Wringhim, a fire-breathing divine, her match in theological debate. (He is like a witch’s familiar.) Wringhim maintains that they are amongst Calvin’s lucky elect. Their nauseating sense of superiority, coupled with their endless arguifying, grows so impassioned, Hogg is plainly giving us an allegory of an affair — the feminine ‘sweet spiritual converse’ mixing and mating with a masculine alacrity; that is, with the ‘heat of his zeal’. Robert is the result. He is raised to hate the laird and his elder half-brother George (quite how George was conceived is passed over) and he is quick to disclaim the family name of Colwan — he becomes a Wringhim, doing whatever he pleases all the hours there are: ‘How delightful to think that a justified person can do no wrong!’ If there are to be no rewards for the non-elect, no matter how they might strive, similarly, if a person is pre-ordained for salvation, he is above mankind’s laws — and this is shown when the devil tempts Robert into becoming a killer. Tormenting other people is a game and being ‘an assassin in the cause of Christ’ a vocation.

The brothers, though brought up under what is technically the same roof, are kept apart. The first time they meet is during some sports in Edinburgh — and Robert, his ‘face as demure as death’, haunts and harasses George, tripping him up, getting him to miss the ball. He keeps as close to his victim as the Rev. Wringhim did to his mother — and as the devil will to him. Wherever George goes, ‘the same devilish-looking youth attended him as constantly as his shadow’. He spoils George’s tennis and cricket playing; he invades his parties; he insults his friends — who start to withdraw from his society. ‘A fiend of … malignant aspect was ever at his elbow.’ They become like good and evil twins. Whether he is in church, the theatres, in the streets or in the fields — Robert is there too, scowling — ‘like the attendance of a demon on some devoted being that had sold himself to destruction’. Whether it is really Robert, or the devil impersonating Robert (and they do become interchangeable), we are never told. What does happen is that the Rev. Wringhim’s prayers, when condemning the innocent George on behalf of his own illegitimate son, take on the frenzy of a black mass —

And upon his right hand

Give thou his greatest enemy,

Even Satan, leave to stand

— and of course it is young Robert who takes up his station ‘at his brother’s right hand’. When they meet alone on the mountain top, all the trappings of high Romantic drama are present — storm clouds and a sunburst, waterfalls and a magical coloured misty light (gravity’s rainbow). It is a scene out of a Casper David Friedrich painting. If set to music, Berlioz would have been the composer. George, hoping at last to be by himself, goes ‘to converse with nature without disturbance’, but Robert manages to materialize through the fogs — an apparition amongst the shadows and declivities of the hill. This persecutor is like a genie, a ‘dilated frame of disembodied air, exhaled from the caverns of death’.

When the men move in to attack, the mood passes from the gothic to the slapstick (‘Eh! Egh! murder! murder! & tc.’) and it is George who is arrested and charged as the aggressor, for he has plenty of ‘moving cause and motive’. But he is acquitted. (Hogg, like Scott, who was Sherrif of Selkirkshire and Clerk to the Court of Session, enjoys the thrust and parry of legal argument.) And then that night his body is discovered, the old laird dies of grief (‘his father never more held up his head’) and Robert takes possession of the title and inheritance. He becomes a lunatic misanthropist, filling his days in wanting ‘to denounce all men and women to destruction’.

At this point we feel that a pact or deal has found expression in the fratricide. Robert, as more of a rakehell now and ‘a limb of Satan’, does the devil’s work. But he encounters an opponent. His adversary is Mrs Logan, the old laird’s helpmeet. In her wanting to solve the mystery of George’s death, the tone of the novel changes again — this time to detective fiction. ‘I will spend my days,’ the old lady vouchsafes, ‘in endeavours to … expose the unnatural deed.’ She tracks down a prostitute, now in gaol, called Bell Calvert, who was on duty at the time and place of George’s murder. After much more legal pettifoggery, to do with her being an accessory for burglary, Bell says it would have been impossible for Thomas Drummond, who is wanted for questioning, to have committed the crime, as he was with her — but that she did see his double: ‘I had seen the one going and the other approaching at the same time.’ Released from prison, Bell joins Miss Logan (interestingly they are both called Arabella) on her quest and they travel to Dalcastle.