Flora Lyndsay Volume I Part 24

The laugh became general; and poor Betty comprehending the blunder she had committed, not only fled from the scene, but dreading the jokes of her fellow-servants, fled from the house.

CHAPTER XXII.

CLIMBING THE MOUNTAINS.

The Lyndsays, to their infinite mortification and disappointment, found upon their arrival at Leith, that the _Chieftain_, in which vessel their places had been taken for Canada, had sailed only two days before. To make bad worse, Mrs. Waddel confidently affirmed, that it was the very last vessel which would sail that season.

Lyndsay, who never yielded to despondency, took these contrary events very philosophically, and lost no time in making inquiries among the s.h.i.+p-owners, to ascertain whether Mrs. Waddel was right.

After several days of anxious and almost hopeless search, he was at last informed that the _Flora_, Captain Ayre, was to leave for Canada in a fortnight. The name seemed propitious, and that very afternoon he walked down with his wife to inspect the vessel.

The _Flora_ was a small brig, very old, very dirty, and with wretched accommodations. The captain was a brutal-looking person, blind of one eye, and very lame. Every third word he uttered was an oath; and instead of answering Mr. Lyndsay's inquiries, he was engaged in a blasphemous dialogue with his two sons, who were his first and second mates. The young men seemed worthy of their parentage; their whole conversation being interloaded with frightful imprecations on their own limbs and souls, and the limbs and souls of others.

They had a very large number of steerage pa.s.sengers engaged, for the very small size of the vessel, and these emigrants were of the very lowest description.

"Don't let us go in this horrible vessel," whispered Flora to her husband. "What a captain! what a crew! we shall be miserable, if we form any part of her live cargo!"

"I fear, my dear girl, there is no alternative. We may, perhaps, hear of another before she sails. I won't engage places in her until the last moment."

The dread of going in the _Flora_ took a hold of the mind of her namesake; and she begged Jim to be on the constant look-out for another vessel.

During their stay at Leith, Lyndsay was busily employed in writing a concluding chapter to his work on the Cape; and Flora amused herself by taking long walks, accompanied by James, the maid, and the baby, in order to explore all the beauties of Edinburgh. The lad, who was very clever, and possessed a wonderful faculty of remembering places and of finding his way among difficulties, always acted as guide on these occasions. Before he had been a week at Leith, he knew every street in Edinburgh; had twice or thrice climbed the heights of Arthur's Seat, and visited every nook in the old castle. There was not a s.h.i.+p in the harbour of Leith, but he not only knew her name and the name of her captain, but he had made himself acquainted with some of her crew, and could tell her freight and tonnage, her age and capabilities, the port from which she last sailed and the port to which she was then bound, as well as any sailor on the wharf. It was really extraordinary to listen of an evening to the lad's adventures, and all the ma.s.s of information he had acquired during his long rambles through the day.

Flora was always in an agony lest James should be lost, or meet with some mishap during his exploring expeditions; but Mistress Waddel comforted her with the a.s.surance, "That a cat, throw her which way you wu'd, lighted a' upon her feet. That nought was never tent-an' they that war' born to be hanget wu'd never be drowned."

So, one fine afternoon in June, Flora took it into her head, that she would climb to the top of the mountain, the sight of which from her chamber window she was never tired of contemplating. She asked her husband to go with her. She begged, she entreated, she coaxed; but he was just writing the last pages of his long task, and he told her, that if she would only wait until the next day, he would go with pleasure.

But with Flora, it was this day or none. She had set her whole heart and soul upon going up to the top of the mountain, and to the top of the mountain she determined to go. This resolution was formed, in direct opposition to her husband's wishes; and with a perfect knowledge of the tale of the dog Ball, which had been one of her father's stock stories, the catastrophe of which she had known from a child. Lyndsay did not tell her positively she should not go without him; and unable to control her impatience, she gave him the slip, and set off with Jim, who was only too eager for the frolic, on her mountain climbing expedition.

Flora was a native of a rich pastoral country; very beautiful in running brooks, smooth meadows, and majestic parks; where the fat sleek cattle so celebrated in the London markets, graze knee-deep in luxuriant pastures, and the fallow deer browse and gambol beneath the shadow of majestic oaks through the long bright summer days. She had never seen a mountain before her visit to the North, in her life; had never risen higher in the world than to the top of Shooter's Hill; and when they arrived at the foot of this grand upheaving of nature, she began to think the task more formidable than she had imagined at a distance. Her young conductor, agile as a kid, bounded up the steep acclivity with as much ease as if he was running over a bowling-green.

"Not so fast, Jim!" cried Flora, pausing to draw breath. "I cannot climb like you."

Jim was already beyond hearing, and was lying on the ground peering over a projecting crag at least two hundred feet above her head, and impishly laughing at the slow progress she made.

"Now Jim! that's cruel of you, to desert me in my hour of need," said Flora, shaking her hand at the young mad-cap. "Lyndsay was right after all. I had better have waited till to-morrow."

Meanwhile, the path that wound round the mountain towards the summit became narrower and narrower, and the ascent more steep and difficult.

Flora sat down upon a stone amid the ruins of the chapel to rest, and to enjoy the magnificent prospect. The contemplation of this sublime panorama for a while absorbed every other feeling. She was only alive to a keen sense of the beautiful; and while her eye rested on the lofty ranges of mountains to the north and south, or upon the broad bosom of the silver Forth, she no longer wondered at the enthusiastic admiration expressed by the bards of Scotland for their romantic land.

While absorbed in thought, and contrasting the present with the past, a lovely boy of four years of age, in kilt and hose, his golden curls flying in the wind, ran at full speed up the steep side of the hill; a panting woman, without bonnet or shawl, following hard upon his track, shaking her fist at him, and vociferating her commands (doubtless for him to return) in Gaelic, fled by.

On ran the laughing child, the mother after him; but as well might a giant pursue a fairy.

Flora followed the path they had taken, and was beginning to enjoy the keen bracing air of the hills, when she happened to cast her eyes to the far-off meadows beneath. Her head grew suddenly giddy, and she could not divest herself of the idea, that one false step would send her to the plains below. Here was a most ridiculous and unromantic position: she neither dared to advance nor retreat; and she stood grasping a ledge of the rocky wall in an agony of cowardice and irresolution. At this critical moment, the mother of the run-away child returned panting from the higher ledge of the mountain, and, perceiving Flora pale and trembling, very kindly stopped and asked what ailed her.

Flora could not help laughing while she confessed her fears, lest she should fall from the narrow footpath on which she stood. The woman, though evidently highly amused at her distress, had too much native kindliness of heart, which is the mother of genuine politeness, to yield to the merriment which hovered about her lips.

"Ye are na accustomed to the hills," she said, in her northern dialect, "or ye wa'd na dread a hillock like this. Ye suld ha' been born whar I wa' born, to ken a mountain fra' a mole-hill. There is my bairn, noo, I canna' keep him fra' the mountain. He will gang awa' to the tap, an'

only laughs at me when I spier to him to come doon. It's a' because he is sae weel begotten-an' all his forbears war reared amang the hills."

The good woman sat down upon a piece of the loose rock, and commenced a long history of herself, of her husband, and of the great clan of Macdonald (to which they belonged), which at last ended in the discovery, that her aristocratic spouse was a Corporal in the Highland regiment then stationed in Edinburgh, and that Flora, his wife, washed for the officers in the said regiment-that the little Donald, with his wild-goat propensities, was their only child, and so attached to the hills, that she could not keep him confined to the meadows below! The moment her eye was off him, his great delight was to lead her a dance up the mountain, which, as she never succeeded in catching him, was quite labour in vain.

All this, and more, the good-natured woman communicated in her frank, desultory manner, as she led Flora down the steep, narrow path which led to the meadows below. Her kindness did not end here, for she walked some way up the road to put Mrs. Lyndsay in the right track to regain her lodgings, for Flora, trusting to the pilotage of Jim, was perfectly ignorant of the location.

This Highland Samaritan indignantly refused the piece of silver Flora proffered in return for her services. "Hout, leddy! keep the siller! I wudna' tak' aught fra' ye o' the Sabbath-day for a trifling act o'

courtesy-na, na, I come of too gude bluid for that!"

There was a n.o.ble simplicity about the honest-hearted woman, which was not lost upon Flora.

"If I were not English," thought Flora, "I should like to be Scotch."

She looked rather crest-fallen, as she presented herself before her Scotch husband, who laughed heartily over her misadventure, and did not cease to tease her about her expedition to the mountain, as long as they remained in its vicinity.

This did not deter her from taking a long stroll on the sands "o'

Leith," the next afternoon, with James, who delighted in these Quixotish rambles; and was always on the alert, to join in any scheme which promised an adventure. It was a lovely afternoon. The sun glittered on the distant waters, which girdled the golden sands with a zone of blue and silver. The air was fresh and elastic, and diffused a spirit of life and joyousness around. Flora, as she followed the footsteps of her young agile conductor, felt like a child again; and began to collect sh.e.l.ls and sea-weeds, with as much zest as she had done along her native coast, in those far-off happy days, which at times returned to her memory like some distinct, but distant dream.

For hours they wandered hither and thither, lulled by the sound of the waters, and amused by their child-like employment; until Flora remarked, that her footprints filled with water at each step, and the full deep roaring of the sea gave notice of the return of the tide. Fortunately they were not very far from the land; and oh, what a race they had to gain the "Peir o' Leith," before they were overtaken by the waves. How thankful they felt that they were safe, as the billows chased madly past, over the very ground, which a few minutes before, they had so fearlessly trod.

"This is rather worse than the mountain, mamma Flora," (a favourite name with James for his friend Mrs. Lyndsay,) "and might have been fatal to us both. I think Mr. Lyndsay would scold this time, if he knew our danger."

"We won't quarrel on the score of prudence. But what is this?" said Flora; and she stepped up to a blank wall, on their homeward path, and read aloud the following advertis.e.m.e.nt:-

"To sail on the first of July, via Quebec and Montreal; the fast sailing brig _Anne_, Captain Williams. For particulars, inquire at the office of P. Gregg, Bank Street, Leith.

"N.B. The _Anne_ is the last s.h.i.+p which leaves this port, for Canada, during the season."

"Hurra!" cried the volatile Jim, flinging his cap into the air; "a fig for Captain Ayre and the _Flora_. I'd lay sixpence if I had it, that we shall sail in the _Anne_."

"Let us go, James, and look at the vessel," cried Flora, clapping her hands with delight. "Oh, if it had not been for our fright on the sands, we should not have seen this."

Flora hastened home to inform her husband of the important discovery they had made; and before half an hour had elapsed, she found herself in company with him and Jim, holding a conference with Captain Williams, in the little cabin of the _Anne_.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE BRIG ANNE

Was a small, old-fas.h.i.+oned, black-hulled vessel, marvellously resembling a collier in her outward appearance. She was a one-masted s.h.i.+p, of 180 tons burthen, and promised everything but aristocratic accommodations for women and children.

The cabin was a low, square room, meant to contain only the captain and his mate; whose berths, curtained with coa.r.s.e red stuff, occupied the opposite walls. The table in the centre was a fixture, and the bench which ran round three sides of this crib, was a fixture also; and though backed by the wall, was quite near enough to the table to serve the double purpose of chair or sofa. A small fireplace occupied the front of the cabin, at the side of which, a door opened into a tiny closet, which the Captain dignified with the name of his state-cabin. The compa.s.s was suspended in a bra.s.s box from the ceiling,-articles of comfort or luxury there were none.