CHAPTER II. Sir, they do scandal me upon the road here! BEN JONSON'S New Inn. As the senior traveller descended the crazy steps of the diligence at the inn, he was greeted by the fat, gouty, pursy landlord, with that mixture of familiarity and respect which the Scotch innkeepers of the old school used to assume towards their more valued customers. << Have a care o' us, Monkbarns, (distinguishing him by his territorial epithet, always most agreeable to the ear of a Scottish proprietor) is this you? I little thought to have seen your honour here till the summer session was ower. >> ' «Ye donnard auld devil,» answered Monkbarns, his Scottish accent predominating when in anger, though otherwise not particularly remarkable, «ye donnard auld crippled idiot, what have I to do with the session or the geese that flock to it, or the hawks that pick their pinions for them?>> Troth, and that's true,» said mine host, who, in fact, only spoke upon a very general recollection of the stranger's original education, yet would have been sorry not to have been supposed accurate as to the station and profession of him, or any other occasional guest—«That's very true-but I thought you had some law affair of your ain to look after I have ane mysell-a ganging plea that my father left me, and his father afore left to him. It's about our back-yard -ye'll maybe hae heard of it in the Parliamenthouse, Hutchinson against Mackitchinson—it's a weel-kenn'd plea- it's been four times in afore the fifteen, and de'il ony thing the wisest o' them could make o't, but just to send it out again to the outer-house. O it's a beautiful thing to see how lang and how carefully justice is considered in this country! » « Hold your tongue, you fool,» said the traveller, but in great good-humour, «and tell us what you can give this young gentleman and me for dinner.» "Ou, there's fish, nae doubt,-that's sea-trout and caller haddocks," said Mackitchinson, twisting his napkin; « and ye'll be for a muttonchop, and there's cranberry tarts, very weel preserved, and--and there's just ony thing else ye -like." «Which is to say, there is nothing else whatever-well, well, the fish, and the chop, and the tarts, will do very well. But don't imitate the cautious delay that you praise in the courts of justice. Let there be no remits from the inner to the outer house, hear ye me?»> - « Na, na," said Mackitchinson, whose long and heedful perusal of volumes of printed session papers had made him acquainted with some law phrases «< the denner shall be served quam primum, and that peremptorie.» And with the flattering laugh of a promising host, he left them in his sanded parlour, hung with prints of the Four Seasons. As, notwithstanding his pledge to the contrary, the glorious delays of the law were not without their parallel in the kitchen of the inn, our younger traveller had an opportunity to step out and make some enquiry at the people of the house concerning the rank and station of his companion. The information which he received was of a general and less authentic nature, but quite sufficient to make him acquainted with the name, history, and circumstances of the gentleman, whom we shall endeavour, in a few words, to introduce more accurately to our readers. Jonathan Oldenbuck, or Oldinbuck, by popular contraction, Oldbuck, of Monkbarns, was the second son of a gentleman possessed of a small property in the neighbourhood of a thriving sea-port town in the north-eastern coast of Scotland, which, for various reasons, we shall denominate Fairport. They had been established for several generations as landholders in the county, and in most shires of England would have been accounted a family of some standing. But the shire of- was filled with gentlemen of more ancient descent and larger fortune. In the last generation, also, the neighbouring gentry had been almost uniformly Jacobites, while the proprietors of Monkbarns, like the burghers of the town near which they were settled, were steady assertors of the Protestant succession. The latter had, however, a pedigree of their own, on which they prided themselves as much as those who despised them valued their respective Saxon, Norman, or Celtic genealogies. The first Oldenbuck, who had settled in their family mansion shortly after the Reformation, was, they asserted, descended from one of the original printers of Germany, and had left his country in consequence of the persecutions directed against the professors of the reformed religion. He had found a refuge in the town near which his posterity dwelt, the more readily that he was a sufferer in the Protestant cause, and certainly not the less so, that he brought with him money enough to purchase the small. estate of Monkbarns, then sold by a dissipated Laird, to whose father it had been gifted, with other church lands, upon the dissolution of the great and wealthy monastery to which it had belonged. The Oldenbucks were therefore loyal subjects on all occasions of insurrection; and, as they kept up a good intelligence with the borough, it chanced that the Laird of Monkbarns, who flou rished in 1745, was provost of the town during that ill-fated year, and had exerted himself with much spirit in favour of King George, and even been put to expences on that score, which, according to the liberal conduct of the existing government towards their friends, had never been repaid him. By dint of solicitation, however, and borough interest, he contrived to gain a place in the customs, and, being a frugal and careful man, had found himself enabled to add considerably to his paternal fortune. He had only two sons, of whom, as we have hinted, the present laird was the younger, and two daughters, one of whom still flourished in single blessedness, and the other, who was greatly more juvenile, made a love-match with a captain in the Forty-twa, who had no other fortune but his commission and a Highland pedigree. Poverty disturbed a union which love would otherwise have made happy, and Captain M'Intyre, in justice to his wife and two children, had found himself obliged to seek his fortune in the East-Indies. Being ordered upon an expedition against Hyder Ally, the detachment to which he belonged was cut off, and no news ever reached his unfortunate wife whether he fell in battle, or was mur dered in prison, or survived, in what the habits of the Indian Tyrant rendered a hopeless captivity. She sunk under the accumulated load of grief and uncertainty, and left a son and daughter to the charge of her brother, the existing laird of Monkbarns. |