The Heather-Moon
Mrs. James had bought a book with quotations from a diary of Burns, and
she read out to us while the car stopped at Sanquhar what he had written
about one specimen day:
"Left Thornhill at five in the morning. Rode four miles to Enterkinfoot
and made a call: thence three miles to Slunkerford with another call:
thence six miles to Sanquhar, where there were twenty official visits to
be made: thence two miles to Whitehall, with two more calls: and a
return journey to Sanquhar, finishing the day's work at seven in the
evening."
Poor poet. But he had always his glowing fancies to keep his heart warm.
We felt almost guilty because we had no horrid calls to make, as he had;
nothing to do but enjoy the scene made magical by his love of it: the
valley with its near green hills and distant peaks of Galloway and
Lowther; the river girdling wooded reaches with a belt of silver, or
burrowing through deep rocky channels, purple as heather petrified. It
was all as different from yesterday's Crockettland as if we had crossed
the ocean from one to the other.
At Carronbridge we saw the woods of Drumlanrig on our right hand; and
Sir S. told me about the Duke of Queensberry who spent all his money in
building the splendid castle, slept in it one night, saw the bills for
it, cursed himself and it, and went away with nothing left but a broken
heart. "Deil pyk out the een of him who sees this," he wrote on the back
of the biggest bill.
There's a Burns museum at lime-tree-shaded Thornhill, but I refused to
go in and stare at an original cast of his skull. I do think a man,
especially a great genius, ought to be allowed the privacy of his own
skull!
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 friendships, 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 friendships" resting near him
in his long sleep. Their presence consoled me for the mausoleum which
nobody 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 associated 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 cushion 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 pass 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 Shiels'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 noble 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 shores 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!"