Rob Roy — Complete by Walter Scott (books to read in your 20s female .TXT) 📕

“No enemy of yours, since I am conveying you to a place, where, were I myself recognised and identified, iron to the heels and hemp to the craig would be my brief dooming.”

I paused and stood still on the pavement, drawing back so as to have the most perfect view of my companion which the light afforded me, and which was sufficient to guard against any sudden motion of assault.

“You have said,” I answered, “either too much or too little—too much to induce me to confide in you as a mere stranger, since you avow yourself a person amenable to the laws of the country in which we are—and too little, unless you could show that you are unjustly subjected to their rigour.”

As I ceased to speak, he made a step towards me. I drew back instinctively, and laid my hand on the hilt of my sword.

“What!” said he—“on an unarmed man, and your friend?”

“I am yet ignorant if you are either the one or the other,” I replied; “and to say the truth, your language and manner might well entitle me to doubt both.”

“It is manfully spoken,” replied my conductor; “and I respect him whose hand can keep his head.—I will be frank and free with you—I am conveying you to prison.”

“To prison!” I exclaimed—“by what warrant or for what offence?—You shall have my life sooner than my liberty—I defy you, and I will not follow you a step farther.”

“I do not,” he said, “carry you there as a prisoner; I am,” he added, drawing himself haughtily up, “neither a messenger nor sheriff's officer. I carry you to see a prisoner from whose lips you will learn the risk in which you presently stand. Your liberty is little risked by the visit; mine is in some peril; but that I readily encounter on your account, for I care not for risk, and I love a free young blood, that kens no protector but the cross o' the sword.”

While he spoke thus, we had reached the principal street, and were pausing before a large building of hewn stone, garnished, as I thought I could perceive, with gratings of iron before the windows.

“Muckle,” said the stranger, whose language became more broadly national as he assumed a tone of colloquial freedom—“Muckle wad the provost and bailies o' Glasgow gie to hae him sitting with iron garters to his hose within their tolbooth that now stands wi' his legs as free as the red-deer's on the outside on't. And little wad it avail them; for an if they had me there wi' a stane's weight o' iron at every ankle, I would show them a toom room and a lost lodger before to-morrow—But come on, what stint ye for?”

As he spoke thus, he tapped at a low wicket, and was answered by a sharp voice, as of one awakened from a dream or reverie,—“Fa's tat?—Wha's that, I wad say?—and fat a deil want ye at this hour at e'en?—Clean again rules—clean again rules, as they ca' them.”

The protracted tone in which the last words were uttered, betokened that the speaker was again composing himself to slumber. But my guide spoke in a loud whisper—“Dougal, man! hae ye forgotten Ha nun Gregarach?”

“Deil a bit, deil a bit,” was the ready and lively response, and I heard the internal guardian of the prison-gate bustle up with great alacrity. A few words were exchanged between my conductor and the turnkey in a language to which I was an absolute stranger. The bolts revolved, but with a caution which marked the apprehension that the noise might be overheard, and we stood within the vestibule of the prison of Glasgow,—a small, but strong guard-room, from which a narrow staircase led upwards, and one or two low entrances conducted to apartments on the same level with the outward gate, all secured with the jealous strength of wickets, bolts, and bars. The walls, otherwise naked, were not unsuitably garnished with iron fetters, and other uncouth implements, which might be designed for purposes still more inhuman, interspersed with partisans, guns, pistols of antique manufacture, and other weapons of defence and offence.

At finding myself so unexpectedly, fortuitously, and, as it were, by stealth, introduced within one of the legal fortresses of Scotland, I could not help recollecting my adventure in Northumberland, and fretting at the strange incidents which again, without any demerits of my own, threatened to place me in a dangerous and disagreeable collision with the laws of a country which I visited only in the capacity of a stranger.