The Spell of Scotland Part 2

What would it not be on fair Melrose, viewed aright?

I hurried northward, entered Edinburgh only to convey my baggage, and then closing my eyes resolutely to all the glory and the memory that lay about, I went southward through the early twilight. I could see, would see, nothing before Melrose.

The gates of the Abbey were, of course, closed. But I did not wish to enter there until the magic hour should strike. The country round about was ineffably lovely in the rose light of the vanis.h.i.+ng day.

"Where fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose And Eildon slopes to the plain."

The Abbey was, of course, the center of thought continually, and its red-gray walls caught the light of day and the coming shadows of night in a curious effect which no picture can report; time has dealt wondrously with this stone, leaving the rose for the day, the gray for the night.

I wandered about, stopping in the empty sloping market-place to look at the Cross, which is as old as the Abbey; looking at the graveyard which surrounds the Abbey, where men lie, common men unsung in Scottish minstrelsy, except as part of the great hosts, men who heard the news when it was swift and fresh from Bannockburn, and Flodden, and Culloden; and where men and women still insert their mortality into this immortality--Elizabeth Clephane who wrote the "Ninety and Nine" lies there; and out into the country and down by the Tweed toward the Holy Pool, the Haly Wheel, to wonder if when I came again in the middle night, I, too, should see the white lady rise in mist from the waters, this lady of Bemersyde who had loved a monk of Melrose not wisely but very well, and who drowned herself in this water where the monk in penance took daily plunges, come summer, come winter. How often this is the Middle-Age penalty!

Far across the s.h.i.+mmering green meadows and through the fragrant orchards came the sound of bagpipes--on this my first evening in Scotland! And whether or not you care for the pipes, there is nothing like them in a Scottish twilight, a first Scottish twilight, to reconstruct all the Scotland that has been.

The mult.i.tudes and the individuals came trooping back. At a time of famine these very fields were filled with huts, four thousand of them, for always the monks had food, and always they could perform miracles and obtain food; which they did. That for the early time. And for the late, the encampment of Leslie's men in these fields before the day when they slaughtered Montrose's scant band of royalists at Philipshaugh, and sent that most splendid figure in late Scottish history as a fugitive to the north, and to the scaffold.

I knew that in the Abbey before the high altar lay the high heart of The Bruce, which had been carried to Spain and to the Holy Land, by order of Bruce, since death overtook him before he could make the pilgrimage.

Lord James Dougla.s.s did battle on the way against the Moslems in southern Spain, where "a Dougla.s.s! a Dougla.s.s!" rang in battle clash against "Allah, illah, allah," and the Dougla.s.s himself was slain. The heart of The Bruce flung against the infidel, was recovered and sent on to Jerusalem, and then back to Melrose. The body of Dougla.s.s was brought back to Scotland, to St. Bride's church in Dougla.s.s, and his heart also lies before the high altar of Melrose. "In their death they were not divided."

There lies also buried Michael Scot

"Buried on St. Michael's night, When the bell toll'd one and the moon was bright."

On such a night as this, I hoped. And Scot is fit companion for the twilight. This strange wizard of a strange time was born in Upper Tweedale, which is the district of Merlin--the older wizard lies buried in a green mound near Drummelzier. Michael traveled the world over, Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Palermo, Toledo, and finally, perhaps because his wizardry had sent him like a wandering Jew from place to place, back to the Border, his home country, where he came and served the Evil One.

Dante places him in the Purgatory of those who attempt blasphemously to tear the veil of the future. The thirteenth century was not the time in which to increase knowledge, whether of this world or the next. Even to-day perhaps we save a remnant of superst.i.tion, and we would not boast

"I could say to thee The words that cleft the Eildon hills in three."

Very dark against the gathering dark of the night sky rose the Eildon hills above, cleft in three by the wizardry of Scot. To that height on the morrow I should climb, for it is there that Sir Walter Scott, a later wizard, had carried our Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, just a century ago, and shown him all this Borderland--which lay about me under the increasing cover of night.

"I can stand on the Eildon Hill and point out forty-three places famous in war and verse," Sir Walter said to our Irving. "I have brought you, like a pilgrim in the Pilgrim's Progress, to the top of the Delectable Mountains, that I may show you all the goodly regions hereabouts. Yonder is Lammermuir and Smailholm; and there you have Galas.h.i.+els and Torwoodelee and Gala Water; and in that direction you see Teviotdale and the Braes of Yarrow; and Ettrick stream winding along like a silver thread to throw itself into the Tweed. It may be pertinacity, but to my eye, these gray hills and all this wild Border country have beauties peculiar to themselves. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like an ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my own honest gray hills; and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die."

On the morrow. But for to-night it was enough to remember that perfect picture as imagination painted it in Andrew Lang's verse--

"Three crests against the saffron sky, Beyond the purple plain, The kind remembered melody Of Tweed once more again.

"Wan water from the Border hills, Dear voice from the old years, Thy distant music lulls and stills, And moves to quiet tears.

"Like a loved ghost thy fabled flood Fleets through the dusky land; Where Scott, come home to die, has stood, My feet returning, stand.

"A mist of memory broods and floats, The Border waters flow; The air is full of ballad notes Borne out of long ago.

"Old songs that sung themselves to me, Sweet through a boy's day dream, While trout below the blossom'd tree Plashed in the golden stream.

"Twilight, and Tweed, and Eildon Hill, Fair and too fair you be; You tell me that the voice is still That should have welcomed me."

I did not miss the voice, any of the voices. They whispered, they sang, they crooned, they keened, about me. For this was Melrose, _mael ros_, so the old Celtic goes, "the naked headland in the wood." And I was seeing, was hearing, what I have come to see and hear; I, a Scot, if far removed, if in diluted element, and Scott's from the reading days of Auld Lang Syne.

And should I not within the moonlight see the white lady rise from the Haly Wheel? And should I not see the moonlight flooding the Abbey, Melrose Abbey? Out of a remembered yesterday, out of a confident midnight--surely there was a budding morrow in this midnight--I remembered the lines--

"If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray.

When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white, When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruined central tower; When b.u.t.tress and b.u.t.tress alternately Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the imagery, And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave, Then go--but go alone the while-- Then view St. David's ruined pile; And, home returning, soothly swear Was never scene so sad and fair."

The moon did not rise that night.

I walked about the fields, lingered about the Cross in the market, looked expectantly at the Abbey, until two in the morning.

"It was near the ringing of matin bell, The night was well nigh done."

The moon did not rise, and neither did the white lady. It was not because there was a mist, a Scottish mist, over the heavens; they were clear, the stars were s.h.i.+ning, and the pole star held true, Charles'

wain--as Charles should in Bonnie Scotland--held true to the pole. But it was a late July moon, and those Eildon hills and their circling kin rose so high against the night sky--daytime they seemed modest enough--that the moon in this lat.i.tude as far north as Sitka did not circle up the sky. Neither does the sun in winter, so the guardian explained to me next day.

Fair Melrose is fairest, o' nights, at some later or earlier time of the year. It was then that I resolved to return in December, on December 27, when the festival of St. John's is celebrated with torch lights in the ruins of the Abbey--and Michael Scot comes back to his own! But then I reflected that the moon is not always full on the Eve of St. John's.

"I cannot come, I must not come, I dare not come to thee, On the Eve of St. John's, I must walk alone, In thy bower I may not be."

I chose, years later, an October moon, in which to see it "aright."

Viewed by day, Melrose is surely fair; fair enough to enchant mortal vision. It is the loveliest ruin in the land where reform has meant ruin, and where from Kelso to Elgin, shattered fanes of the faith proclaim how variable is the mind of man through the generations, and how hostile when it forsakes.

Melrose is an old foundation. In truth the monastery was established at old Melrose, two miles farther down the Tweed, and is so lovely, so dramatic a corner of the Tweed, that Dorothy Woodsworth declared, "we wished we could have brought the ruins of Melrose to this spot." She missed the nearby murmur of the river as we do.

This oldest harbour of Christianity was founded in the pagan world by monks from Iona. Therefore by way of Ireland and not from Rome, blessed by Saint Columba sixty years before Saint Augustine came to Canterbury. It was the chief "island" between Iona and Lindisfarne. Very haughty were these monks of the West. "Rome errs, Alexandria errs, all the world errs; only the Scots and the Britons are in the right." There is surely something still left of the old spirit in Scotia, particularly in spiritual Scotia.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MELROSE ABBEY.]

Near Melrose was born that Cuthbert who is the great saint of the North, either side the Border, and who lies in the midst of the splendour of Durham. A shepherd, he watched his sheep on these very hills round about us, and saw, when abiding in the fields, angels ascending and descending on golden ladders. Entering Melrose as a novice he became prior in 664, and later prior at Lindisfarne. When the monks were driven from the Holy Island by the Danes they carried the body of St. Cuthbert with them for seven years, and once it rested at Melrose--

"O'er northern mountain, march and moor, From sea to sea, from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, Seven years St. Cuthbert's corpse they bore, They rested them in fair Melrose; But though alive he loved it well, Not there his relics might repose."

When King David came to the making of Scotland, he came into the Middle Marches, and finding them very lovely--even as you and I--this "sair sanct to the Croon," as his Scottish royal descendant, James VI saw him--and James would have fell liked to be a saint, but he could accomplish neither sinner nor saint, because Darnley crossed Mary in his veins--David determined to build him fair Abbeys. Of which, Melrose, "St. David's ruined pile," is the fairest. He brought Cistercians from Rievaulx in Yorks.h.i.+re, to supplant the Culdees of Iona, and they builded them a beautiful stone Melrose to supplant the wooden huts of old Melrose. It centered a very active monastic life, where pavements were once smooth and lawns were close-clipped, and cowled monks in long robes served G.o.d, and their Abbot lorded it over lords, even equally with kings.

But it stood on the highway between Dunfermline and London, between English and Scottish ambitions. And it fell before them. Edward I spared it because the Abbots gave him fealty. But Edward II, less royal in power and in taste, destroyed it. The Bruce rebuilded it again, greater splendour rising out of complete ruin. When Richard II came to Scotland he caused the Abbey to be pillaged and burned. And when Hertford came for Henry VIII, after the Thirty Nine Articles had annulled respect for buildings under the protection of Rome, the final ruin came to St.

David's church-palace. Yet, late as 1810, church service, reformed, of course, was held in a roofed-over part of the Abbey ruin. To-day it is under the protection of the Dukes of Buccleuch. And, we remember as we stand here, while the beams of lightsome day gild the ruin, the mottoes of the great family of the Border, _Luna Cornua Reparabit_, which being interpreted is, "There'll be moonlight again." Then to light the raids, the reiving that refilled the larder. But to-morrow for scenic effect.

Examined in this daylight, the beauty of Melrose surely loses very little. It is one of the most exquisite ruins in the United Kingdom, perhaps second to Tintern, but why compare? It is of finest Gothic, out of France, not out of England. In its general aspect it is n.o.bly magnificent--

"The darken'd roof rose high aloof On pillars, lofty, light and small; The keystone that locked each ribbed aisle Was a fleur de lys or a quatre feuille, The corbels were carved grotesque and grim; And the pillars with cl.u.s.tered shafts so trim, With base and with capital flourish'd around Seem'd bundles of lances which garlands had bound."

And, as a chief detail which yields not to Tintern or any other, is the east window over the high altar, through which the moon and sun s.h.i.+nes on those buried hearts--

"The moon on the east oriel shone Through slender shafts of shapely stone, By foliaged tracery combined.

Thou would'st have thought some fairy'd hand 'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined, Then framed a spell when the work was done, And changed the willow wreaths to stone.

The silver light, so pale and faint, Showed many a prophet and many a saint, Whose image on the gla.s.s was dyed, Full in the midst his cross of red Triumphant Michael brandish'd, And trampled on the Apostate's pride; The moonbeams kissed the holy pane, And threw on the pavement a b.l.o.o.d.y stain."

_Abbotsford_

If "Scott restored Scotland," he built the "keep" which centers all the Scott-land of the Border side.