Before many days had elapsed, sufficient evidence was forthcoming to prove that by this strange, but lucky, accident of the shipwreck, the long lost niece was found.  The young heiress keenly felt leaving the old castle, but to soften the wrench it was arranged that one of the Misses Gordon should accompany her to Gottenburg, where her uncle had long been settled as a merchant.

The sequel of this romance, as it is pointed out in the “Book of Days,"[55] is equally astonishing.  It seems that among the Scotch merchants settled in the Swedish port, was Mr. Thomas Erskine—­a younger son of a younger brother of Sir William Erskine, of Cambo, in Fife—­an offshoot of the family of the Earl of Kellie—­to whom Miss Anne Gordon was married in the year 1771.  A younger brother, named Methven, ten years later married Joanna, a sister of Miss Gordon.  It was never contemplated that these two brothers would ever come near to the peerage of their family—­there being at one time seventeen persons between them and the family titles; but in the year 1797 the baronet of Cambo became Earl of Kellie, and two years later the title came to the husband of Anne Gordon.  In short, “these two daughters of Mr. Gordon, of Ardoch, became in succession Countesses of Kellie in consequence of the incident of the shipwrecked foundling, whom their father’s humanity had rescued from the waves.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[54] See “Dictionary of National Biography,” xix., 242.

[55] “The Two Countesses of Kellie,” ii. 41, 42.

CHAPTER XVII.

FATAL PASSION.

    What dreadful havoc in the human breast
    The passions make, when, unconfined and mad,
    They burst, unguided by the mental eye,
    The light of reason, which, in various ways,
    Points them to good, or turns them back from ill! 
               THOMSON.

The annals of some of our old and respected families have occasionally been sadly stained “by hideous exhibitions of cruelty and lust,” in certain instances the result of an unscrupulous disregard of moral duty and of a vindictive fierceness in avenging injury.  It has been oftentimes remarked that few tragedies which the brain of the novelist has depicted have surpassed in their unnatural and horrible details those enacted in real life, for

    When headstrong passion gets the reins of reason,
    The force of Nature, like too strong a gale,
    For want of ballast, oversets the vessel.

Love, indeed, which has been proverbially said to lead to as much evil as any impulse that agitates the human bosom, must be held responsible for only too many of those crimes which from time to time outrage society, for, as the authors of “Guesses at Truth” have remarked, “jealousy is said to be the offspring of love, yet, unless the parent make haste to strangle the child, the child will not rest till it has poisoned the parent.”  Thus, a tragedy which made the Castle of Corstorphine the scene of a terrible crime and scandal in the year 1679, may be said to have originated in an unhallowed passion.