The Antiquary — Complete by Walter Scott (best fiction novels to read TXT) 📖

“Then, Hector, I wish the bitch would travel herself out of my grounds.”

“We will both of us retreat to-morrow, or to-day, but I would not willingly part from my mother’s brother in unkindness about a paltry pipkin.”

“O brother! brother!” ejaculated Miss M’Intyre, in utter despair at this vituperative epithet.

“Why, what would you have me call it?” continued Hector; “it was just such a thing as they use in Egypt to cool wine, or sherbet, or water;—I brought home a pair of them—I might have brought home twenty.”

“What!” said Oldbuck, “shaped such as that your dog threw down?”

“Yes, sir, much such a sort of earthen jar as that which was on the sideboard. They are in my lodgings at Fairport; we brought a parcel of them to cool our wine on the passage—they answer wonderfully well. If I could think they would in any degree repay your loss, or rather that they could afford you pleasure, I am sure I should be much honoured by your accepting them.”

“Indeed, my dear boy, I should be highly gratified by possessing them. To trace the connection of nations by their usages, and the similarity of the implements which they employ, has been long my favourite study. Everything that can illustrate such connections is most valuable to me.”

“Well, sir, I shall be much gratified by your acceptance of them, and a few trifles of the same kind. And now, am I to hope you have forgiven me?”

“O, my dear boy, you are only thoughtless and foolish.”

“But Juno—she is only thoughtless too, I assure you—the breaker tells me she has no vice or stubbornness.”

“Well, I grant Juno also a free pardon—conditioned, that you will imitate her in avoiding vice and stubbornness, and that henceforward she banish herself forth of Monkbarns parlour.”

“Then, uncle,” said the soldier, “I should have been very sorry and ashamed to propose to you anything in the way of expiation of my own sins, or those of my follower, that I thought worth your acceptance; but now, as all is forgiven, will you permit the orphan-nephew, to whom you have been a father, to offer you a trifle, which I have been assured is really curious, and which only the cross accident of my wound has prevented my delivering to you before? I got it from a French savant, to whom I rendered some service after the Alexandria affair.”

The captain put a small ring-case into the Antiquary’s hands, which, when opened, was found to contain an antique ring of massive gold, with a cameo, most beautifully executed, bearing a head of Cleopatra. The Antiquary broke forth into unrepressed ecstasy, shook his nephew cordially by the hand, thanked him an hundred times, and showed the ring to his sister and niece, the latter of whom had the tact to give it sufficient admiration; but Miss Griselda (though she had the same affection for her nephew) had not address enough to follow the lead.

“It’s a bonny thing,” she said, “Monkbarns, and, I dare say, a valuable; but it’s out o’my way—ye ken I am nae judge o’ sic matters.”

“There spoke all Fairport in one voice!” exclaimed Oldbuck “it is the very spirit of the borough has infected us all; I think I have smelled the smoke these two days, that the wind has stuck, like a remora, in the north-east—and its prejudices fly farther than its vapours. Believe me, my dear Hector, were I to walk up the High Street of Fairport, displaying this inestimable gem in the eyes of each one I met, no human creature, from the provost to the town-crier, would stop to ask me its history. But if I carried a bale of linen cloth under my arm, I could not penetrate to the Horsemarket ere I should be overwhelmed with queries about its precise texture and price. Oh, one might parody their brutal ignorance in the words of Gray:

Weave the warp and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of wit and sense, Dull garment of defensive proof, ‘Gainst all that doth not gather pence.”

The most remarkable proof of this peace-offering being quite acceptable was, that while the Antiquary was in full declamation, Juno, who held him in awe, according to the remarkable instinct by which dogs instantly discover those who like or dislike them, had peeped several times into the room, and encountering nothing very forbidding in his aspect, had at length presumed to introduce her full person; and finally, becoming bold by impunity, she actually ate up Mr. Oldbuck’s toast, as, looking first at one then at another of his audience, he repeated, with self-complacency,

“Weave the warp and weave the woof,—

“You remember the passage in the Fatal Sisters, which, by the way, is not so fine as in the original—But, hey-day! my toast has vanished!—I see which way—Ah, thou type of womankind! no wonder they take offence at thy generic appellation!”—(So saying, he shook his fist at Juno, who scoured out of the parlour.)—“However, as Jupiter, according to Homer, could not rule Juno in heaven, and as Jack Muirhead, according to Hector M’Intyre, has been equally unsuccessful on earth, I suppose she must have her own way.” And this mild censure the brother and sister justly accounted a full pardon for Juno’s offences, and sate down well pleased to the morning meal.

When breakfast was over, the Antiquary proposed to his nephew to go down with him to attend the funeral. The soldier pleaded the want of a mourning habit.

“O, that does not signify—your presence is all that is requisite. I assure you, you will see something that will entertain—no, that’s an improper phrase—but that will interest you, from the resemblances which I will point out betwixt popular customs on such occasions and those of the ancients.”

“Heaven forgive me!” thought M’Intyre;—“I shall certainly misbehave, and lose all the credit I have so lately and accidentally gained.”

When they set out, schooled as he was by the warning and entreating looks of his sister, the soldier made his resolution strong to give no offence by evincing inattention or impatience. But our best resolutions are frail, when opposed to our predominant inclinations. Our Antiquary,—to leave nothing unexplained, had commenced with the funeral rites of the ancient Scandinavians, when his nephew interrupted him, in a discussion upon the “age of hills,” to remark that a large sea-gull, which flitted around them, had come twice within shot. This error being acknowledged and pardoned, Oldbuck resumed his disquisition.

“These are circumstances you ought to attend to and be familiar with, my dear Hector; for, in the strange contingencies of the present war which agitates every corner of Europe, there is no knowing where you may be called upon to serve. If in Norway, for example, or Denmark, or any part of the ancient Scania, or Scandinavia, as we term it, what could be more convenient than to have at your fingers’ ends the history and antiquities of that ancient country, the officina gentium, the mother of modern Europe, the nursery of those heroes,

Stern to inflict, and stubborn to endure,