The Spell of Scotland Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. MARY'S AISLE AND TOMB OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, DRYBURGH ABBEY].

Dryburgh is also one of St. David's foundations, in the "sacred grove of oaks," the Darach Bruach of the wors.h.i.+p that is older than Augustus or Columba. These were white monks that David brought up from Alnwick where his queen had been a Northumbrian princess, and their white cloaks must have seemed, among these old old oaks, but the white robes of the Druids come back again.

It is a well-kept place, vines covering over the crumbling gray stone, kept by the Lords of Buchan. And, perhaps too orderly, too fanciful, too "improved"; one likes better the acknowledged ruin of Melrose, and one would prefer that Sir Walter were there with his kin, instead of here with his kindred. But this is a sweet place, a historic place, begun by Hugh de Moreville, who was a slayer of Thomas a Becket, and was Constable of Scotland. His tomb is marked by a double circle on the floor of the Chapter House, and there is nothing of the Chapter House; it is open to beating rain and scorching sun--fit retribution for his most foul deed.

It is not this remembrance you carry away, but that of St. Mary's aisle, in

"Dryburgh where with chiming Tweed The lintwhites sing in chorus."

CHAPTER III

BORDER TOWNS

_Kelso_

It is a very great little country which lies all about Melrose, with never a bend of the river or a turn of the highway or a shoulder of the hill, nay, scarce the shadow of any hazel bush or the piping of any wee bird but has its history, but serves to recall what once was; and because the countryside is so teeming seems to make yesterday one with to-day. The distances are very short, even between the places the well-read traveler knows; with many places that are new along the way, each haunted with its tradition, soon to haunt the traveler, while the people he meets would seem to have been here since the days of the Winged Hats.

Perhaps in order to get into the center of the ecclesiastical country--for after this being a Borderland, and a Scott-land, it is decidedly Abbots-land, even before Abbotsford came into being with its new choice of old t.i.tle--the traveler will take train to Kelso, or walk there, a scant dozen miles from Melrose.

The journey is down the Tweed, which opens ever wider between the gentle hills that are more and more rounding as the flow goes on to the sea.

There is not such intense loneliness; here is the humanest part of the Scottish landscape, and while even on this highway the cottages are not frequent, and one eyes the journeymen with as close inspection as one is eyed, still it is a friendly land. The southern burr--we deliberately made excuse of drinking water or asking direction in order to hear it--is softer than in the North; yet, you would not mistake it for Northumberland. We wondered if this was the accent Scott spoke with; but to him must have belonged all the dialect-voices.

It was at Roxburgh Castle that King David lived when he determined to build these abbeys of the Middle Marches, of which the chief four are Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Kelso, with Holyrood as their royal keystone.

Roxburgh was a stronghold of the Border, and therefore met the fate of those strongholds, when one party was stronger than the other; usually the destruction was by the English because they were farther away and could hold the country only through making it desolate.

Who would not desire loveliness and desire to fix it in stone, if he lived in such a lovely spot as this where the Tweed and Teviot meet?

David had been in England. He was brother to the English queen Maude, wife of Henry I, and had come in contact with the Norman culture. Or, as William of Malmesbury put it, with that serene a.s.surance of the Englishman over the Scot, he "had been freed from the rust of Scottish barbarity, and polished from a boy from his intercourse and familiarity with us." Ah, welladay! if residence at the English court and Norman culture resulted in these lovely abbeys, let us be lenient with William of Malmesbury. Incidentally David added to the Scotland of that time certain English counties, Northumberland and c.u.mberland and Westmoreland--as well as English culture!

David was son to Saxon Margaret, St. Margaret, and from her perhaps the "sair sanct" inherited some of his gentleness. But also he had married Matilda of Northumberland, wealthy and a widow, and he preferred to remain on the highway to London rather than at Dunfermline. So he was much at Roxburgh.

But the castle did not remain in Scottish or English hands. It was while curiously interested in a great Flemish gun that James II was killed by the explosion--and the siege of Roxburgh went on more hotly, and the castle was razed to its present low estate.

To-day the silly sheep are cropping gra.s.s about the scant stones that once sheltered kings and defied them; and ash trees are the sole occupants of the once royal dwelling. To the American there is something of pa.s.sing interest in the present seat of the Duke of Roxburgh, Floors castle across the Teviot. For the house, like many another Scottish house, still carries direct descent. And an heiress from America, like the heiress from Northumberland, unites her fortune with this modern splendour--and admits Americans and others on Wednesdays!

The town of Kelso is charming, like many Tweed towns. It lies among the wooded hills; there is a greater note of luxury here. Scott called it "the most beautiful if not the most romantic village in Scotland." Seen from the bridge which arches the flood, that placid flood of Tweed, and a five-arched bridge ambitiously and successfully like the Waterloo bridge of London, one wonders if after all perhaps Wordsworth wrote his Bridge sonnet here--"Earth hath not anything to show more fair." Surely this bridge, these spires and the great tower of the Abbey, "wear the beauty of the morning," the morning of the world. The hills, luxuriously wooded, rise gently behind, the persistent Eildons hang over, green meadows are about, the silver river runs--and the skies are Scottish skies, whether blue or gray.

The Abbey, of course, is the crown of the place, bolder in design and standing more boldly in spite of the havoc wrought by men and time, and Hertford and Henry VIII; calmer than Melrose, less ornamental, with its north portal very exquisite in proportion.

The Abbot of Kelso was in the palmy early days chief ecclesiastic of Scotland, a spiritual lord, receiving his miter from the Pope, and armoured with the right to excommunicate.

There have been other kings here than David and the Abbot. The latter days of the Stewarts are especially connected with Kelso, so near the Border. Baby James was hurried hither and crowned in the cathedral as the III after Roxburgh. Mary Queen lodged here for two nights before she rode on to Berwick. Here in the ancient market-place, looking like the square of a continental town, the Old Chevalier was proclaimed King James VIII on an October Monday in 1715, and the day preceding the English chaplain had preached to the troops from the text--"The right of the first born is his." Quite differently minded from that Whig minister farther north, who later prayed "as for this young man who has come among us seeking an earthly crown, may it please Thee to bestow upon him a heavenly one."

When this Rising of the Forty Five came, and he who should have been Charles III (according to those of us who are Scottish, and royalist, and have been exiled because of our allegiance) attempted to secure the throne for his father, he established his headquarters at Sunilaw just outside Kelso; the house is in ruins, but a white rose that he planted still bears flowers. To the citizens of Kelso who drank to him, the Prince, keeping his head, and having something of his royal great uncle's gift of direct speech, replied, "I believe you, gentlemen, I believe you. I have drinking friends, but few fighting ones in Kelso."

Scott knew Kelso from having lived here, from going to school here, and it was in out of the Kelso library--where they will show you the very copy--that he first read Percy's Reliques.

"I remember well the spot ... it was beneath a huge plata.n.u.s, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old fas.h.i.+oned arbour in the garden.... The summer day had sped onward so fast that notwithstanding the sharp appet.i.te of thirteen, I forgot the dinner hour. The first time I could sc.r.a.pe together a few s.h.i.+llings I bought unto myself a copy of the beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently or with half the enthusiasm."

Was it not a nearer contemporary to Percy, and a knight of romance, Sir Philip Sidney, who said, "I never read the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet"?

For myself I have resolutely refused to identify the word, Plata.n.u.s, lest it should not be identical with the spot where I first read my Percy.

Scott also knew Kelso as the place of his first law practice, and of his honeymoon. Here flowered into maturity that long lavish life, so enriched and so enriching of the Border.

Horatio Bonar was minister here for thirty years--I wondered if he wrote here, "I was a wandering sheep."

While James Thomson, who wrote "The Seasons," but also "Rule, Britannia"--if he was a Scotsman; perhaps this was an Act of Union--

"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves!"

was born at a little village nearby, back in the low hills of Tweed, in 1700, seven years before the Union.

_Jedburgh_

From Kelso I took train to the Border town which even the Baedeker admits has had "a stormy past," and where the past still lingers; nay, not lingers, but is; there is no present in Jedburgh. It is but ten miles to the Border; more I think that at any other point in all the blue line of the Cheviot, is one conscious of the Border; consciousness of antiquity and of geography hangs over Jedburgh.

It lies, a hill town, on the banks of the Jed; "sylvan Jed" said Thomson, "crystal Jed" said Burns; a smaller stream than the Tweed, more tortuous, swifter, rus.h.i.+ng through wilder scenery, tumultuous, vocative, before Border times began--if ever there were such a time before--and disputatious still to remind us that this is still a division in the kingdom.

One of the most charming walks in all Scotland--and I do not know of any country where foot-traveler's interest is so continuous (I wrote this before I had read the disastrous walking trip of the Pennell's)--is up this valley of the Jed a half dozen miles, where remnants of old forest, or its descendants, still stand, where the bracken is thick enough to conceal an army crouching in ambush, where the hills move swiftly up from the river, and break sharply into precipices, with crumbling peel towers, watch towers, to guard the heights, and where outcropping red scars against the hill mark sometimes the entrance to caves that must have often been a refuge when Border warfare tramped down the valley.

In Jedburgh we lodged not at the inn; although the name of Spread Eagle much attracted us; but because every one who had come before us had sought lodging, we, too, would "lodge," if it be but for a night.

Mary Queen had stayed at an old house, still standing in Queenstreet, Prince Charles at a house in Castlegate, Burns in the Canongate, the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, in Abbey Close, because there was no room in the inn. I do not know if it were the Spread Eagle then, but the a.s.sizes were being held, Jethart justice was being administered, or, juster justice, since these were more parlous times, and parley went before sentence. Scott as a sheriff and the other officials of the country were filling the hostelry. But Sir Walter, then the Sheriff of Selkirk, sheriff being a position of more "legality" than with us, and no doubt remembering his first law case which he had pled at Jedburgh years before, came over to Abbey Close after dinner, and according to Dorothy Wordsworth "sate with us an hour or two, and repeated a part of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel.'"

Think of not knowing whether it was an hour or two hours, with Scott repeating the "Lay," and in Jedburgh.

We lodged in a little narrow lane, near the Queen in the Backgate, with a small quaint garden plot behind; there would be pears in season, and many of them, ripening against these stone walls. The pears of the Border are famous. Our landlady was removed from Yetholm only a generation. Yetholm is the gipsy capital of this countryside. And we wondered whether Meg Faa, for so she ambitiously called herself, by the royal name of Scottish Romany, was descended from Meg Merrilies. Mrs.

Faa had dark flas.h.i.+ng eyes in a thin dark face, and they flashed like a two-edged dagger. She was a small woman, scarce taller than a Jethart ax as we had seen them in the museum at Kelso. I should never have dared to ask her about anything, not even the time of day, and, in truth, like many of the Scotch women, she had a gift of impressive silence. All the night I had a self-conscious feeling that something was going to happen in this town of Jed, and in the morning when I met Mrs. Faa again and her eyes rather than her voice challenged me as to how I had slept, I should not have dared admit that I slept with one eye open lest I become one more of the permanent ghosts of Jed.

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

The Abbey is, in its way, its individual way, most interesting of the chief four of "St. David's piles." It is beautifully lodged, beside the Jed, near the stream, and the stream more a part of its landscape; smooth-shaven English lawns lie all about, a veritable ecclesiastical close. It is simpler than Melrose, if the detail is not so marvelous, and there is substantially more of it. The Norman tower stands square; if witches still dance on it they choose their place for security. The long walls of the nave suggest almost a restoration--almost.

When the Abbey flourished, and when Alexander III was king, he was wedded here (1285) to Joleta, daughter of the French Count de Dreux.

Always French and Scotch have felt a kins.h.i.+p, and often expressed it in royal marriage. The gray abbey walls, then a century and a half old, must have looked curiously down on this gay wedding throng which so possessed the place, so dispossessed the monks, Austin friars come from the abbey of St. Quentin at Beauvais.

Suddenly, in the midst of the dance, the King reached out his hand to the maiden queen--and Death, the specter, met him with skeleton fingers.

It may have been a pageant trick, it may have been a too thoughtful monk; but the thirteenth century was rich with superst.i.tion. Six months later Alexander fell from his horse on a stormy night on the Fife coast--and the prophetic omen was remembered, or constructed.

The Abbey was newly in ruin when Mary Queen rode down this way, only twenty-one years after Hertford's hurtful raid. Court was to be held here, the a.s.sizes of October, 1566, at this Border town. For the Border had been over-lively and was disputing the authority of the Scottish queen as though it had no loyalty. Bothwell had been sent down as Warden of the Marches to quell the marauding free-booters. He had met with Little Jock Elliott, a Jethart callant, a Border bandit, to whom we can forgive much, because of the old ballad.

"My castle is aye my ain, An' herried it never shall be; For I maun fa' ere it's taen, An' wha daur meddle wi' me?

Wi' my kuit in the rib o' my naig, My sword hangin' doun by my knee, For man I am never afraid, An' wha daur meddle wi' me?