Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century by Walter Scott (classic novels .TXT) 📕

game which she is playing, and is determined to keep me in ignorance. Both of them, and the wench in particular, treat me as they would do a spoiled child, and never directly refuse me anything which I ask, taking care, at the same time, not to make their words good by effectually granting my request. Thus, if I desire to go out, I am promised by Dorcas that I shall walk in the park at night, and see the cows milked, just as she would propose such an amusement to a child. But she takes care never to keep her word, if it is in her power to do so.

In the meantime, there has stolen on me insensibly an indifference to my freedom—a carelessness about my situation, for which I am unable to account, unless it be the consequence of weakness and loss of blood. I have read of men who, immured as I am, have surprised the world by the address with which they have successfully overcome the most formidable obstacles to their escape; and when I have heard such anecdotes, I have said to myself, that no one who is possessed only of a fragment of freestone, or a rusty nail to grind down rivets and to pick locks, having his full leisure to employ in the task, need continue the inhabitant of a prison. Here, however, I sit, day after day, without a single effort to effect my liberation.

Yet my inactivity is not the result of despondency, but arises, in part at least, from feelings of a very different cast. My story, long a mysterious one, seems now upon the verge of some strange development; and I feel a solemn impression that I ought to wait the course of events, to struggle against which is opposing my feeble efforts to the high will of fate. Thou, my Alan, wilt treat as timidity this passive acquiescence, which has sunk down on me like a benumbing torpor; but if thou hast remembered by what visions my couch was haunted, and dost but think of the probability that I am in the vicinity, perhaps under the same roof with G.M., thou wilt acknowledge that other feelings than pusillanimity have tended in some degree to reconcile me to my fate.

Still I own it is unmanly to submit with patience to this oppressive confinement. My heart rises against it, especially when I sit down to record my sufferings in this journal, and I am determined, as the first step to my deliverance, to have my letters sent to the post-house. ——

I am disappointed. When the girl Dorcas, upon whom I had fixed for a messenger, heard me talk of sending a letter, she willingly offered her services, and received the crown which I gave her (for my purse had not taken flight with the more valuable contents of my pocket-book) with a smile which showed her whole set of white teeth.

But when, with the purpose of gaining some intelligence respecting my present place of abode, I asked to which post-town she was to send or carry the letter, a stolid ‘ANAN’ showed me she was either ignorant of the nature of a post-office, or that, for the present, she chose to seem so.—‘Simpleton!’ I said, with some sharpness.

‘O Lord, sir!’ answered the girl, turning pale, which they always do when I show any sparks of anger, ‘Don’t put yourself in a passion—I’ll put the letter in the post.

‘What! and not know the name of the post-town?’ said I, out of patience. ‘How on earth do you propose to manage that?’

‘La you there, good master. What need you frighten a poor girl that is no schollard, bating what she learned at the Charity School of Saint Bees?’

‘Is Saint Bees far from this place, Dorcas? Do you send your letters there?’ said I, in a manner as insinuating, and yet careless, as I could assume.

‘Saint Bees! La, who but a madman—begging your honour’s pardon—it’s a matter of twenty years since fader lived at Saint Bees, which is twenty, or forty, or I dunna know not how many miles from this part, to the West, on the coast side; and I would not have left Saint Bees, but that fader’—

‘Oh, the devil take your father!’ replied I.

To which she answered, ‘Nay, but thof your honour be a little how-come-so, you shouldn’t damn folk’s faders; and I won’t stand to it, for one.’

‘Oh, I beg you a thousand pardons—I wish your father no ill in the world—he was a very honest man in his way.’

‘WAS an honest man!’ she exclaimed; for the Cumbrians are, it would seem, like their neighbours the Scotch, ticklish on the point of ancestry,—‘He IS a very honest man as ever led nag with halter on head to Staneshaw Bank Fair. Honest! He is a horse-couper.’

‘Right, right,’ I replied; ‘I know it—I have heard of your father-as honest as any horse-couper of them all. Why, Dorcas, I mean to buy a horse of him.’

‘Ah, your honour,’ sighed Dorcas, ‘he is the man to serve your honour well—if ever you should get round again—or thof you were a bit off the hooks, he would no more cheat you than’—

‘Well, well, we will deal, my girl, you may depend on’t. But tell me now, were I to give you a letter, what would you do to get it forward?’

‘Why, put it into Squire’s own bag that hangs in hall,’ answered poor Dorcas. ‘What else could I do? He sends it to Brampton, or to Carloisle, or where it pleases him, once a week, and that gate.’

‘Ah!’ said I; ‘and I suppose your sweetheart John carries it?’

‘Noa—disn’t now—and Jan is no sweetheart of mine, ever since he danced at his mother’s feast with Kitty Rutlege, and let me sit still; that a did.’

‘It was most abominable in Jan, and what I could never have thought of him,’ I replied.

‘Oh, but a did though—a let me sit still on my seat, a did.’

‘Well, well, my pretty May, you will get a handsomer fellow than Jan—Jan’s not the fellow for you, I see that.’

‘Noa, noa,’ answered the damsel; ‘but he is weel aneugh for a’ that, mon. But I carena a button for him; for there is the miller’s son, that suitored me last Appleby Fair, when I went wi’ oncle, is a gway canny lad as you will see in the sunshine.’

‘Aye, a fine stout fellow. Do you think he would carry my letter to Carlisle?’

‘To Carloisle! ‘Twould be all his life is worth; he maun wait on clap and hopper, as they say. Odd, his father would brain him if he went to Carloisle, bating to wrestling for the belt, or sic loike. But I ha’ more bachelors than him; there is the schoolmaster, can write almaist as weel as tou canst, mon.’

‘Then he is the very man to take charge of a letter; he knows the trouble of writing one.’

‘Aye, marry does he, an tou comest to that, mon; only it takes him four hours to write as mony lines. Tan, it is a great round hand loike, that one can read easily, and not loike your honour’s, that are like midge’s taes. But for ganging to Carloisle, he’s dead foundered, man, as cripple