GILDEROY AND THE SIXTEEN-STRING JACK

I—­GILDEROY

He stood six feet ten in his stockinged feet, and was the tallest ruffian that ever cut a purse or held up a coach on the highway.  A mass of black hair curled over a low forehead, and a glittering eye intensified his villainous aspect; nor did a deep scar, furrowing his cheek from end to end, soften the horror of his sudden apparition.  Valiant men shuddered at his approach; women shrank from the distant echo of his name; for fifteen years he terrorised Scotland from Caithness to the border; and the most partial chronicler never insulted his memory with the record of a good deed.

He was born to a gentle family in the Calendar of Monteith, and was celebrated even in boyhood for his feats of strength and daring.  While still at school he could hold a hundredweight at arm’s-length, and crumple up a horseshoe like a wisp of hay.  The fleetest runner, the most desperate fighter in the country, he was already famous before his name was besmirched with crime, and he might have been immortalised as the Hercules of the seventeenth century, had not his ambition been otherwise flattered.  At the outset, though the inclination was never lacking, he knew small temptation to break the sterner laws of conduct.  His pleasures were abundantly supplied by his father’s generosity, and he had no need to refrain from such vices as became a gentleman.  If he was no drunkard, it was because his head was equal to the severest strain, and, despite his forbidding expression, he was always a successful breaker of hearts.  His very masterfulness overcame the most stubborn resistance; and more than once the pressure of his dishonourable suit converted hatred into love.  At the very time that he was denounced for Scotland’s disgrace, his praises were chanted in many a dejected ballad.  ‘Gilderoy was a bonny boy,’ sang one heart-broken maiden: 

               Had roses till his shoon,
          His stockings were of silken soy,
               Wi’ garters hanging doon.

But in truth he was admired less for his amiability than for that quality of governance which, when once he had torn the decalogue to pieces, made him a veritable emperor of crime.

His father’s death was the true beginning of his career.  A modest patrimony was squandered in six months, and Gilderoy had no penny left wherewith to satisfy the vices which insisted upon indulgence.  He demanded money at all hazards, and money without toil.  For a while his more loudly clamant needs were fulfilled by the amiable simplicity of his mother, whom he blackmailed with insolence and contempt.  And when she, wearied by his shameless importunity, at last withdrew her support, he determined upon a monstrous act of vengeance.  With a noble affectation of penitence he visited his home; promised reform at supper; and said good-night in the broken accent of