The Spell of Scotland Part 23

"But ere the Brig o' Turk was won The headmost horseman rode alone, Alone, but with unbated zeal--"

Here I should take up the thread of the old poem and weave it entire.

But first because I had come adventuring, even like the Gudeman o'

Ballengeich, and taking my chances as they came along, and meeting no Highland girl and no Fair Ellen, I did seek out lodgings in one of the cottages which cl.u.s.ter about the foot of Glen Finglas, typical Highland cottages. Not the kind, I regret and do not regret, which Dorothy Wordsworth describes with such triumph, where William and Dorothy and Coleridge put up--"we caroused our cups of coffee, laughing like children," over the adventure; but still a cottage, with a single bed room. These cottages, no doubt because artists now and then inhabit them and because all the world pa.s.ses by and because they are on Montrose property, are what the artist and the poet mean by a cottage, low-browed, of field stone, and rose-entwined.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BRIG O' TURK.]

The hurried traveler with no time to spare and no comforts, lodges at the Trossachs hotel, which aspires to look like a Lady-of-the-Lake Abbotsford, and is, in truth, of an awesome splendour like some Del Monte or Ponce de Leon.

There is a parish church--I heard the bell far off in the woods--near the hotel, but standing mid

"the copsewood gray That waved and wept on Loch Achray."

It waved gently, and wept not at all that peaceful Sunday morning when we made our way by path and strath into the dell of peace. The people coming from the countryside repossess their own, and of course the tourists are not in the church, or if there, with a subdued quality. The coaches do not run, and there fell a peace over all the too well known, too much trodden land, which restored it to the century in which it truly belongs.

In the late afternoon, under that matchless sky which the wind had swept clear of even rapid clouds--we were glad we could match it by no other Scottish sky, and only by the sky which shone down when we first came to the Lake, that aeon ago--and by the scant two miles that lie between the Brig and the Lake, "stepping westward," we followed the far memory till it was present.

The road leads through the forest beautifully, peacefully. If on that early September day no birds sang, still one missed nothing, not even the horn of the Knight of Snowdoun. The paths twine and retwine, through this bosky birchen wood, with heather purple, and knee deep on either side, and through the trees swift glimpses of the storied mountains.

Suddenly the way changes, the ground breaks, rocks heap themselves, a gorge appears,--it is the very place!

"Das.h.i.+ng down a darksome glen, Soon lost to hound and hunter's ken, In the deep Trossachs' wildest nook His solitary refuge took."

I can never forget the thrill I had in the old schoolroom when Mr.

Kennedy first read the story and I knew that the stag had escaped.

I felt even more certain of it in this wild glen. Surely he must be in there still. And so I refused to go and find him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Trossachs_]

I could not discover where fell the gallant gray. I mean I was without guide and could map my own geography out of my own more certain knowledge. So I chose a lovely green spot--notwithstanding my remembrance of "stumbling in the rugged dell"--encircled with oak and birch, the shadows lying athwart it as they would write the legend.

"Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day, That costs thy life, my gallant gray."

And then, by a very pleasant path, instead of the tortuous ladderlike way which James Fitz James was forced to take, I came again to The Lake, splendid in the evening as it had been mysterious in the morning.

"The western waves of ebbing day Roll'd o'er the glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire.

But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravine below, Where twined the path in shadow hid, Round many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle."

No shallop set out when I raised my imaginary horn and blew my imaginary salute to the lovely isle. There were no boats to hire, on this Sunday, and I was not Malcolm Graeme to swim the s.p.a.ce. But there it lay, bosky and beautiful, a green bit of peace in a blue world. Nothing could rob me of my memory of Loch Katrine, not even the very lake itself.

_Stirling_

Stirling stands up boldly--in the midst of Scotland.

That is the feeling I had in coming on it by train from the West.

Highlanders coming on it from the North, English coming on it from the South, must have seen even more conclusively that Stirling rises out of the midst of Scotland.

I should have preferred to approach it on foot. But then, this is the only conquering way in which to make one's descent on any corner of the world one seeks to possess; either on one's own valiant two feet or on the resounding four feet of a battle charger. Alas, to-day one does neither. But--there lies Stirling rising from the water-swept plain, through the gray of a Scotch morning, entirely worthy of being "taken,"

and looking completely the part it has played in Scottish history.

Scotland is curiously provided with these natural forts, the Rocks of Edinburgh and Dumbarton and Stirling. They have risen out of the plain, for the defense and the contention of man. And because Stirling lies, between East and West, between North and South, it has looked down on more history, seen more armies advance and retreat than--any other one place in the world?

Standing upon its wind-swept battlements--I can never think that the wind dies down on the heights of Stirling--one looks upon the panorama of Scottish history. The Lomonds lie blue and far to the east, the Grampians gray and stalwart to the north, and on the west the peaks of the Highlands, Ben Lomond and all the hills that rampart "The Lady of the Lake." All around the sky were ramparts of low-lying clouds, lifting themselves here and there at the corners of the world into splendid impregnable bastions. Stirling looks a part of this ground plan, of this sky battlement.

Soldiers, from yonder heights!--and you know the rest. From this height you who are far removed from those our wars, a mere human speck in the twentieth century look down on seven battlefields. Did Pharaoh see more, or as much, from Cheops? The long list runs through a thousand years and is witness to the significance of Stirling.

Here, in 843, was fought the battle of Cambuskenneth, and the Painted People fell back, and Kenneth, who did not paint, made himself king of an increasing Scotland.

Here, in 1297, was fought the battle of Stirling Bridge, and William Wallace with a thousand men--but Scotsmen--defeated the Earl of Surrey and the Abbot Cressingham with five thousand Englishmen.

Here, in 1298, was fought the battle of Falkirk, and Wallace was defeated. But not for long. Dead, he continued to speak.

Here, in 1313, was fought the battle of Bannockburn, forty thousand Scots against a hundred thousand English, Irish and Gascons. And The Bruce established Scotland Forever.

Here, in 1488, was fought the battle of Sauchieburn, the n.o.bles against James III, and James flying from the field was treacherously slain.

Here, in 1715, was fought the battle of Sheriffmuir, when Mar and Albany with all their men marched up the hill of Muir and then marched down again.

Here, in 1745, Prince Charles experienced one of his great moments; how his great moments stand forth in the pathos, yes, and the bathos, of his swift career.

It is a tremendous panorama.

"Scots, wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled!

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led!"

I listened while the guide went through with the battle, which, of course, is the Battle of Bannockburn. How The Bruce disposed his army to meet the English host he knew was coming up from the south to relieve the castle garrison; how they appeared at St. Ninians suddenly, and the ever-seeing Bruce remarked to Moray, who had been placed in charge of that defense--"there falls a rose from your chaplet"--it is almost too romantic not to be apocryphal; and how Moray (who was the Randolph Moray who scaled the crags at Edinburgh that March night) countered the English dash for the castle and won out; how in the evening of the day as King Robert was inspecting his lines for the battle of the to-morrow, a to-morrow which had been scheduled the year before--"unless by St.

John's day"; they had then a sense of leisure--the English knight Sir Henry de Bohun spurred upon him to single combat; it is worth while listening to the broad Scots of the guide as he repeats his well-conned, his well-worn, but his immortal story--

"High in his stirrups stood the King And gave his battle-ax the swing, Right on de Boune, the whiles he pa.s.sed, Fell that stern dint--the first, the last, Such strength upon the blow was put, The helmet crashed like hazel nut."

And all the battle the next day, until King Edward rides hot-trod to Berwick, leaving half his host dead upon this pleasant green field that lies so unremembering to the south of the castle. There is no more splendid moment in human history, unless all battles seem to you too barbaric to be splendid. But it made possible a nation--and, I take it, Scotland has been necessary to the world.

If this is too overwhelming a remembrance, there is an opposite to this, looking across the level lands of the Ca.r.s.e. The view leads past the Bridge of Allan, on to Dunblane, near which is the hill of Sheriffmuir.

You can see the two armies in the distance of time and of the plain, creeping on each other unwittingly--and the guide, too, is glad to turn to a later and less revered moment--

"Some say that we wan, Some say that they wan, And some say that nane wan at a', man; But o' ae thing I'm sure, That at Sheriffmuir A battle there was that I saw, man; And we ran, and they ran, And they ran, and we ran, And they ran and we ran awa', man."

To-day the wind has swept all these murmurs of old wars into the infinite forgotten. The world is as though MacAlpine and Wallace and The Bruce and Prince Charles had not been. Or, is it? It looks that way, at this quiet moment, in this quiet century, and in this country where there is such quiet; a country with such a long tumult, a country with such a strange silence. But the rest of the world would never have been as it is but for the events that lie thick about here, but for the race which was bred in such events.

"And the castle stood up black With the red sun at its back."

There is something more dour about Stirling than Edinburgh. It is, in the first place, too useful. One never thinks of the castle at Edinburgh as anything but romantic, of the troops as anything but decorative. Stirling is still used, much of it closed, and it has the bare, uninviting look of a historic place maintained by a modern up-keep.

Evidently when Burns visited it he found a ruin, and was moved to express his Jacobitism--would a poet be anything but a Jacobite?--

"Here Stuarts once in glory reign'd, And laws for Scotland's weal ordain'd; But now unroof'd their palace stands, Their scepter's sway'd by other hands; The injured Stuart line is gone, A race outlandish fills their throne--"