Part 11

For a girl of ten years of age, Margaret Swinton was possessed of much good sense and solidity of character. She heard herself doomed to a solitary confinement of six hours without shrinking; or thought, at least, that she would have no difficulty in beguiling the time by means of her new book—the Pilgrim’s Progress. So long as the steps and voices of her kindred were heard about the house, she felt quite at her ease. But, in reality, the trial was too severe for the nerves of a child of her tender age. When she heard the outer door locked by the last person that left the house, she felt the sound as a knell. The shot of the bolt echoed through the long passages of the empty house with a supernatural loudness; and, next moment after, succeeded that perceptible audible quiet, the breath-like voice of an untenanted mansion, which, like the hum of the vacant shell, seems still as if it were charged with sounds of life. There was no serious occasion for fear, seeing that nothing like real danger could be apprehended; nor was this the proper time for the appearance of supernatural beings: yet the very loneliness of her situation, and the speaking stillness of all around her, insensibly overspread her mind with that vague negative sensation which is described by the native word _eeriness_. From her window nothing was visible but the cold blue sky, which was not enlivened by even the occasional transit of a cloud. By and by the desolating wind of autumn began to break upon the moody silence of the hour. It rose in low melancholy gusts, and, whistling monotonously through every chink, spoke to the mind of this little child, of withering woods, and the lengthened excursions of hosts of leaves, hurried on from the scene of their summer pride into the dens and hollows where they were to decay. The sound gradually became more fitful and impetuous, and at last appeared to her imagination as if it were the voice of an enemy who was running round and round the house, in quest of admission—now and then going away as if disappointed and foiled, and anon returning to the attack, and breathing his rage and vexation in at every aperture. She soon found her mind possessed by a numerous train of fantastic fancies and fearful associations, drawn from the store of nursery legends and ballads which she was in the habit of hearing night after night, at the fireside in the hall, and which were infinitely more dreadful than the refined superstitions of modern children. She thought of the black bull of Norway, which went about the world destroying whatever of human life came within its reach; of the weary well at the World’s End, which formed the entrance into new regions, from whence no traveller ever returned; and of the fairies or _good neighbours_, a small green-coated race of supernatural creatures, who often came to the dwellings of mortals, and did them many good and evil turns. She had been told of persons yet alive, who in their childhood had been led away by these fays into the woods, and fed for weeks with wild berries and the milk of nuts, till at length, by the _po’orfu’_ preaching of some great country divine, they were reclaimed to their parents, being in such cases generally found sitting under a tree near their own homes. She had heard of a queen of these people—the Queen of Elfinland—who occasionally took a fancy for fair young maidens, and endeavoured to wile them into her service; and the thought occurred to her, that, as the fairies could enter through the smallest aperture, the house might be full of them at this moment.

For several hours the poor child suffered under these varied apprehensions, till at last she became in some measure desperate, and resolved at least to remove to another part of the house. The parlour below stairs commanded from its window a view of the avenue by which the house was approached; and she conceived that, by planting herself in the embrasure of one of those windows, she would be at the very border of the _eerie_ region within doors, and as near as possible to the scene without, the familiarity of which was in itself calculated to dispel her fears. From that point, also, she would catch the first glimpse of the family returning from church, after which she would no longer be in solitude. Trying, therefore, to think of a merry border tune, she opened her own door, walked along the passage—making as much noise as she could—and tramped sturdily and distinctly down stairs. The room of which she intended to take possession was at the end of a long passage leading from the back to the front of the house. This she traversed slowly—not without fear of being caught from behind by some unimaginable creature of horror; an idea which, on her reaching the chamber door, so far operated upon her, that, yielding to her imaginary terrors, and yet relying for safety upon getting into the parlour, she in the same moment uttered a slight scream and burst half joyfully into the room. Both of these actions scarcely took up more than the space of a single moment, and in another instant she had the door closed and bolted behind her. But what was her astonishment, her terror, and her awe, when, on glancing round the room, she saw distinctly before her, and relieved against the light of the window, the figure of a lady, in splendid apparel, supernaturally tall, and upon whose countenance was depicted a surprise not less than her own! The girl stood fixed to the spot, her breath suspended, and her eyes wide open, surveying the glorious apparition, whose beauty and fine attire, unlike aught earthly she had ever seen, made her believe it to be an _enchanted queen_—an imaginary being, of which the idea was suggested to her by one of the nursery tales already alluded to. Fortunately, the associations connected with this personage were rather of a pathetic than an alarming character; and though she still trembled at the idea of being in the presence of a supernatural object, yet as it was essentially beautiful and pleasing, and supposed to be rather in a condition of suffering than in the capacity of an injurer, Margaret Swinton did not experience the extremity of terror, but stood for a few seconds in innocent surprise, till at length the vision completely assured her of its gentle and pacific character, by smiling upon her, and, in a tone of the most winning sweetness, bidding her approach. She then went forward, with timid and slow steps; and becoming convinced that her enchanted queen was neither more nor less than a real lady of this world, soon ceased to regard her with any other sentiment than that of admiration. The lady took her hand, and addressed her by name—at first asking a few unimportant questions, and concluding by telling her that she might speak to her mother of what she had seen, but by no means to say a word upon the subject to any other person, and that under pain of her mother’s certain and severe displeasure. Margaret promised to obey this injunction, and was then desired by the lady to go to the window, to see if the family were yet returning from church. She did so, and found that they were not as yet in sight; when, turning round to give that information to the stranger, she found the room empty, and the lady gone. Her fears then returned in full force, and she would certainly have fainted, if she had not been all at once relieved by the appearance of the family at the head of the avenue, along which the dogs—as regular church-goers as their master—ran barking towards the house, gratifying her with what she afterwards declared to have been the most welcome sounds that ever saluted her ear.

Miss Swinton, being found out of her own room, was sharply reprimanded by her mother, and taken up stairs to be again confined to the sick-chamber. But before being left there, she found an opportunity of whispering into her mother’s ear, that she had seen a lady in the low parlour. Lady Swinton was arrested by the words, and, immediately dismissing the servant, asked Margaret, in a kindly and confidential tone, what she meant. The child repeated, that in the low parlour she had seen a beautiful lady—an enchanted queen—who had afterwards vanished, but not before having exacted from her a promise that she would say nothing of what she had seen, except to her mother. “Margaret,” said Lady Swinton, “I see you have been a very good girl; and since you are so prudent, I will let you know a little more about this enchanted queen, though her whole story cannot properly be disclosed to you at present.” She then conducted Margaret back to the parlour, pushed aside a sliding panel, and entered a secret chamber, in which the child again saw the tall and beautiful woman, who was now sitting at a table with a large prayer-book open before her. Lady Swinton informed the stranger, that, as Margaret had kept her secret so far according to her desire, she now brought her to learn more of it. “My dear,” said her ladyship, “this lady is unfortunate—her life is sought by certain men; and if you were to tell any of your companions that you have seen her, it might perhaps be the cause of bringing her to a violent death. You could not wish that the enchanted queen should suffer from so silly an error on your part.” Margaret protested, with tears, that she would speak to none of what she had seen; and after some farther conversation, she and her mother retired.

Margaret Swinton never again saw this apparition; but some years afterwards, when she had grown up, and all fears respecting the unfortunate lady were at an end, she learned the particulars of her story. She was the Mrs Macfarlane alluded to in the motto to this paper; a person whose fatal history made a noise at the time over all Britain, and interested alike the intelligent and the ignorant, the noble and the mean.

Mrs Macfarlane was the only daughter of a gentleman of Roxburghshire, who had perished in the insurrection of 1715. An attempt was made by his surviving friends to save the estate from forfeiture, so that it might have been enjoyed by his orphan daughter, then just emerged into womanhood. But almost all hope of that consummation was soon closed, and, in the meantime, the unfortunate young lady remained in a destitute situation. The only arrangement that could be devised by the generosity of her friends, was to permit her to reside periodically for a certain time in each of their houses—a mode of subsistence from which her spirit recoiled, but to which, for a little while, she was obliged to submit. It was while experiencing all the bitter pangs of a dependent situation, encountered for the first time, and altogether unexpectedly, that Mr Macfarlane, a respectable and elderly law agent, who had been employed by her father, came forward and made an offer of his hand. Glad to escape from the immediate pain of dependency, even at the hazard of permanent unhappiness, she accepted the proposal, although her relations did every thing they could to dissuade her from a match so much beneath her rank. The proud spirit of Elizabeth Ker swelled almost to bursting, when she entered the dwelling of her low-born husband; and the humble marriage-feast which was there placed before her, seemed in her eyes as the first wages of her degradation. But her own reflections might have been endured, and in time subdued, if they had not been kept awake by the ungenerous treatment which she received from all her former friends. The pride of caste was at this period unbroken in Scotland, and it rigorously demanded the exclusion of “the doer’s wife” from all the circles in which she had previously moved. The stars made a conspiracy to banish the sun. If Mrs Macfarlane had been educated properly, she would have been able to repel scorn with scorn, and, in these tergiversations of the narrow-spirited great, would have only seen their degradation, not her own. But under her deceased mother, a scion of a better house than even her father’s, she had grown up in the full participation of all the ridiculous notions as to caste, and of course was herself deeply sensible of the advantages she had forfeited. Rendered irritable in the highest degree by consciousness of her own loss, she received every slight thrown upon her by society into her innermost heart, where it festered and fed upon her very vitals. She found that she had fallen, that the step was irretrievable; and as factitious degradation, imposed by the forms of society, always in a short time becomes real, her character suffered a material deterioration. She took refuge from offended self-love in a spirit of hatred and contempt for her fellow-matrons, and began to entertain feelings from which, in earlier and happier years, she would have shrunk as from actual crime.

There was at least one branch of the better sort of Edinburgh society which never manifested any disinclination to her acquaintance. This was the class of loose young men of good birth, who daily paraded at the Cross with flowing periwigs and glancing canes, and nightly drowned their senses in a vulgar debauch, from which they occasionally awoke in the morning with the duty of settling scores by a rencontre in St Ann’s Yards, or at St Leonard’s Crags. This set of brawlers, the proper successors of those drunken cavaliers who disgraced a preceding age, subsisted in a state of pure antagonism to the stayed and decorous habits of the general community; many of them were literally the children of cavaliers, and indebted in a great measure for their idle way of life to the circumstances of the government, which dictated an exclusive distribution of its patronage among its own adherents, and of course left the poor Jacobites exposed to all the temptations of idleness. Dicing and golfing were the employments of their forenoons; in the evening they would stagger from table into Heriot’s Green, or Lady Murray’s garden in the Canongate, where they would make a point of staring out of countenance such sober citizens and their daughters as ventured to frequent those fashionable promenades. According to a Presbyterian writer of the day, they sent to London regularly for the last fashions and the newest oaths; but perhaps the latter part of the report is only a scandal. If such personages were to revive now-a-days, and appear some forenoon among the modern _beaux esprits_ of Prince’s Street, they would be looked upon, with their long wide-skirted coats, and buckles, and cravats, as a set of the most solemn looking gentlemen; but in their own time, there were no ideas associated with them but those of reckless, hot-headed youth, and daily habits the most opposite to those of decency and virtue.

Mrs Macfarlane, while she sunk from the society of gentlewomen of her own rank, still retained such acquaintance as she had ever happened to possess, of their wild sons and brothers. With them, she was in her turn an object of great interest, on account of her transcendant beauty, or rather its fame—for the fame with such persons is of far more importance than the reality. It was not disagreeable to Mrs Macfarlane, when she walked with her husband on the Castle Hill, and found herself passed with dry recognition by persons of her own sex, to be made up to by some long-waisted Sir Harry Wildair, who, in language borrowed from Congreve or Farquhar, protested that the sun was much aided in his efforts to illuminate the world by the light of her eyes. A rattle of the fan was the least favour that could be dispensed in reward for such a compliment; and then would ensue a conversation, perhaps only interrupted by a declaration from Mr Macfarlane, that he felt the air getting rather cold, and was afraid to stay out any longer on account of his rheumatism. The society of these fops was never farther encouraged by Mrs Macfarlane; indeed, it was only agreeable to her in public places, where it consoled her a little for the ungenerous slights of more respectable persons. Yet it had some effect upon her reputation, and was partly the cause of all her misfortunes.

About two years after the insurrection of 1715, the host of Edinburgh fops received an important accession in Mr George Cayley, a young English gentleman, who was sent down as one of the commissioners upon the forfeited estates. Cayley brought with him a considerable stock of cash, an oath of recent coinage, said to be very fashionable in Pall Mall, and a vest of peculiar cut, which he had lately got copied at Paris from an original belonging to the Regent Orleans. As he also brought a full complement of the most dissolute personal habits, he might be considered as recommended in the strongest manner to the friendship of the native beaux; if, indeed, his accomplishments were not apt rather to produce displeasure from their superiority. Some days after his arrival, he was introduced to Mrs Macfarlane, to whom he was an object of some interest on account of his concern in the disposal of her father’s estate. If she felt an interest in him on this account, he was not the less struck by her surpassing beauty and elegant manners, which appeared to him alike thrown away upon her husband, and the city in which she dwelt. He rushed home from the first interview in a state of mind scarcely to be imagined. That such a glorious creature should squander her light upon the humble house of an attorney, when she seemed equally fit to illuminate the halls of a palace, was in his eyes a perversion of the designs of nature. He wished that it was in his power to fly with her away—away from all the scenes where either was known, to some place far over this world’s wilderness, where every consciousness might be lost, except that of mutual love. Over and over again he deplored the artificial bonds imposed by human laws, and protected by the virtuous part of the human race, by which hearts the most devoted to each other were often condemned to eternal separation. His heart, he found, was possessed by sensations such as had never before moved it. It worshipped its object as a kind of idol, instead of, as formerly, regarding it as a toy. He flung himself in idea before the shrine of her splendour, in breathless, boundless, despairing passion.

It is probable that if Cayley had been fortunate enough to meet Mrs Macfarlane before she was married, he might have been inspired with an attachment equally devoted, and which, being indulged innocently, might have had the effect of purifying him from all his degrading vices, and raising him into a worthy member of society. As it was, the passion which, in proper circumstances, is apt to refine and humanise, only lent a frantic earnestness to his usual folly. He made it his endeavour to obtain as much of her society as possible—an object in which he was greatly favoured by his official character, which caused him to be treated with much less coolness by Mr Macfarlane than was otherwise to have been expected. That individual had not altogether lost hope of regaining the property to which his wife was entitled, and he therefore met Mr Cayley’s advances with more than corresponding warmth, every other sentiment being for the time subordinate to this important object. The young Englishman, in order to cultivate this delightful intimacy with the greater convenience, removed from his former lodgings to a house directly opposite to Mrs Macfarlane’s, in the High Street, where, at such times as a visit was out of the question, he would sit for hours watching patiently for the slightest glimpse of her through the windows, and judging even a momentary gleam of her figure within the dim glass as an ample compensation for his pains. He now became much less lively than before—forsook, in some measure, the company of his gay contemporaries—and seemed, in short, the complete _beau ideal_ of the melancholy, abstracted lover. It was his custom to spend most of his evenings in Mrs Macfarlane’s house; and, except during those too quickly flying hours, time was to him the greatest misery. Existence was only existence in that loved presence; the rest was a state of dormancy or watchfulness only to be spent in pain. If he applied at all to the business for which he was commissioned by the government, it was only to that part of it which related to the inheritance of Mrs Macfarlane, in order that he might every night have an excuse for calling upon that lady, to inform her of the progress he was making in her cause. His attachment in that quarter was soon whispered abroad in society; and while it served as a grateful theme for the tongues of Mrs Macfarlane’s former compeers, the favour with which he seemed to be received was equally the subject of envy to the young men, few of whom had ever found much countenance in her house, for want of something to recommend them equally to her husband.

Scarcely any thing is calculated to have so deteriorating an effect upon the mind as the constant fret of an unlawful passion. In every one of the clandestine and stealthy operations by which it is sought to be gratified, a step is gained in the downward descent towards destruction. Cayley, who was not naturally a man of wicked dispositions, and who might have been reclaimed by this passion, had it been virtuous, from all his trivial follies, gradually became prepared, by the emotions which convulsed his bosom, for an attempt involving the honour of his adored mistress, and, consequently, her whole happiness in life, as well as that of many innocent individuals with whom she was connected. This he now only waited for an opportunity of carrying into effect, and it was not long ere it was afforded.

Called by the urgent request of a Highland client, Mr Macfarlane had left town somewhat suddenly, and was not expected to return for upwards of a week. During his absence, Mrs Macfarlane endeavoured to repress the attentions of Mr Cayley as much as possible, from a sense of propriety, and contented herself with a kind of society—dumb, yet eloquent—which she felt to be much more fit for her situation—the society of her infant child. One evening, however, as she sat with her tender charge hushed to sleep upon her bosom, Mr Cayley was unexpectedly ushered in, notwithstanding that she had given directions for his exclusion after a certain hour, now past. To add to her distress, he appeared a little excited, as she thought, by liquor, but, in reality, by nothing but the burning and madly imprudent passion which had taken possession of him. He sat down, and gazed at her for a few moments without speaking, while she remonstrated against this unseasonable intrusion. She then rung her bell, in order to chide her servant for disobedience of her orders; but Mr Cayley tranquilly told her, that he had taken the liberty of sending the girl away upon an errand.

“In the name of heaven,” said the lady, “what do you mean?”