is a child at last in the corner house at the College Wynd, who is not destined to an infant’s grave. He is to be named Robert, and, in defiance of the record of a previous holder of that name, he is also to go to sea.
Another son, John, followed after a short interval, and then—three years later—a third boy, who was named Walter after his father and Auld Beardie, and it would be hard to say how many other ancestors. It was not the first attempt to continue the name which Walter’s parents had made. It is significant of a stubborn fighting quality which is persistent in the Scott family, generation after generation, that the living children repeated the names of those who had died in infancy before them.
The second Walter throve (in spite of an unfortunate experiment with a tuberculous foster-mother), and shortly after his birth the Scotts removed to a larger and lighter residence in George’s Square. The shadow of those four children’s deaths was a receding thing in a nursery which was made noisy by three vigorous boys, to which a baby girl had just been added when it threatened again in a new way.
Walter, now eighteen months old, had been very lively one night, as was remembered afterwards, and resisted capture when bed-time came, but the next morning he was in a state of fever. The wisdom of the nursery authorities attributed this to a coming tooth, but upon the fourth day it became an insufficient explanation of the fact that he could not move his right leg.
Anxious family consultations followed. The medical faculty of Edinburgh congregated around the child’s cot—Alexander Wood, the grandfather, Dr. Rutherford, and other names of repute at that time. Many treatments, blistering among them, were suggested, and tried in vain. The fever went. The child was otherwise well. But he crawled on the floor with the dragging weight of a useless limb.
A chicken, being vigorous at birth, may run about very cheerfully for the first fortnight, even if it be badly fed and worse housed. It is when the down moults, and the growth of feathers makes the first call on its strength, that the effects of previous damp, or lack of exercise or sunlight or vitalising food are shown in weakness and death; while another, that was no stronger at birth, but which has had its necessities better supplied, will grow feathers as easily as it will swallow a worm. A child should grow its teeth in the same way, and it is a poor standard of rearing which anticipates trouble. But if there be any lack of initial vitality, or if there have been any serious deprivation of air or light or essential food, it is then that Nature will present a bill which the child must pay.
Dr. Rutherford, if he failed with those four children before, has the credit of having spoken the right word now. “Try Sandy-Knowe.” The proposal was quickly adopted by parents who remembered those four tiny graves of children who had been strong at birth, and then so soon, so inexplicably failed.
Walter was consigned to his grandparents’ care. Mrs. Scott sent him to Sandy-Knowe in the charge of a maid in whom she must have felt that she had cause for sufficient confidence, but it was badly placed. The girl was mentally unstable. She was in a lunatic asylum soon afterwards.
She may have had good reasons of her own for desiring to return to Edinburgh. It may have been no more than a general dislike of a quiet country life, which often affects the town-dwellers whose minds are badly developed in our own day. For their own peace they require a surrounding clamour. They are dependent, almost for existence, upon that which happens outside themselves. Anyway, she conceived a longing for the city streets, and hatred of the child who was the unconscious cause of her detention from them. Concealing a pair of scissors, she went out with the baby in her arms. She climbed the crags with a purpose of cutting his throat, and burying him in the moss. Even if suspicion should fall upon her, there could be no proof. The child would have disappeared. After a few days, she would be allowed to go home. Her need to do that appeared more to her than the life of a deformed baby.
Had she carried out her purpose, there would have been a short trouble in George’s Square; a crime, whether discovered or not, too unimportant for any permanent memory; and Robert Burns would have continued to be the greatest of Scottish poets. The English-speaking race would have lost one of its major intellectual impulses during the succeeding century, Tom Purdie would have gone to jail for poaching, Miss Charpentier would have found a different husband, and J. G. Lockhart a different wife. But the future development of English poetry (though Macauley would not have written the Lays of Ancient Rome) or of the English novel, would not have been very different, for reasons which we must not turn aside to consider here.
But, fortunately for many besides the child who was most concerned, the young woman altered her mind. She went back, and the peak of full insanity must have been very near, for she mentioned the unusual use to which she had thought of applying her scissors to Alison Wilson, the housekeeper, with the result that she was sent back to Edinburgh by the next coach, as her heart desired. Shortly afterwards, the wretched creature disappeared within the sinister silence of asylum walls.
It is a curious duplication of the exceptional that Walter Scott’s life was again threatened many years later by a man who was crossing the threshold of lunacy. On that occasion (as we shall see in its place) he owed his safety to his own courage and self-control: on this one, his own part in the incident though it may not have been without importance, must have been of an unconscious kind.
So the child of pure Border blood is back in the farmhouse where his father was born. He is in his grandfather’s charge. Alison Wilson, the old housekeeper, takes him into her care. The baby happy-tempered, very loving in baby ways, alert of mind, healthy but for the dragging limb, becomes the common pet of the farm. There is no nurse to restrain his activities, nor (by Heaven’s mercy) and baby-carriage to confine him further. Tibby Hunter and the other farm-girls compete for the privilege of carrying ‘the darling’ on their backs when they go ewe-milking among the crags. Better than that, when Sandy Ormiston goes out to the flocks, he is on the old man’s shoulder. He is laid down to roll and crawl in the heather as he will, or as he can with that dragging limb. He raises baby hands to pull the fleeces of the friendly sheep. He lies out in sun and rain and wind as the lambs lie.
Sandy has a whistle that he can blow at need from the crag’s height on a note which will be heard in the kitchen at Sandy-Knowe, and one of the maids will come running to carry him in; but for the most part he is left in the heather’s care, and once at least is forgotten, and must be sought through the torrent of moorland storm.... It was his Aunt Janet who found him at last, looking up at the lightning with laughing eyes.
So, significantly enough, after half a generation of city life (or more on the mother’s side) the child of Border blood, of Scotts and Rutherfords, Haliburtons and Swintons, is back on his native crags, the child who is to interpret, to the world’s end, that Border country in itself, in its history, and its people, as it never otherwise would have been known; transfigured somewhat, if you will, by a valour and nobility which was of himself, and which to him must be in every tale for it to be worth the telling, but always with the breadth of the only roof which closed the vision of his waking hours, the wide sanity of the moorland sky.
CHAPTER IV.
For the next three or four years the younger Walter saw little of his parents’ house in George’s Square, where there was an ever-growing family, from which the curse of infant weakness seemed to have permanently lifted, but whether through the change of residence or the superior vitality which is frequently observable in the younger children of a large family might be hard to decide. Tom and Daniel are added to Robert and John and Anne. It seems to have been a happy, noisy family, in spite of the strict routine of its Calvinistic Sabbath. Its mother ruled it with a sympathetic gentleness. She had humour as well as courage and wisdom. Its father was absorbed in his growing practice. He was often absent on visits to his country clients. His reputation for chivalrous integrity, separating him somewhat from the practise of his brother lawyers, increased his clients, and in spite of some consequences of that quality, his income and status grew.
We
