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Their bones stuck out through their skin; they moaned as they lay on the parched earth, and had not strength enough to swish at the clouds of flies. They had sores upon them, which festered and spread. If Mabilla, the nameless wife, was not responsible for this, who could be? Perhaps Heaven was offended with Dryhope on account of Andrew King's impiety. Bessie believed that Mabilla was a witch.
You may be disposed to blame him for lightness of conscience, but I take leave to tell you that he had had the cure of souls in Dryhope for five-and-thirty years. He claimed on that score to know his people. The more he knew of them, the less he was able to question the lore of such an one as Miranda King.
Next summer, too, there were portents. There was a great drought, so great that Dryhope burn ran dry, and water had to be fetched from a distance for the sheep. There were heather fires in many places; smut got into the oats, and a plague of caterpillars attacked the trees so that in July they were leafless, and there was no shade. There was no pasture for the kine, which grew lean and languid.
The epithet of 'Flower of Yarrow' was in later times bestowed upon one of her immediate posterity, Miss Mary Lillias Scott, daughter of John Scott Esq. of Harden, and celebrated for her beauty in the pastoral song of Tweedside, I mean that set of modern words which begins 'What beauty does Flora disclose. This lady I myself remember very well, and I mention her to you least you should receive any inaccurate information owing to her being called like her predecessor the 'Flower of Yarrow. There was a portrait of this latter lady in the collection at Hamilton which the present Duke transferred through my hands to Lady Diana Scott relict of the late Walter Scott Esq. of Harden, which picture was vulgarly but inaccurately supposed to have been a resemblance of the original Mary Scott, daughter of Philip Scott of Dryhope, and married to Auld Wat of Harden in the middle of the 16th century.
Next morning, when the family and some neighbours were standing together on the fell-side looking up the valley where the Dryhope burn comes down from the hills, they saw two figures on the rough road which follows it. Mrs. King, the widow, I believe, had seen them first, but she had said nothing. It was Bessie Prawle who raised the first cry that "Andrew was coming, and his wife with him."
They went along the forest and up and down the fells together. The wind had dropped, the stars shone. And together they took up their life where they had dropped it, with one significant omission in its circumstance. Bessie Prawle had disappeared from Dryhope. She had followed him up the fell on the night of the storm, but she came not back. And they say that she never did.
It is called Dryhope, and lies in a close valley, which is watered by a beck or burn, known as the Dryhope Burn. It is deeply buried in the hills. Spurs of the Cheviots as these are, they rise to a considerable elevation, but are pasturable nearly to the top. There, however, where the heather begins, peat-hags and morasses make dangerous provision, from which the flocks are carefully guarded.
One of them is fallen. Standing there, looking north-west, the Knapp may be seen easily, some five miles away; and the extent of the forest with which it is covered can be estimated. A great and solemn wood that is, which no borderer will ever enter if he can help it. There was and may be still a family of shepherds living in Dryhope of the name of King.
It was the King of the Wood who had come in quest of Mabilla, had pulled her out of the cottage in Dryhope and frozen her in the forest. It was he, no doubt, said Andrew King, who had come to defy the Christian and his God. I detect here the inspiration of his mother Miranda, the strange sea-woman who knew Mabilla without mortal knowledge and spoke to her in no mortal speech.
The sound of their rage was like that of gulls about a fish in the tide-way; but they laid no hands on him, and said nothing that he could understand, and by this time his awe was gone, and his heart was on fire. Holding fast to what he had and wanted, he pushed out of Knapp Forest and took the lee-side of the Edge on his way to Dryhope. This must have been about the time of the gale at its worst.
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