The Heather-Moon Part 27

Closeburn is the place where the Kirkpatricks, the Empress Eugenie's family, used to live before they went to Spain. At Auldgirth we went over a bridge built by Carlyle's father. At Mauchline Burns grew from a boy into a man and fell in love. At Ellisland, Burns lived for a long time with his handsome wife, Jean Armour. At Dalswinton the first steamboat made its first trip, and Burns was on it. All round us now was Scott's "Red-gauntlet" country; and the bridge crossing the Nith at Dumfries was built by Devorgilla. There was something to see and think of every minute; and in fifty-nine miles we had followed Burns's whole life-story on its slow way from Ayr to Dumfries. Only--we couldn't follow his thoughts to the stars!

We had stopped many times; still it wasn't yet five o'clock, and we had time to see all that's sacred to Burns at Dumfries, the "Fair Queen of the South," as Sir S. called it, quoting I don't know what.

First we went to the house in Bank Street where Burns came when he left Ellisland, and had seventy pounds a year to live on instead of fifty--a sad and grim little house, where in the wee closet that was his study we could hear the music of the Nith, but catch no sparkle of its water. He had hardly air enough to fan the fire of genius, yet it went on turning brightly because nothing could put it out. If it was a sad house to live in, it must have been even sadder to die in. He'd have liked his last look to be on sky and meadow, or he would not have said in his "Song of Death":

"Farewell, thou fair day, thou green earth and ye skies, Now gay with the broad setting sun.

Farewell, loves and friends.h.i.+ps, ye dear tender ties!

Our race of existence is run."

I found those words in the Poems bound in tartan which Basil had bought for me in a fascinating bookshop at Ayr and I read them in the room where the poet died. Afterward I was glad to see in St. Michael's churchyard a great many of the "loves and friends.h.i.+ps" resting near him in his long sleep. Their presence consoled me for the mausoleum which n.o.body can admire nowadays, or think worthy of him. Almost, I would rather have had him lie under one of those strange, enormous tombstones like stone cupboards or tables which clutter the graveyard.

While we were trying to find the burial-place of Napoleon's doctor, and some martyrs and cholera victims Mrs. James was interested in, Mrs. West and Basil appeared, and then the Americans. Sir S. looked horribly bored, when he saw the four tall, brown, nice-looking boys, and asked me quite fiercely if I'd given them permission to follow us every step of the way. I snapped back, "No, of course not!" And immediately he said, "Forgive me. If you had, after all where would be the harm?"

There was no time for more. We had to say, "How do you do?" to Basil and Aline; and then the boys surged round us, in their high spirits rather like big Newfoundland puppies sacrilegiously racing each other among the graves. They had been reading up history on purpose to please me, they announced, and were ready to bet five pounds against a glove that they knew more than I did. Was I aware that Dumfries meant "fort in the thorn bushes?" Had I learned that the British Christian chief, who was the real King Arthur, fought with pagan Saxons all along the Nith. Did I know it was in Grayfriars, or the Minories Church, that Bruce killed the Red Comyn, Devorgilla's grandson?

They won the glove; and then there was a scene when they took a penknife and cut it up in four pieces, one for each man. I tried to keep them from being so foolish, but might as well have tried to stop the wind from blowing; and it was no wonder that Mrs. West turned her back on us rather than see those dreadful boys ostentatiously stowing away the bits of gray kid in what Jack Morrison called their "heart-pockets."

I was afraid Sir S. might think it was my fault, their coming to stay at the pretty hotel he'd chosen for us because it overlooked the river; but it wasn't a bit. It was just as much a coincidence as Mrs. West and Basil finding three Canadian friends already there--perhaps even _more_ of a coincidence; for it didn't seem to me that Mrs. West was really astonished at finding these people at a Dumfries hotel, or they at finding her and Basil. I was there when they met in the hall: two rather handsome dark men, brothers, named Vanneck, and the fair, thin little wife of the younger one. All they said at first was, "Well, this _is_ nice! How do you do?" And it struck me afterward, when I thought it over, that if it had been a great surprise, they would have mentioned it. I wondered if they hadn't corresponded and arranged it somehow, for they appeared to know each other very well, and to be the best of friends, especially the elder Mr. Vanneck and Mrs. West, who called each other "Aline" and "George." After dinner it turned out that she had been inviting the Vannecks to go on to Melrose and Edinburgh in Old Blunderbore, without consulting the chauffeur-owner of the car. He thought the load, with extra luggage, too heavy for Blunderbore's powers; consequently Mrs. West threw herself on the mercy of Sir S. She asked if the Gray Dragon could take Basil, and the Gray Dragon's master quietly said yes.

After Mrs. West had walked with Sir S. in the churchyard of St.

Michael's, he seemed very thoughtful and a little gloomy, even stiff in his manner with me. At first I felt it must be that she had said something to change him toward me, but again I told myself that that was a silly and far-fetched suspicion. It was more likely that he disapproved of my "larking" with the American boys and giving them a glove to divide in bits. Afterward, too, when they turned up at our hotel, he might easily have thought I'd encouraged them to follow us again.

I hoped for a chance to put that idea out of his mind, but next morning, starting for Melrose, Vedder had the place next Sir S., and Basil, Mrs.

James, and I were all three together behind.

We started before Aline West and her friends the Vannecks (her special one is a widower, very rich, who has proposed several times, she told Mrs. James); but the four boys waited for us to get off again, so they might know where we were going; and I began to be almost angry, because of the wrong impression their nonsense was making on Sir S. It had been so good to get him back yesterday that it was worse than ever so see him slipping quietly away once more.

If it hadn't been for these worries, it would have been a wonderful day.

From Dumfries we ran up and down nice scallopy hills, crossing the Annan at a place named Beattock, for Moffat, where there are sulphur wells a girl discovered two hundred years ago, and made the fortune of the town.

Then there was a lovely road along Moffat Water, with a succession of wild green dells and hillsides cleft with fern-choked ravines. Still we were in Burns's country, for by Craigie Burn lived Jean Lorimer, to whom he wrote love-songs; and a little farther on was the scene where "Willie brewed a peck o' maut." The next bit of beauty was a.s.sociated with the Ettrick Shepherd (I can't bear to think of his name being Hogg), for he wrote a Covenanter story, "Brownie of Bodesbeck," about a mountain we could see hovering in the distance.

All Moffatdale looked a haunt for fairies, so no wonder it is cram full of legends; and if I had been sitting with Sir S. I should have begged him to stop and let us scramble up a rocky path to the haunt of a pale spirit disguised as a waterfall. The Gray Mare's Tail is a disguising name, too, for there is nothing gray about it, but all white as streaming moonlight; and Sir S. and I together might have stood a good chance of finding the rainbow key, sparkling on some cus.h.i.+on of irridescent spray. We missed the chance, however; and who knows if it will ever come again?

Basil had bought a volume of Scott's poems for me, to match the Burns's and he found in "Marmion"--where he knew it existed--a verse about the torrent:

Issuing forth one foamy wave, And wheeling round the Giant's Grave, White as a snowy charger's tail Drives down the pa.s.s of Moffatdale.

So already we were coming into Scott's country. I remember Birkhill, because it's the watershed between the Moffat and the Yarrow, and the word "watershed" goes through my mind with a musical white rush, like a cataract. It suggests beautiful faraway things. Besides, there's another reason for remembering. Close by, at Dobbs Linn, the Covenanters used to hide in the time of the great persecution.

We swept through some bare, bleak country before coming to the Yarrow, but the rover brought us back to gentle, cultivated land, with thoughts of her favourite Wordsworth for Mrs. James; and soon we came to a very famous place, Tibbie s.h.i.+els's Inn. I had never heard of it, but that doesn't take from its fame! Basil and Mrs. James could both tell me how Scott, and Christopher North, and De Quincey, and a long list of other great men, used to meet at the house kept by Mrs. Richardson, "Tibbie,"

who outlived all the n.o.ble company, and was buried at last in the same churchyard with the Ettrick Shepherd.

By and by our road dropped down and down to the sh.o.r.es of lonely St.

Mary's Loch (Scott wrote of it in "Marmion"), and at the end of the still lake to Dryhope Tower, where brave Mary Scott, his ancestress, "The Flower of Yarrow," had her birthplace.

So we went on to Selkirk on its hill overlooking Ettrick Water, and stopped just long enough to buy some of the celebrated "bannocks" for our picnic luncheon later on, and to have a glance at the statues of Sir Walter Scott and Mungo Park, the African traveller. Basil pretended to be shocked because I had never heard of him! "And you had never heard of Aline and me till you met us," he sighed, shaking his head. "I suppose you never heard of the sutors of Selkirk, either? The burly sutors who 'firmly stood' at Flodden when other 'pow'rful clans gave way'? Well, I'm glad, anyhow, that we aren't the _only_ people you'd never heard of!"

Basil seemed very happy, and kind, and _understanding_, somehow, as if he saw that something was not quite right with me, and he wanted to console me as well as he could.

Sir S. had managed very clearly about not letting us stop to look at the town of Burns's death until we'd seen the place of his birth and traced out the path of his life-story; but he couldn't contrive the same kind of trip for Sir Walter Scott's country without going over the whole road twice. Besides, he wanted us to see Melrose by moonlight, and said it would be "incomparably better than Sweetheart Abbey." But I knew it wouldn't be better for me, and I didn't quite forgive him for thinking it possible, now that we had got so mixed up with irrelevant people.

We had to go to Jedburgh first, the place farthest south; then to Dryburgh; then flas.h.i.+ng through Melrose to Abbotsford, where Scott died as well as lived; and then back to Melrose for the night. That was his plan; and I still supposed that we were to go on somewhere else next day--Sunday--not arriving in Edinburgh till Monday. But it seems that Sir S. had made up his mind to a different programme, though he said nothing about it then.

Things happened to the boys' car on the way to Jedburgh, though the road was good, and only undulating. Basil said that, as a matter of fact, he had "ill-wished" them and their auto, and as "thoughts are things," he had created the nail on which their tire came to grief. "Somerled and I want to be the only ones," he added mysteriously. "We'll have no interlopers." Which would have made me think him rather a frivolous person, after all, if he hadn't been so well up in the lore of the road, and known so many interesting things about Jedburgh, the county town of Roxburghs.h.i.+re.

"If we curse a mere nail on a white velvet road-surface nowadays," said he, "think what the roads must have been like when Jedburgh had a royal castle, and kings and queens were travelling about from one of their houses to another! Think what Queen Mary must have had to endure, even bringing things down to modern times, comparatively. She stayed in Jedburgh town, in an old house in Queen Street--came for a.s.sizes, I think. Then, while she was there, bored to death, she heard that Bothwell was 'sick of a wound' at Hermitage Castle, over twenty miles distant. In an hour she was on her palfrey and off to see him, falling into a mora.s.s on the way. But she got back again that night, rather than her good subjects should say she neglected their affairs. She fell ill with fever after her exertions. What wouldn't she have given for a motor-car? But how she would have been b.u.mped and bruised if she'd had one, though the roads were grand then compared to the state they'd fallen into after the Romans marched out of Scotland. Imagine the early kings and queens with their processions pa.s.sing where we pa.s.s now; and armies returning from battle with their prisoners; and bands of pilgrims going to some sacred shrine; and robber hordes moving at night; and wild-beast shows on the way from one fair to another. Can't you see the panorama?"

I could, easily, picture after picture. But when you come to think of it, he'd mentioned nothing as curious as motors, which we take quietly for granted, just as our forefathers took the wild beasts and the robbers.

We had a glimpse of Burns's "Eden scenes on crystal Jed," though only enough to be aggravating, for Basil said there were prehistoric caves, and scenery enough to make a journey to Scotland worth while, if one came for nothing else. But people in motor-cars never seem to turn aside for anything. They go toward their destination like creatures possessed.

So, although Jedburgh is supposed to be the most historic town of the Lowlands, we hardly looked at it in our haste to see the Abbey, and to rush on to other Abbeys--a dayful of Abbeys! Not that Jedburgh put itself out to attract us. It had rather a grim air as a town, as if it hadn't quite forgotten the fierce slogan of the Jedburgh men, who shouted "Jethart's here!" as they wielded the terrible Jethart axes invented by themselves. And one isn't allowed to go inside Queen Mary's house to see the tapestry her ladies worked.

I wished to think no abbey so beautiful as Sweetheart Abbey, which was my first, and seen on the first night of the heather moon; but I had to tell myself that Jedburgh was lovelier, in its garden on the river-bank.

Dreaming of its own reflection, its hollow, window-eyes could see, deep down under a gla.s.s, all its own history and legends preserved forever as in a crystal casket; the story of saintly King David who built it, and of the French friars who left their own Abbey at Beauvais to people it; better still, of the wedding with the spectre guest--the marriage of little French Jolette to Alexander, the last of the Celtic kings.

Perhaps, too, the window-eyes peering into the crystal could see the figure of Sir Walter Scott, seeking and finding inspiration in the Abbey's old tales.

Basil, who told me the stories, read in a book that "Jedburgh is completer than Kelso or Dryburgh, and simpler and more harmonious than Melrose," so when the four boys appeared at last in Dryburgh Abbey, having calmly missed out Jedburgh and Kelso to save time, I used the criticism as if it were original, with great effect; for by that time _we_ had made a side dash to see lovely Kelso, where Sir Walter went to the Grammar School, and met Ballantyne, who long afterward published his novels and brought about his bankruptcy. I heard also, read out from the same book, that the stone of Dryburgh was taken from the quarry that built Melrose, and that the name Dryburgh meant "Druid." Even the boys, I think, could hardly help feeling the mysterious, haunting charm of the place, which was as strange and secret as if the dark yew trees and Lebanon cedars guarding the ruins were enchanted Druid priests. There was a Druid urn, too, which looked as if it knew all the secrets of the ages, and had held sacrificial blood.

I could imagine Sir Walter Scott coming to Dryburgh again and again, and loving the hidden spot so well that he wanted to sleep his last sleep there. Such a peaceful sleep it must be with the Tweed singing out of sight, and yews old as legend to play lullabies upon their own harp-strings when the wind touches their dark, rustling sleeves.

The song of the Tweed at Abbotsford was the song of Inspiration, changing to the song of Fulfilment in the master's pa.s.sing hour. Now, at Dryburgh, the river veils itself like a mourner, and its song is the Sleep Music which has in it the secret of death and of life beyond. I stood for a minute alone in front of the tomb where Sir Walter's body lies with those he loved best, in the place he loved best, and transparent green shadows like the spirits of shadow hid me from the sunlight. While I shut my eyes, I could understand the message of the song. And I knew that if my knight had been with me it would have come to him in the same way, because we are both of the land where the old, old secrets of wind and waves and rock are in the blood of the people, and sung by their bards. It is perhaps the mysterious kins.h.i.+p of far-off ancestry which draws me to him, and tells me that we two belong together--that others stand outside as strangers.

Just then I felt that it would have been worth the bother of being born only for the sake of that minute, if I had no other minutes worth living; and it seemed that some knowledge was coming back to me which souls forget as bodies grow up to manhood or womanhood. But suddenly Basil's voice broke the Music. "You look as if you were conjuring up the White Lady of Avenel, who will come to any one who knows how to call her, here at Dryburgh," he said. And I opened my eyes as if he had jerked me back by the arm from the days of the Druids to the era of motor-cars. And so he had--by the ear, not the arm. If Sir S. had spoken to me then it would have been different. I begin to think he is going to be the only Real Man in my world. But if I find that out, and he doesn't think me the only Real Girl, what will become of me?

After we had done what Mrs. West, in her pretty little tinkling voice, called "exhausting Dryburgh" (as if one could!) we went to Melrose, only four miles away, to leave our luggage at a nice hotel and take rooms for the night, before going on another mile and a half to Abbotsford. I little thought what a surprise I should have by and by, owing to this plan of action mapped out by Sir S.

The next thing that happened to us was seeing the many turreted house built by the "Wizard of the North," when his wish was to found a great Border family. He didn't realize then that he was founding a great school of romance and that all the world would be his family in mind and heart.

A book Basil had, said that the house was "ill-placed," but to me that seemed a dull and unimaginative criticism. Nowadays people may think a great deal about wide views from their windows; and if I ever build a house with a fairy wand, that's what I shall choose to have myself. But perhaps in Sir Walter's day the thing most sought for was a peaceful, sheltered outlook all to yourself and your family, like a secret garden of which only you had the key. Just such an outlook the Wizard had from his windows; and of course what he most wished for was to bring the singing Tweed into his secret garden, just as you coax a lovely wild bird, if you can whistle its own notes, under the trees it loves.

Perhaps if Sir Walter had not been able to look out over his flowers and hay-scented meadows to the friendly river, inspiration might have failed him in his troubles. But, you see, he had that secret garden of his soul; and when he was there it must have walled him into a region of peace where worries could do no more than knock at the door.

Wandering over the big house with Mrs. James and Basil (the boys in the background), I was glad, glad that Sir Walter had owned so many treasures, and collected so many curiosities; yet I felt an undertone of sadness even in the library (where the twenty thousand books are, given back by those decent bodies, his creditors), a sadness like that which must have pressed on his spirit, thinking of all the money he had paid for his home, and the beautiful things in it--all the money he would have to make out of his brain to clear away the debt. "When I do build my house, I shall have a gallery like this in the library," I said, thinking Basil was close behind me, as he had been; but instead, there was Sir S. standing silently by. Basil had gone into the study, or perhaps into the tiny "Speak a bit," to look at the wall-panelling taken from Queen Mary's bed at Jedburgh.

"That's just what I was thinking about my library," Sir S. answered, as if I had spoken to him.

"Haven't you got one yet?" I asked.

"Only an embryo library in a flat in New York--a rather nice flat. But a flat isn't home. And you know--you ought to know--the house of my heart is on a faraway island."

"The island of Dhrum?"

"Yes. I've just begun to realize that I never have had and never can have a real home out of the Highlands. Would you think me an interloper--you and the other grand MacDonalds--if I, the crofter's boy, should develop an ambition like Sir Walter's--oh, not so worthy or splendid, because _I'm_ neither worthy nor splendid--if I should wish to have the great house of the MacDonalds of Dhrum, not let to me for a term of years as it is now, but bought and paid for as my own?"

"Can the MacDonalds sell?"

"Yes, and will, if I'll pay his price. You see, he has no son, only a daughter; and she, having failed to bring off a match or two----"