The Spell of Scotland Part 12

In the morning of the day on which I made my pilgrimage I went up to the Parliament buildings in the Old Town, looked them about, saw the lawyers pacing to and fro, as Stevenson had paced, but not for long--the absurdity of it!--and then down the hill in the shadow of three men.

"One November afternoon in 1810"--(the year in which the "Lady of the Lake" was published) "three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like school boys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm in arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet." They were Lord Erskine, William Clerk--and the third we all know; what service of romance has he not performed for us! As the snow blattered in his face he muttered, "how it raves and drifts! On-ding o'

snaw--aye, that's the word, on-ding." And so he approached his own door, Castle Street, No. 39. There, over the door, looking forth on the world, is his face to-day, looking up Young Street.

Then, as he grew restless and would awa, I followed him through Young Street up to No. 1, North Charlotte Street. It is a substantial building, still of dignified and fair estate; neighbourhoods are not transformed in a Scots century as they are in America. But it carries no tablet to tell the world that here Marjorie lived. It was here that at the age of six she wrote her first letter to Isa Keith. It was here that Marjorie saw "regency bonnets" and with eyes of envy; as indeed she envied and desired with the pa.s.sionate depths of her nature all lovely and strange things. Here she read the Newgate calendar, and found it a fascinating affair--Marjorie less than nine! And here that Isabel Keith, her adored cousin, would not permit the little bookworm to read much of lovers or to talk of them. Marjorie says very gravely, "a great many authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally," but Isa was never able quite to cure Marjorie of her interest in love.

That evening Sir Walter carried her, through the "on-ding o' snaw," in a shepherd's plaid, over to Castle Street. I walked through the narrow stone-lined thoroughfare on a hot July morning--and I could feel the cold and snow of that winter a century back, and see the strong, lame, great man, carrying the wee wifie in the neuk of his plaid, to the warm firelight of his castle. Marjorie and he would romp there the evening long. She would hear him say his lessons, "Ziccoty, diccoty, dock," or "Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven," while Marjorie "grew quite bitter in her displeasure at his ill behaviour and stupidness."

Then they would read ballads together; and then "he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat Constance's speeches in King John till he swayed to and fro sobbing his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature, like one possessed, repeating--

"'For I am sick, and capable of fears, Oppressed with wrongs, and therefore full of fears; A widow, husbandless, subject to fears; A woman, naturally born to fears.'"

I walked out through what used to be fields, and is now much suburban dwelling, toward Braehead.--"I am going to-morrow to a delightful place, Braehead by name, where there is ducks, c.o.c.ks, bubblyjocks, 2 dogs, 2 cats and swine which is delightful"--to Ravelston--"I am at Ravelston enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing sweetly, the calf doth frisk and nature shows her glorious face."

Ravelston is still a place of delight, with its great cliffs breaking the surface of the park and a deep-lying lake with dark woodlands. I wish Marjorie might have known the ballad by Sydney Dobell; it has the magic quality she would have felt.

"Ravelston, Ravelston, The merry path that leads Down the golden morning hill, And through the silver meads;

"She sang her song, she kept her kine, She sat beneath the thorn, When Andrew Keith of Ravelston Rode thro' the Monday morn.

"Year after year, where Andrew came, Comes evening down the glade, And still there sits a moons.h.i.+ne ghost Where sat the suns.h.i.+ne maid.

"She makes her immemorial moan, She keeps her shadowy kine; O Keith of Ravelston The sorrows of thy line!"

In the late afternoon I took tram for Leith, changing of course at Pilrig, because Leith remains haughtily aloof from Edinburgh and emphasizes it through this break at the boundary. "When we came to Leith," says Boswell, "I talked perhaps with too boasting an air, how pretty the Frith of Forth looked; as indeed, after the prospect from Constantinople, of which I have been told, and that from Naples, which I have seen, I believe the view of the Frith and its environs from the Castle-hill of Edinburgh is the finest prospect in Europe, 'Aye,'

replied Dr. Johnson, 'that is the state of the world. Water is the same everywhere.'"

And so, down to the pier, stopping on the way to look at a New Haven fishwife in her picturesque costume, which she has worn ever since the Danes came over. Yes, and looking for a suitable piece of earth for Queen Magdalene to kiss, "Scottis eard!" Well, if not here, there is Scottis eard worthy elsewhere.

I asked for the ferry to Burnt-is-land. The conductor of the tram looked, yes, and laughed. Burnt-island, he dared, _dared_ to repeat. And so, I took ferry from Granton to--Burnt-island.

It is a long journey across the Firth. Far down the waters rises the bold rock of the Ba.s.s, around which I had sailed a day before, looking for a landing for some one more ponderous than solan geese or kittie wake, and not finding it; although I was told that from Canty bay--excellent Scots name--the innkeeper will row you o'er, and you may walk where James I was waiting for the boat which should carry him to safety in France, and getting instead the boat which carried him to prison in England. Still I like to remember that Henry IV declared in explanation that he "could speak very good French" himself, if that were what they were sending Scottish Jamie o'er the water for; Henry who had years of the Hundred Years' War behind him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TANTALLON CASTLE.]

The rock is rent by a cavern running clean through. It's quite a terrific place, and seven acres of benty gra.s.s must have seemed small refuge for the Covenanters who were lodged here numerously in Killing Time.

On the mainsh.o.r.e, the Lothian, rises Tantallon Castle, where Marmion dared to beard Angus Bell-the-Cat. It still looks pretty tremendous, and still stands, like the Coliseum. "Ding doon Tantallon? Build a brig to the Ba.s.s!" runs the proud proverb.

But we are on our way across the Firth. There was a certain magic about it on my day of pilgrimage. The north sh.o.r.e lay sparkling in the late afternoon sun, blue s.h.i.+mmering land against a clear blue sky, the thin rim of the continent playing here and there with opalescent colour where man had builded village or castle, or where man had not destroyed the ancient green. The south sh.o.r.e lay vague and gray, and growing darker, against the falling afternoon, while the Lammermuirs stood up in paler dusk in the background, and the sun blazed behind them. And all about the Firth glittered like an inland lake, a Great Lake. I thought of how the Roman galleys and Norse fleets had come this way, and looked and departed. And how kings had brought their armies here, and looked, perhaps besieged, and departed. And how time and time and time again, French fleets had sailed in here to help their continuing ally, Scotland. And how kings had sailed out from here to France, and how Scots knights had sailed out from here for France, the Crusades, anywhere that promised adventure. And here Saxon Margaret had sailed in to be Scotland's queen. And here Scottish Mary had sailed in to be Scotland's queen, and not to be. Far out in the offing the sun shone golden upon the brown sails of a single fis.h.i.+ng boat, tacking to catch a homing wind, a ghost where once had sailed the war and merchant fleets of nations.

At Burntisland I did not pause to visit Rossend Castle where Mary is supposed to have had her affair with Chastelard; certainly not. Nor at Kinghorn, where Alexander III, within a few months after he had married in haunted Kelso, and within a few hours perhaps after he had drunk the blude red wine in Dunfermline, came galloping by this way, the horse stumbled, the king fell, and

"Quhen Alysandyr oure King was dede That Scotland led in luve and le ...

Succoure Scotland and remede That stands in perplexite."

_Kirkcaldy_

If Kirkcaldy was a "lang toun" in the olden days, it is longer to-day, stretching from Linktown to Dysart, and broadening inland to Gallatown, where they make the famous Wemyss pottery. To-day Kirkcaldy makes linoleum and jute and engineering works, and it is the center of a string of fis.h.i.+ng villages, a "metropolitan borough system," hundreds of boats fis.h.i.+ng the North Sea with KY marked as their home port, when their sailor men make home in any of these picturesque and smelling villages, St. Monan, Pittenweem, Cellard.y.k.e, Crail where Mary of Lorraine landed, Largo where Sir Andrew Wood the admiral lived, and where Alexander Selkirk lived what time he did not live as Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, and Anstruther--

"Wha wad na be in love Wi' bonny Maggie Lauder, A piper met her gaen to Fife And speired what wast they ca'd her....

I've lived in Fife Baith maid and wife These ten years and a quarter, Gin ye should come to Anster Fair Speir ye for Maggie Lauder."

There is also some castellated splendour, Ravenscraig, and Wemyss on the site of the castle of MacDuff, then of Fife, this Wemyss being the ill-fated place where Mary first met Darnley.

Abbotshall kirkyard is at the right of the railway station as the train pulls in to Kirkcaldy. In his book of Scotch pilgrimages when William Winter was on his way to St. Andrews, past Kirkcaldy, he wrote "gazing as I pa.s.s at its quaint church among the graves." I suppose he did not know what grave.

But first I would find where she had lived. Kirkcaldy is close set against the sea. Here on winding High Street, I found the house in which she had lived, standing much as it did no doubt a hundred years ago, except for a new coat of tan on the stone. From those upper windows Marjorie looked out on the coach going away toward Edinburgh. The ground floor is occupied by a book store, where I could buy no book about Marjorie. Under a window you enter the archway and find yourself in a little green-gra.s.sed court, which is all that is left of Marjorie's garden. The house proper fronted the garden in that comfortable excluding way which British people still prefer for their places of habitation. It is still occupied as a dwelling, and the nursery still looks as it did in Marjorie's day, and the drawing-room, where she wrote that letter to Isa Keith--"I now sit down on my botom to answer all your kind and beloved letters." The door of the nursery was open. I remembered those last days, when lying ill, her mother asked Marjorie if there was anything she wished. "Oh, yes, if you would just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play 'The Land o' the Leal,' and I will lie still and think and enjoy myself."

"I'm wearin' awa', Jean, Like snaw wreaths in thaw, Jean, I'm wearin' awa', To the Land o' the Leal."

The kirkyard lies on the outskirts of the town. It was a beautiful place as the Scotch sun sank behind the Fife hills and the Firth. The organist was playing and the music drifted out through the narrow lancet windows when I found the little white cross marked "Pet Marjorie," and the old gray tombstone with its simple token, "M. F.

1811."

For a hundred years then she has been lying there. But Marjorie has become one of the immortal dream children of the world. I laid my fresh flowers beside another's which had withered, and went my ways into the dusk.

_St. Andrews_

Past Kirkcaldy the road leaves the sea and runs northward through meadows between fields which have the look of centuries-old cultivation, at peace like the fields and villages of the English Midland, to St.

Andrews.

"St. Andrews by the Northern Sea, A haunted town it is to me!

A little city, worn and gray, The gray North Ocean girds it round; And o'er the rocks, and up the bay, The long sea-rollers surge and sound; And still the thin and biting spray Drives down the melancholy street, And still endure, and still decay, Towers that the salt winds vainly beat.

Ghost-like and shadowy they stand Dim mirrored in the wet sea-sands.

"St. Leonard's Chapel, long ago We loitered idly where the tall Fresh-budded mountain ashes blow Within thy desecrated wall; The tough roots rent the tombs below, And April birds sang clamorous, We did not dream, we could not know How hardly Fate would deal with us!

"O broken minster, looking forth Beyond the bay, above the town, O winter of the kindly North, O college of the scarlet gown!"

Small wonder St. Andrews is the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland, and smaller wonder, remembering the Calvinistic wind, that here happened the brunt of the fight between the old faith and the new.

It is a clean and seemly town, with much historic memory and much present day dignity, a small gray town, "the essence of all the antiquity of Scotland in good clean condition," said Carlyle. Its ancient sights the cathedral and the castle; its living sight the university and the golf links.

The town stands on a promontory, three long streets converging on the cathedral and castle lying in ruins. The cathedral, a hundred years in the building, and very splendid in its wealth of detail, its vastness of s.p.a.ce like that of York or Amiens, was dedicated in the days of The Bruce, with the king present to endow it with a hundred marks "for the mighty victory of the Scots at Bannockburn, by St. Andrew's, the guardian of the realm." For three hundred years its wax tapers lighted the old rites according to which The Bruce wors.h.i.+ped; he was not covenanted. Then the torch of the reformation was applied to it, the torch of the flaming tongue of John Knox.

To-day there are three towers left of the five--Dr. Johnson hoped that one which looked unstable on the day of his visit, would "fall on some of the posterity of John Knox; and no great matter!" There are ma.s.sive walls. There is no roof between us and the sky, which, after all, does shelter the true faith, and if one misses the chanting of the monks echoing through these arches, under this roofless s.p.a.ce, there is the moan of the sea, sobbing at the foot of the crag, the sea which is of no faith and never keeps faith. And if one misses the scarlet robes of Cardinal Beaton as he swept through these aisles in splendid procession with all the gorgeous trappings of his retinue, there are mosses and wild flowers to give glows of colour--one must content himself. Those were evil days, whatever the faith; there was not much division in matters of conduct; there may have been in matters of morals.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. ANDREWS CASTLE.]

The castle stands stalwart on the rock promontory washed by the ocean, and the ocean breaks angrily at its base like a creature robbed over long of its prey. It is not the castle in which the Cardinal lived, but it was built soon after, and wrecked so thoroughly, and looks so very ancient, that one would fain believe; and the guide will tell, unless you prevent him, that it was at these windows that the Cardinal sat at his ease and witnessed the entertainment of the auto da fe of the non-conformist, George Wishart, burned alive on March 28, 1542; about the time Philip the Second was burning heretics in the Old Plaza at Madrid, and a little before Queen Mary spouse to Philip, was burning them in England. And it was only two months later, May 29, when workmen were strengthening the castle at the orders of the Cardinal against this very thing that happened, that the reformers made their way in, killed the Cardinal, and hung him "by the tane arm and the tane foot," from the very balcony where he had sat to enjoy Wishart's burning. A very barbarous time. As Wishart had lain in the Bottle Dungeon months before his burning, so Beaton lay in the dungeon in salt, seven months before his burial.

John Knox joined the reformers, holding the town until it was taken by the French fleet--"defended their castle against Scotland, France, and Ireland all three"--surrendering to Strozzi, Prior of Capua, a Knight of Rhodes; so was the great world made small in those days by errant knights and captains and hired mercenaries. The French captain entered, "and spoiled the castle very rigorously," lest it should be "a receptacle for rebels." All this in the time of the Regency of Mary of Lorraine.

Knox was taken and sent to the galleys for a year. Then he returned, and was frequently in St. Andrews, preaching in the town kirk, founded, perhaps, by the confessor of Saint Margaret, preaching here some of his last sermons. "I saw him everie day of his doctrine go hulie and fear,"

wrote James Melville, "with a furrning of martriks about his neck, a staff in the an hand," and lifted up to the pulpit "whar he behovite to lean at his first entrie; bot or he had done with his sermont, he was so active and vigorus, that he lyk to ding that pulpit in blads and fly out of it." The pulpit held. And so did the doctrine of Knox.