The Spell of Scotland Part 5

Wha daur meddle wi' me, Wha daur meddle wi' me?

Oh, my name is little Jock Elliott, An' wha daur meddle wi' me?

"I munt my gude naig wi' a will When the fray's in the wind, an' he c.o.c.ks his lugs as he tugs for the hill That enters the south countrie, Where p.r.i.c.king and spurring are rife, And the bluid boils up like the sea, But the Southrons gang doon i' the strife, An' wha daur meddle wi' me?"

And perhaps we can forgive the reiver, since he dealt a blow to Bothwell that those of us who love Mary have longed to strike through the long centuries. Bothwell took Elliott in custody, Elliott not suspecting that a Scot could prove treacherous like a Southron, and was carrying him to the Hermitage. Jock asked pleasantly what would be his fate at the a.s.size.

"Gif ane a.s.syises wald mak him clene, he was hertlie content.i.t, but he behuvit to pas to the Quenis grace."

This was little promise to little Jock Elliott. He fled. Bothwell chased. Bothwell fired, wounded Jock, overtook him, and Jock managed to give Bothwell three vicious thrusts of his skene dhu--"Wha daur meddle wi' me!"--before Bothwell's whinger drove death into little Jock Elliott.

Bothwell, wounded, perhaps to death, so word went up to Edinburgh, was carried to the Hermitage.

Buchanan, the scandalous chronicler of the time--there were such in Scotland, then, and always for Mary--set down that "when news thereof was brought to Borthwick to the Queen, she flingeth away in haste like a madwoman by great journeys in post, in the sharp time of winter, first to Melrose, and then to Jedworth."

It happened to be the crisp, lovely, truly Scottish time, October, and Mary opened court at Jedburgh October 9, presiding at the meetings of the Privy Council, and then rode to the Hermitage October 16. She rode with an escort which included the Earl of Moray, the Earl of Huntley, Mr. Secretary Lethington, and more men of less note. For six days the girl queen (Mary was only twenty-four in this year of the birth of James, year before the death of Darnley, the marriage with Bothwell, the imprisonment at Loch Leven) had been mewed to state affairs, and a ride through the brown October woods, thirty miles there and thirty miles back again, must have lured the queen who was always keen for adventure, whether Bothwell was the goal, or just adventure.

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

The mist of the morning turned to thick rain by night, and the return ride was made in increasing wet and darkness. Once, riding ahead and alone and rapidly, the Queen strayed from the trail, was bogged in a mire, known to-day as the Queen's Mire, and rescued with difficulty.

Next day Mary lay sick at Jedburgh, a sickness of thirty days, nigh unto death. News was sent to Edinburgh, and bells were rung, and prayers offered in St. Giles. On the ninth day she lay unconscious, in this little town of Jedburgh, apparently dead, twenty years before Fotheringay. "Would G.o.d I had died at Jedburgh."

She did not die. Darnley visited her one day, coming from Glasgow.

Bothwell came as soon as he could be moved, and the two made convalescence together in this old house of Jedburgh, perhaps the happiest house of all those where the legend of Mary persists. Even to-day it has its charm. The windowed turret looks out on the large fruit garden that stretches down to the Jed, very like that very little turret of "Queen Mary's Lookout" at Roscoff where the child queen had landed in France less than twenty years before.

Five years later, when Mary was in an English prison, a proclamation was read in her name at the town cross of Jedburgh, the herald was roughly handled by the Provost who received his orders from England, and Buccleuch and Ker of Fernihurst revenged themselves by hanging ten loyal (?) citizens who stood with the Provost.

Later, a century later, when at the town cross the magistrates were drinking a health to the new sovereign, a well-known Jacobite came by.

They insisted on his joining in the toast. And he pledged--"confusion to King William, and the rest.i.tution of our sovereign and the heir!" Bravo, the Borderers!

_Selkirk_

The sentimental journeymen--with whom I count myself openly--may hesitate to visit Yarrow. It lies so near the Melrose country, and is so much a part of that, in song and story, that it would seem like leaving out the fragrance of the region to omit Yarrow. And yet--. One has read "Yarrow Unvisited," one of the loveliest of Wordsworth's poems. And one has read "Yarrow Visited." And the conclusion is too easy that if the unvisitings and visitings differ as much as the poems it surely were better not to "turn aside to Yarrow," to accept it as

"Enough if in our hearts we know There's such a place as Yarrow....

For when we're there although 'tis fair, 'Twill be another Yarrow."

There is peril at times in making a dream come true, in translating the dream into reality, in lifting the mists from the horizon of imagination. Should one hear an English skylark, an Italian nightingale?

should one see Carca.s.sonne, should one visit Yarrow?

Ah, welladay. I have heard, I have seen. Just at first, because no dream can ever quite come true, not the dream of man in stone, or of song in bird-throat, or even of nature in trees and sky and hills, there is a disappointment. But after the reality these all slip away into the misty half-remembered things, even Carca.s.sonne, even Yarrow; the dream enriched by the vision, the vision softened again into dream.

And so, I will down into Yarrow.

Coaches run, or did before the war, and will after the war, through the pleasant dales of Yarrow and Moffat, dales which knew battles long ago and old unhappy far off things, but very silent now, too silent; almost one longs for a burst of Border warfare that the quiet may be filled with fitting clamour. The coaches meet at Tibbie s.h.i.+el's on St. Mary's and it is to Tibbie's that you are bound, as were so many gallant gentlemen, especially literary gentlemen, before you.

Selkirk is the starting point. And Selkirk is a very seemly, very prosperous town, looking not at all like an ecclesiastic city, as it started to be in the dear dead days of David the saint, looking very much as a hill city in Italy will look some day when Italy becomes entirely "redeemed" and modern, and exists for itself instead of for the tourist. Selkirk is indifferent to tourists, as indeed is every Scottish town; Scotland and Scotsmen are capable of existing for themselves. Selkirk hangs against the hillside above the Ettrick, and its show places are few; the spot where Montrose lodged the night before the defeat at Philipshaugh, the statue of Scott when he was sheriff, "s.h.i.+rra," the statue of Mungo Park near where he was given his medical training, and the home of Andrew Lang.

There is no trace of the "kirk o' the s.h.i.+elings," founded by the religious from Iona, from which by way of Scheleschyrche came Selkirk.

Nor is there trace of Davis's pile, ruined or unruined, in this near, modern, whirring city. It is the sound of the looms one remembers in Selkirk, making that infinity of yards of Scotch tweed to clothe the world. Selkirk and Galas.h.i.+els and Hawick form the Glasgow of the Border.

Always industrious, in the time of Flodden it was the "souters of Selkirk" who marched away to the Killing--

"Up wi' the Souters of Selkirk And down wi' the Earl o' Home."

These same souters--shoemakers--were busy in the time of Prince Charles Edward and contracted to furnish two thousand pair of shoes to his army; but one does not inquire too closely into whether they furnished any quota of the four thousand feet to go therein.

It was a warm sunny day when I made my pilgrimage up the Yarrow to St.

Mary's. Although Yarrow has always sung in my ears, I think it was rather to see one sight that I came for the first time to Scotland, to see

"The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow."

I rather think it was for this I had journeyed across the Atlantic and up the East coast route. Such a sentimental lure would I follow. But then, if that seems wasteful and ridiculous excess of sentiment, let us be canny enough, Scotch enough, to admit that one sees so many other things, incidentally.

The "wan waters" of the Yarrow were s.h.i.+mmering, glimmering, in the morning light as I coached out of Selkirk, and by Carterhaugh.

"I forbid ye, maidens a', That wear gowd in your hair, To come or gae by Carterhaugh; For young Tamlane is there."

These round-shouldered hills, once covered with the Wood of Caledon, and the Forest of Ettrick, and the Forest of Yarrow, are very clear and clean in their green lawns to-day, scarce an ancient tree or a late descendant standing; here and there only gnarled and deformed, out of the centuries, out of perhaps that "derke forest" of James IV. His son, the Fifth James, thought to subdue the Border and increase his revenue by placing thousands of sheep in this forest; and these ruining the trees have decreased the tourists' rightful revenue. It is because of this absence of trees that one is perhaps more conscious of the s.h.i.+ning ribbon of river; longer, clearer stretches may be seen in the green plain:

"And is this--Yarrow? This the stream Of which my fancy cherished So faithfully a waking dream?

An image that has perished!

O that some minstrel's harp were near To utter notes of gladness, And chase this silence from the air That fills my heart with sadness!"

About Philipshaugh, two miles from Selkirk, the trees are in something of large estate, with oak and birch and fir and rowan, making dark shadows in the fair morning, as the historically minded traveler would fain have it. For it was there that Montrose met defeat, his small band against Leslie's many men. All about there lie legends of his fight and his flight across the Minchmoor and on to the North.

And through here Scott loved to wander. Here he let the Minstrel begin his Last Lay--

"He paused where Newark's stately Tower Looks down from Yarrow's birchen bower."

And it was. .h.i.ther the Scotch poet came with Wordsworth, as the English poet describes it--

"Once more by Newark's Castle gate Long left without a warder, I stood, looked, listened, and with Thee Great Minstrel of the Border."

Nearby, and near the highways, is the deserted farm cottage, the birthplace of Mungo Park, who traveled about the world even as you and I, and I fancy his thought must often have returned to the Yarrow.

The driver will point out the Trench of Wallace, a redout a thousand feet long, on the height to the North; and here will come into the Border memories of another defender of Scotland who seems rather to belong to the North and West.

Soon we reach the Kirk of Yarrow, a very austere "reformed" looking basilica, dating back to 1640, which was a reformed date, set among pleasant gardens and thick verdure. Scott and Wordsworth and Hogg have wors.h.i.+ped here, and from its ceiling the heraldic devices of many Borderers speak a varied history.

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

Crossing the bridge we are swiftly, unbelievingly, on the Dowie Dens of Yarrow.

"Yestreen I dream'd a dolefu' dream; I fear there will be sorrow!

I dream'd I pu'd the heather green, Wi' my true love on Yarrow.

"But in the glen strive armed men; They've wrought me dole and sorrow; They've slain--the comeliest knight they've slain-- He bleeding lies on Yarrow.