WINTER ON THE MOORS
1. At Hermiston
The road to Hermiston runs for a great
part of the way up the valley of a stream, a favourite
with anglers and with midges, full of falls and pools,
and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch.
Here and there, but at great distances, a byway branches
off, and a gaunt farmhouse may be descried above in
a fold of the hill; but the more part of the time,
the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills
of habitation. Hermiston parish is one of the
least populous in Scotland; and, by the time you came
that length, you would scarce be surprised at the
inimitable smallness of the kirk, a dwarfish, ancient
place seated for fifty, and standing in a green by
the burn-side among two-score gravestones. The
manse close by, although no more than a cottage, is
surrounded by the brightness of a flower-garden and
the straw roofs of bees; and the whole colony, kirk
and manse, garden and graveyard, finds harbourage
in a grove of rowans, and is all the year round in
a great silence broken only by the drone of the bees,
the tinkle of the burn, and the bell on Sundays.
A mile beyond the kirk the road leaves the valley
by a precipitous ascent, and brings you a little after
to the place of Hermiston, where it comes to an end
in the back-yard before the coach-house. All
beyond and about is the great field of the hills; the
plover, the curlew, and the lark cry there; the wind
blows as it blows in a ship’s rigging, hard
and cold and pure; and the hill-tops huddle one behind
another, like a herd of cattle, into the sunset.
The house was sixty years old, unsightly,
comfortable; a farmyard and a kitchen-garden on the
left, with a fruit wall where little hard green pears
came to their maturity about the end of October.
The policy (as who should say the
park) was of some extent, but very ill reclaimed;
heather and moor-fowl had crossed the boundary wall
and spread and roosted within; and it would have tasked
a landscape gardener to say where policy ended and
unpolicied nature began. My lord had been led
by the influence of Mr. Sheriff Scott into a considerable
design of planting; many acres were accordingly set
out with fir, and the little feathery besoms gave
a false scale and lent a strange air of a toy-shop
to the moors. A great, rooty sweetness of bogs
was in the air, and at all seasons an infinite melancholy
piping of hill birds. Standing so high and with
so little shelter, it was a cold, exposed house, splashed
by showers, drenched by continuous rains that made
the gutters to spout, beaten upon and buffeted by
all the winds of heaven; and the prospect would be
often black with tempest, and often white with the
snows of winter. But the house was wind and weather
proof, the hearths were kept bright, and the rooms
pleasant with live fires of peat; and Archie might
sit of an evening and hear the squalls bugle on the
moorland, and watch the fire prosper in the earthy
fuel, and the smoke winding up the chimney, and drink
deep of the pleasures of shelter.
Solitary as the place was, Archie
did not want neighbours. Every night, if he chose,
he might go down to the manse and share a “brewst”
of toddy with the minister a hare-brained
ancient gentleman, long and light and still active,
though his knees were loosened with age, and his voice
broke continually in childish trebles and
his lady wife, a heavy, comely dame, without a word
to say for herself beyond good-even and good-day.
Harum-scarum, clodpole young lairds of the neighbourhood
paid him the compliment of a visit. Young Hay
of Romanes rode down to call, on his crop-eared pony;
young Pringle of Drumanno came up on his bony grey.
Hay remained on the hospitable field, and must be carried
to bed; Pringle got somehow to his saddle about 3
A.M., and (as Archie stood with the lamp on the upper
doorstep) lurched, uttered a senseless view-holloa,
and vanished out of the small circle of illumination
like a wraith. Yet a minute or two longer the
clatter of his break-neck flight was audible, then
it was cut off by the intervening steepness of the
hill; and again, a great while after, the renewed beating
of phantom horsehoofs, far in the valley of the Hermiston,
showed that the horse at least, if not his rider,
was still on the homeward way.
There was a Tuesday club at the “Crosskeys”
in Crossmichael, where the young bloods of the countryside
congregated and drank deep on a percentage of the
expense, so that he was left gainer who should have
drunk the most. Archie had no great mind to this
diversion, but he took it like a duty laid upon him,
went with a decent regularity, did his manfullest
with the liquor, held up his head in the local jests,
and got home again and was able to put up his horse,
to the admiration of Kirstie and the lass that helped
her. He dined at Driffel, supped at Windielaws.
He went to the new year’s ball at Huntsfield
and was made welcome, and thereafter rode to hounds
with my Lord Muirfell, upon whose name, as that of
a legitimate Lord of Parliament, in a work so full
of Lords of Session, my pen should pause reverently.
Yet the same fate attended him here as in Edinburgh.
The habit of solitude tends to perpetuate itself,
and an austerity of which he was quite unconscious,
and a pride which seemed arrogance, and perhaps was
chiefly shyness, discouraged and offended his new
companions. Hay did not return more than twice,
Pringle never at all, and there came a time when Archie
even desisted from the Tuesday Club, and became in
all things what he had had the name of
almost from the first the Recluse of Hermiston.
High-nosed Miss Pringle of Drumanno and high-stepping
Miss Marshall of the Mains were understood to have
had a difference of opinion about him the day after
the ball he was none the wiser, he could
not suppose himself to be remarked by these entrancing
ladies. At the ball itself my Lord Muirfell’s
daughter, the Lady Flora, spoke to him twice, and the
second time with a touch of appeal, so that her colour
rose and her voice trembled a little in his ear, like
a passing grace in music. He stepped back with
a heart on fire, coldly and not ungracefully excused
himself, and a little after watched her dancing with
young Drumanno of the empty laugh, and was harrowed
at the sight, and raged to himself that this was a
world in which it was given to Drumanno to please,
and to himself only to stand aside and envy.
He seemed excluded, as of right, from the favour of
such society seemed to extinguish mirth
wherever he came, and was quick to feel the wound,
and desist, and retire into solitude. If he had
but understood the figure he presented, and the impression
he made on these bright eyes and tender hearts; if
he had but guessed that the Recluse of Hermiston,
young, graceful, well spoken, but always cold, stirred
the maidens of the county with the charm of Byronism
when Byronism was new, it may be questioned whether
his destiny might not even yet have been modified.
It may be questioned, and I think it should be doubted.
It was in his horoscope to be parsimonious of pain
to himself, or of the chance of pain, even to the
avoidance of any opportunity of pleasure; to have a
Roman sense of duty, an instinctive aristocracy of
manners and taste; to be the son of Adam Weir and
Jean Rutherford.
2. Kirstie
Kirstie was now over fifty, and might
have sat to a sculptor. Long of limb, and still
light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her golden
hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the
years had but caressed and embellished her. By
the lines of a rich and vigorous maternity, she seemed
destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother
of their children; and behold, by the iniquity of fate,
she had passed through her youth alone, and drew near
to the confines of age, a childless woman. The
tender ambitions that she had received at birth had
been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain
barren zeal of industry and fury of interference.
She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she
washed floors with her empty heart. If she could
not win the love of one with love, she must dominate
all by her temper. Hasty, wordy, and wrathful,
she had a drawn quarrel with most of her neighbours,
and with the others not much more than armed neutrality.
The grieve’s wife had been “sneisty”;
the sister of the gardener who kept house for him
had shown herself “upsitten”; and she wrote
to Lord Hermiston about once a year demanding the
discharge of the offenders, and justifying the demand
by much wealth of detail. For it must not be
supposed that the quarrel rested with the wife and
did not take in the husband also or with
the gardener’s sister, and did not speedily
include the gardener himself. As the upshot of
all this petty quarrelling and intemperate speech,
she was practically excluded (like a lightkeeper on
his tower) from the comforts of human association;
except with her own indoor drudge, who, being but
a lassie and entirely at her mercy, must submit to
the shifty weather of “the mistress’s”
moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets
or caresses according to the temper of the hour.
To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer
of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the
gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie’s
presence. She had known him in the cradle and
paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had
not so much as set eyes on him since he was eleven
and had his last serious illness, the tall, slender,
refined, and rather melancholy young gentleman of
twenty came upon her with the shock of a new acquaintance.
He was “Young Hermiston,” “the laird
himsel’”: he had an air of distinctive
superiority, a cold straight glance of his black eyes,
that abashed the woman’s tantrums in the beginning,
and therefore the possibility of any quarrel was excluded.
He was new, and therefore immediately aroused her
curiosity; he was reticent, and kept it awake.
And lastly he was dark and she fair, and he was male
and she female, the everlasting fountains of interest.
Her feeling partook of the loyalty
of a clanswoman, the hero-worship of a maiden aunt,
and the idolatry due to a god. No matter what
he had asked of her, ridiculous or tragic, she would
have done it and joyed to do it. Her passion,
for it was nothing less, entirely filled her.
It was a rich physical pleasure to make his bed or
light his lamp for him when he was absent, to pull
off his wet boots or wait on him at dinner when he
returned. A young man who should have so doted
on the idea, moral and physical, of any woman, might
be properly described as being in love, head and heels,
and would have behaved himself accordingly. But
Kirstie though her heart leaped at his coming
footsteps though, when he patted her shoulder,
her face brightened for the day had not
a hope or thought beyond the present moment and its
perpetuation to the end of time. Till the end
of time she would have had nothing altered, but still
continue delightedly to serve her idol, and be repaid
(say twice in the month) with a clap on the shoulder.
I have said her heart leaped it
is the accepted phrase. But rather, when she
was alone in any chamber of the house, and heard his
foot passing on the corridors, something in her bosom
rose slowly until her breath was suspended, and as
slowly fell again with a deep sigh, when the steps
had passed and she was disappointed of her eyes’
desire. This perpetual hunger and thirst of his
presence kept her all day on the alert. When
he went forth at morning, she would stand and follow
him with admiring looks. As it grew late and
drew to the time of his return, she would steal forth
to a corner of the policy wall and be seen standing
there sometimes by the hour together, gazing with shaded
eyes, waiting the exquisite and barren pleasure of
his view a mile off on the mountains. When at
night she had trimmed and gathered the fire, turned
down his bed, and laid out his night-gear when
there was no more to be done for the king’s
pleasure, but to remember him fervently in her usually
very tepid prayers, and go to bed brooding upon his
perfections, his future career, and what she should
give him the next day for dinner there
still remained before her one more opportunity; she
was still to take in the tray and say good-night.
Sometimes Archie would glance up from his book with
a preoccupied nod and a perfunctory salutation which
was in truth a dismissal; sometimes and
by degrees more often the volume would
be laid aside, he would meet her coming with a look
of relief; and the conversation would be engaged, last
out the supper, and be prolonged till the small hours
by the waning fire. It was no wonder that Archie
was fond of company after his solitary days; and Kirstie,
upon her side, exerted all the arts of her vigorous
nature to ensnare his attention. She would keep
back some piece of news during dinner to be fired
off with the entrance of the supper tray, and form
as it were the lever de rideau of the evening’s
entertainment. Once he had heard her tongue wag,
she made sure of the result. From one subject
to another she moved by insidious transitions, fearing
the least silence, fearing almost to give him time
for an answer lest it should slip into a hint of separation.
Like so many people of her class, she was a brave
narrator; her place was on the hearthrug and she made
it a rostrum, miming her stories as she told them,
fitting them with vital detail, spinning them out
with endless “quo’ he’s” and
“quo’ she’s,” her voice sinking
into a whisper over the supernatural or the horrific;
until she would suddenly spring up in affected surprise,
and pointing to the clock, “Mercy, Mr. Archie!”
she would say, “whatten a time o’ night
is this of it! God forgive me for a daft wife!”
So it befell, by good management, that she was not
only the first to begin these nocturnal conversations,
but invariably the first to break them off; so she
managed to retire and not to be dismissed.
3. A Border Family
Such an unequal intimacy has never
been uncommon in Scotland, where the clan spirit survives;
where the servant tends to spend her life in the same
service, a help-meet at first, then a tyrant, and at
last a pensioner; where, besides, she is not necessarily
destitute of the pride of birth, but is, perhaps,
like Kirstie, a connection of her master’s,
and at least knows the legend of her own family, and
may count kinship with some illustrious dead.
For that is the mark of the Scot of all classes:
that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable
to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory
of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive
in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the
twentieth generation. No more characteristic instance
could be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott.
They were all, and Kirstie the first of all, ready
and eager to pour forth the particulars of their genealogy,
embellished with every detail that memory had handed
down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every ramification
of that tree there dangled a halter. The Elliotts
themselves have had a chequered history; but these
Elliotts deduced, besides, from three of the most
unfortunate of the border clans the Nicksons,
the Ellwalds, and the Crozers. One ancestor after
another might be seen appearing a moment out of the
rain and the hill mist upon his furtive business,
speeding home, perhaps, with a paltry booty of lame
horses and lean kine, or squealing and dealing death
in some moorland feud of the ferrets and the wild
cats. One after another closed his obscure adventures
in mid-air, triced up to the arm of the royal gibbet
or the Baron’s dule-tree. For the rusty
blunderbuss of Scots criminal justice, which usually
hurt nobody but jurymen, became a weapon of precision
for the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers.
The exhilaration of their exploits seemed to haunt
the memories of their descendants alone, and the shame
to be forgotten. Pride glowed in their bosoms
to publish their relationship to “Andrew Ellwald
of the Laverockstanes, called ’Unchancy Dand,’
who was justifeed wi’ seeven mair of the same
name at Jeddart in the days of King James the Sax.”
In all this tissue of crime and misfortune, the Elliotts
of Cauldstaneslap had one boast which must appear
legitimate: the males were gallows-birds, born
outlaws, petty thieves, and deadly brawlers; but,
according to the same tradition, the females were
all chaste and faithful. The power of ancestry
on the character is not limited to the inheritance
of cells. If I buy ancestors by the gross from
the benevolence of Lyon King of Arms, my grandson (if
he is Scottish) will feel a quickening emulation of
their deeds. The men of the Elliotts were proud,
lawless, violent as of right, cherishing and prolonging
a tradition. In like manner with the women.
And the woman, essentially passionate and reckless,
who crouched on the rug, in the shine of the peat
fire, telling these tales, had cherished through life
a wild integrity of virtue.
Her father Gilbert had been deeply
pious, a savage disciplinarian in the antique style,
and withal a notorious smuggler. “I mind
when I was a bairn getting mony a skelp and being
shoo’d to bed like pou’try,” she
would say. “That would be when the lads
and their bit kegs were on the road. We’ve
had the riffraff of two-three counties in our kitchen,
mony’s the time, betwix’ the twelve and
the three; and their lanterns would be standing in
the forecourt, ay, a score o’ them at once.
But there was nae ungodly talk permitted at Cauldstaneslap;
my faither was a consistent man in walk and conversation;
just let slip an aith, and there was the door to ye!
He had that zeal for the Lord, it was a fair wonder
to hear him pray, but the faim’ly has aye had
a gift that way.” This father was twice
married, once to a dark woman of the old Ellwald stock,
by whom he had Gilbert, presently of Cauldstaneslap;
and, secondly, to the mother of Kirstie. “He
was an auld man when he married her, a fell auld man
wi’ a muckle voice you could hear
him rowting from the top o’ the Kye-skairs,”
she said; “but for her, it appears she was a
perfit wonder. It was gentle blood she had, Mr.
Archie, for it was your ain. The country-side
gaed gyte about her and her gowden hair. Mines
is no to be mentioned wi’ it, and there’s
few weemen has mair hair than what I have, or yet
a bonnier colour. Often would I tell my dear Miss
Jeannie that was your mother, dear, she
was cruel ta’en up about her hair, it was unco
tender, ye see ’Hoots, Miss Jeannie,’
I would say, ‘just fling your washes and your
French dentifrishes in the back o’ the fire,
for that’s the place for them; and awa’
down to a burn side, and wash yersel’ in cauld
hill water, and dry your bonny hair in the caller
wind o’ the muirs, the way that my mother aye
washed hers, and that I have aye made it a practice
to have wishen mines just you do what I
tell ye, my dear, and ye’ll give me news of it!
Ye’ll have hair, and routh of hair, a pigtail
as thick’s my arm,’ I said, ’and
the bonniest colour like the clear gowden guineas,
so as the lads in kirk’ll no can keep their
eyes off it!’ Weel, it lasted out her time, puir
thing! I cuttit a lock of it upon her corp that
was lying there sae cauld. I’ll show it
ye some of thir days if ye’re good. But,
as I was sayin’, my mither ”
On the death of the father there remained
golden-haired Kirstie, who took service with her distant
kinsfolk, the Rutherfords, and black-a-vised Gilbert,
twenty years older, who farmed the Cauldstaneslap,
married, and begot four sons between 1773 and 1784,
and a daughter, like a postscript, in ’97, the
year of Camperdown and Cape St. Vincent. It seemed
it was a tradition in the family to wind up with a
belated girl. In 1804, at the age of sixty, Gilbert
met an end that might be called heroic. He was
due home from market any time from eight at night
till five in the morning, and in any condition from
the quarrelsome to the speechless, for he maintained
to that age the goodly customs of the Scots farmer.
It was known on this occasion that he had a good bit
of money to bring home; the word had gone round loosely.
The laird had shown his guineas, and if anybody had
but noticed it, there was an ill-looking, vagabond
crew, the scum of Edinburgh, that drew out of the
market long ere it was dusk and took the hill-road
by Hermiston, where it was not to be believed that
they had lawful business. One of the country-side,
one Dickieson, they took with them to be their guide,
and dear he paid for it! Of a sudden, in the ford
of the Broken Dykes, this vermin clan fell on the
laird, six to one, and him three parts asleep, having
drunk hard. But it is ill to catch an Elliott.
For a while, in the night and the black water that
was deep as to his saddle-girths, he wrought with
his staff like a smith at his stithy, and great was
the sound of oaths and blows. With that the ambuscade
was burst, and he rode for home with a pistol-ball
in him, three knife wounds, the loss of his front
teeth, a broken rib and bridle, and a dying horse.
That was a race with death that the laird rode.
In the mirk night, with his broken bridle and his
head swimming, he dug his spurs to the rowels in the
horse’s side, and the horse, that was even worse
off than himself, the poor creature! screamed out
like a person as he went, so that the hills echoed
with it, and the folks at Cauldstaneslap got to their
feet about the table and looked at each other with
white faces. The horse fell dead at the yard
gate, the laird won the length of the house and fell
there on the threshold. To the son that raised
him he gave the bag of money. “Hae,”
said he. All the way up the thieves had seemed
to him to be at his heels, but now the hallucination
left him he saw them again in the place
of the ambuscade and the thirst of vengeance
seized on his dying mind. Raising himself and
pointing with an imperious finger into the black night
from which he had come, he uttered the single command,
“Brocken Dykes,” and fainted. He had
never been loved, but he had been feared in honour.
At that sight, at that word, gasped out at them from
a toothless and bleeding mouth, the old Elliott spirit
awoke with a shout in the four sons. “Wanting
the hat,” continues my author, Kirstie, whom
I but haltingly follow, for she told this tale like
one inspired, “wanting guns, for there wasna
twa grains o’ pouder in the house, wi’
nae mair weepons than their sticks into their hands,
the fower o’ them took the road. Only Hob,
and that was the eldest, hunkered at the door-sill
where the blood had rin, fyled his hand wi’
it, and haddit it up to Heeven in the way o’
the auld Border aith. ’Hell shall have
her ain again this nicht!’ he raired, and
rode forth upon his earrand.” It was three
miles to Broken Dykes, down hill, and a sore road.
Kirstie had seen men from Edinburgh dismounting there
in plain day to lead their horses. But the four
brothers rode it as if Auld Hornie were behind and
Heaven in front. Come to the ford, and there was
Dickieson. By all tales, he was not dead, but
breathed and reared upon his elbow, and cried out
to them for help. It was at a graceless face
that he asked mercy. As soon as Hob saw, by the
glint of the lantern, the eyes shining and the whiteness
of the teeth in the man’s face, “Damn
you!” says he; “ye hae your teeth, hae
ye?” and rode his horse to and fro upon that
human remnant. Beyond that, Dandie must dismount
with the lantern to be their guide; he was the youngest
son, scarce twenty at the time. “A’
nicht long they gaed in the wet heath and jennipers,
and whaur they gaed they neither knew nor cared, but
just followed the bluid-stains and the footprints
o’ their faither’s murderers. And
a’ nicht Dandie had his nose to the grund
like a tyke, and the ithers followed and spak’
naething, neither black nor white. There was nae
noise to be heard, but just the sough of the swalled
burns, and Hob, the dour yin, risping his teeth as
he gaed.” With the first glint of the morning
they saw they were on the drove-road, and at that the
four stopped and had a dram to their breakfasts, for
they knew that Dand must have guided them right, and
the rogues could be but little ahead, hot foot for
Edinburgh by the way of the Pentland Hills. By
eight o’clock they had word of them a
shepherd had seen four men “uncoly mishandled”
go by in the last hour. “That’s yin
a piece,” says Clem, and swung his cudgel.
“Five o’ them!” says Hob. “God’s
death, but the faither was a man! And him drunk!”
And then there befell them what my author termed “a
sair misbegowk,” for they were overtaken by a
posse of mounted neighbours come to aid in the pursuit.
Four sour faces looked on the reinforcement.
“The Deil’s broughten you!” said
Clem, and they rode thenceforward in the rear of the
party with hanging heads. Before ten they had
found and secured the rogues, and by three of the afternoon,
as they rode up the Vennel with their prisoners, they
were aware of a concourse of people bearing in their
midst something that dripped. “For the
boady of the saxt,” pursued Kirstie, “wi’
his head smashed like a hazel-nit, had been a’
that nicht in the chairge o’ Hermiston Water,
and it dunting in on the stanes, and grunding it on
the shallows, and flinging the deid thing heels-ower-hurdie
at the Fa’s o’ Spango; and in the first
o’ the day, Tweed had got a hold o’ him
and carried him off like a wind, for it was uncoly
swalled, and raced wi’ him, bobbing under braesides,
and was long playing with the creature in the drumlie
lynns under the castle, and at the hinder end of all
cuist him up on the sterling of Crossmichael brig.
Sae there they were a’thegither at last (for
Dickieson had been brought in on a cart long syne),
and folk could see what mainner o’ man my brither
had been that had held his head again sax and saved
the siller, and him drunk!” Thus died of honourable
injuries and in the savour of fame Gilbert Elliott
of the Cauldstaneslap; but his sons had scarce less
glory out of the business. Their savage haste,
the skill with which Dand had found and followed the
trail, the barbarity to the wounded Dickieson (which
was like an open secret in the county), and the doom
which it was currently supposed they had intended
for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination.
Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might
have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that
Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead,
or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott,
and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell
the tale in prose, and to make of the “Four
Black Brothers” a unit after the fashion of the
“Twelve Apostles” or the “Three Musketeers.”
Robert, Gilbert, Clement, and Andrew in
the proper Border diminutives, Hob, Gib, Clem, and
Dand Elliott these ballad heroes, had much
in common; in particular, their high sense of the
family and the family honour; but they went diverse
ways, and prospered and failed in different businesses.
According to Kirstie, “they had a’ bees
in their bonnets but Hob.” Hob the laird
was, indeed, essentially a decent man. An elder
of the Kirk, nobody had heard an oath upon his lips,
save, perhaps, thrice or so at the sheep-washing,
since the chase of his father’s murderers.
The figure he had shown on that eventful night disappeared
as if swallowed by a trap. He who had ecstatically
dipped his hand in the red blood, he who had ridden
down Dickieson, became, from that moment on, a stiff
and rather graceless model of the rustic proprieties;
cannily profiting by the high war prices, and yearly
stowing away a little nest-egg in the bank against
calamity; approved of and sometimes consulted by the
greater lairds for the massive and placid sense
of what he said, when he could be induced to say anything;
and particularly valued by the minister, Mr. Torrance,
as a right-hand man in the parish, and a model to
parents. The transfiguration had been for the
moment only; some Barbarossa, some old Adam of our
ancestors, sleeps in all of us till the fit circumstance
shall call it into action; and, for as sober as he
now seemed, Hob had given once for all the measure
of the devil that haunted him. He was married,
and, by reason of the effulgence of that legendary
night, was adored by his wife. He had a mob of
little lusty, barefoot children who marched in a caravan
the long miles to school, the stages of whose pilgrimage
were marked by acts of spoliation and mischief, and
who were qualified in the country-side as “fair
pests.” But in the house, if “faither
was in,” they were quiet as mice. In short,
Hob moved through life in a great peace the
reward of any one who shall have killed his man, with
any formidable and figurative circumstance, in the
midst of a country gagged and swaddled with civilisation.
It was a current remark that the Elliotts
were “guid and bad, like sanguishes”;
and certainly there was a curious distinction, the
men of business coming alternately with the dreamers.
The second brother, Gib, was a weaver by trade, had
gone out early into the world to Edinburgh, and come
home again with his wings singed. There was an
exaltation in his nature which had led him to embrace
with enthusiasm the principles of the French Revolution,
and had ended by bringing him under the hawse of my
Lord Hermiston in that furious onslaught of his upon
the Liberals, which sent Muir and Palmer into exile
and dashed the party into chaff. It was whispered
that my lord, in his great scorn for the movement,
and prevailed upon a little by a sense of neighbourliness,
had given Gib a hint. Meeting him one day in
the Potterrow, my lord had stopped in front of him:
“Gib, ye eediot,” he had said, “what’s
this I hear of you? Poalitics, poalitics, poalitics,
weaver’s poalitics, is the way of it, I hear.
If ye arena a’thegither dozened with eediocy,
ye’ll gang your ways back to Cauldstaneslap,
and ca’ your loom, and ca’ your
loom, man!” And Gilbert had taken him at the
word and returned, with an expedition almost to be
called flight, to the house of his father. The
clearest of his inheritance was that family gift of
prayer of which Kirstie had boasted; and the baffled
politician now turned his attention to religious matters or,
as others said, to heresy and schism. Every Sunday
morning he was in Crossmichael, where he had gathered
together, one by one, a sect of about a dozen persons,
who called themselves “God’s Remnant of
the True Faithful,” or, for short, “God’s
Remnant.” To the profane they were known
as “Gib’s Deils.” Bailie Sweedie,
a noted humorist in the town, vowed that the proceedings
always opened to the tune of “The Deil Fly Away
with the Exciseman,” and that the sacrament
was dispensed in the form of hot whisky-toddy; both
wicked hits at the evangelist, who had been suspected
of smuggling in his youth, and had been overtaken
(as the phrase went) on the streets of Crossmichael
one Fair day. It was known that every Sunday
they prayed for a blessing on the arms of Buonaparte.
For this, “God’s Remnant,” as they
were “skailing” from the cottage that
did duty for a temple, had been repeatedly stoned
by the bairns, and Gib himself hooted by a squadron
of Border volunteers in which his own brother, Dand,
rode in a uniform and with a drawn sword. The
“Remnant” were believed, besides, to be
“antinomian in principle,” which might
otherwise have been a serious charge, but the way
public opinion then blew it was quite swallowed up
and forgotten in the scandal about Buonaparte.
For the rest, Gilbert had set up his loom in an outhouse
at Cauldstaneslap, where he laboured assiduously six
days of the week. His brothers, appalled by his
political opinions, and willing to avoid dissension
in the household, spoke but little to him; he less
to them, remaining absorbed in the study of the Bible
and almost constant prayer. The gaunt weaver was
dry-nurse at Cauldstaneslap, and the bairns loved him
dearly. Except when he was carrying an infant
in his arms, he was rarely seen to smile as,
indeed, there were few smilers in that family.
When his sister-in-law rallied him, and proposed that
he should get a wife and bairns of his own, since
he was so fond of them, “I have no clearness
of mind upon that point,” he would reply.
If nobody called him in to dinner, he stayed out.
Mrs. Hob, a hard, unsympathetic woman, once tried
the experiment. He went without food all day,
but at dusk, as the light began to fail him, he came
into the house of his own accord, looking puzzled.
“I’ve had a great gale of prayer upon my
speerit,” said he. “I canna mind
sae muckle’s what I had for denner.”
The creed of God’s Remnant was justified in
the life of its founder. “And yet I dinna
ken,” said Kirstie. “He’s maybe
no more stock-fish than his neeghbours! He rode
wi’ the rest o’ them, and had a good stamach
to the work, by a’ that I hear! God’s
Remnant! The deil’s clavers! There
wasna muckle Christianity in the way Hob guided Johnny
Dickieson, at the least of it; but Guid kens!
Is he a Christian even? He might be a Mahommedan
or a Deevil or a Fireworshipper, for what I ken.”
The third brother had his name on
a door-plate, no less, in the city of Glasgow, “Mr.
Clement Elliott,” as long as your arm. In
this case, that spirit of innovation which had shown
itself timidly in the case of Hob by the admission
of new manures, and which had run to waste with Gilbert
in subversive politics and heretical religions, bore
useful fruit in many ingenious mechanical improvements.
In boyhood, from his addiction to strange devices
of sticks and string, he had been counted the most
eccentric of the family. But that was all by now;
and he was a partner of his firm, and looked to die
a bailie. He too had married, and was rearing
a plentiful family in the smoke and din of Glasgow;
he was wealthy, and could have bought out his brother,
the cock-laird, six times over, it was whispered;
and when he slipped away to Cauldstaneslap for a well-earned
holiday, which he did as often as he was able, he
astonished the neighbours with his broadcloth, his
beaver hat, and the ample plies of his neckcloth.
Though an eminently solid man at bottom, after the
pattern of Hob, he had contracted a certain Glasgow
briskness and aplomb which set him off.
All the other Elliotts were as lean as a rake, but
Clement was laying on fat, and he panted sorely when
he must get into his boots. Dand said, chuckling:
“Ay, Clem has the elements of a corporation.”
“A provost and corporation,” returned Clem.
And his readiness was much admired.
The fourth brother, Dand, was a shepherd
to his trade, and by starts, when he could bring his
mind to it, excelled in the business. Nobody
could train a dog like Dandie; nobody, through the
peril of great storms in the winter time, could do
more gallantly. But if his dexterity were exquisite,
his diligence was but fitful; and he served his brother
for bed and board, and a trifle of pocket-money when
he asked for it. He loved money well enough,
knew very well how to spend it, and could make a shrewd
bargain when he liked. But he preferred a vague
knowledge that he was well to windward to any counted
coins in the pocket; he felt himself richer so.
Hob would expostulate: “I’m an amature
herd.” Dand would reply, “I’ll
keep your sheep to you when I’m so minded, but
I’ll keep my liberty too. Thir’s
no man can coandescend on what I’m worth.”
Clem would expound to him the miraculous results of
compound interest, and recommend investments.
“Ay, man?” Dand would say; “and do
you think, if I took Hob’s siller, that I wouldna
drink it or wear it on the lassies? And, anyway,
my kingdom is no of this world. Either I’m
a poet or else I’m nothing.” Clem
would remind him of old age. “I’ll
die young, like Robbie Burns,” he would say
stoutly. No question but he had a certain accomplishment
in minor verse. His “Hermiston Burn,”
with its pretty refrain
“I love to gang thinking whaur ye
gang linking,
Hermiston
burn, in the howe”;
his “Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld
Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotts of auld,” and
his really fascinating piece about the Praying Weaver’s
Stone, had gained him in the neighbourhood the reputation,
still possible in Scotland, of a local bard; and,
though not printed himself, he was recognised by others
who were and who had become famous. Walter Scott
owed to Dandie the text of the “Raid of Wearie”
in the “Minstrelsy”; and made him welcome
at his house, and appreciated his talents, such as
they were, with all his usual generosity. The
Ettrick Shepherd was his sworn crony; they would meet,
drink to excess, roar out their lyrics in each other’s
faces, and quarrel and make it up again till bedtime.
And besides these recognitions, almost to be called
official, Dandie was made welcome for the sake of his
gift through the farmhouses of several contiguous
dales, and was thus exposed to manifold temptations
which he rather sought than fled. He had figured
on the stool of repentance, for once fulfilling to
the letter the tradition of his hero and model.
His humorous verses to Mr. Torrance on that occasion “Kenspeckle
here my lane I stand” unfortunately
too indelicate for further citation, ran through the
country like a fiery cross; they were recited, quoted,
paraphrased, and laughed over as far away as Dumfries
on the one hand and Dunbar on the other.
These four brothers were united by
a close bond, the bond of that mutual admiration or
rather mutual hero-worship which is so strong
among the members of secluded families who have much
ability and little culture. Even the extremes
admired each other. Hob, who had as much poetry
as the tongs, professed to find pleasure in Dand’s
verses; Clem, who had no more religion than Claverhouse,
nourished a heartfelt, at least an open-mouthed, admiration
of Gib’s prayers; and Dandie followed with relish
the rise of Clem’s fortunes. Indulgence
followed hard on the heels of admiration. The
laird, Clem, and Dand, who were Tories and patriots
of the hottest quality, excused to themselves, with
a certain bashfulness, the radical and revolutionary
hérésies of Gib. By another division of
the family, the laird, Clem, and Gib, who were men
exactly virtuous, swallowed the dose of Dand’s
irregularities as a kind of clog or drawback in the
mysterious providence of God affixed to bards, and
distinctly probative of poetical genius. To appreciate
the simplicity of their mutual admiration it was necessary
to hear Clem, arrived upon one of his visits, and
dealing in a spirit of continuous irony with the affairs
and personalities of that great city of Glasgow where
he lived and transacted business. The various
personages, ministers of the church, municipal officers,
mercantile big-wigs, whom he had occasion to introduce,
were all alike denigrated, all served but as reflectors
to cast back a flattering side-light on the house
of Cauldstaneslap. The Provost, for whom Clem
by exception entertained a measure of respect, he
would liken to Hob. “He minds me o’
the laird there,” he would say. “He
has some of Hob’s grand, whunstane sense, and
the same way with him of steiking his mouth when he’s
no very pleased.” And Hob, all unconscious,
would draw down his upper lip and produce, as if for
comparison, the formidable grimace referred to.
The unsatisfactory incumbent of St. Enoch’s
Kirk was thus briefly dismissed: “If he
had but twa fingers o’ Gib’s, he would
waken them up.” And Gib, honest man! would
look down and secretly smile. Clem was a spy
whom they had sent out into the world of men.
He had come back with the good news that there was
nobody to compare with the Four Black Brothers, no
position that they would not adorn, no official that
it would not be well they should replace, no interest
of mankind, secular or spiritual, which would not immediately
bloom under their supervision. The excuse of their
folly is in two words: scarce the breadth of
a hair divided them from the peasantry. The measure
of their sense is this: that these symposia of
rustic vanity were kept entirely within the family,
like some secret ancestral practice. To the world
their serious faces were never deformed by the suspicion
of any simper of self-contentment. Yet it was
known. “They hae a guid pride o’
themsel’s!” was the word in the country-side.
Lastly, in a Border story, there should
be added their “two-names.” Hob was
The Laird. “Roy ne puis, prince
ne daigne”; he was the laird of Cauldstaneslap say
fifty acres ipsissimus. Clement
was Mr. Elliott, as upon his door-plate, the earlier
Dafty having been discarded as no longer applicable,
and indeed only a reminder of misjudgment and the
imbecility of the public; and the youngest, in honour
of his perpetual wanderings, was known by the sobriquet
of Randy Dand.
It will be understood that not all
this information was communicated by the aunt, who
had too much of the family failing herself to appreciate
it thoroughly in others. But as time went on,
Archie began to observe an omission in the family
chronicle.
“Is there not a girl too?” he asked.
“Ay: Kirstie. She
was named for me, or my grandmother at least it’s
the same thing,” returned the aunt, and went
on again about Dand, whom she secretly preferred by
reason of his gallantries.
“But what is your niece like?”
said Archie at the next opportunity.
“Her? As black’s
your hat! But I dinna suppose she would maybe
be what you would ca’ ill-looked
a’thegither. Na, she’s a kind of a
handsome jaud a kind o’ gipsy,”
said the aunt, who had two sets of scales for men
and women or perhaps it would be more fair
to say that she had three, and the third and the most
loaded was for girls.
“How comes it that I never see
her in church?” said Archie.
“’Deed, and I believe
she’s in Glesgie with Clem and his wife.
A heap good she’s like to get of it! I
dinna say for men folk, but where weemen folk are
born, there let them bide. Glory to God, I was
never far’er from here than Crossmichael.”
In the meanwhile it began to strike
Archie as strange, that while she thus sang the praises
of her kinsfolk, and manifestly relished their virtues
and (I may say) their vices like a thing creditable
to herself, there should appear not the least sign
of cordiality between the house of Hermiston and that
of Cauldstaneslap. Going to church of a Sunday,
as the lady housekeeper stepped with her skirts kilted,
three tucks of her white petticoat showing below,
and her best India shawl upon her back (if the day
were fine) in a pattern of radiant dyes, she would
sometimes overtake her relatives preceding her more
leisurely in the same direction. Gib of course
was absent: by skreigh of day he had been gone
to Crossmichael and his fellow-heretics; but the rest
of the family would be seen marching in open order:
Hob and Dand, stiff-necked, straight-backed six-footers,
with severe dark faces, and their plaids about their
shoulders; the convoy of children scattering (in a
state of high polish) on the wayside, and every now
and again collected by the shrill summons of the mother;
and the mother herself, by a suggestive circumstance
which might have afforded matter of thought to a more
experienced observer than Archie, wrapped in a shawl
nearly identical with Kirstie’s, but a thought
more gaudy and conspicuously newer. At the sight,
Kirstie grew more tall Kirstie showed her
classical profile, nose in air and nostril spread,
the pure blood came in her cheek evenly in a delicate
living pink.
“A braw day to ye, Mistress
Elliott,” said she, and hostility and gentility
were nicely mingled in her tones. “A fine
day, mem,” the laird’s wife would reply
with a miraculous curtsey, spreading the while her
plumage setting off, in other words, and
with arts unknown to the mere man, the pattern of
her India shawl. Behind her, the whole Cauldstaneslap
contingent marched in closer order, and with an indescribable
air of being in the presence of the foe; and while
Dandie saluted his aunt with a certain familiarity
as of one who was well in court, Hob marched on in
awful immobility. There appeared upon the face
of this attitude in the family the consequences of
some dreadful feud. Presumably the two women
had been principals in the original encounter, and
the laird had probably been drawn into the quarrel
by the ears, too late to be included in the present
skin-deep reconciliation.
“Kirstie,” said Archie
one day, “what is this you have against your
family?”
“I dinna complean,” said
Kirstie, with a flush. “I say naething.”
“I see you do not not
even good-day to your own nephew,” said he.
“I hae naething to be ashamed
of,” said she. “I can say the Lord’s
Prayer with a good grace. If Hob was ill, or in
preeson or poverty, I would see to him blithely.
But for curtchying and complimenting and colloguing,
thank ye kindly!”
Archie had a bit of a smile:
he leaned back in his chair. “I think you
and Mrs. Robert are not very good friends,” says
he slily, “when you have your India shawls on?”
She looked upon him in silence, with
a sparkling eye but an indecipherable expression;
and that was all that Archie was ever destined to
learn of the battle of the India shawls.
“Do none of them ever come here to see you?”
he inquired.
“Mr. Archie,” said she,
“I hope that I ken my place better. It would
be a queer thing, I think, if I was to clamjamfry
up your faither’s house that I should
say it! wi’ a dirty, black-a-vised
clan, no ane o’ them it was worth while to mar
soap upon but just mysel’! Na, they’re
all damnifeed wi’ the black Ellwalds. I
have nae patience wi’ black folk.”
Then, with a sudden consciousness of the case of Archie,
“No that it maitters for men sae muckle,”
she made haste to add, “but there’s naebody
can deny that it’s unwomanly. Long hair
is the ornament o’ woman ony way; we’ve
good warrandise for that it’s in the
Bible and wha can doubt that the Apostle
had some gowden-haired lassie in his mind Apostle
and all, for what was he but just a man like yersel’?”