Red Cap Tales | Page 9

in the manner of
Froissart.
It is to be noted that thus far both Sweetheart and Maid Margaret
disdained the female parts, the latter even going the length of saying
that she preferred Celie Stubbs, the Squire's daughter at
Waverley-Honour, to Rose Bradwardine. On being asked for an
explanation of this heresy, she said, "Well, at any rate, Celie Stubbs got
a new hat to come to church in!"
* * * * *
And though I read the "Repentance and a Reconciliation" chapter,
which makes number Twelve of Waverley, to the combatants, I was
conscious that I must hasten on to scenes more exciting if I meant to
retain the attention of my small but exacting audience. Furthermore, it
was beginning to rain. So, hurriedly breaking off the tale, we drove
back to Melrose across the green holms of St. Boswells.
It was after the hour of tea, and the crowd of visitors had ebbed away
from the precincts of the Abbey before the tale was resumed. A flat
"throuch" stone sustained the narrator, while the four disposed
themselves on the sunny grass, in the various attitudes of severe
inattention which youth assumes when listening to a story. Sweetheart
pored into the depths of a buttercup. Hugh John scratched the freestone
of a half-buried tomb with a nail till told to stop. Sir Toady Lion,
having a "pinch-bug" coralled in his palms, sat regarding it cautiously
between his thumbs. Only Maid Margaret, her dimpled chin on her
knuckles, sat looking upward in rapt attention. For her there was no joy
like that of a story. Only, she was too young to mind letting the
tale-teller know it. That made the difference.
Above our heads the beautiful ruin mounted, now all red gold in the
lights, and purple in the shadows, while round and round, and through
and through, from highest tower to lowest arch, the swifts shrieked and
swooped.

THE SECOND TALE FROM "WAVERLEY"
I. THE CATTLE-LIFTING
NEXT morning (I continued, looking up for inspiration to the pinnacles
of Melrose, cut against the clear sky of evening, as sharply as when
"John Morow, master mason," looked upon his finished work and
found it very good)--next morning, as Captain Edward Waverley was
setting out for his morning walk, he found the castle of Bradwardine by
no means the enchanted palace of silence he had first discovered.
Milkmaids, bare-legged and wild-haired, ran about distractedly with
pails and three-legged stools in their hands, crying, "Lord, guide us!"
and "Eh, sirs!"
Bailie Macwheeble, mounted on his dumpy, round-barrelled pony, rode
hither and thither with half the ragged rascals of the neighbourhood
clattering after him. The Baron paced the terrace, every moment
glancing angrily up at the Highland hills from under his bushy grey
eyebrows.
From the byre-lasses and the Bailie, Edward could obtain no
satisfactory explanation of the disturbance. He judged it wiser not to
seek it from the angry Baron.
Within-doors, however, he found Rose, who, though troubled and
anxious, replied to his questions readily enough.
"There has been a 'creach,' that is, a raid of cattle-stealers from out of
the Highland hills," she told him, hardly able to keep back her
tears--not, she explained, because of the lost cattle, but because she
feared that the anger of her father might end in the slaying of some of
the Caterans, and in a blood-feud which would last as long as they or
any of their family lived.
"And all because my father is too proud to pay blackmail to Vich Ian
Vohr!" she added.
"Is the gentleman with that curious name," said Edward, "a local robber

or a thief-taker?"
"Oh, no," Rose laughed outright at his southern ignorance, "he is a
great Highland chief and a very handsome man. Ah, if only my father
would be friends with Fergus Mac-Ivor, then Tully-Veolan would once
again be a safe and happy home. He and my father quarrelled at a
county meeting about who should take the first place. In his heat he
told my father that he was under his banner and paid him tribute. But it
was Bailie Macwheeble who had paid the money without my father's
knowledge. And since then he and Vich Ian Vohr have not been
friends."
"But what is blackmail?" Edward asked in astonishment. For he
thought that such things had been done away with long ago. All this
was just like reading an old black-letter book in his uncle's library.
"It is money," Rose explained, "which, if you live near the Highland
border, you must pay to the nearest powerful chief--such as Vich Ian
Vohr. And then, if your cattle are driven away, all you have to do is just
to send him word and he will have them sent back, or others as good in
their places. Oh,