Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume II Part 7

A light breeze had risen as the sun sunk, and our lugger, with all her sails set, came sweeping along the sh.o.r.e. She had nearly gained the little bay in front of the cave, and the countrymen from above, to the number of perhaps twenty, had descended to the beach, when, all of a sudden, after a shrill whistle, and a brief half minute of commotion among the crew, she wore round and stood out to sea. I turned to the south, and saw a square-rigged vessel shooting out from behind one of the rocky headlands, and then bearing down in a long tack on the smuggler. "The sharks are upon us," said one of the countrymen, whose eyes had turned in the same direction--"we shall have no sport to-night." We stood lining the beach in anxious curiosity; the breeze freshened as the evening fell; and the lugger, as she lessened to our sight, went leaning against the foam in a long bright furrow, that, catching the last light of evening, shone like the milky way amid the blue. Occasionally we could see the flash, and hear the booming of a gun from the other vessel; but the night fell thick and dark; the waves too began to lash against the rocks, drowning every feebler sound in a continuous roaring; and every trace of both the chase and the chaser disappeared. The party broke up, and I was left standing alone on the beach, a little nearer home, but in every other respect in quite the same circ.u.mstances as when landed by my American friends on the wild coast of Connaught. "Another of Fortune's freaks!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed; "but 'tis well she can no longer surprise me."

A man stepped out in the darkness as I spoke, from beside one of the rocks; it was the peasant Burns, my acquaintance of the earlier part of the evening.

"I have waited, Mr. Lindsay," he said, "to see whether some of the country folks here, who have homes of their own to invite you to, might not have brought you along with them. But I am afraid you must just be content to pa.s.s the night with me. I can give you a share of my bed and my supper, though both, I am aware, need many apologies." I made a suitable acknowledgment, and we ascended the cliff together. "I live, when at home with my parents," said my companion, "in the inland parish of Tarbolton; but, for the last two months, I have attended school here, and lodge with an old widow woman in the village. To-morrow, as harvest is fast approaching, I return to my father."

"And I," I replied, "shall have the pleasure of accompanying you in at least the early part of your journey, on my way to Irvine, where my mother still lives."

We reached the village, and entered a little cottage, that presented its gable to the street, and its side to one of the narrower lanes.

"I must introduce you to my landlady," said my companion, "an excellent, kind-hearted old woman, with a fund of honest Scotch pride and shrewd good sense in her composition, and with the mother as strong in her heart as ever, though she lost the last of her children more than twenty years ago."

We found the good woman sitting beside a small but very cheerful fire.

The hearth was newly swept, and the floor newly sanded; and, directly fronting her, there was an empty chair, which seemed to have been drawn to its place in the expectation of some one to fill it.

"You are going to leave me, Robert, my bairn," said the woman, "an' I kenna how I sall ever get on without you; I have almost forgotten, sin you came to live with me, that I have neither children nor husband." On seeing me, she stopped short.

"An acquaintance," said my companion, "whom I have made bold to bring with me for the night; but you must not put yourself to any trouble, mother; he is, I daresay, as much accustomed to plain fare as myself.

Only, however, we must get an additional pint of _yill_ from the _clachan;_ you know this is my last evening with you, and was to be a merry one at any rate." The woman looked me full in the face.

"Matthew Lindsay!" she exclaimed--"can you have forgotten your poor old aunt Margaret!" I grasped her hand.

"Dearest aunt, this is surely most unexpected! How could I have so much as dreamed you were within a hundred miles of me?" Mutual congratulation ensued.

"This," she said, turning to my companion, "is the nephew I have so often told you about, and so often wished to bring you acquainted with.

He is, like yourself, a great reader and a great thinker, and there is no need that your proud, kindly heart should be jealous of him; for he has been ever quite as poor, and maybe the poorer of the two." After still more of greeting and congratulation, the young man rose.

"The night is dark, mother," he said, "and the road to the clachan a rough one; besides you and your kinsman will have much to say to one another. I shall just slip out to the clachan for you; and you shall both tell me on my return whether I am not a prime judge of ale."

"The kindest heart, Matthew, that ever lived," said my relative, as he left the house; "ever since he came to Kirkoswald, he has been both son and daughter to me, and I shall feel twice a widow when he goes away."

"I am mistaken, aunt," I said, "if he be not the strongest minded man I ever saw. Be a.s.sured he stands high among the aristocracy of nature, whatever may be thought of him in Kirkoswald. There is a robustness of intellect, joined to an overmastering force of character, about him, which I have never yet seen equalled, though I have been intimate with at least one very superior mind, and with hundreds of the cla.s.s who pa.s.s for men of talent. I have been thinking ever since I met with him, of the William Tells and William Wallaces of history--men who, in those times of trouble which unfix the foundations of society, step out from their obscurity to rule the destiny of nations."

"I was ill about a month ago," said my relative--"so very ill that I thought I was to have done with the world altogether; and Robert was both nurse and physician to me--he kindled my fire, too, every morning, and sat up beside me sometimes for the greater part of the night. What wonder I should love him as my own child? Had your cousin Henry been spared to me, he would now have been much about Robert's age."

The conversation pa.s.sed to other matters, and in about half an hour, my new friend entered the room; when we sat down to a homely, but cheerful repast.

"I have been engaged in argument, for the last twenty minutes, with our parish schoolmaster," he said--"a shrewd, sensible man, and a prime scholar, but one of the most determined Calvinists I ever knew.

Now, there is something, Mr. Lindsay, in abstract Calvinism, that dissatisfies and distresses me; and yet, I must confess, there is so much of good in the working of the system, that I would ill like to see it supplanted by any other. I am convinced, for instance, there is nothing so efficient in teaching the bulk of a people to think as a Calvinistic church."

"Ah, Robert," said my aunt, "it does meikle mair nor that. Look round ye, my bairn, an' see if there be a kirk in which puir sinful creatures have mair comfort in their sufferings or mair hope in their deaths."

"Dear mother," said my companion, "I like well enough to dispute with the schoolmaster, but I must have no dispute with you. I know the heart is everything in these matters, and yours is much wiser than mine."

"There is something in abstract Calvinism," he continued, "that distresses me. In almost all our researches we arrive at an ultimate barrier, which interposes its wall of darkness between us and the last grand truth, in the series which we had trusted was to prove a master-key to the whole. We dwell in a sort of Goshen--there is light in our immediate neighbourhood, and a more than Egyptian darkness all around; and as every Hebrew must have known that the hedge of cloud which he saw resting on the landscape, was a boundary not to things themselves, but merely to his view of things--for beyond there were cities, and plains, and oceans, and continents--so we in like manner must know that the barriers of which I speak exist only in relation to the faculties which we employ, not to the objects on which we employ them. And yet, notwithstanding this consciousness that we are necessarily and irremediably the bound prisoners of ignorance, and that all the great truths lie outside our prison, we can almost be content that, in most cases, it should be so--not, however, with regard to those great unattainable truths which lie in the track of Calvinism.

They seem too important to be wanted, and yet want them we must--and we beat our very heads against the cruel barrier which separates us from them."

"I am afraid I hardly understand you," I said;--"do a.s.sist me by some instance of ill.u.s.tration."

"You are acquainted," he replied, "with the Scripture doctrine of Predestination, and, in thinking over it, in connection with the destinies of man, it must have struck you that, however much it may interfere with our fixed notions of the goodness of Deity, it is thoroughly in accordance with the actual condition of our race. As far as we can know of ourselves and the things around us, there seems, through the will of Deity--for to what else can we refer it?--a fixed, invariable connection between what we term cause and effect. Nor do we demand of any cla.s.s of mere effects, in the inanimate or irrational world, that they should regulate themselves otherwise than the causes which produce them have determined. The roe and the tiger pursue, unquestioned, the instincts of their several natures; the cork rises, and the stone sinks; and no one thinks of calling either to account for movements so opposite. But it is not so with the family of man; and yet our minds, our bodies, our circ.u.mstances, are but combinations of effects, over the causes of which we have no control. We did not choose a country for ourselves, nor yet a condition in life--nor did we determine our modic.u.m of intellect, or our amount of pa.s.sion--we did not impart its gravity to the weightier part of our nature, or give expansion to the lighter--nor are our instincts of our own planting.

How, then, being thus as much the creatures of necessity as the denizens of the wild and forest--as thoroughly under the agency of fixed, unalterable causes, as the dead matter around us--why are we yet the subjects of a retributive system, and accountable for all our actions?"

"You quarrel with Calvinism," I said; "and seem one of the most thorough-going necessitarians I ever knew."

"Not so," he replied; "though my judgment cannot disprove these conclusions, my heart cannot acquiesce in them--though I see that I am as certainly the subject of laws that exist and operate independent of my will, as the dead matter around me, I feel, with a certainty quite as great, that I am a free, accountable creature. It is according to the scope of my entire reason that I should deem myself bound--it is according to the const.i.tution of my whole nature that I should feel myself free. And in this consists the great, the fearful problem--a problem which both reason and revelation propound; but the truths which can alone solve it, seem to lie beyond the horizon of darkness--and we vex ourselves in vain. 'Tis a sort of moral asymptotes; but its lines, instead of approaching through all s.p.a.ce without meeting, seem receding through all s.p.a.ce, and yet meet."

"Robert, my bairn," said my aunt, "I fear you are wasting your strength on these mysteries to your ain hurt. Did ye no see, in the last storm, when ye staid out among the caves till c.o.c.k-crow, that the bigger and stronger the wave, the mair was it broken against the rocks?--it's just thus wi' the pride o' man's understanding, when he measures it against the dark things o' G.o.d. An' yet it's sae ordered, that the same wonderful truths which perplex and cast down the proud reason, should delight and comfort the humble heart. I am a lone, puir woman, Robert.

Bairns an' husband have gone down to the grave, one by one; an' now, for twenty weary years, I have been childless an' a widow. But trow ye that the puir lone woman wanted a guard, an' a comforter, an' a provider, through a' the lang mirk nichts, an' a' the cauld scarce winters o'

these twenty years? No, my bairn--I kent that Himsel' was wi' me. I kent it by the provision He made, an' the care He took, an' the joy He gave.

An' how, think you, did He comfort me maist? Just by the blessed a.s.surance that a' my trials an' a' my sorrows were nae hasty chance matters, but dispensations for my guid, an' the guid o' those He took to Himsel', that, in the perfect love and wisdom o' His nature, He had ordained frae the beginning."

"Ah, mother," said my friend, after a pause, "you understand the doctrine far better than I do! There are, I find, no contradictions in the Calvinism of the heart."

CHAPTER III.

"Ayr, gurgling, kissed his pebbled sh.o.r.e, O'erhung with wild woods thick'ning green; The fragrant birch and hawthorn h.o.a.r Twined, amorous, round the raptured scene;

The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, The birds sang love on every spray-- Till, too, too soon, the glowing west Proclaimed the speed of winged day."

_To Mary in Heaven_.

We were early on the road together; the day, though somewhat gloomy, was mild and pleasant, and we walked slowly onward, neither of us in the least disposed to hasten our parting by hastening our journey. We had discussed fifty different topics, and were prepared to enter on fifty more, when we reached the ancient burgh of Ayr, where our roads separated.

"I have taken an immense liking to you, Mr. Lindsay," said my companion, as he seated himself on the parapet of the old bridge, "and have just bethought me of a scheme through which I may enjoy your company for at least one night more. The Ayr is a lovely river, and you tell me you have never explored it. We shall explore it together this evening for about ten miles, when we shall find ourselves at the farm-house of Lochlea. You may depend on a hearty welcome from my father, whom, by the way, I wish much to introduce to you, as a man worth your knowing; and, as I have set my heart on the scheme, you are surely too good-natured to disappoint me." Little risk of that, I thought; I had, in fact, become thoroughly enamoured of the warm-hearted benevolence and fascinating conversation of my companion, and acquiesced with the best good-will in the world.

We had threaded the course of the river for several miles. It runs through a wild pastoral valley, roughened by thickets of copse-wood, and bounded on either hand by a line of swelling, moory hills, with here and there a few irregular patches of corn, and here and there some little nest-like cottage peeping out from among the wood. The clouds, which during the morning had obscured the entire face of the heavens, were breaking up their array, and the sun was looking down, in twenty different places, through the openings, checkering the landscape with a fantastic, though lovely carpeting of light and shadow. Before us there rose a thick wood, on a jutting promontory, that looked blue and dark in the shade, as if it wore mourning; while the sunlit stream beyond shone through the trunks and branches, like a river of fire. At length the clouds seemed to have melted in the blue--for there was not a breath of wind to speed them away--and the sun, now hastening to the west, shone in unbroken effulgence over the wide extent of the dell, lighting up stream and wood, and field and cottage, in one continuous blaze of glory. We had walked on in silence for the last half hour; but I could sometimes hear my companion muttering as he went; and when, in pa.s.sing through a thicket of hawthorn and honeysuckle, we started from its perch a linnet that had been filling the air with its melody, I could hear him exclaim, in a subdued tone of voice, "Bonny, bonny birdie! why hasten frae me?--I wadna skaith a feather o' yer wing." He turned round to me, and I could see that his eyes were swimming in moisture.

"Can he be other," he said, "than a good and benevolent G.o.d, who gives us moments like these to enjoy? Oh, my friend, without these sabbaths of the soul, that come to refresh and invigorate it, it would dry up within us! How exquisite," he continued, "how entire the sympathy which exists between all that is good and fair in external nature, and all of good and fair that dwells in our own! And, oh, how the heart expands and lightens! The world is as a grave to it--a closely-covered grave--and it shrinks, and deadens, and contracts all its holier and more joyous feelings under the cold, earth-like pressure. But, amid the grand and lovely of nature--amid these forms and colours of richest beauty--there is a disinterment, a resurrection of sentiment; the pressure of our earthly part seems removed, and those _senses of the mind_, if I may so speak, which serve to connect our spirits with the invisible world around us, recover their proper tone, and perform their proper office."

"_Senses of the mind_," I said, repeating the phrase; "the idea is new to me; but I think I catch your meaning."

"Yes; there are--there must be such," he continued, with growing enthusiasm; "man is essentially a religious creature--a looker beyond the grave, from the very const.i.tution of his mind; and the sceptic who denies it is untrue not merely to the Being who has made and who preserves him, but to the entire scope and bent of his own nature besides. Wherever man is--whether he be a wanderer of the wild forest or still wilder desert, a dweller in some lone isle of the sea, or the tutored and full-minded denizen of some blessed land like our own--wherever man is, there is religion--hopes that look forward and upward--the belief in an unending existence, and a land of separate souls."

I was carried away by the enthusiasm of my companion, and felt, for the time, as if my mind had become the mirror of his. There seems to obtain among men a species of moral gravitation, a.n.a.logous, in its principles, to that which regulates and controls the movements of the planetary system. The larger and more ponderous any body, the greater its attractive force, and the more overpowering its influence over the lesser bodies which surround it. The earth we inhabit carries the moon along with it in its course, and is itself subject to the immensely more powerful influence of the sun. And it is thus with character. It is a law of our nature, as certainly as of the system we inhabit, that the inferior should yield to the superior, and the lesser owe its guidance to the greater. I had hitherto wandered on through life almost unconscious of the existence of this law, or, if occasionally rendered half aware of it, it was only through a feeling that some secret influence was operating favourably in my behalf on the common minds around me. I now felt, however, for the first time, that I had come in contact with a mind immeasurably more powerful than my own; my thoughts seemed to cast themselves into the very mould--my sentiments to modulate themselves by the very tone of his. And yet he was but a russet-clad peasant--my junior by at least eight years--who was returning from school to a.s.sist his father, an humble tacksman, in the labours of the approaching harvest. But the law of circ.u.mstance, so arbitrary in ruling the destinies of common men, exerts but a feeble control over the children of genius. The prophet went forth commissioned by Heaven to anoint a king over Israel, and the choice fell on a shepherd boy who was tending his father's flocks in the field.

We had reached a lovely bend of the stream. There was a semicircular inflection in the steep bank, which waved over us, from base to summit, with hawthorn and hazle; and while one half looked blue and dark in the shade, the other was lighted up with gorgeous and fiery splendour by the sun, now fast sinking in the west. The effect seemed magical. A little gra.s.sy platform that stretched between the hanging wood and the stream, was whitened over with clothes, that looked like snow-wreathes in the hollow; and a young and beautiful girl watched beside them.

"Mary Campbell!" exclaimed my companion, and in a moment he was at her side, and had grasped both her hands in his. "How fortunate, how very fortunate I am!" he said; "I could not have so much as hoped to have seen you to-night, and yet here you are! This, Mr. Lindsay, is a loved friend of mine, whom I have known and valued for years; ever, indeed, since we herded our sheep together under the cover of one plaid. Dearest Mary, I have had sad forebodings regarding you for the whole last month I was in Kirkoswald, and yet, after all my foolish fears, here you are, ruddier and bonnier than ever."

She was, in truth, a beautiful, sylph-like young woman--one whom I would have looked at with complacency in any circ.u.mstances; for who that admires the fair and the lovely in nature--whether it be the wide-spread beauty of sky and earth, or beauty in its minuter modifications, as we see it in the flowers that spring up at our feet, or the b.u.t.terfly that flutters over them--who, I say, that admires the fair and lovely in nature, can be indifferent to the fairest and loveliest of all her productions? As the mistress, however, of by far the strongest-minded man I ever knew, there was more of scrutiny in my glance than usual, and I felt a deeper interest in her than mere beauty could have awakened.

She was, perhaps, rather below than above the middle size; but formed in such admirable proportion, that it seemed out of place to think of size in reference to her at all. Who, in looking at the _Venus de Medicis_, asks whether she be tall or short? The bust and neck were so exquisitely moulded, that they reminded me of Burke's fanciful remark, viz., that our ideas of beauty originate in our love of the s.e.x, and that we deem every object beautiful which is described by soft-waving lines, resembling those of the female neck and bosom. Her feet and arms, which were both bare, had a statue-like symmetry and marble-like whiteness; but it was on her expressive and lovely countenance, now lighted up by the glow of joyous feeling, that nature seemed to have exhausted her utmost skill. There was a fascinating mixture in the expression of superior intelligence and child-like simplicity; a soft, modest light dwelt in the blue eye; and in the entire contour and general form of the features, there was a nearer approach to that union of the straight and the rounded, which is found in its perfection in only the Grecian face, than is at all common in our northern lat.i.tudes, among the descendants of either the Celt or the Saxon. I felt, however, as I gazed, that when lovers meet, the presence of a third person, however much the friend of either, must always be less than agreeable.

"Mr. Burns," I said, "there is a beautiful eminence a few hundred yards to the right, from which I am desirous to overlook the windings of the stream. Do permit me to leave you for a short half hour, when I shall return; or, lest I weary you by my stay, 'twere better, perhaps, you should join me there." My companion greeted the proposal with a good-humoured smile of intelligence; and, plunging into the wood, I left him with his Mary. The sun had just set as he joined me.

"Have you ever been in love, Mr. Lindsay?" he said.

"No, never seriously," I replied. "I am, perhaps, not naturally of the coolest temperament imaginable; but the same fortune that has improved my mind in some little degree, and given me high notions of the s.e.x, has. .h.i.therto thrown me among only its less superior specimens. I am now in my eight-and-twentieth year, and I have not yet met with a woman whom I could love."