The Pirate
Just as she had arrived at this conclusion, her father, dashing the
crumbs from his laced waistcoat with one hand, and receiving with the
other a fourth cup of brandy and water, drank devoutly to the success of
their voyage, and ordered all to be in readiness to set forward. Whilst
they were saddling their ponies, Brenda, with some difficulty, contrived
to make her father understand she wished to speak with him in
private--no small surprise to the honest Udaller, who, though secret as
the grave in the very few things where he considered secrecy as of
importance, was so far from practising mystery in general, that his most
important affairs were often discussed by him openly in presence of his
whole family, servants included.
But far greater was his astonishment, when, remaining purposely with his
daughter Brenda, a little in the wake, as he termed it, of the other
riders, he heard the whole account of Norna's visit to Burgh-Westra, and
of the communication with which she had then astounded his daughters.
For a long time he could utter nothing but interjections, and ended with
a thousand curses on his kinswoman's folly in telling his daughters such
a history of horror.
"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 assuredly! I
know no more how to steer than if I had lost my compass. 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 shining
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 trimming of the boat, with
reverence,"--here he touched his hat reverentially; "and, after all the
shifting of ballast, poor Norna is as heavily loaded in the bows as ever
was an Orkneyman's yawl at the dog-fishing--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 sturdy 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 authoress'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 Danaë.
[17] _Lowe_, flame.
CHAPTER VII.
Thrice from the cavern's darksome womb
Her groaning voice arose;
And come, my daughter, fearless come,
And fearless tell thy woes!
MEIKLE.
The dwelling of Norna, though none but a native of Zetland, familiar,
during his whole life, with every variety of rock-scenery, could have
seen any thing ludicrous in this situation, was not unaptly compared by
Magnus Troil to the eyry of the osprey, or sea-eagle. It was very small,
and had been fabricated out of one of those dens which are called Burghs
and Picts-houses in Zetland, and Duns on the mainland of Scotland and
the Hebrides, and which seem to be the first effort at architecture--the
connecting link betwixt a fox's hole in a cairn of loose stones, and an
attempt to construct a human habitation out of the same materials,
without the use of lime or cement of any kind,--without any timber, so
far as can be seen from their remains,--without any knowledge of the
arch or of the stair. Such as they are, however, the numerous remains of
these dwellings--for there is one found on every headland, islet, or
point of vantage, which could afford the inhabitants additional means of
defence--tend to prove that the remote people by whom these Burghs were
constructed, were a numerous race, and that the islands had then a much
greater population, than, from other circumstances, we might have been
led to anticipate.
The Burgh of which we at present speak had been altered and repaired at
a later period, probably by some petty despot, or sea-rover, who,
tempted by the security of the situation, which occupied the whole of a
projecting point of rock, and was divided from the mainland by a rent or
chasm of some depth, had built some additions to it in the rudest style
of Gothic defensive architecture;--had plastered the inside with lime
and clay, and broken out windows for the admission of light and air;
and, finally, by roofing it over, and dividing it into stories, by means
of beams of wreck-wood, had converted the whole into a tower, resembling
a pyramidical dovecot, formed by a double wall, still containing within
its thickness that set of circular galleries, or concentric rings, which
is proper to all the forts of this primitive construction, and which
seem to have constituted the only shelter which they were originally
qualified to afford to their shivering inhabitants.[18]
This singular habitation, built out of the loose stones which lay