Part 2

Then what of the Lady Anne Campbell of Argyle, at one time betrothed to Charles II.? The youthful Prince, aged twenty, had been crowned gorgeously, after the ancient manner of the Scottish Kings, at Scone. But King only in name, with England still under the iron rule of Cromwell, and only a faction in Scotland devoted to his cause, his immediate fortunes were entirely in the hands of the Scottish leader, the crafty, covenanting Marquis of Argyle. Reaching ever higher in ambition, and dazzled by the weird vision of the race of MacCallum More mounting the throne, Argyle proposed that Charles should marry his daughter. Needy and reckless, and eager to attach Argyle to the Royalist cause by the golden bands of hope, the King pretended consent. Alas for the Lady Anne! What maiden could keep still her heart when wooed by so royal a lover? For wooing there must have been, to keep up the pretence of betrothal, and how was the maiden to know that those words and looks, and, it may have been, those warmer caresses, were all no more than a diplomacy? And when the crash came, with Cromwell’s defeat of the covenanting army at Dunbar, and the revelation that she had given up her all and had been deceived--how bitter, how cruel the discovery! The contemporary Kirkton relates circumstantially that “so grievous was the disappointment to the young lady, that of a gallant young gentlewoman, she lost her spirit, and turned absolutely distracted.”

Then there is a pitiful little song, unprinted and all but forgotten,[A] sung to a quavering, pathetic old tune, and relating in quaint ballad fashion something of the story of one Jeanie Cameron, an adherent of Prince Charles Edward in the rebellion of 1745. It narrates how the maiden, having fallen sick, not without a suspicion of its being heart-sickness, and all cures of the leeches failing, was prescribed “ae bricht blink o’ the Young Pretender.” So she sate her down and wrote the Prince “a very long letter, stating who were his friends and who were his foes.” This letter she had closed, and was just “sealing with a ring,” when, as used to happen in ballad story, “ope flew the door, and in came her King.” Poor young lady!--

She prayed to the saints and angels to defend her, And sank i’ the arms o’ the Young Pretender. Rare, oh, rare! bonnie Jeanie Cameron!

Nor is this pretty romance merely an invention of the poet’s brain. One of the family by whom the song has been preserved happened, it seems, in the latter part of last century, to be buying snuff in a shop in Edinburgh, when a beggar came in. Nothing was said before the stranger; but the shopkeeper, as if it were an accustomed dole, handed the beggar a groat. Afterwards, in reply to a remark of his customer as to the delicacy of the beggar’s hand which had received the coin, the shopkeeper revealed the fact that the recipient of his charity was no man, but a woman, and no other than Jeanie Cameron, a follower of the Chevalier. Her story, so far as he knew it, was sad enough. She had followed the Prince to France, hoping, no doubt, poor thing! to resume there something of the place she had believed herself to hold in his affections. Alas! it was only to find herself, like so many others, forgotten, cast off, an encumbrance to a broken man. And then, with who can tell how heavy a heart, she made her way home, only to discover that her family had shut their door upon her, and cut her adrift. So, for these many years, she had wandered about forlorn and lonely, supported by a few charitable bourgeois in the streets of Edinburgh--she who could look back upon the day when she had loved and been loved by a Stuart Prince.[B]

[A] It has now been included in “Ancient Scots Ballads with their Traditional Airs.” Glasgow: Bayley & Ferguson, 1894.

[B] This account of the latter days of “Mrs Jean Cameron” finds corroboration in a footnote to the second volume of Chambers’s “Traditions of Edinburgh.”

Such are some of the stories which find no place in history, but whose consciousness sheds a tragic and tender interest about this grey old capital of the North. Who will say that they are not as well worth thought as the trumpetings of herald pursuivants and the clash of warlike arms?

A WEAVING VILLAGE.

Out of the way, in this quiet hollow of the Ayrshire hills, something remains yet of the life of a hundred years ago. Elsewhere the puffing of steam may have taken the place of toil by hand, but here in the long summer days, from morning till night, the click-clack of the looms is still to be heard, and within every second window up the length of the village street, the dusty frames are to be seen moving regularly to and fro. Pots of geranium and fuchsia are set sometimes in these windows, and through the narrow doorways the cottage gardens can be seen behind, carefully kept, and ablaze just now with wallflower borders and pansies. Sadly, however, is the place decayed from its prosperity of old. Little traffic comes now to the wide, empty street. The carrier’s waggon is an object of interest when it puts in an appearance. The baker’s van may be the only vehicle of an afternoon; and twice a week only comes the flesher’s cart. Butcher meat, it is to be feared, is but seldom seen on some of the village tables; and, when work is more than usually scarce, many must put up with but “muslin-broth.” Here and there a roofless ruin, breaking the regular line of dwellings, tells of a decaying industry. In the sunny inn-door at the head of the village the brown retriever may rouse himself, once in the afternoon, to inspect the credentials of some vagrant terrier; and, but for the faint click-clack of the looms all day, and the appearance, once in a while, of a woman with a pair of stoups to draw water at the village well, the place might seem asleep.

Yet a hearty trade once throve on the spot. Every house had its loom going, sometimes two; and there was always work in plenty. Weavers’ wives could go to kirk then in black-beaded bonnets and flowered Paisley shawls, and the Relief Kirk minister got his stipend of eighty pounds a year nearly always paid. In those times the carrier’s cart used to have business in the village every day; merchants from Glasgow came bidding against each other for work in a hurry; and four of the weavers at once have been known to have sons at college studying for the ministry. Those were the days when the village kept a watchful eye upon the religious and political movements of the country. Before the Stamp Duty was removed from newspapers, the weavers subscribed in clubs and took out their weekly sheet, which was passed from shop to shop, read and digested, and thoroughly threshed out in the door-step debates, when a knot of neighbours would gather between the spells of work. In this way the great Reform Bill was fully discussed and settled here long before it passed the House of Commons; and the absorbing question of the Disruption, which gave birth to the Free Church, was thoroughly argued and thought out on its merits.

True to the traditions of their craft, of course, most of the weavers were the reddest of Radicals, and the progress of the Chartist movement excited the keenest interest among them. The work at the looms was to a great extent mechanical, and while they pushed the treadles and pulled the shuttles to and fro, the weavers had time to think; and shrewd thinkers and able debaters many of them became, ready at the hustings with questions on the Corn Laws, the freeing of the slaves, and the Irish grievances, which were apt to put a political candidate to some trouble. He had not their advantage of the daily “argufying” and the Saturday night debates at the village inn. There was a tradition that in the room where this club met, the poet Burns had once spent an evening, and the fact lent an additional zest to his song, which they never tired of quoting,--“A man’s a man for a’ that.”

A king can mak’ a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a’ that; But an honest man’s aboon his might, Guid faith he maunna fa’ that.

The industry of the village has died hard. Amid decaying trade the weavers kept to their looms, and many a pinch was suffered before one after another laid down his shuttle. Their feelings are not difficult to understand. As boys they had played about the village well. As young men they had wandered with their sweethearts--that delicious time--down the woodland roads around. Memories had grown about them and their old homes during the long years of work. In the kirkyard not far off lay the ashes of mother or wife or child. But the merchants had ceased to come to the village, and it was a weary walk for the poor weavers to carry their webs all the way to Glasgow, to hawk them from warehouse to warehouse, and sometimes to have the choice at last of accepting a ruinous price for them, or of taking them home again.

It was after a bootless errand of this sort that old John Gilmour was returning to the village one night in late October some forty-three years back. Honest soul, through all his straits he had never owed a neighbour a penny. That night, however, his affairs had come to a critical pass, and the morrow held a black look-out for him. His web was still on his back, not an offer having been got for it in town, though he knew the workmanship to be his best. Upon its sale he had depended to pay for the winter’s coals, and the necessaries of the morrow; for on the day previous the last of his carefully guarded savings had been spent. Moreover, his wife and he were growing old, and could hardly look forward to increased energy for work. And he was bringing home bad news. Their second son (the eldest had run away to sea eleven years before) had broken down in his attempt to teach, and, at the same time, push his way through the Divinity Hall, and had been ordered by the doctor to stop work for the winter altogether. How was the old man to break all this disastrous news to his wife? The web was heavy, but his heart was heavier.

He had reached the fork of the road close by the old disused graveyard of the parish, and was thinking a little bitterly of the reward that remained to him from his long life of hard work, and of how quiet and far from care those were who lay on the other side of the low dyke under the green sod, when a hackney carriage came up behind, and the driver stopped to ask the way to ----.

“Keep the left road,” said the old man, and was resuming his walk, when a bearded face appeared at the carriage window.

“That seems a heavy bundle you are carrying. Are you going my way?”

Once inside, the old weaver found his companion looking at him intently.

“You have had a long walk this day, surely? Have you no son to carry so heavy a load for you?”

Ay, he had two sons, Gilmour said: but one was lost at sea, and the other was struggling at college.

“You live alone, then?” asked the questioner, tremulously.

No, thank God! he had a kind wife at home, who had been his consolation through many a dark hour.

“Thank God!” echoed the younger man.

The carriage rolled on and entered the village. The weaver pointed to his house, and they stopped there. The stranger helped him out with his web, and entered the house with him.

“It’s just the web back, guidwife,” he said. “But dinna look sae queer like. I’se warrant I’ll sell it the morn. An’ here’s a gentleman has helpit me on the road. Hae ye onything i’ the hoose to offer him?”

But the wife was not thinking of the web or the distress of the morrow. Her eyes were on the stranger, and the corners of her lips were twitching curiously. He had not spoken, but as he removed his hat she sprang towards him.

“It’s Willie!” she cried; “it’s Willie!” And her arms were about his neck, and, half laughing and half crying, she buried her face on his breast.

It was Willie. He was the first who came back to the village from the gold-fields of Ballarat.

WHERE THE CLANS FELL.

What richer picture could the eye desire than this sunlit glory of harvest colour amid the Highland mountains? The narrow sea-loch itself below gleams blue as melted sapphire under the radiant and stainless sky; around it, on the rising slopes, the corn-fields, rough with fruitful stooks, spread their yellow ripeness in the sun; amid them shine patches of fresh soft green where the second clover has been cut; while above hang the sheltering woods, like dark brown shadows; and, over all, the surrounding hills, bloom-spread as for a banquet of the gods, raise their purple stain against the blue. Only far off, above the dim mountains of amethyst in the North, lies a white argosy of clouds, like some convoy of home-bound India-men becalmed on a summer sea.

There has been no sound for an hour but the whisper of the warm autumn wind that the farmer loves for winnowing his grain, the drone of a velvety bee sometimes in the blue depth of a hare-bell, and the crackle of the black broom-pods bursting in the heat. The furry brown rabbits that pop prudently out of sight in the mossy bank are silent as shadows; the red squirrel that runs along the dyke top and disappears up a tree makes no chatter; and even the shy speckled mavis that bobs bright-eyed across the path is voiceless, for among the birds this is the silent month.

Less and less, as the narrow road rises through the fir woods, grows the bit of blue loch seen far behind under the branches, and the little clachan in the warm hollow over the brow of the hill is shut from the world on every side by the deep and silent forests of fragrant pine. Wayside flowers are seeding on the time-darkened thatch of these sequestered dwellings. There, with branches of narrow pods, the wallflower clings; and the spikes of the field-mustard ripen beside the golden bullets of the ox-eyed daisy. On a chair at the door of one of the cottages an ancient granny is sunning herself, counting with feeble fingers the stitches on her glancing knitting wires. A frail old body she is, set here, neat and comfortable, by some loving hand, to enjoy, it may be, the sunshine of her last autumn on earth. Withered and wrinkled are her old cheeks with the cares of many a winter, and it seems difficult to recall the day when she was a ripe-lipped, merry reaper in the corn-fields; but under her clean, white mutch the grey old eyes are undimmed yet as they watch, heedful and lovingly, the movements of the little maid tottering about her knee. Where are her thoughts as she sits there alone, hour after hour, in the silent sunshine? Is she back in the dusk among the sweet-scented hay-ricks, listening with fluttering heart to the whispers of her rustic lover? Is it a sunny doorway where she sits crooning for happiness over the baby on her knee? the little one that is all her own--and his. Or is it a winter night as she kneels in the flickering light by the bedside, feeling the rough, loving hand relax its grasp, while she sees the shadow pass across the wistful face, and knows with breaking heart that she is alone? These are the peaceful scenes of peasant life; alas, that they should ever be darkened by the shadow of the sword!

Granny can speak no English, or she might have something to say of the great disaster that befell the clans on the moor close by in her father’s time. For not far beyond the little clachan the road emerges on the open heath, and there, where the paths cross, lies the great, grey boulder on which the terrible duke stood to survey the field just before the battle. Not even then was he aware how nearly his birthday carousals of the night before, at Nairn, had been surprised and turned into another slaughter of Prestonpans. So perilously sometimes does the sword of Damocles tremble over an unconscious head. His troops, well rested and provisioned, were fresh as that April morning itself, while the poor clansmen in the boggy hollow to the right, divided in their councils, and famishing for treacherous lack of bread, were exhausted by the fruitless twenty-four mile surprise march of the night. Yet they came on, these clansmen, half an hour later, like lions; plunging through the bog, sword in hand, in the face of the regulars’ terrific blaze of musketry, cutting Cumberland’s first line to pieces, and rushing on the second line to be blown to atoms at sword’s length.

The yellow corn is being shorn to-day where the clans were mowed down then. Here was spilt the best blood of the Highlands. Close by, the brave Keppoch, crying out as he charged alone before the eyes of his immovable Macdonalds that the children of his tribe had forsaken him, threw his sword in the air as a bullet went into his heart. Wounded, at the tall tree to the west fell Cameron of Lochiel; and in the little valley beyond, the defeated Prince Charles, as he fled, paused a moment to bid his army a bitter farewell. The road here at the corn-field’s edge dips a little yet, where the fatal bog once lay, and ten yards to the left still springs the Dead Men’s Well, to which so many poor fellows crawled during the awful succeeding night to allay the tortures of their thirst before they died. Here the gigantic MacGillivray, leader that day of the clan M’Intosh, fell dead as, with his last strength, he bore to the spring a little wounded boy whom he had heard at his side moaning for water.

A better fate the bravery of these men deserved, misguided though they might be; for the victors gave no quarter to wounded or prisoners, and the soul shudders yet at thought of the horrors that followed the battle. It was not enough that disabled men should be clubbed and shot, and barns full of them burned to ashes; but to this day in many a quiet glen lie the remains of hamlets ruined in cold blood, and tales are told of the dark vengeance taken by the victorious soldiery upon defenceless women, little children, and old men. Well was it, perhaps, for those who had fallen that they lay here at rest under the heather--they could not know the cruel fate of wife or child. To other lips was left the wail for “Drummossie; oh, Drummossie!” At rest they were, these hot and valiant hearts, plaided and plumed as warriors wish to lie, in their long bivouac under the open heaven. Not the first nor the last of their race, either, were they to fall, scarred with the wounds of war; for, less than a mile away, under the lichened cairns of Clava, do not the ashes rest of the chiefs their ancestors, slain in some long-forgotten battle of the past, and waiting, like these, for the sound of the last _réveille_?

Here, on each side of the road, can still be made out the trenches where the dead were buried, according to their tartans it is said; and, while the rest of the moor is purple with heather, these sunken places alone are green. On the edge of the corn-field rises a stone, inscribed “Field of the English; they were buried here”; and at the end of each trench on the moor stands a rude slab bearing the name of its tribe. A singular pathos attends two of these stones, on which is written, not M’Intosh or Stewart or Fraser, but “Mixed Clans.”

Round the oval moorland of the battle rise thick fir-woods now, dark and mournful. Sometimes the winds of the equinox, as they roar through these, recall the deadly rolling musketry of long ago. But the air to-day scarcely whispers in the tree-tops, and sunshine and silence sleep upon the resting-place of the gallant dead. Only some fair, white-clad girls, who have come up from Inverness to read the battle inscription on the great boulder-cairn, are plucking a spray of heather from the Camerons’ grave.

TAM O’ SHANTER’S RIDE.

Never is a man more conscious of his manhood than when, with bridle in hand and a good horse under him, he takes the road at a gallop. As his steed stretches out and the hoof-beats quicken, as the milestones fly past and the cool air rushes in his face, he casts care to the winds, his pulse beats stronger, he rejoices to breathe and to live. The pride and the pleasure of this experience have ever appealed to the poets, and the ringing of horse-hoofs echoes through the verse of all ages--in the warrior chants of Israel; through the sounding Virgilian lines; to the reverberating rhythm of the “Ride from Ghent to Aix.” But the maddest, most riotous gallop of all is, perhaps, that of the grey mare Meg and her master from Ayr to the Shanter farm.

Burns was never more fortunate in his subject than when thus fulfilling his promise of providing a legend for “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk.” He did not, it is true, with the nice precision of the Augustan laureate, trim his verse to a mechanical imitation of sound; but the wild rush and deftness of the movement of the poem, the quick succession of humour on pathos, scene upon scene, the ludicrous, the startling, the horrible, carry away the breath, and suggest more vividly than any mere measuring rhythm the mad daring of that midnight ride.

There is a little, old-fashioned, deep-thatched inn still standing where the street leads southwards out of Ayr. Under its low, brown-raftered roof it is yet easy to imagine how the veritable hero, Tam, may have sat with his cronies “fast by the ingle, bleezing finely,” while “the night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter,” and the storm outside hurled itself fruitlessly against the little deep-set window. It would need all the liquor he had imbibed to fortify the carouser for that fourteen-mile ride into Carrick. A midnight hurricane of rain and wind would be no pleasant encounter on that lonely road, to say nothing of the eerie spots to be passed, and at least one point more than a trifle dangerous. But Tam o’ Shanter was a stout Ayrshire farmer, and, moreover, he was accustomed to face worse ragings than those of the elements; so it may be supposed that, when he had hiccupped a last goodbye to his friends, and, leaving the warm lights of the inn streaming into the street behind him, galloped off into the blackness of the night, it was with no stronger regret than that he must go so soon. Half a mile to his right, as he bucketed southward along the narrow road, he could hear the ocean thundering its diapason on the broad beach of sand, and at the places where he crossed the open country its spray would strike his cheek and fly inland with the foam from Maggie’s bit. Sometimes, when the way lay through belts of beech and oak woods, the branches would roar and shriek overhead as they strove with maniac arms against the tempest.

The old road to Maybole, and that which Tam o’ Shanter took, ran a little nearer the sea than the one which did duty in Burns’ time, and still serves its purpose; and about a mile out of Ayr it crosses the small stream at the ford where “in the snaw the chapman smoored.” Here, on the newer road, a curious adventure is said to have befallen the poet’s father. There was formerly no bridge across this stream; and the legend runs that William Burnes, a few hours before the birth of his son, in riding to Ayr for an attendant, found the water much swollen, and was requested by an old woman on the farther side to carry her across. Notwithstanding his haste he did this; and a little later, on returning home with the attendant, he was surprised to find the woman seated by his own fireside. It is said that when the child was born it was placed in the gipsy’s lap, and she, glancing into its palm, made a prophecy which the poet has turned in one of his verses:--

He’ll hae misfortunes great and sma’, But aye a heart aboon them a’; He’ll be a credit till us a’-- We’ll a’ be prood o’ Robin.

If all gipsy predictions were as well fulfilled as this concerning the poet, the dark-skinned race assuredly would be far sought and courted.