THE DEATH OF THE STAG;

OR THE TALBOTS IN TEVIOTDALE.

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BY FRANK FORESTER.

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[SEE ENGRAVING.]

The stag at eve had drunk his fill,

Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,

And deep his midnight lair had made

In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade;

But when the sun his beacon red

Had kindled on Benvoirlich’s head,

The blood-hound’s deep resounding bay

Came swelling up the rocky way.

Lady of the Lake.

“Tayho! Tayho!”^[1]

And straightway to the cry responded the long-drawn, mellow notes of the huge French-horns which were in those days used by every yeoman pricker, as the peculiar and time-honored instrument of the stag-hunt, the mots of which were as familiar to every hunter’s ear, as so many spoken words of his vernacular.

It was the gray dawn of a lovely summer morning in the latter part of July, and although the moor-cocks were crowing sharp and shrill from every rocky knoll or purple eminence of the wild moors, now waving far and wide with the redolent luxuriance of their amethyst garniture, for the heather was in its full flush of bloom, although the thrush and black-bird were caroling in emulous joy, at the very top of their voices, from every brake and thicket which feathered the wild banks of the hill-burns, the sun had not lifted a portion of his disc above the huge, round-topped fells which formed the horizon to the north and westward of my scene. That scene was the slope of a long hill—

“A gentle hill,

Green and of mild declivity—the last,

As ’twere the cape of a long ridge of such,

Save that there was no sea to lave its base

But a most living landscape and the wave

Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men

Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke

Arising from such rustic roofs.”

The hills above and somewhat farther off to the southward and eastward, are clothed and crowned with oak woods of magnificence and size so unusual, and kept with such marked evidences of care and culture that no one could doubt, even if it were not proved by the gray turrets of an old baronial manor and the spire of a tall clock-house shooting up high over the tops of the forest giants, that they were the appendages and ornaments of some one of those ancient homes of England, which, full of the elegancies and graces of the present, remind us so pleasantly of the ruder, though not less homely, hospitalities of the past.

The immediate summit of the slope I have mentioned is bare, yet conspicuous for a single tree, the only one of its kind existing for many miles in that district—a single white pine, tall enough for the mast of some huge admiral, and as such visible, it is said, from points in the four northern provinces of England, and the two southernmost of Scotland—whence it is known far and wide, in many a border lay and legend, as the one-tree hill on Reedswood.^[2] Below the bare brow of this inland promontory, for such indeed it is, which is covered with beautiful, short, mossy grass, as firm and soft as the greensward of a modern race-course, and used as one vast pasture of two hundred acres, lies a vast tract of coppice, principally of oak and birch, but interspersed with expanses of waving heather, where the soil is too shallow to support a larger growth, and dotted here and there with bold, gray crags which have cropped out above the surface, and amongst these, few and far between, some glorious old, gnarled hawthorns, which may well have furnished May-wreaths to the yellow-haired daughters of the Saxon before the mailed-foot of the imperious Norman had dinted the green turf of England. This coppice overspread the whole declivity and base of the hill, until it melted into the broad, rich meadows, which, with a few scattered woods of small size, and here and there a patch of yellow wheat, or a fragrant bean-field, filled all the bottom of the great strath or valley, down to the banks of a large stream, beyond which the land rose steeply, first in rough moorland pastures, divided by dry stone walls, then in round heathery swells, then in great, broad-backed purple fells, and beyond all, faintly traceable in the blue haze of distance, in the vast ridges of the Cheviots and the hills of Tevydale. Along the base of the hill-side, parting it from the meadows, ran a tall, oak park-paling, made of rudely split planks, not any where less than five feet in height, through which access was given to the valley by heavy gates of the same material, from two or three winding wood-roads into the shadowy lanes of the lovely lower country.

Such was the scene, o’er which there arose before the sun, startling the hill echoes far and near, and silencing the grouse-cocks on the moors, and the song-birds in the brake and thicket by their tumultuous din, the shouts and fanfares that told the hunt was up.

“Tayho! Tayho!”

Tarà-tarà-tara-tantara-râ-taratantara-tantara-rà-rà-râh. Which being interpreted into verbal dog-talk is conceived to say—“Gone-away! gone-away! gone-away! away! away! away!” and is immediately understood as such not by the well-mounted sportsmen only, but by what Scott calls, himself no unskilled woodsman, “the dauntless trackers of the deer,” who rush full-mouthed to the cheery clangor, filling all earth and ether with the musical discords of their sweet chidings.

The spot whence the first loud, manly shout “Tayho” resounded, was almost within the shadow of the one tree, where, as from a station commanding the whole view of the covert, which a powerful pack of the famous Talbot blood-hounds, numbering not less than forty couple, were in the act of drawing, a gay group was collected, gallantly appareled, gallantly mounted, and all intent, like the noble steeds they bestrode, eyes, ears and souls erect on the gallant sport of the day.

Those were the days of broad-leaved hats and floating plumes, of velvet justaucorps, rich on the seams with embroideries of gold and silver, of the martial jack-boot and the knightly spur on the heel, and the knightly sword on the thigh, and thus were our bold foresters accoutred for such a chase as is never heard tell of in these times of racing hounds and flying thoroughbreds, when the life of a fox is counted by the minutes he can live with a breast-high scent before the flyers, and the value of a hunter by the seconds he can go in the first flight with a dozen horseman’s stone upon its back.

Things then were otherwise, the fox was unkenneled, or the stag unharbored at daybreak, and killed if the scent lay well, sooner or later, before sunset—runs were reckoned by hours, hounds picked for their staunchness not their fleetness, horses bought not for their speed but for their stoutness, and the longest, steadiest last rider, not the most daring or the foremost won the palm of the chase, were it brush or antler, when the game fox was run into, or the gallant stag turned to bay.

The gentlemen, who were gathered on the broad, bare brow of the one-tree hill, were in all, twelve or thirteen in number, all at first sight men of gentle blood and generous education, although as there ever is, ever must be in every company, whether of men or of inferior animals, there was one to whom every eye, even of the unknown stranger or the ignorant peasant, would have naturally turned as evidently and undoubtedly the superior of the party, both in birth and breeding; he mingled nevertheless with the rest on the most perfect terms not of equality only, but of intimate familiar intercourse and friendship. No terms of ceremonial, no titles of rank or territorial influence, but simple Christian names passed between those gay and joyous youths; nor was there any thing in the habit of the wearers, or the mounting of the riders, to indicate the slightest difference in their positions of social well-being and well-doing. One youth, however, who answered to the name of Gerald, and sometimes to the patrimonial Howard, was so far the handsomer both in form and feature, the statelier in stature, the gracefuller in gesture, the manlier in bearing, the firmer and easier of seat and hand on his hunter, that any one would have been prompt to say almost at a glance, there is the man of all this gentle and generous group, whom, if war wakes its clangor in the land, if external perils threaten its coasts, or internal troubles shake its state, foreign war or domestic strife will alike find the foremost, whether in his seat with the senate, or in his saddle on the field, wielding with equal force and skill the stateman’s, scholar’s, soldier’s eye, tongue, sword—all honored him, indeed, and he deserved that all should honor him.

I have omitted, not forgotten or neglected, to mention as first and fairest of that fair company, a bevy of half a dozen fair and graceful girls—not like the gentlemen, all of one caste, but as was evident, not so much from the difference of their grace and beauty—though in these also there was a difference—as from the relative difference of position which they maintained, four remaining somewhat in the rear of the other two, and not mingling unless first addressed in the conversation, and from some distinction in the costliness and material of their attire.

A mounted chamberlain, with four or five grooms, who stood still farther aloof, in the rear of the ladies in waiting, and two or three glittering pages standing a-foot among the latter, in full tide of gallantry and flirtation, their coursers held by the grooms in attendance, made up the party. From which must always be excepted the huntsman, the verdurer, and eight or ten yeomen prickers, in laced green jerkins, with round velvet caps, like those worn by the whippers-in of the present day, and huge French-horns over their left shoulders, who were seen from time to time appearing, disappearing, and reappearing in the glades and dingles of the hill-side covert, and heard now rating the untimely and fallacious challenge of some wayward and willful puppy, now cheering the earnest and trusty whimper of some redoubted veteran of the pack, as he half-opened on a scent of yester-even.

The hounds had been in the coppice above an hour, and two-thirds of its length had already been drawn blank—the gentlemen were beginning to exchange anxious and wistful glances, and two or three had already consulted more than once or twice their ponderous, old-fashioned repeaters—and now the elder, shorter and fairer of the two damsels, giving the whip lightly to her chestnut palfry, cantered up to the side of Gerald Howard, followed by her companion, whose dark redundance of half-disheveled nut-brown tresses fell down from beneath a velvet cap, with a long drooping plume, on each side of a face of the most exquisite oval, with a high brow, long, jet-black eyelashes, showing in cold relief against her pure, colorless cheeks, for her eyes were downcast, and an expression of the highest intellect, which is ever found in woman mingled with all a woman’s tenderness and softness. She was something above the middle height, with a figure of rare slenderness and symmetry, exquisitely rounded, and sat her horse at once most femininely and most firmly, without the least indication of manliness in her seat or demeanor, yet with a certain of-at-homeness in her position and posture, that showed she could ride as well, perhaps as boldly, as the best man among them.

“Ah! Gerald, Gerald,” said the elder girl, laughingly, as she tapped him on the arm with the silver-butt of her riding-whip, “is this your faith to fair ladies, and especially to this fairest Kate, that you deluded us from our soft beds at this untimely hour, with promise to unharbor us a stag of ten within so many minutes, all for the pleasure of our eyes, and the delectation of our hearts, and here have we been sitting on this lone hill-side two hours and upward, to the great craving of our appetites and the faintness of our hearts, yearning—as the queen’s good Puritans would have it—after creature comforts—out on you! out on you, for a false knight, as I believe not, for my part, that there is one horn or hoof from the east to the west on the hill-side—no, not from the ‘throstle’s nest’ to the ‘thorny brae.’ ”

“Ah! sister mine, art so incredulous—but I will wager you or ere the Talbots reach that great gray stone, with the birch boughs waving over it like the plumes, as our bright Kate would say, of a dead warrior’s helmet over his cold brow, we will have a stag a-foot—ay, and a stag of ten.” And instantly raising his voice to a quicker and clearer note—“See now!” he cried, “see now!” as a superb, dark-colored animal, not lower than a yearling colt at the forehand, leaped with a bound as agile as if he was aided by wings, on the cope-stone of the dry stone wall which bounded the hither side of the hill coppice, with vast, branching antlers tossed as if in defiance, and a swan-like neck swollen with pride and anger. He stood there an instant, self-poised, self-balanced, “like the herald Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill”—uttered a hoarse, belling cry, peculiar to the animal in his season, and then sailing forth in a long, easy curve, alighted on the springy turf, whose enameled surface he scarce dinted, and then swept up the gentle slope almost toward the admiring group on the brow, but in a diagonally curved line that would carry him in the long run to the south-west of them, at the distance of perhaps a hundred yards.

“Tayho! Tayho!” burst in a clear and cheery shout from the excited lips of Gerald Howard.

And instantly from every part of the hill-side from east to west, from the throstle’s nest to the “thorny brae,” from ten well-blown French-horns burst the wild call Tarà-tarà—tara-tantara-ra—tara-tantara-tantara—ra—ra—rah—“Gone away—gone away—gone away—away—away!” and the fierce rally of the mighty Talbots broke into tongue at once through the whole breadth and length of the oak coppice, as they came pouring up the hills, making the heather bend and the coppice crash before them like those famed Spartan hounds of Hercules and Cadmus,

“When in the woods of Crete they bayed the bear—

So flewed, so randed, and their heads were hung

With ears that sweep away the morning dew;

Crook-kneed and dew-lapped like Thessalian bulls;

Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells

Each under each”

As fifty separate spots they leaped the wall nearly abreast, but four were it may be a spear’s length the leaders, and they laying their head right at the noble quarry, which was still full in view, came straining up the hill, making all ring around them with their deep-mouthed thunder. The rest topped the wall one by one, in view too, and on a breast-high scent at once came streaming up the rich grass slope on converging lines, so that as they passed the attentive group to the westward within a hundred yards, the pack had got all together within, perhaps, another hundred yards of his haunches, running so that a large carpet might have covered the whole forty couple, and raving with such a din of harmonious discords, such shrill and savage trebles of the fierce fleet bitch hounds, such a deep diapason of the old veteran dogs, such sweet and attuned chidings of the whole, that not an ear but must have listened with delight, not a heart but must have bounded with rapture at the exulting sounds.

And ever and anon there rang up from the wildwood, the deep, mellow blasts of the French-horns, blent with the jangled cries of the Talbots into a strange and indescribable clangor and crepitation, at once most peculiar and most entrancing.

At the same moment the sun burst into full view above the eastern hills, and pouring down a great flood of golden lustre over the whole glowing scene, kindled up every thing into light and life—tinging with ruddy light the dappled sides of the noble beast as he swept by them now within fifty yards—for he had circled round them wantoning and bounding to and fro, perfectly unconcerned by the nearer presence of his pursuers, and seemingly desirous to display the miracles of his speed and beauty to the fair eyes that admired him—enlivening the dappled hides of the many-colored glossy pack—burnishing the sleek and satin coats of the noble coursers, till they glowed with almost metallic splendor—flashing upon the rich laces, the bright buckles, and the polished sword-hilts of the hunters, and gilding the bridle-bits and brazen horns of the verdurers and yeomen prickers, until the whole hill-side was glittering with a thousand gay hues and salient lights, filling the mind with memories of faëry land and magic marvels.

Hitherto the little group on the brow of the one-tree hill had stood motionless, while the gay, animated scene revolved around them, a glittering circle wheeling around the stationary centre; but now, when the servants of the chase, huntsman and verdurer, prickers, all streamed up the long hill at their best pace, all wheeled around the tree and its gay company, swelling the din with the flare and braying of their horns, the gallant stag appeared to comprehend that a fresh band of enemies were added to his first pursuers—for he half turned his head to gaze on them, half paused for a moment to snuff the air, with nostrils pridefully dilated, and flanks heaving, not with weariness as yet, but with contempt and scorn, then with a toss of his antlers, and a loud snort of indignation, set his head fair to the north-west, full for the hills of Scotland, and went away at long sweeping bounds that seemed to divide the green slope by leaps of eight yards each, soared back again over the rough stone wall, and went crashing through the thickets straight for the tall oak palings and the river, as if he were bound for some distant well-known point, on a right line as the crow flies it.

And now for the gentlemen the chase was begun, and Gerald Howard led it, like their leader as he was in all things, and the rest followed him like men as they were, and brave ones—but to the ladies it was ended so soon as they had breathed their palfries down the slope to the stone wall and the wood-side at an easy canter; and they returned to the hill-top, where they found viands and refreshments spread on the grass; and long they lingered there watching the hunt recede, and the sounds of the chase die away in the far distance. But it was long ere the sights and sounds were lost all and wholly to their eyes and ears—for the quarry still drove on, as straight as the crow flies, due northward—due northward the chase followed.

They saw the gallant stag swoop over the oak-pales as if they were no obstacle—they saw the yelping pack crash and climb after him; then they saw Gerald Howard on his tall coal-black barb soar over it unhindered—but all the rest turned right and left to gate or gap, or ere they might follow him. The valley was crossed as by a whirlwind—the river swam by hart, hound, and hunters, unhesitating and unheeding—and far beyond up the green moorland pastures, over the stone walls, now disappearing over the hill-tops into the misty hollows, now glinting up again into light over some yet more distant stretch of purple heath, and still the chiding of the hounds, and still the wild bursts of the French-horns fell faintly on the ears, as the wind freshened from the westward—but at length sound and sight failed them, and when silence had sunk still and solitude reigned almost perfect over the late peopled slope of thorny brae and the one-tree hill, the gay bevy of dames and damsels returned homeward, something the more serious if not the sadder for the parting, to await the gathering of their partners to the gay evening meal.

Long they awaited—late it grew—the evening meal was over—the close of night had come—the lights in bower and hall were kindled—the gates were locked and barred—long ere the first of the belated foresters, returned soiled and splashed, way-worn and weary, with the jaded and harassed hounds, and horses almost dead from the exertion and exhaustion of the day. At midnight, of the field all the men save one were collected, though two or three came in on foot, and yet more on borrowed horses—their own good steeds left in the morass or on the moorland, to feed the kites and the hill-foxes—of the pack all save two mustered at the kennel-gates in such plight as the toil they had borne permitted.

The man missing was Sir Gerald Howard, the master of the pack, the two hounds were its two leaders, Hercules and Hard-heart, of whom no rider had ever yet seen the speed slacken or the heart fail.

The old verdurer, who gave out the last, reported Gerald Howard going well, when he saw him last, with the stag and two Talbots of all in full view—and this many miles into Scotland within the pleasant vale of Teviotdale, with the great Scottish hills grim and gray, towering up before him, and the night closing fast on those dim solitudes.

It was late on the next day when Sir Gerald Howard was seen riding up the road on the same steed he had backed so gallantly, still weary and worn, though recruited—with the huge antlers at his saddle-bow, but no brave Talbots at his heel.

He had ridden far into the darkness, still guided by the baying of the staunch hounds; and when he could see to ride no longer, had obtained timely succor and refreshment from a stout borderer of Teviot-side. At daylight remounted a fresh horse, a garron of the country, to renew the chase; but it was now soon ended. Scarce had he gone a mile on the straight line they had run throughout ere he found Hard-heart stiff and cold on the mountain heather, and not a hundred yards yet onward, ere the great stag lay before him, not a hair of his hide injured, and Hercules beside him, with his head upon his haunches, where he had breathed his last, powerless to blood the brave quarry he had so nobly conquered.

Sixty miles had they run on that summer’s day from point, they had died together, and in their graves they were not confounded, for a double tomb was scooped in the corrie or hollow of the mountain-side, wherein they were found, and above it was piled a rough, gray column, whereon may be seen rudely sculptured this true epitaph,

Hercules killed Hart O’Grease,

And Hart O’Grease killed Hercules.

For, reader mine, this is a real and true tale, and I, who tell it you, have sat upon the stone, and tempered my cup of Ferintosh from the little rill beside it, with the wild peak of the Maiden’s Pass before me, the dark Cheviots at my right, the blue heights of the Great Moor looming away almost immeasurably to the westward, and no companions near me save the red grouse of the heather, and the curlew of the morass, nothing to while away the time that my weary setters slept in the noonday sun, save this old-time tradition.