The Heather-Moon
"The child has had no novels to read later than Scott."
"Crockett has done for Galloway what Scott did for Tweedside," said Sir
S. "It's his country. He has made it live. When I give this girl the
promised present of Carlyle and Shakespeare, I must add Crockett. That
is, as she reminded me"--and he smiled--"if Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald
allows Ian of that ilk to lay gifts at her daughter's feet."
"Oh, she'll permit Barrie to accept books," said Mrs. James, with her
pretty primness. "How the child will love the 'Raiders,' and the 'Men of
the Moss Hags.' Yes, certainly she ought to see 'gray Galloway.'"
"Galloway be it, then," said Sir S., looking pleased. "But it won't be
gray at this time of year. It will be purple and gold and emerald, and
silvered with rivers running between flowery banks. And it will smell
sweet as a Scotsman's paradise, with bog myrtle and peat."
"I too have often wanted to see Galloway," said Mrs. James, "even before
I read the Crockett books; for the doctor devoted a particularly
interesting chapter to its history. I remember well, the ancient name
was most romantic: Gallgaidhel, for the country of the stranger Gaels.
That was the heading he gave his chapter, and I fear I did not know what
'stranger Gaels' meant until I read it. The Celtic Gaels who lived there
used to be called Atecott Picts; and though they were very independent
and wild, and the Romans didn't govern them long, they accepted the
Northumbrians as their overlords--oh, it must have been in the seventh
century, I think. And two hundred years later they made common cause
with the Vikings: so the other Gaels, who would have nothing to do with
the foreigners, scornfully named the men of Galloway 'stranger Gaels.'"
"It was just jealousy, then!" said I. "Because the people of Galloway
were so broad-minded and hospitable, and ahead of their times. It's the
right country for strangers to visit first----"
"But we're not strangers," Sir S. cut me short. "You and I, Barrie, are
coming into our own. To-night for the first time you'll sleep in your
ain countree, under the 'heather moon.'"
"It ought to be a wonderful place, for our first night of the heather
moon," I said, half shutting my eyes--"a mysterious, beautiful, _lucky_
place, to remember always. What shall it be? Have you decided on what is
appropriate?"
"I'd thought of Dumfries," he said. "But it doesn't answer that
description, and though it's in Galloway, it concerns Burns and is out
of Crockett land. Still----"
"Sweetheart Abbey!" Mrs. James exclaimed rapturously. "It should be at
Sweetheart Abbey that Barrie dreams her first Scottish dreams."
The knight laughed rather bitterly for some reason. "Are Scottish dreams
different from other dreams?"
"Perhaps," said Mrs. James, "they are the dreams that come true."
VI
It is days later, it seems a long time ago that I wrote of our plan to
spend the first night in Scotland at Sweetheart Abbey--a long time since
the night itself; for I have lived more in these few days than in all my
life before.
Soon we are to reach Edinburgh. Monday is the day when my mother will
begin acting there in her new play. I shall see her. It is to be the
Great Day of all, the day to which all the others have been leading up,
and I ought to be perfectly happy. So I am! Still, there's one little
heavy spot in my heart. All the yeast of happiness won't make it light.
The beginning of the new means the end of the old. The trip will be
over--for me; though the Knight and the Gray Dragon will go on and have
hundreds of adventures without me. They will be my knight and my dragon
no longer. Perhaps I shall never see them again.
Before our days together slip away into the background of my mind (it
seems as if they never could!) I want to write down things about them to
keep and read when I am _old_.
First of all, there was Ruthwell Cross.
We went there from Annan; and as we flew along in the car over a good
white road, we could see across widening waters the mountains of the
English Lake country floating like a mirage along the southern sky,
Skiddaw with its twin peaks higher and bluer than the rest. How I love
the names of the Cumberland places and mountains! I made Sir S. say
Helvellyn and Blencathra and Glaramara over very slowly, just for the
music in my ears. And when his voice says a thing it sounds particularly
well. I like to hear it roll out such a word as Northumberland, for
instance. The way he says it makes you think of thunder on great
moorlands, or a rush of wild Scotsmen over the border. But the Celtic
names he speaks most lovingly, most softly, so that they ring on your
ear for a long time after they are spoken, like an echo of fairy bells.
I did not mean to write all this about him and his voice when I began.
There is so much else to say. Yet, somehow, I keep running back to him
in my thoughts, especially now the trip is nearly over. And while I
still cling to the subject, I have found out that he can sing as well as
paint. But the singing belongs to Sweetheart Abbey; and Ruthwell Cross
came before.
Mrs. James and Sir S. excited my interest in Galloway by telling me bits
from the "Raiders," then stopping in exciting places to talk of
something else. And somehow Galloway does seem a country where almost
anything might happen--big, sensational, historic things. There was
nothing gray to see except glimpses of the Solway, where the sea poured
in its resistless tide; and that was the gray of polished silver. I had
an impression of high hills, blunt in shape yet strangely dignified, and
wide-spreading moors which sent out exquisite smells like lovely unseen
messengers to meet us, as the car seemed to break through crystal walls
of wind. Here and there were piles of pansy-brown peat, ready for
burning. Children with heads wrapped in scarlet flame ran out of
cottages to stare at us. Sir S. actually admired their red hair. He
exclaimed suddenly, "By Jove, it's worth crossing the ocean to see that
glorious stuff again! It's the hair of Circe." I don't know when
anything has made me feel so much like a kitten that purrs over a dish
of cream. For you know the hair he loved was _just_ my colour, not a bit
less scarlet. What would Grandma say?
It rained once--sharp rain like thin daggers of glass stabbing our faces
as the car dashed through--and the wet road looked like a shining silver
ribbon flung down anyhow on purple velvet. The purple velvet was
heather, and I never saw any before we started on our trip, except a
little sad, tame heather in the garden of Hillard House--heather
moulting like a bird in a cage, with all the spirit of the moors gone
out of it. But this Galloway heather was real heather, the heather of
poetry; and I knew that by and by I was going to see the heather moon
rise over it. The very thought brought a thrill--and I was glad, as I
had it, that Mrs. West was somewhere else in her own car. She does so
damp you, somehow, in your high moments, and make you feel too young for
anybody to care for your crude little thrills or take them seriously.
When the rain stopped, it left a thin white mist floating over the
heather, until the sun broke out and the deep purple was lit to crimson,
like a running fire.
I'm not quite sure if all this happened before Ruthwell Church (called
Rivvel by the people near), but in my memory it is part of the same
picture, of that first day in Galloway.
I know we skimmed through a little place called Cummer-trees, and then
Sir S. slowed down to show us, he said, one of the "sights of the
world." He had never seen it himself, but he knew all about it, and even
Mrs. James knew a little. It is a great advantage to a simple woman to
have had a clever husband, and feel obliged, to live up to him.
We had come not so much for the church as for a wonderful stone cross
which it contains, as a jewel-box contains treasure of pearls and
diamonds. This cross is worth countless numbers of both; and it has a
history as intricate as its own strange carvings.
In the manse they gave Sir S. the key of the small old church behind a
high wall with steps up and down: and once inside he led us straight to
the north end, where, in a side aisle, we saw a great shape rise. We
must have known it to be a marvel, even if we had heard nothing
beforehand.
The cross used to stand, not in the church, but out in the open long
before the church was built, and it towered eighteen feet tall against
the sky. There it lived year after year, generation after generation,
and nobody knew what its carved birds and beasts and hieroglyphic
inscriptions meant. Nobody cared much, until a gloomy set of men in a
General Assembly, when Charles I was King of England, threw it down and
broke it up, because it was an idolatrous emblem. Luckily, some wise
person hid all the pieces in the church; but after a while another
person not so wise threw them out into the backyard. There they stayed
until a Doctor Duncan thought he would have the cross put up in his
manse garden: and some great Norwegian scholars, to whom he sent copies
of the writings, grew very excited, and contradicted each other about
them in 1802. But no one knew what the letters really meant till the
eldest son of the famous actor John Kemble came to the neighbourhood for
a holiday. He was a learned authority on Anglo-Saxon times, and he
discovered that the writing was really Early English, the very earliest
of all, the rudiments of the language which--as Sir S. expressed
it--"Chaucer helped to form and Shakespeare perfected"; because they had
to _make_ their words, as well as group them together--which is all that
lazy authors have to do nowadays. The quaint carvings relate to the life
of Christ and saints, and they are described in Latin from the Vulgate;
but it was the runic inscriptions which John Mitchell Kemble puzzled
out--a kind of rhymed soliloquy the cross itself was supposed to speak;
and afterward he found the whole thing in an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the
seventh or eighth century, far away from Scotland, in a library at
Vercelli, near Milan. But it was written by the Northumbrian bard
Caedmon, in a poem called "The Dream of the Holy Rood."
No wonder Sir S. wished to see Ruthwell Cross. There's nothing else of
the kind, he thinks, so splendid anywhere.
Even then my first wonderful day in Scotland wasn't over, for we had
time to see Caerlaverock Castle, which, according to Sir S., is another
of the best things on earth. I suppose, in old days, when the world was
small because it was difficult to travel great distances, it didn't seem
odd to find magnificent runic crosses, and castles, and historic
blacksmiths' shops, and houses of geniuses all standing cheek by jowl
within a step of each other. They had to be like that, or nobody from
the next county would ever have seen them: but now, especially to a
person who has seen nothing except in dreams, it is startling, almost
incredible.
Caerlaverock, Mrs. James said, was probably Scott's Ellangowan in "Guy
Mannering"; so I shall read "Guy Mannering" as soon as I settle down to
live with my mother. We couldn't help getting a little mixed up with
Scott even here, at the gate of the Crockett country; and there were
traces of Burns too, because of our being near already to Dumfries,
where he lived for years and finally died. But the idea Sir S. had set
his heart upon was for us to come back to Dumfries after we had seen
Galloway and had run up to Burns's birthplace at Ayr. It would make each
part of the trip more "concrete," he said.
Whether or no the stronghold of the Maxwells was Ellangowan, it was in
any case the key to southwest Scotland, and in looking at the place it
is easy to understand why. A great red-gold Key it was when we saw it,