Kabanata Kabanata 4 · CASTLE-BUILDING

. CASTLE-BUILDING

I have already hinted that the dainty, squeamish, and fastidious taste

acquired by a surfeit of idle reading had not only rendered our hero

unfit for serious and sober study, but had even disgusted him in some

degree with that in which he had hitherto indulged.

He was in his sixteenth year when his habits of abstraction and love of

solitude became so much marked as to excite Sir Everard’s affectionate

apprehension. He tried to counterbalance these propensities by engaging

his nephew in field-sports, which had been the chief pleasure of his

own youthful days. But although Edward eagerly carried the gun for one

season, yet when practice had given him some dexterity, the pastime

ceased to afford him amusement.

In the succeeding spring, the perusal of old Isaac Walton’s fascinating

volume determined Edward to become “a brother of the angle.” But of all

diversions which ingenuity ever devised for the relief of idleness,

fishing is the worst qualified to amuse a man who is at once indolent

and impatient; and our hero’s rod was speedily flung aside. Society and

example, which, more than any other motives, master and sway the

natural bent of our passions, might have had their usual effect upon

the youthful visionary. But the neighbourhood was thinly inhabited, and

the home-bred young squires whom it afforded were not of a class fit to

form Edward’s usual companions, far less to excite him to emulation in

the practice of those pastimes which composed the serious business of

their lives.

There were a few other youths of better education and a more liberal

character, but from their society also our hero was in some degree

excluded. Sir Everard had, upon the death of Queen Anne, resigned his

seat in Parliament, and, as his age increased and the number of his

contemporaries diminished, had gradually withdrawn himself from

society; so that when, upon any particular occasion, Edward mingled

with accomplished and well-educated young men of his own rank and

expectations, he felt an inferiority in their company, not so much from

deficiency of information, as from the want of the skill to command and

to arrange that which he possessed. A deep and increasing sensibility

added to this dislike of society. The idea of having committed the

slightest solecism in politeness, whether real or imaginary, was agony

to him; for perhaps even guilt itself does not impose upon some minds

so keen a sense of shame and remorse, as a modest, sensitive, and

inexperienced youth feels from the consciousness of having neglected

etiquette or excited ridicule. Where we are not at ease, we cannot be

happy; and therefore it is not surprising that Edward Waverley supposed

that he disliked and was unfitted for society, merely because he had

not yet acquired the habit of living in it with ease and comfort, and

of reciprocally giving and receiving pleasure.

The hours he spent with his uncle and aunt were exhausted in listening

to the oft-repeated tale of narrative old age. Yet even there his

imagination, the predominant faculty of his mind, was frequently

excited. Family tradition and genealogical history, upon which much of

Sir Everard’s discourse turned, is the very reverse of amber, which,

itself a valuable substance, usually includes flies, straws, and other

trifles; whereas these studies, being themselves very insignificant and

trifling, do nevertheless serve to perpetuate a great deal of what is

rare and valuable in ancient manners, and to record many curious and

minute facts which could have been preserved and conveyed through no

other medium. If, therefore, Edward Waverley yawned at times over the

dry deduction of his line of ancestors, with their various

intermarriages, and inwardly deprecated the remorseless and protracted

accuracy with which the worthy Sir Everard rehearsed the various

degrees of propinquity between the house of Waverley-Honour and the

doughty barons, knights, and squires to whom they stood allied; if

(notwithstanding his obligations to the three ermines passant) he

sometimes cursed in his heart the jargon of heraldry, its griffins, its

moldwarps, its wyverns, and its dragons, with all the bitterness of

Hotspur himself, there were moments when these communications

interested his fancy and rewarded his attention.

The deeds of Wilibert of Waverley in the Holy Land, his long absence

and perilous adventures, his supposed death, and his return on the

evening when the betrothed of his heart had wedded the hero who had

protected her from insult and oppression during his absence; the

generosity with which the Crusader relinquished his claims, and sought

in a neighbouring cloister that peace which passeth not away;[2]—to

these and similar tales he would hearken till his heart glowed and his

eye glistened. Nor was he less affected when his aunt, Mrs. Rachel,

narrated the sufferings and fortitude of Lady Alice Waverley during the

Great Civil War. The benevolent features of the venerable spinster

kindled into more majestic expression as she told how Charles had,

after the field of Worcester, found a day’s refuge at Waverley-Honour,

and how, when a troop of cavalry were approaching to search the

mansion, Lady Alice dismissed her youngest son with a handful of

domestics, charging them to make good with their lives an hour’s

diversion, that the king might have that space for escape. “And, God

help her,” would Mrs. Rachel continue, fixing her eyes upon the

heroine’s portrait as she spoke, “full dearly did she purchase the

safety of her prince with the life of her darling child. They brought

him here a prisoner, mortally wounded; and you may trace the drops of

his blood from the great hall door along the little gallery, and up to

the saloon, where they laid him down to die at his mother’s feet. But

there was comfort exchanged between them; for he knew, from the glance

of his mother’s eye, that the purpose of his desperate defence was

attained. Ah! I remember,” she continued, “I remember well to have seen

one that knew and loved him. Miss Lucy Saint Aubin lived and died a

maid for his sake, though one of the most beautiful and wealthy matches

in this country; all the world ran after her, but she wore widow’s

mourning all her life for poor William, for they were betrothed though

not married, and died in—I cannot think of the date; but I remember, in

the November of that very year, when she found herself sinking, she

desired to be brought to Waverley-Honour once more, and visited all the

places where she had been with my grand-uncle, and caused the carpets

to be raised that she might trace the impression of his blood, and if

tears could have washed it out, it had not been there now; for there

was not a dry eye in the house. You would have thought, Edward, that

the very trees mourned for her, for their leaves dropt around her

without a gust of wind, and, indeed, she looked like one that would

never see them green again.”

From such legends our hero would steal away to indulge the fancies they

excited. In the corner of the large and sombre library, with no other

light than was afforded by the decaying brands on its ponderous and

ample hearth, he would exercise for hours that internal sorcery by

which past or imaginary events are presented in action, as it were, to

the eye of the muser. Then arose in long and fair array the splendour

of the bridal feast at Waverley-Castle; the tall and emaciated form of

its real lord, as he stood in his pilgrim’s weeds, an unnoticed

spectator of the festivities of his supposed heir and intended bride;

the electrical shock occasioned by the discovery; the springing of the

vassals to arms; the astonishment of the bridegroom; the terror and

confusion of the bride; the agony with which Wilibert observed that her

heart as well as consent was in these nuptials; the air of dignity, yet

of deep feeling, with which he flung down the half-drawn sword, and

turned away for ever from the house of his ancestors. Then would he

change the scene, and fancy would at his wish represent Aunt Rachel’s

tragedy. He saw the Lady Waverley seated in her bower, her ear strained

to every sound, her heart throbbing with double agony, now listening to

the decaying echo of the hoofs of the king’s horse, and when that had

died away, hearing in every breeze that shook the trees of the park,

the noise of the remote skirmish. A distant sound is heard like the

rushing of a swoln stream; it comes nearer, and Edward can plainly

distinguish the galloping of horses, the cries and shouts of men, with

straggling pistol-shots between, rolling forwards to the Hall. The lady

starts up—a terrified menial rushes in—but why pursue such a

description?

As living in this ideal world became daily more delectable to our hero,

interruption was disagreeable in proportion. The extensive domain that

surrounded the Hall, which, far exceeding the dimensions of a park, was

usually termed Waverley-Chase, had originally been forest ground, and

still, though broken by extensive glades, in which the young deer were

sporting, retained its pristine and savage character. It was traversed

by broad avenues, in many places half grown up with brush-wood, where

the beauties of former days used to take their stand to see the stag

coursed with greyhounds, or to gain an aim at him with the crossbow. In

one spot, distinguished by a moss-grown Gothic monument, which retained

the name of Queen’s Standing, Elizabeth herself was said to have

pierced seven bucks with her own arrows. This was a very favourite

haunt of Waverley. At other times, with his gun and his spaniel, which

served as an apology to others, and with a book in his pocket, which

perhaps served as an apology to himself, he used to pursue one of these

long avenues, which, after an ascending sweep of four miles, gradually

narrowed into a rude and contracted path through the cliffy and woody

pass called Mirkwood Dingle, and opened suddenly upon a deep, dark, and

small lake, named, from the same cause, Mirkwood-Mere. There stood, in

former times, a solitary tower upon a rock almost surrounded by the

water, which had acquired the name of the Strength of Waverley, because

in perilous times it had often been the refuge of the family. There, in

the wars of York and Lancaster, the last adherents of the Red Rose who

dared to maintain her cause carried on a harassing and predatory

warfare, till the stronghold was reduced by the celebrated Richard of

Gloucester. Here, too, a party of Cavaliers long maintained themselves

under Nigel Waverley, elder brother of that William whose fate Aunt

Rachel commemorated. Through these scenes it was that Edward loved to

“chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancy,” and, like a child among his

toys, culled and arranged, from the splendid yet useless imagery and

emblems with which his imagination was stored, visions as brilliant and

as fading as those of an evening sky. The effect of this indulgence

upon his temper and character will appear in the next chapter.