The Fair Maid of Perth; Or, St. Valentine's Day by Walter Scott (electronic reader .TXT) 📕

smiles of kings, the pardon of popes and priests for old crimes, and the indulgence which encourages priest ridden fools to venture on new ones—all these holy incentives to vice may be purchased for gold. Revenge itself, which the gods are said to reserve to themselves, doubtless because they envy humanity so sweet a morsel—revenge itself is to be bought by it. But it is also to be won by superior skill, and that is the nobler mode of reaching it. I will spare, then, my treasure for other uses, and accomplish my revenge gratis; or rather I will add the luxury of augmented wealth to the triumph of requited wrongs.”

Thus thought Dwining, as, returned from his visit to Sir John Ramorny, he added the gold he had received for his various services to the mass of his treasure; and, having gloated over the whole for a minute or two, turned the key on his concealed treasure house, and walked forth on his visits to his patients, yielding the wall to every man whom he met and bowing and doffing his bonnet to the poorest burgher that owned a petty booth, nay, to the artificers who gained their precarious bread by the labour of their welked hands.

“Caitiffs,” was the thought of his heart while he did such obeisance—“base, sodden witted mechanics! did you know what this key could disclose, what foul weather from heaven would prevent your unbonneting? what putrid kennel in your wretched hamlet would be disgusting enough to make you scruple to fall down and worship the owner of such wealth? But I will make you feel my power, though it suits my honour to hide the source of it. I will be an incubus to your city, since you have rejected me as a magistrate. Like the night mare, I will hag ride ye, yet remain invisible myself. This miserable Ramorny, too, he who, in losing his hand, has, like a poor artisan, lost the only valuable part of his frame, he heaps insulting language on me, as if anything which he can say had power to chafe a constant mind like mine! Yet, while he calls me rogue, villain, and slave, he acts as wisely as if he should amuse himself by pulling hairs out of my head while my hand had hold of his heart strings. Every insult I can pay back instantly by a pang of bodily pain or mental agony, and—he, he!—I run no long accounts with his knighthood, that must be allowed.”

While the mediciner was thus indulging his diabolical musing, and passing, in his creeping manner, along the street, the cry of females was heard behind him.

“Ay, there he is, Our Lady be praised!—there is the most helpful man in Perth,” said one voice.

“They may speak of knights and kings for redressing wrongs, as they call it; but give me worthy Master Dwining the potter carrier, cummers,” replied another.

At the same moment, the leech was surrounded and taken hold of by the speakers, good women of the Fair City.

“How now, what’s the matter?” said Dwining, “whose cow has calved?”

“There is no calving in the case,” said one of the women, “but a poor fatherless wean dying; so come awa’ wi’ you, for our trust is constant in you, as Bruce said to Donald of the Isles.”

“Opiferque per orbem dicor,” said Henbane Dwining. “What is the child dying of?”

“The croup—the croup,” screamed one of the gossips; “the innocent is rouping like a corbie.”

“Cynanche trachealis—that disease makes brief work. Show me the house instantly,” continued the mediciner, who was in the habit of exercising his profession liberally, not withstanding his natural avarice, and humanely, in spite of his natural malignity. As we can suspect him of no better principle, his motive most probably may have been vanity and the love of his art.

He would nevertheless have declined giving his attendance in the present case had he known whither the kind gossips were conducting him, in time sufficient to frame an apology. But, ere he guessed where he was going, the leech was hurried into the house of the late Oliver Proudfute, from which he heard the chant of the women as they swathed and dressed the corpse of the umquhile bonnet maker for the ceremony of next morning, of which chant the following verses may be received as a modern imitation:

Viewless essence, thin and bare, Well nigh melted into air, Still with fondness hovering near The earthly form thou once didst wear, Pause upon thy pinion’s flight; Be thy course to left or right, Be thou doom’d to soar or sink, Pause upon the awful brink. To avenge the deed expelling Thee untimely from thy dwelling, Mystic force thou shalt retain O’er the blood and o’er the brain. When the form thou shalt espy That darken’d on thy closing eye, When the footstep thou shalt hear That thrill’d upon thy dying ear, Then strange sympathies shall wake, The flesh shall thrill, the nerves shall quake, The wounds renew their clotter’d flood, And every drop cry blood for blood!

Hardened as he was, the physician felt reluctance to pass the threshold of the man to whose death he had been so directly, though, so far as the individual was concerned, mistakingly, accessory.

“Let me pass on, women,” he said, “my art can only help the living—the dead are past our power.”

“Nay, but your patient is upstairs—the youngest orphan”—Dwining was compelled to go into the house. But he was surprised when, the instant he stepped over the threshold, the gossips, who were busied with the dead body, stinted suddenly in their song, while one said to the others:

“In God’s name, who entered? That was a large gout of blood.”

“Not so,” said another voice, “it is a drop of the liquid balm.”

“Nay, cummer, it was blood. Again I say, who entered the house even now?”

One looked out from the apartment into the little entrance, where Dwining, under pretence of not distinctly seeing the trap ladder by which he was to ascend into the upper part of this house of lamentation, was delaying his progress purposely, disconcerted with what had reached him of the conversation.

“Nay, it is only worthy Master Henbane Dwining,” answered one of the sibyls.

“Only Master Dwining,” replied the one who had first spoken, in a tone of acquiescence—“our best helper in need! Then it must have been balm sure enough.”

“Nay,” said the other, “it may have been blood nevertheless; for the leech, look you, when the body was found, was commanded by the magistrates to probe the wound with his instruments, and how could the poor dead corpse know that that was done with good purpose?”

“Ay, truly, cummer; and as poor Oliver often mistook friends for enemies while he was in life, his judgment cannot be thought to have mended now.”

Dwining heard no more, being now forced upstairs into a species of garret, where Magdalen sat on her widowed bed, clasping to her bosom her infant, which, already black in the face and uttering the gasping, crowing sound which gives the popular name to the complaint, seemed on the point of rendering up its brief existence. A Dominican monk sat near the bed, holding the