-paws and her unwieldy strength, wrenched the weapon out of the assailant’s hand, overturned him on the sands, and scuttled away into the sea, without doing him any farther injury. Captain M’Intyre, a good deal out of countenance at the issue of his exploit, just rose in time to receive the ironical congratulations of his uncle, upon a single combat worthy to be commemorated by Ossian himself, “since,” said the Antiquary, “your magnanimous opponent has fled, though not upon eagle’s wings, from the foe that was low—Egad, she walloped away with all the grace of triumph, and has carried my stick off also, by way of spolia opima.”
M’Intyre had little to answer for himself, except that a Highlander could never pass a deer, a seal, or a salmon, where there was a possibility of having a trial of skill with them, and that he had forgot one of his arms was in a sling. He also made his fall an apology for returning back to Monkbarns, and thus escape the farther raillery of his uncle, as well as his lamentations for his walking-stick.
“I cut it,” he said, “in the classic woods of Hawthornden, when I did not expect always to have been a bachelor—I would not have given it for an ocean of seals—O Hector! Hector!—thy namesake was born to be the prop of Troy, and thou to be the plague of Monkbarns!”
CHAPTER TENTH. Tell me not of it, friend—when the young weep, Their tears are luke-warm brine;—from your old eyes Sorrow falls down like hail-drops of the North, Chilling the furrows of our withered cheeks, Cold as our hopes, and hardened as our feeling— Theirs, as they fall, sink sightless—ours recoil, Heap the fair plain, and bleaken all before us. Old Play.
The Antiquary, being now alone, hastened his pace, which had been retarded by these various discussions, and the rencontre which had closed them, and soon arrived before the half-dozen cottages at Mussel-crag. They had now, in addition to their usual squalid and uncomfortable appearance, the melancholy attributes of the house of mourning. The boats were all drawn up on the beach; and, though the day was fine, and the season favourable, the chant, which is used by the fishers when at sea, was silent, as well as the prattle of the children, and the shrill song of the mother, as she sits mending her nets by the door. A few of the neighbours, some in their antique and well-saved suits of black, others in their ordinary clothes, but all bearing an expression of mournful sympathy with distress so sudden and unexpected, stood gathered around the door of Mucklebackit’s cottage, waiting till “the body was lifted.” As the Laird of Monkbarns approached, they made way for him to enter, doffing their hats and bonnets as he passed, with an air of melancholy courtesy, and he returned their salutes in the same manner.
In the inside of the cottage was a scene which our Wilkie alone could have painted, with that exquisite feeling of nature that characterises his enchanting productions.
The body was laid in its coffin within the wooden bedstead which the young fisher had occupied while alive. At a little distance stood the father, whose rugged weather-beaten countenance, shaded by his grizzled hair, had faced many a stormy night and night-like day. He was apparently revolving his loss in his mind, with that strong feeling of painful grief peculiar to harsh and rough characters, which almost breaks forth into hatred against the world, and all that remain in it, after the beloved object is withdrawn. The old man had made the most desperate efforts to save his son, and had only been withheld by main force from renewing them at a moment when, without the possibility of assisting the sufferer, he must himself have perished. All this apparently was boiling in his recollection. His glance was directed sidelong towards the coffin, as to an object on which he could not stedfastly look, and yet from which he could not withdraw his eyes. His answers to the necessary questions which were occasionally put to him, were brief, harsh, and almost fierce. His family had not yet dared to address to him a word, either of sympathy or consolation. His masculine wife, virago as
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