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Read Ebook: Red Cap Tales Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North by Crockett S R Samuel Rutherford Scott Walter
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Ebook has 386 lines and 93764 words, and 8 pages
CERTAIN SMALL PHARAOHS THAT KNEW NOT JOSEPH 1
RED CAP TALES FROM "WAVERLEY"
THE FIFTH TALE: THE WHITE COCKADE 81
THE LAST TALE: THE BARON'S SURPRISE 105
RED CAP TALES FROM "GUY MANNERING"
THE THIRD TALE: THE RETURN OF DIRK HATTERAICK 166
RED CAP TALES FROM "ROB ROY"
BY SIMON HARMON VEDDER
GUY MANNERING
ROB ROY
THE ANTIQUARY
RED CAP TALES
CERTAIN SMALL PHARAOHS THAT KNEW NOT JOSEPH
IT was all Sweetheart's fault, and this is how it came about.
She and I were at Dryburgh Abbey, sitting quietly on a rustic seat, and looking toward the aisle in which slept the Great Dead. The long expected had happened, and we had made pilgrimage to our Mecca. Yet, in spite of the still beauty of the June day, I could see that a shadow lay upon our Sweetheart's brow.
I knew what was coming.
"But what?" I said, looking severely at the ground, so that I might be able to harden my heart against the pathos of Sweetheart's expression.
Even the multiplication table failed here, and at this, variously a-sprawl on the turf beneath, the smaller fry giggled.
"Yes, though we had heard it twenty times already," commented Sir Toady Lion, trying his hardest to pinch his brother's legs on the sly.
"Books wifout pictures is silly!" said a certain Maid Margaret, a companion new to the honourable company, who was weaving daisy-chains, her legs crossed beneath her, Turk fashion. In literature she had got as far as words of one syllable, and had a poor opinion even of them.
The children received this announcement with the cautious silence with which every rising generation listens to the experiences of its elders when retailed by way of odious comparison.
"Oh, we know--we know!" cried all the others in chorus. Whereupon I informed them what would have happened to us thirty years ago if we had ventured to address our parents in such fashion. But Sweetheart, with the gravity of her age upon her, endeavoured to raise the discussion to its proper level.
"Scott writes such a lot before you get at the story," she objected, knitting her brows; "why couldn't he just have begun right away?"
"With Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey drawing at their pipes in the oak-pannelled dining room, and Black Dog outside the door, and Pew coming tapping along the road with his stick!" cried Hugh John, turning off a sketchy synopsis of his favourite situations in fiction.
"Now that's what I call a proper book!" said Sir Toady, hastily rolling himself out of the way of being kicked.
As for blithe Maid Margaret, she said nothing, for she was engaged in testing the capacities of a green slope of turf for turning somersaults upon.
"In Sir Walter Scott's time," I resumed gravely, "novels were not written for little girls--"
"Then why did you give us Miss Edgeworth to read?" said Sweetheart, quickly. But I went on without noticing the interruption, "Now, if you like, I will tell you some of Sir 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."
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
RED CAP TALES
TOLD FROM
WAVERLEY
THE FIRST TALE FROM "WAVERLEY"
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 set out to join the colours.
Being a soldier and a hero, Edward Waverley was naturally tall and handsome, but, owing to the manner of his education, his uncle, an high Jacobite of the old school, held that he was "somewhat too bookish" for a proper man. He must therefore see a little of the world, asserted old Sir Everard.
Edward's uncle, Sir Everard, had wished him to travel abroad in company with his tutor, a staunch Jacobite clergyman by the name of Mr. Pembroke. But to this Edward's father, who was a member of the government, unexpectedly refused his sanction. Now Sir Everard despised his younger brother as a turncoat , but he could not gainsay a father's authority, even though he himself had brought the boy up to be his heir.
"I am willing that you should be a soldier," he said to Edward; "your ancestors have always been of that profession. Be brave like them, but not rash. Remember you are the last of the Waverleys and the hope of the house. Keep no company with gamblers, with rakes, or with Whigs. Do your duty to God, to the Church of England, and--" He was going to say "to the King," when he remembered that by his father's wish Edward was going to fight the battles of King George. So the old Jacobite finished off rather lamely by repeating, "to the Church of England and all constituted authorities!"
Then the old man, not trusting himself to say more, broke off abruptly and went down to the stables to choose the horses which were to carry Edward to the north. Finally, he delivered into the hands of his nephew an important letter addressed as follows:--
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