You have paid the heavens your function,
and the prisoner the very debt of your calling.
Measure for Measure.
Jeanie Deans,--for here our story unites itself with that part of the narrative which
broke off at the end of the fourteenth chapter,--while she waited, in terror and
amazement, the hasty advance of three or four men towards her, was yet more
startled at their suddenly breaking asunder, and giving chase in different
directions to the late object of her terror, who became at that moment, though
she could not well assign a reasonable cause, rather the cause of her interest.
One of the party (it was Sharpitlaw) came straight up to her, and saying, "Your
name is Jeanie Deans, and you are my prisoner," immediately added, "But if you
will tell me which way he ran I will let you go."
"I dinna ken, sir," was all the poor girl could utter; and, indeed, it is the phrase
which rises most readily to the lips of any person in her rank, as the readiest
reply to any embarrassing question.
"But," said Sharpitlaw, "ye ken wha it was ye were speaking wi', my leddy, on the
hill side, and midnight sae near; ye surely ken that, my bonny woman?"
"I dinna ken, sir," again iterated Jeanie, who really did not comprehend in her
terror the nature of the questions which were so hastily put to her in this moment
of surprise.
"We will try to mend your memory by and by, hinny," said Sharpitlaw, and
shouted, as we have already told the reader, to Ratcliffe, to come up and take
charge of her, while he himself directed the chase after Robertson, which he still
hoped might be successful. As Ratcliffe approached, Sharpitlaw pushed the
young woman towards him with some rudeness, and betaking himself to the
more important object of his quest, began to scale crags and scramble up steep
banks, with an agility of which his profession and his general gravity of
demeanour would previously have argued him incapable. In a few minutes there
was no one within sight, and only a distant halloo from one of the pursuers to the
other, faintly heard on the side of the hill, argued that there was any one within
hearing. Jeanie Deans was left in the clear moonlight, standing under the guard
of a person of whom she knew nothing, and, what was worse, concerning whom,
as the reader is well aware, she could have learned nothing that would not have
increased her terror.
When all in the distance was silent, Ratcliffe for the first time addressed her, and
it was in that cold sarcastic indifferent tone familiar to habitual depravity, whose
