Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/243

Rh order "from my Lord Advocate, for the taking up again the body of Sir James Standsfield," bid him rise and come. Philip also must go with the party to Morham. Here the grave was opened, the body taken out and carried into the church, where the surgeons made their examination, which clearly pointed to death by strangulation, not by drowning (possibly it struck Spurway as an odd use for a church; it had not seemed so to a Presbyterian Scot of the period). The dead being redressed in his grave clothes must now be set back in his coffin. A terrible thing happened. According to Scots custom, the nearest relative must lift the body, and so Philip took the head, when lo! the corpse gushed forth blood on his hands! He dropped the head the "considerable noise" it made in falling is noted by one of the surgeons frantically essayed to wipe off the blood on his clothes, and with frenzied cries of "Lord have mercy upon me, Lord have mercy upon us," fell half swooning across a seat. Strong cordials were administered, and in time he regained his sullen composure.

A strange scene to ponder over, but how terrible to witness! Think of it! The lonely church on the Lammermoors, the dead vast and middle of the dreary night (Nov. 30, 1687), the murdered man, and the parricide's confession (it is so set forth in the ditty) wrung from him (as all believed) by the direct interposition of Providence. What fiction ever equalled this gruesome horror? Even his mother, who had sided with him against the father, scarce professed to believe his innocence. "What if they should put her bairn in prison?" she wailed. "Her bairn" was soon hard and fast in the gloomy old Tolbooth of Edinburgh, to which, as the Heart of Midlothian, Scott's novel was in future days to give a world-wide fame. The trial came on next February 6. In Scotland there is no inquest or public magisterial examination to discount the interest of the story, and the crowd Rh