Part 20 (1/2)
VI
It is days later, it seems a long time ago that I wrote of our plan to spend the first night in Scotland at Sweetheart Abbey--a long time since the night itself; for I have lived more in these few days than in all my life before.
Soon we are to reach Edinburgh. Monday is the day when my mother will begin acting there in her new play. I shall see her. It is to be the Great Day of all, the day to which all the others have been leading up, and I ought to be perfectly happy. So I am! Still, there's one little heavy spot in my heart. All the yeast of happiness won't make it light.
The beginning of the new means the end of the old. The trip will be over--for me; though the Knight and the Gray Dragon will go on and have hundreds of adventures without me. They will be my knight and my dragon no longer. Perhaps I shall never see them again.
Before our days together slip away into the background of my mind (it seems as if they never could!) I want to write down things about them to keep and read when I am _old_.
First of all, there was Ruthwell Cross.
We went there from Annan; and as we flew along in the car over a good white road, we could see across widening waters the mountains of the English Lake country floating like a mirage along the southern sky, Skiddaw with its twin peaks higher and bluer than the rest. How I love the names of the c.u.mberland places and mountains! I made Sir S. say Helvellyn and Blencathra and Glaramara over very slowly, just for the music in my ears. And when his voice says a thing it sounds particularly well. I like to hear it roll out such a word as Northumberland, for instance. The way he says it makes you think of thunder on great moorlands, or a rush of wild Scotsmen over the border. But the Celtic names he speaks most lovingly, most softly, so that they ring on your ear for a long time after they are spoken, like an echo of fairy bells.
I did not mean to write all this about him and his voice when I began.
There is so much else to say. Yet, somehow, I keep running back to him in my thoughts, especially now the trip is nearly over. And while I still cling to the subject, I have found out that he can sing as well as paint. But the singing belongs to Sweetheart Abbey; and Ruthwell Cross came before.
Mrs. James and Sir S. excited my interest in Galloway by telling me bits from the ”Raiders,” then stopping in exciting places to talk of something else. And somehow Galloway does seem a country where almost anything might happen--big, sensational, historic things. There was nothing gray to see except glimpses of the Solway, where the sea poured in its resistless tide; and that was the gray of polished silver. I had an impression of high hills, blunt in shape yet strangely dignified, and wide-spreading moors which sent out exquisite smells like lovely unseen messengers to meet us, as the car seemed to break through crystal walls of wind. Here and there were piles of pansy-brown peat, ready for burning. Children with heads wrapped in scarlet flame ran out of cottages to stare at us. Sir S. actually admired their red hair. He exclaimed suddenly, ”By Jove, it's worth crossing the ocean to see that glorious stuff again! It's the hair of Circe.” I don't know when anything has made me feel so much like a kitten that purrs over a dish of cream. For you know the hair he loved was _just_ my colour, not a bit less scarlet. What would Grandma say?
It rained once--sharp rain like thin daggers of gla.s.s stabbing our faces as the car dashed through--and the wet road looked like a s.h.i.+ning silver ribbon flung down anyhow on purple velvet. The purple velvet was heather, and I never saw any before we started on our trip, except a little sad, tame heather in the garden of Hillard House--heather moulting like a bird in a cage, with all the spirit of the moors gone out of it. But this Galloway heather was real heather, the heather of poetry; and I knew that by and by I was going to see the heather moon rise over it. The very thought brought a thrill--and I was glad, as I had it, that Mrs. West was somewhere else in her own car. She does so damp you, somehow, in your high moments, and make you feel too young for anybody to care for your crude little thrills or take them seriously.
When the rain stopped, it left a thin white mist floating over the heather, until the sun broke out and the deep purple was lit to crimson, like a running fire.
I'm not quite sure if all this happened before Ruthwell Church (called Rivvel by the people near), but in my memory it is part of the same picture, of that first day in Galloway.
I know we skimmed through a little place called c.u.mmer-trees, and then Sir S. slowed down to show us, he said, one of the ”sights of the world.” He had never seen it himself, but he knew all about it, and even Mrs. James knew a little. It is a great advantage to a simple woman to have had a clever husband, and feel obliged, to live up to him.
We had come not so much for the church as for a wonderful stone cross which it contains, as a jewel-box contains treasure of pearls and diamonds. This cross is worth countless numbers of both; and it has a history as intricate as its own strange carvings.
In the manse they gave Sir S. the key of the small old church behind a high wall with steps up and down: and once inside he led us straight to the north end, where, in a side aisle, we saw a great shape rise. We must have known it to be a marvel, even if we had heard nothing beforehand.
The cross used to stand, not in the church, but out in the open long before the church was built, and it towered eighteen feet tall against the sky. There it lived year after year, generation after generation, and n.o.body knew what its carved birds and beasts and hieroglyphic inscriptions meant. n.o.body cared much, until a gloomy set of men in a General a.s.sembly, when Charles I was King of England, threw it down and broke it up, because it was an idolatrous emblem. Luckily, some wise person hid all the pieces in the church; but after a while another person not so wise threw them out into the backyard. There they stayed until a Doctor Duncan thought he would have the cross put up in his manse garden: and some great Norwegian scholars, to whom he sent copies of the writings, grew very excited, and contradicted each other about them in 1802. But no one knew what the letters really meant till the eldest son of the famous actor John Kemble came to the neighbourhood for a holiday. He was a learned authority on Anglo-Saxon times, and he discovered that the writing was really Early English, the very earliest of all, the rudiments of the language which--as Sir S. expressed it--”Chaucer helped to form and Shakespeare perfected”; because they had to _make_ their words, as well as group them together--which is all that lazy authors have to do nowadays. The quaint carvings relate to the life of Christ and saints, and they are described in Latin from the Vulgate; but it was the runic inscriptions which John Mitch.e.l.l Kemble puzzled out--a kind of rhymed soliloquy the cross itself was supposed to speak; and afterward he found the whole thing in an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the seventh or eighth century, far away from Scotland, in a library at Vercelli, near Milan. But it was written by the Northumbrian bard Caedmon, in a poem called ”The Dream of the Holy Rood.”
No wonder Sir S. wished to see Ruthwell Cross. There's nothing else of the kind, he thinks, so splendid anywhere.
Even then my first wonderful day in Scotland wasn't over, for we had time to see Caerlaverock Castle, which, according to Sir S., is another of the best things on earth. I suppose, in old days, when the world was small because it was difficult to travel great distances, it didn't seem odd to find magnificent runic crosses, and castles, and historic blacksmiths' shops, and houses of geniuses all standing cheek by jowl within a step of each other. They had to be like that, or n.o.body from the next county would ever have seen them: but now, especially to a person who has seen nothing except in dreams, it is startling, almost incredible.
Caerlaverock, Mrs. James said, was probably Scott's Ellangowan in ”Guy Mannering”; so I shall read ”Guy Mannering” as soon as I settle down to live with my mother. We couldn't help getting a little mixed up with Scott even here, at the gate of the Crockett country; and there were traces of Burns too, because of our being near already to Dumfries, where he lived for years and finally died. But the idea Sir S. had set his heart upon was for us to come back to Dumfries after we had seen Galloway and had run up to Burns's birthplace at Ayr. It would make each part of the trip more ”concrete,” he said.
Whether or no the stronghold of the Maxwells was Ellangowan, it was in any case the key to southwest Scotland, and in looking at the place it is easy to understand why. A great red-gold Key it was when we saw it, red-gold in the western sunlight in a hollow near the river; such red and gold colour as the old sandstone had, in contrast with the green of lichen and green of waving gra.s.s, I wouldn't have believed in, if I'd seen it in a picture. I should have said, ”The artist who painted that ruined castle put on the colours he would like to see, not those he did see.” But I should have misjudged him, because the colours were real.
Once there was a double moat all round the vast, triangular castle, and still there's water in one of them. You would have thought the Maxwell ladies had thrown their rubies and diamonds into it one wild day when they were escaping from enemies, and that the jewels had lain ever since at the bottom of the moat unnoticed, though the sunlight found out and treacherously tried to tell the secret. Think of Ptolemy writing about Caerlaverock, and calling it Carbantorigun! I'm glad we haven't to call it that now, or I should always have to say _it_--as one goes on saying ”you” to a person whose name one hasn't caught.
Even if Caerlaverock were in hideous surroundings, it would be magnificent: but the river Solway is its silver foreground, and Lochar Moss is its mysterious background; so it is perfect in beauty as in strength, and if only no such hateful things as cannons had been invented, it would not now be a ruin. Although it lies so low, it was built to resist everything but gunpowder: for how could the Maxwells dream that all their beautiful arrangements for pouring down molten lead and boiling oil would be useless against a new foe?
Edward I took the castle in 1300, but Bruce got it back thirteen years later; and there was much fighting and tossing back of the Key from one hand to the other even before the great siege when the Earl of Ess.e.x punished Lord Herries for defending Queen Mary. Still, the walls stood bravely, and after the Ess.e.x affair they were made stronger than ever--so strong and so splendid it must have seemed as if Caerlaverock need never capitulate again to any enemy. But no sooner had the Maxwells finished a lovely new facade, the best they'd ever had, with carved window and door caps of the latest fas.h.i.+on, than Colonel Home came along with his grim Covenanters and blew up everything with his horrid cannons. I can't help disliking him, for the Maxwells seem to have been the most fascinating people. One Lord Maxwell of the seventeenth century, who was Roman Catholic when it wasn't safe to be Roman Catholic, used to disguise himself as a beggar, and play the fiddle in the market-place of Dumfries as a signal to tell the faithful of his own religion where and when they might come to Ma.s.s. They understood according to certain tunes agreed upon, which was easy, as they had only three meeting-places. A nice old man in the castle told us these stories and showed us the exquisite courtyard where Burns came one day when he was seventeen and cut on a stone in the wall the initials R. B. in a triangle, like a masonic sign, which suggests the wedge shape of the castle.
Sir S. knew all about this carving, and said that Americans had offered two thousand pounds for the stone. But the d.u.c.h.ess of Norfolk, who is mistress of Caerlaverock in her own right, turned up her nose, metaphorically speaking, at the offer. ”I bid ye fair:” is the motto that goes with the crest over the huge gateway between two towers, and the rumour is that the Americans, in bidding for the stone of the initials, quoted this motto; but their aptness did them no good. In one of those towers Murdoch, the blind Duke of Albany, was imprisoned for seven years by James I before he was executed at Stirling; and they say that in the green hollow where the great red ruin glows he can be seen walking in the moonlight on the anniversary of his beheading.
One of my favourite stories in history is about Lord Nithsdale and his brave, clever wife who saved him on the eve of his execution by dressing him in her clothes and letting him walk calmly out of the Tower of London in her place. Think of being able to do such a thing for a man you loved! He was one of the Lords Nithsdale who came from Caerlaverock; and not far away, at Terregles House, is a portrait of that Countess of Nithsdale, with the cloak which her husband wore when he escaped. They have a Prayer Book, too, of Queen Mary's in that house, for she gave it to Lord Herries, who sheltered her in her flight after the battle at Langside, eighty miles away. But we didn't see these things. It was the old man at the castle who told us of them, because they are still in the keeping of the Maxwell family, of which he is very proud.
We hurried quickly through Dumfries, not to see or think of the Burns a.s.sociations there until we should come back; but at Lincluden Abbey, close by, we were forced to think of him--although, as far as our trip was concerned, he wasn't born. At Lincluden, where he loved to come, walking out from Dumfries (as he must have walked to Caerlaverock to cut his initials) he saw the Vision. And Lincluden is so sweet a place that my thoughts of it, mingling very humbly with the great poet's thoughts, will lie together in my memory as pressed flowers lie between the pages of a book.