The Spell of Scotland Part 3

Two miles above Melrose, a charming walk leads to Abbotsford; redeemed out of a swamp into at least the most memory-filled mansion of all the land. Scott, like the monks, could not leave the silver wash of the Tweed; and, more loving than those who dwelt at Melrose and Dryburgh, he placed his Abbot's House where the rippling sound was within a stone's throw.

The Tweed is such a storied stream that as you walk along, sometimes across sheep-cropped meadows, sometimes under the fragant rustling bough and athwart the s.h.i.+fting shadows of oak, ash, and thorn--Puck of Pook's hill must have known the Border country in its most embroidered days--you cannot tell whether or not the deep quiet river is the n.o.blest you have seen, or the storied hills about are less than the Delectable mountains.

The name "Tweed" suggests romance--unless instead of having read your Scott you have come to its consciousness through the homespun, alas, to-day too often the factory-spun woolens, which are made throughout all Scotland, but still in greatest length on Tweedside.

Dorothy Wordsworth, winsome marrow, who loved the country even better than William, I trow--only why remark it when he himself recognized how his vision was quickened through her companions.h.i.+p?--has spoke the word Tweed--"a name which has been sweet in my ears almost as far back as I can remember anything."

The river comes from high in the Cheviot hills, where East and West Marches merge and where--

"Annan, Tweed, and Clyde Rise a' out o' ae hillside."

And down to the sea it runs, its short hundred miles of story--

"All through the stretch of the stream, To the lap of Berwick Bay."

As you walk along Tweedside, you feel its enchantment, you feel the sorrow of the thousands who through the centuries have exiled themselves from its banks, because of war, or because of poverty, or because of love--

"Therefore I maun wander abroad, And lay my banes far frae the Tweed."

But now, you are returned, you are on your way to Abbotsford, there are the Eildons, across the river you get a glimpse of the Catrail, that sunken way that runs along the boundary for one-half its length, and may have been a fosse, or may have been a concealed road of the Romans or what not. Scott once leaped his horse across it, nearly lost his life, and did lose his confidence in his horsemans.h.i.+p.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Abbotsford_]

"And all through the summer morning I felt it a joy indeed To whisper again and again to myself, This is the voice of the Tweed."

It is not possible to approach Abbotsford, as it should be approached, from the riverside, the view with which one is familiar, the view the pictures carry. Or, it can be done if one would forego the walk, take it in the opposite direction, and come hither by rail from Galas.h.i.+els--that noisy modern factory town, once the housing place for Melrose pilgrims, which to-day speaks nothing of the romance of Gala water, and surely not these factory folk "can match the lads o' Gala Water." It is a short journey, and railway journeys are to be avoided in this land of by-paths. But there, across the water, looking as the pictures have it, and as Scott would have it, rises Abbotsford, turreted and towered, engardened and exclusive.

It stands on low level ground, for it is redeemed out of a duckpond, out of Clarty hole. Sir Walter wished to possess the Border, or as much of it as might be, so he made this first purchase of a hundred acres in 1811. As he wrote to James Ballantyne--

"I have resolved to purchase a piece of ground sufficient for a cottage and a few fields. There are two pieces, either of which would suit me, but both would make a very desirable property indeed, and could be had for between 7,000 and 8,000 pounds, or either separate for about half that sum. I have serious thoughts of one or both."

He began with one, and fourteen years later, when the estate had extended to a thousand acres, to the inclusion of many fields, sheep-cropped and story-haunted, he entered in his diary--

"Abbotsford is all I can make it, so I am resolved on no more building, and no purchases of land till times are more safe."

By that time the people of the countryside called him "the Duke," he had at least been knighted, and was, in truth, the Chief of the Border; a royal ambition which I doubt not he cherished from those first days when he read Percy under a plata.n.u.s.

He paid fabulous prices for romantic spots, and I think would have bought the entire Border if the times had become safer, in those scant seven years that were left to him. Even Scott could be mistaken, for he bought what he believed was Huntlie Bank, where True Thomas had his love affair with the fair ladye--

"True Thomas lay on Huntlie Bank; A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e; And there he saw a ladye bright Come riding down by the Eildon tree.

"Her skirt was o' the gra.s.s-green silk, Her mantle o' the velvet fyne; At ilka tett o' her horse's mane Hung fifty siller bells and nine."

And now the experts tell us that it is not Huntlie Bank at all, but that is in an entirely different direction, over toward Ercildoune and the Rhymer's Tower.

There is a satisfaction in this to those of us who believe in fairies and in Scott. For fairies have no sense of place or of time. And of course if they knew that Scott wished them to have lived at his Huntlie Bank, they straightway would have managed to have lived there. Always, as you go through this land of romance, or any romance land, and wise dull folk dispute, you can console yourself that Scott also was mistaken(?).

The castle began with a small cottage, not this great pile of gray stone we can see from the railway carriage across the Tweed, into which we make our humble way through a wicket gate, a restrained walk, and a bas.e.m.e.nt doorway. "My dreams about my cottage go on," he wrote to Joanna Baillie, as we all dream of building cottages into castles. "My present intention is to have only two spare bedrooms," but "I cannot relinquish my Border principles of accommodating all the cousins and duniwastles, who will rather sleep on chairs, and on the floor, and in the hay-loft, than be absent when folks are gathered together."

So we content ourselves with being duniwastles, whatever that may be, and are confident that Sir Walter if he were alive would give us the freedom of the castle.

In any event, if we feel somewhat robbed of any familiar intercourse, we can remember that Ruskin called this "perhaps the most incongruous pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed." This may content the over-sensitive who are prevented ever hearing the ripple of the Tweed through the windows.

Scott was a zealous relic hunter, and if you like relics, if you can better conjure up persons through a sort of transubstantiation of personality that comes by looking on what the great have possessed, there can be few private collections more compelling than this of Abbotsford.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE STUDY, ABBOTSFORD.]

In the library are such significant hints for reconstruction as the blotting book wherewith Napoleon cleared his record, the crucifix on which Queen Mary prayed, the quaigh of her great great and last grandson, the tumbler from which Bobbie Burns drank--one of them--the purse into which Rob Roy thrust his plunder, the pocket book of Flora MacDonald, which held nothing I fear from the generosity of the Bonnie Prince.

In the armoury are Scott's own gun, Rob Roy's gun, dirk and skene dhu, the sword of Montrose, given to that last of the great Cavaliers by his last king, Charles I, the pistol of Claverhouse, the pistol of Napoleon, a hunting flask of James III; and here are the keys of Loch Leven castle, dropped in the lake by Mary Queen's boatman; and the keys of the Edinburgh Tolbooth turned on so many brave men, yes, and fair women, in the old dividing days, of Jacobite and Covenanter.

The library of Scott, twenty thousand volumes, still lines the shelves, and one takes particular interest in this place, and its little stairway whereby ascent is made to the balcony, also book-lined, and escape through a little doorway. When Scott first came to the cottage of Abbotsford he wrote, furiously, in a little window embrasure with only a curtain between him and the domestic world. Here he had not only a library, but a study, where still stands the desk at which the Waverleys were written, and the well-worn desk chair.

After he had returned from Italy, whither he went in search of health and did not find it, he felt, one day, a return of the old desire to write, the ruling pa.s.sion. He was wheeled to the desk, he took the pen,--nothing came. He sank back and burst into tears. As Lockhart reports it--"It was like Napoleon resigning his empire. The scepter had departed from Judah; Scott was to write no more."

Scott has always seemed like a contemporary. Not because of his novels; I fear the Waverleys begin to read a little stilted to the young generation, and there are none left to lament with Lowell that he had read all of Scott and now he could never read him all over again for the first time. It is rather because Scott the man is so immortal that he seems like a man still living; or at least like one who died but yesterday. Into the dining-room where we cannot go--and perhaps now that we think it over it is as well--he was carried in order that out of it he might look his last on "twilight and Tweed and Eildon hill." And there he died, even so long ago as September, 1832.

"It was a beautiful day," that day we seem almost to remember as we stand here in the vivid after glow, "so warm that every window was wide open, and so peacefully still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed, was distinctly audible."

_Dryburgh_

Five days after they carried him to rest in the Abbey--rival certainly in this instance of The Abbey of England, where is stored so much precious personal dust. The time had become thrawn; dark skies hung over the Cheviots and the Eildon, and over the haughs of Ettrick and Yarrow; the silver Tweed ran leaden, and moaned in its going; there was a keening in the wind.

The road from Abbotsford past Melrose to Dryburgh is--perhaps--the loveliest walk in the United Kingdom; unless it be the road from Coventry past Kenilworth to Stratford. It was by this very way that there pa.s.sed the funeral train of Scott, the chief carriage drawn by Scott's own horses. Thousands and thousands of pilgrims have followed that funeral train; one goes to Holy Trinity in Stratford, to the Invalides in Paris, but one walks to Dryburgh through the beautiful Tweedside which is all a shrine to Sir Walter.

The road runs away from the river to the little village of Darnick, with its ivy-shrouded tower, across the meadows to the bridge across the river, with the ringing of bells in the ear. For it was ordered on that September day of 1832, by the Provost, "that the church bell shall toll from the time the funeral procession reaches Melrose Bridge till it pa.s.ses the village of Newstead."

I do not suppose the people of this countryside, who look at modern pilgrims so sympathetically, so understandingly, have ever had time to forget; the stream of pilgrims has been so uninterrupted for nearly a century. Through the market-place of Melrose it pa.s.sed, the sloping stony square, where people of the village pa.s.s and repa.s.s on their little village errands. And it did not stop at the Abbey.

The day was thickening into dusk then; it is ripening into sunset glory to-day. And the Abbey looks very lovely, and very lonely. And one wonders if Michael Scot did not call to Walter Scott to come and join the quiet there, and if the dust that once was the heart of Bruce did not stir a little as the recreator of Scotland was carried by.

To the village of Newstead you move on; with the sound of immemorial bells falling on the ear, and pa.s.s through the little winding street--and wonder if the early Roman name of Trimontium, triple mountains, triple Eildon, was its first call name out of far antiquity as Scott believed.

Then the road ascends between hedgerows, and begins to follow the Tweed closely--and perhaps you meet pilgrims on Leaderfoot bridge who have come the wrong way. There is a steep climb to the heights of Bemersyde, where on the crest all Melrose Glen lies beautifully storied before you.

And here you pause--as did those horses of Scott's, believing their master would fain take one last look at his favourite view.

There is no lovelier landscape in the world, or in Scotland. The blue line of the Cheviots bars back the world, the Dunion, the Ruberslaw, the Eildon rise, and in the great bend of the river with richly wooded braes about is the site of Old Melrose. Small wonder he paused to take farewell of all the country he had loved so well.

The road leads on past Bemersyde village with woodlands on either side, and to the east, near a little loch, stands Sandyknowe Tower.

Near the tower lies the remnant of the village of Smailholm, where Scott was sent out of Edinburgh when only three years old. It is in truth his birthplace, for without the clear air of the Border he would have followed the other Scott children; and without the romance of the Border he might have been merely a barrister.

Sandyknowe is brave in spite of its ruin, for it is built of the very stone of the eternal hills, and has become part of the hills. From its balcony, sixty feet high, a beautiful Scottish panorama may be glimpsed, and here Scott brought Turner to make his sketch of the Border. And here, because a kinsman agreed to save Sandyknowe Tower from the mortality that comes even to stone if Scott would write a ballad and make it immortal, is laid the scene of "Eve of St. John's"--with these last haunting intangible lines--

"There is a nun in Dryburgh bower Ne'er looks upon the sun; There is a monk in Melrose tower He speaketh a word to none."

Then, back to the Tweed, where the river sweeps out in a great circle, and leaves a peninsula for Dryburgh. The gray walls of the ruin lift above the thick green of the trees; yew and oak and sycamore close in the fane. Druid and Culdee and Roman have built shrines in this lovely spot, but to-day pilgrimage is made chiefly because in the quiet sheltered ruined St. Mary's aisle sleeps Sir Walter. It would make one-half in love with death to think of being buried in so sweet a place.