Glimpses of Three Coasts Part 12

mice an' men" must "gang aft aglee;" and the other field, also near by, where grew that mountain daisy,

"Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,"

whose name is immortal in our hearts as that of Burns. This farm-wife, however, knew nothing about them. The stern air of the north country in which she had been reared still chilled somewhat her thoughts of Burns and her interest in his inalienable bond on the fields of her farm.

It is but a mile from Mossgiel's gate to Mauchline, the town of "bonnie Jean" and Nansie Tinnoch and Gavin Hamilton. Surely a strange-a.s.sorted trio to be comrades of one man. Their houses are still standing: Jean's a tumble-down thatched cottage, looking out of place enough between the smart, new houses built on either side of it; Gavin Hamilton's, a dark, picturesque stone house, joined to the ruins of Mauchline Castle; and Nansie Tinnoch's, a black and dilapidated hovel, into which it takes courage to go. It stands snugged up against the wall of the old graveyard, part below it and part above it,--a situation as unwholesome as horrible; a door at the head of the narrow stairway opening out into the graveyard itself, and the slanting old stones leering in at the smoky windows by crowds. In the days when all the "country side" met at the open-air services in this churchyard,

"Some thinkin' on their sins, an' some on their claes,"

no doubt Nancy Tinnoch's was a lighter, whiter, cheerier place than now; else the "Jolly Beggars" would never have gone there to tipple.

It was the nooning between services when I reached Mauchline, and church-goers from a distance were taking their beer and crackers decorously in the parlor of the inn. As the intermission was only three quarters of an hour long, this much of involuntary dissipation was plainly forced on them; but they did not abuse it, I can testify.

They partook of it as of a pa.s.sover: young men and maidens as sober and silent as if they had been doing solemn penance for sins, as indeed, from one point of view, it might perhaps be truly said that they were.

By dint of some difficult advances I drew one or two of them into conversation about the Mossgiel farm and the disappearance of the old relics of Burns's life in that region. It was a great pity, I said, that the Mossgiel house had to be taken down.

"'Deed, then, it was na such thing," spoke up an elderly man. "It was na moor than a wreck, an' I'm the mon who did it."

He was the landlord of the farm, it appeared. He seemed much amused at hearing of the farm-wife's disapproval of Burns's verses, and of her father's prohibition of them.

"He was a heepocritical auld Radical, if ye knows him," he said angrily. "I hope we'll never have ony worse readin' in our country than Robert Bur-r-r-ns." The prolongation of the "r" in the Scotch way of saying "Burns" is something that cannot be typographically represented. It is hardly a rolling of the "r," nor a multiplication of it; but it takes up a great deal more time and room than any one "r" ought to.

After the landlady had shown to me the big hall where the Freemasons meet, "the Burns' Mother Lodge," and the chest which used to hold the regalia at Tarbolton in Burns's day, and the little bedroom in which Stedman and Hawthorne had slept,--coming also to look at Burns's fields,--she told me in a mysterious whisper that there was a nephew of Burns's in the kitchen, who would like to see me, if I would like to see him. "A nephew of Burns's!" I exclaimed. "Weel, not exactly,"

she explained, "but he's a grand-nephew of Burns's wife; she thet was Jean, ye know," with a deprecating nod and lowering of the eyelid. So fast is the clutch of a Scotch neighborhood on its traditions of offended virtue, even to-day poor Jean cannot be mentioned by a landlady in her native town without a small stone cast backward at her.

Jean's grand-nephew proved to be a middle-aged man; not "ower weel-to-do," the landlady said. He had tried his hand at doctoring both in Scotland and America,--a rolling stone evidently, with too much of the old fiery blood of his race in his veins for quiet and decorous prosperity. He, too, seemed only half willing to speak of poor "Jean,"--his kinswoman; but he led me to the cottage where she had lived, and pointed out the window from which she was said to have leaned out many a night listening to the songs of her lover when he sauntered across from the Whiteford Arms, Johnny Pigeon's house, just opposite, "not fou, but having had plenty" to make him merry and affectionate. Johnny Pigeon's is a "co-operative store" now; and new buildings have altered the line of the street so that "Rob Mossgiel"

would lose his way there to-day.

The room in which Burns and his "bonnie Jean" were at last married in Gavin Hamilton's house, by Hamilton himself, is still shown to visitors. This room I had a greater desire to see than any other spot in Mauchline. "We can but try," said the grand-nephew; "but it's a small chance of seeing it the Sabba."

The sole tenant of this house now is the widow of a son of Gavin Hamilton's. Old, blind, and nearly helpless, she lives there alone with one family servant, nearly as old as herself, but hale, hearty, and rosy as only an old Scotchwoman can be. This servant opened the door for us, her cap, calico gown, and white ap.r.o.n all alike bristling with starch, religion, and pride of family. Her mistress would not allow the room to be shown on the Sabbath, she said. Imploringly it was explained to her that no other day had been possible, and that I had come "all the way from America."

"Ye did na do weel to tak the Sabbath," was her only reply, as she turned on her heel to go with the fruitless appeal to her mistress.

Returning, she said curtly,--

"She winna shew it on the Sabbath."

At this crisis my companion, who had kept in the background, stepped forward with,--

"You don't know me, Elspie, do ye?"

"No, sir," she said stiffly, bracing herself up mentally against any further heathenish entreaties.

"What, not know ----?" repeating his name in full.

Presto! as if changed by a magician's trick, the stiff, starched, religious, haughty family retainer disappeared, and there stood, in the same cap, gown, and ap.r.o.n, a limber, rollicking, wellnigh improper old woman, who poked the grand-nephew in the ribs, clapped him on the shoulder, chuckling, ejaculating, questioning, wondering, laughing, all in a breath. Reminiscence on reminiscence followed between them.

"An' do ye mind Barry, too?" she asked. (This was an old man-servant of the house.) "An' many's the quirrel, an' many's the gree we had."

Barry was dead. Dead also was the beautiful girl whom my companion remembered well,--dead of a broken heart before she was eighteen years of age. Forbidden to marry her lover, she had drooped and pined. He went to India and died. It was in a December the news of his death came, just at Christmas time, and in the next September she followed him.

"Ay, but she was a bonnie la.s.s," said Elspie, the tears rolling down her face.

"I dare say she [nodding his head toward the house]--I dare say she's shed many a salt tear over it; but naebody 'ill ever know she repent.i.t," quoth the grand-nephew.

"Ay, ay," said Elspie. "There's a wee bit closet in every hoos."

"'Twas in that room she died," pointing up to a small ivy-shaded window. "I closed her eyes wi' my hands. She's never spoken of. She was a bonnie la.s.s."

The picture of this desolate old woman, sitting there alone in her house, helpless, blind, waiting for death to come and take her to meet that daughter whose young heart was broken by her cruel will, seemed to shadow the very sunshine on the greensward in the court. The broken arches and crumbling walls of the old stone abbey ruins seemed, in their ivy mantles, warmly, joyously venerable by contrast with the silent, ruined, stony old human heart still beating in the house they joined.

In spite of my protestations, the grand-nephew urged Elspie to show us the room. She evidently now longed to do it; but, casting a fearful glance over her shoulder, said: "I daur na! I daur na! I could na open the door that she'd na hear 't." And she seemed much relieved when I made haste to a.s.sure her that on no account would I go into the room without her mistress's permission. So we came away, leaving her gazing regretfully after us, with her hand shading her eyes from the sun.

Going back from Mauchline to Ayr, I took another road, farther to the south than the one leading through Tarbolton, and much more beautiful, with superb beech-trees meeting overhead, and gentlemen's country-seats, with great parks, on either hand.

On this road is Montgomerie Castle, walled in by grand woods, which Burns knew so well.

"Ye banks and braes and streams around The castle o' Montgomery, Green be your woods and fair your flowers, Your waters never drumlie!

There simmer first unfauld her robes, And there the langest tarry, For there I took the last fareweel O' my sweet Highland Mary."

Sitting in the sun, on a bench outside the gate-house, with his little granddaughter on his lap, was the white-haired gate-keeper. As the horses' heads turned toward the gate, he arose slowly, without a change of muscle, and set down the child, who accepted her altered situation also without a change of muscle in her sober little face.

"Is it allowed to go in?" asked the driver.

"Eh--ye'll not be calling at the hoos?" asked the old man, surprised.

"No, I'm a stranger; but I like to see all the fine places in your country," I replied.

"I've no orders," looking at the driver reflectively; "I've no orders--but--a decent pairson"--looking again scrutinizingly at me,--"I think there can be no hairm." And he opened the gate.

Grand trees, rolling tracts of velvety turf, an ugly huge house of weather-beaten stone, with white pillars in front; conservatories joining the wings to the centre; no attempt at decorative landscape art; gra.s.s, trees, distances,--these were all; but there were miles of these. It was at least a mile's drive to the other entrance to the estate, where the old stone gateway house was in ruin. I fancy that it was better kept up in the days before an Earl of Eglinstoune sold it to a plain Mr. Patterson.

At another fine estate nearer Ayr, where an old woman was gate-keeper, and also had "no orders" about admitting strangers, the magic word "America" threw open the gates with a sweep, and bent the old dame's knees in a courtesy which made her look three times as broad as she was long. This estate had been "always in the Oswald family, an' is likely always to be, please G.o.d," said the loyal creature, with another courtesy at the mention, unconsciously devout as that of the Catholic when he crosses himself. "An' it's a fine country ye've yersel' in America," she added politely. The Oswald estate has acres of beautiful curving uplands, all green and smooth and open; a lack of woods near the house, but great banks of sunshine instead, make a beauty all their own; and the Ayr Water, running through the grounds, and bridged gracefully here and there, is a possession to be coveted.

From all points is a clear sight of sea, and headlands north and south,--Ayr harbor lying like a crescent, now silver, now gold, afloat between blue sky and green sh.o.r.e, and dusky gray roof-lines of the town.

The most precious thing in all the parish of Ayr is the cottage in which Burns was born. It is about two miles south from the centre of the town, on the sh.o.r.e of "Bonnie Doon," and near Alloway Kirk. You cannot go thither from Ayr over any road except the one Tam o' Shanter took: it has been straightened a little since his day, but many a rod of it is the same that Maggie trod; and Alloway Kirk is as ghostly a place now, even at high noon, as can be found "frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat's." There is nothing left of it but the walls and the gable, in which the ancient bell still hangs, intensifying the silence by its suggestion of echoes long dead.

The Burns cottage is now a sort of inn, kept by an Englishman whose fortunes would make a tale by themselves. He fought at Balaklava and in our civil war; and side by side on the walls of his dining-room hang, framed, his two commissions in the Pennsylvania Volunteers and the menu of the Balaklava Banquet, given in London to the brave fellows that came home alive after that fight. He does not love the Scotch people.

"I would not give the Americans for all the Scotch ever born," he says, and is disposed to speak with unjust satire of their apparent love of Burns, which he ascribes to a perception of his recognition by the rest of the world and a shamefaced desire not to seem to be behindhand in paying tribute to him.

"Oh, they let on to think much of him," he said. "It's money in their pockets."

The room in which Burns was born is still unaltered, except in having one more window let in. Originally, it had but one small square window of four panes. The bed is like the beds in all the old Scotch cottages, built into the wall, similar to those still seen in Norway.

Stifling enough the air surely must have been in the cupboard bed in which the "waly boy" was born.

"The gossip keekit in his loof; Quo' scho, 'Wha lives will see the proof,-- This waly boy will be nae coof; I think we'll ca' him Robin.'"

Before he was many days old, or, as some traditions have it, on the very night he was born, a violent storm "tirled" away part of the roof of the poor little "clay biggin," and mother and babe were forced to seek shelter in a neighbor's cottage. Misfortune and Robin early joined company, and never parted. The little bedroom is now the show-room of the inn, and is filled with tables piled with the well-known boxes, pincushions, baskets, paper-cutters, etc., made from sycamore wood grown on the banks of Doon and Ayr. These articles are all stamped with some pictures of scenery a.s.sociated with Burns or with quotations from his verses. It is impossible to see all this money-making without thinking what a delicious, rollicking bit of verse Burns would write about it himself if he came back to-day. There are those who offer for sale articles said to be made out of the old timbers of the Mossgiel house; but the Balaklava Englishman scouts all that as the most barefaced imposture. "There wasn't an inch of that timber," he says,--and he was there when the house was taken down--"which wasn't worm-eaten and rotten; not enough to make a knife-handle of!"