In other ballads, the yearning or remorse of the living draw the dead from their graves. In the tale of _The Cruel Mother_, we seem to see the workings of the guilty conscience, which at length 'visualised' the victims of unnatural murder. The bride goes alone to the bonnie greenwood, to bear and to slay her twin children:
'She 's wrapped her mantle about her head, All alone, and alonie O! She 's gone to do a fearful deed Down by the greenwood bonnie O!'
The crime and shame are hid; but peace does not come to her:
'The lady looked o'er her high castle wa', All alone and alonie O! She saw twa bonnie bairnies play at the ba' Down by yon greenwood bonnie O!
The mother's yearning awakens within her, and she promises them all manner of gifts if they will only be hers. But the voices of the ghost-children rise and pronounce judgment on her:
'O cruel mither, when we were thine, All alone and alonie O! From us ye did our young lives twine, Doon by yon greenwood bonnie O.'
Elsewhere in these old rhymes may be traced a superstitious belief, which was put in practice as a means of discovering guilt, at least as late as the middle of the seventeenth century--that of the Ordeal by Touch. In _Young Benjie_ another test is applied to find the murderer; and at midnight the door of the death-chamber is set ajar, so that the wandering spirit may enter and reanimate for an hour the 'streikit corpse':
'About the middle of the night The cocks began to craw; And at the dead hour o' the night, The corpse began to thraw.'
It sat up; and with its dead lips told the waiting brethren on whose head justice, tempered with a strange streak of mercy, should fall for the foul slaughter of their 'ae sister':
'Ye maunna Benjie head, brothers, Ye maunna Benjie hang, But ye maun pyke oot his twa grey een Before ye let him gang.'
In _Proud Lady Margaret_, again, we have a form of the legend, told in many lands, and made familiar, in a milder form, by the classical German ballad of _The Lady of the Kynast_, of a haughty and cruel dame whose riddles are answered and whose heart is at length won by a stranger knight. She would fain ride home with him, but he answers her that he is her brother Willie, come from the other side of death to 'humble her haughty heart has gart sae mony dee':