Red Cap Tales | Page 3

Walter's stories over again, and then I will mark in your own little edition the chapters you can read for yourselves."
The last clause quieted the joyous shout which the promise of a story--any sort of a story--had called forth. An uncertain look crept over their faces, as if they scented afar off that abomination of desolation--"lessons in holiday time."
"Must we read the chapters?" said Hugh John, unhopefully.
"Tell us the stories, anyway, and leave it to our honour!" suggested Sir Toady Lion, with a twinkle in his eye.
"Is it a story--oh, don't begin wifout me!" Maid Margaret called from behind the trees, her sturdy five-year-old legs carrying her to the scene of action so fast that her hat fell off on the grass and she had to turn back for it.
"Well, I will tell you, if I can, the story of 'Waverley,'" I said.
"Was he called after the pens?" said Toady Lion the irreverent, but under his breath. He was, however, promptly kicked into silence by his peers--seriously this time, for he who interferes with the telling of a story is a "Whelk,"--which, for the moment, is the family word for whatever is base, mean, unprofitable, and unworthy of being associated with.
But first I told them about the writing of Waverley, and the hand at the Edinburgh back window which wrote and wrote. Only that, but the story as told by Lockhart had affected my imagination as a boy.
"Did you ever hear of the Unwearied Hand?" I asked them.
"It sounds a nice title," said Sir Toady; "had he only one?"
"It was in the early summer weather of 1814," I began, "after a dinner in a house in George Street, that a young man, sitting at the wine with his companions, looked out of the window, and, turning pale, asked his next neighbour to change seats with him.
"'There it is--at it again!' he said, with a thump of his fist on thetable that made the decanters jump, and clattered the glasses; 'it has haunted me every night these three weeks. Just when I am lifting my glass I look through the window, and there it is at it--writing--writing--always writing!'
"So the young men, pressing about, looked eagerly, and lo! seen through the back window of a house in a street built at right angles, they saw the shape of a man's hand writing swiftly, steadily, on large quarto pages. As soon as one was finished, it was added to a pile which grew and grew, rising, as it were, visibly before their eyes.
"'It goes on like that all the time, even after the candles are lit,' said the young man, 'and it makes me ashamed. I get no peace for it when I am not at my books. Why cannot the man do his work without making others uncomfortable?'
"Perhaps some of the company may have thought it was not a man at all, but some prisoned fairy tied to an endless task--Wizard Michael's familiar spirit, or Lord Soulis's imp Red Cap doing his master's bidding with a goose-quill.
"But it was something much more wonderful than any of these. It was the hand of Walter Scott finishing Waverley, at the rate of a volume every ten days!"
"Why did he work so hard?" demanded Hugh John, whom the appearance of fifty hands diligently writing would not have annoyed--no, not if they had all worked like sewing-machines.
"Because," I answered, "the man who wrote Waverley was beginning to have more need of money. He had bought land. He was involved in other people's misfortunes. Besides, for a long time, he had been a great poet, and now of late there had arisen a greater."
"I know," cried Sweetheart, "Lord Byron--but I don't think he was."
"Anyway Fitzjames and Roderick Dhu is ripping!" announced Hugh John, and, rising to his feet, he whistled shrill in imitation of the outlaw. It was the time to take the affairs of children at the fulness of the tide.
"I think," I ventured, "that you would like the story of Waverley if I were to tell it now. I know you will like Rob Roy. Which shall it be first?"
Then there were counter-cries of "Waverley" and "Rob Roy"--all the fury of a contested election. But Sweetheart, waiting till the brawlers were somewhat breathed, indicated the final sense of the meeting by saying quietly, "Tell us the one the hand was writing!"

RED CAP TALES
TOLD FROM
WAVERLEY

THE FIRST TALE FROM "WAVERLEY"[1]
I. GOOD-BYE TO WAVERLEY-HONOUR
ON a certain Sunday evening, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, a young man stood practising the guards of the broadsword in the library of an old English manor-house. The young man was Captain Edward Waverley, recently assigned to the command of a company in Gardiner's regiment of dragoons, and his uncle was coming in to say a few words to him before he