'The lady stampéd wi' her foot And winkéd wi' her e'e; But for a' that she could say or do Forbidden he wadna be.'
It is the angry and jealous baron who, in woman guise, meets and slays the youth who is waiting in gude greenwood, and brings back the bloody head to the mother.
Other fine ballads in which mother and son carry on tragic colloquy are _Lord Randal_ and _Edward_. These versions of a story of treachery and blood, conveyed in the dark hints of a strange dialogue, have received many touches from later hands; but the germ comes down from the age of tradition. It has even been noted that, with the curious tenacity with which the ballad memory often clings to a detail while forgetting or mislaying essential fact, the food with which, in the version Burns recovered for Johnson's _Museum_, Lord Randal is poisoned--'eels boiled in broo'--is identical with that given to his prototype in the folk-ballads of Italy and other countries. The structure of this ballad, like the beautiful old air to which it is sung, bears marks of antiquity, and its wide diffusion militates against Scott's not very convincing suggestion that it refers to the alleged poisoning of the Regent Randolph. But it lacks the terrible and dramatic intensity of _Son Davie_, better known in the version transmitted, under the name of _Edward_, by Lord Hailes to Bishop Percy's _Reliques_. Here it is the murderer, and not the victim, who answers; and it is the questioning mother, and not the absent false love, with whom the curse is left as a legacy. Despair had never a more piercing utterance than this:
'"And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife? Edward, Edward! And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife When ye gang over the sea, O?"
"The warld 's room, let them beg through life, Mither, Mither! The warld 's room, let them beg through life, For them never mair will I see, O!"
"And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear? Edward, Edward! And what will ye leave to your ain mother dear, My dear son, now tell me, O?"
"The curse o' hell from me shall ye bear, Mither, Mither! The curse o' hell from me shall ye bear, Sic counsels ye gae me, O!"'
Although Yarrow be the favoured haunt on Scottish soil--may we not also say on the whole round of earth?--of the Romantic Ballad, and has coloured them, and taken colour from them, for all time, yet there are other streams and vales that only come short of being its rivals. 'Leader Haughs,' for instance, which the harp of Nicol Burne, the 'Last Minstrel' who wandered and sang in the Borderland, has linked indissolubly with Yarrow braes, know of ballad strains well-nigh as sweet as those of the neighbour water. But cheerfulness rather than sadness is their prevailing note. _Auld Maitland_, the lay which James Hogg's mother repeated to Scott, has its scene on Leader side, and at the 'darksome town'--a misnomer in these days--of Lauder. Long before the time of that tough champion, St. Cuthbert and True Thomas had wandered and dreamed and sang by Leader. It was a Lord Lauderdale who rode to Traquair to court, after the older fashion, Katherine Janferie: