The Pirate
mansion of Jarlshof, he walked at a pace much faster than was usual with
him, taking the direction of the ruinous church, which stood, as he well
knew, within three or four miles of his dwelling.
The Ranzelman and Swertha stood gazing after him in silence, until he
was fairly out of ear-shot, when, looking seriously on each other, and
shaking their sagacious heads in the same boding degree of vibration,
they uttered their remarks in the same breath.
"Fools are aye fleet and fain," said Swertha.
"Fey folk run fast," added the Ranzelman; "and the thing that we are
born to, we cannot win by.--I have known them that tried to stop folk
that were fey. You have heard of Helen Emberson of Camsey, how she
stopped all the boles and windows about the house, that her gudeman
might not see daylight, and rise to the Haaf-fishing, because she feared
foul weather; and how the boat he should have sailed in was lost in the
Roost; and how she came back, rejoicing in her gudeman's safety--but
ne'er may care, for there she found him drowned in his own masking-fat,
within the wa's of his ain biggin; and moreover"----
But here Swertha reminded the Ranzelman that he must go down to the
haven to get off the fishing-boats; "for both that my heart is sair for
the bonny lad, and that I am fear'd he cast up of his ain accord before
you are at sea; and, as I have often told ye, my master may lead, but he
winna drive; and if ye do not his bidding, and get out to sea, the never
a bodle of boat-hire will ye see."
"Weel, weel, good dame," said the Ranzelman, "we will launch as fast as
we can; and by good luck, neither Clawson's boat, nor Peter Grot's, is
out to the Haaf this morning, for a rabbit ran across the path as they
were going on board, and they came back like wise men, kenning they wad
be called to other wark this day. And a marvel it is to think, Swertha,
how few real judicious men are left in this land. There is our great
Udaller is weel eneugh when he is fresh, but he makes ower mony voyages
in his ship and his yawl to be lang sae; and now, they say, his
daughter, Mistress Minna, is sair out of sorts.--Then there is Norna
kens muckle mair than other folk, but wise woman ye cannot call her. Our
tacksman here, Maister Mertoun, his wit is sprung in the bowsprit, I
doubt--his son is a daft gowk; and I ken few of consequence
hereabouts--excepting always myself, and maybe you, Swertha--but what
may, in some sense or other, be called fules."
"That may be, Niel Ronaldson," said the dame; "but if you do not hasten
the faster to the shore, you will lose tide; and, as I said to my master
some short time syne, wha will be the fule then?"
CHAPTER V.
I do love these ancient ruins--
We never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history;
And, questionless, here, in this open court,
(Which now lies naked to the injuries
Of stormy weather,) some men lie interr'd,
Loved the Church so well, and gave so largely to it,
They thought it should have canopied their bones
Till doomsday;--but all things have their end--
Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men,
Must have like death which we have.
_Duchess of Malfy._
The ruinous church of Saint Ninian had, in its time, enjoyed great
celebrity; for that mighty system of Roman superstition, which spread
its roots over all Europe, had not failed to extend them even to this
remote archipelago, and Zetland had, in the Catholic times, her saints,
her shrines, and her relics, which, though little known elsewhere,
attracted the homage, and commanded the observance, of the simple
inhabitants of Thule. Their devotion to this church of Saint Ninian, or,
as he was provincially termed, Saint Ringan, situated, as the edifice
was, close to the sea-beach, and serving, in many points, as a landmark
to their boats, was particularly obstinate, and was connected with so
much superstitious ceremonial and credulity, that the reformed clergy
thought it best, by an order of the Church Courts, to prohibit all
spiritual service within its walls, as tending to foster the rooted
faith of the simple and rude people around in saint-worship, and other
erroneous doctrines of the Romish Church.
After the Church of Saint Ninian had been thus denounced as a seat of
idolatry, and desecrated of course, the public worship was transferred
to another church; and the roof, with its lead and its rafters, having
been stripped from the little rude old Gothic building, it was left in
the wilderness to the mercy of the elements. The fury of the
uncontrolled winds, which howled along an exposed space, resembling that
which we have described at Jarlshof, very soon choked up nave and aisle,
and, on the north-west side, which was chiefly exposed to the wind, hid
the outside walls more than half way up with mounds of drifted sand,
over which the gable-ends of the building, with the little belfry, which
was built above its eastern angle, arose in ragged and shattered
nakedness of ruin.
Yet, deserted as it was, the Kirk of Saint Ringan still retained some
semblance of the ancient homage formerly rendered there. The rude and
ignorant fishermen of Dunrossness observed a practice, of which they
themselves had wellnigh forgotten the origin, and from which the
Protestant Clergy in vain endeavoured to deter them. When their boats
were in extreme peril, it was common amongst them to propose to vow an
_awmous_, as they termed it, that is, an alms, to Saint Ringan; and when
the danger was over, they never failed to absolve themselves of their
vow, by coming singly and secretly to the old church, and putting off
their shoes and stockings at the entrance of the churchyard, walking
thrice around the ruins, observing that they did so in the course of the
sun. When the circuit was accomplished for the third time, the votary
dropped his offering, usually a small silver coin, through the mullions
of a lanceolated window, which opened into a side aisle, and then
retired, avoiding carefully to look behind him till he was beyond the
precincts which had once been hallowed ground; for it was believed that
the skeleton of the saint received the offering in his bony hand, and
showed his ghastly death's-head at the window into which it was thrown.
Indeed, the scene was rendered more appalling to weak and ignorant
minds, because the same stormy and eddying winds, which, on the one side
of the church, threatened to bury the ruins with sand, and had, in fact,
heaped it up in huge quantities, so as almost to hide the side-wall with
its buttresses, seemed in other places bent on uncovering the graves of
those who had been laid to their long rest on the south-eastern quarter;
and, after an unusually hard gale, the coffins, and sometimes the very
corpses, of those who had been interred without the usual cerements,
were discovered, in a ghastly manner, to the eyes of the living.
It was to this desolated place of worship that the elder Mertoun now
proceeded, though without any of those religious or superstitious
purposes with which the church of Saint Ringan was usually approached.
He was totally without the superstitious fears of the country,--nay,
from the sequestered and sullen manner in which he lived, withdrawing
himself from human society even when assembled for worship, it was the
general opinion that he erred on the more fatal side, and believed
rather too little than too much of that which the Church receives and
enjoins to Christians.
As he entered the little bay, on the shore, and almost on the beach of
which the ruins are situated, he could not help pausing for an instant,
and becoming sensible that the scene, as calculated to operate on human
feelings, had been selected with much judgment as the site of a
religious house. In front lay the sea, into which two headlands, which
formed the extremities of the bay, projected their gigantic causeways of
dark and sable rocks, on the ledges of which the gulls, scouries, and
other sea-fowl, appeared like flakes of snow; while, upon the lower
ranges of the cliff, stood whole lines of cormorants, drawn up alongside
of each other, like soldiers in their battle array, and other living
thing was there none to see. The sea, although not in a tempestuous
state, was disturbed enough to rush on these capes with a sound like
distant thunder, and the billows, which rose in sheets of foam half way
up these sable rocks, formed a contrast of colouring equally striking
and awful.
Betwixt the extremities, or capes, of these projecting headlands, there
rolled, on the day when Mertoun visited the scene, a deep and dense
aggregation of clouds, through which no human eye could penetrate, and
which, bounding the vision, and excluding all view of the distant ocean,
rendered it no unapt representation of the sea in the Vision of Mirza
whose extent was concealed by vapours, and clouds, and storms. The
ground rising steeply from the sea-beach, permitting no view into the
interior of the country, appeared a scene of irretrievable barrenness,
where scrubby and stunted heath, intermixed with the long bent, or
coarse grass, which first covers sandy soils, were the only vegetables
that could be seen. Upon a natural elevation, which rose above the beach
in the very bottom of the bay, and receded a little from the sea, so as
to be without reach of the waves, arose the half-buried ruin which we
have already described, surrounded by a wasted, half-ruinous, and
mouldering wall, which, breached in several places, served still to
divide the precincts of the cemetery. The mariners who were driven by
accident into this solitary bay, pretended that the church was
occasionally observed to be full of lights, and, from that circumstance,
were used to prophesy shipwrecks and deaths by sea.
As Mertoun approached near to the chapel, he adopted, insensibly, and
perhaps without much premeditation, measures to avoid being himself
seen, until he came close under the walls of the burial-ground, which he
approached, as it chanced, on that side where the sand was blowing from
the graves, in the manner we have described.
Here, looking through one of the gaps in the wall which time had made,
he beheld the person whom he sought, occupied in a manner which assorted
well with the ideas popularly entertained of her character, but which
was otherwise sufficiently extraordinary.
She was employed beside a rude monument, on one side of which was
represented the rough outline of a cavalier, or knight, on horseback,
while, on the other, appeared a shield, with the armorial bearings so
defaced as not to be intelligible; which escutcheon was suspended by one
angle, contrary to the modern custom, which usually places them straight
and upright. At the foot of this pillar was believed to repose, as
Mertoun had formerly heard, the bones of Ribolt Troil, one of the remote
ancestors of Magnus, and a man renowned for deeds of valorous emprize in
the fifteenth century. From the grave of this warrior Norna of the
Fitful-head seemed busied in shovelling the sand, an easy task where it
was so light and loose; so that it seemed plain that she would shortly
complete what the rude winds had begun, and make bare the bones which
lay there interred. As she laboured, she muttered her magic song; for
without the Runic rhyme no form of northern superstition was ever
performed. We have perhaps preserved too many examples of these
incantations; but we cannot help attempting to translate that which
follows:--
"Champion, famed for warlike toil,
Art thou silent, Ribolt Troil?
Sand, and dust, and pebbly stones,
Are leaving bare thy giant bones.
Who dared touch the wild-bear's skin
Ye slumber'd on while life was in?--
A woman now, or babe, may come,